Anne Neville’s Unknown Heirs
Penrith Castle
December 1479

You rush inside
your apartments, shooing
your ladies away.
You fear the inside,
bones gnawing,
knowing, gripe.
Your body and blood
feel wrong.

You are drawn to large
windows, but they never
let in enough light.
You touch Cumberland
sandstone: red, viscous.
Your womb shreds.

 

Edwin Stockdale has published two poetry pamphlets with Red Squirrel Press: Aventurine (September 2014) and The Glower of the Sun (January 2019).  Currently, he is studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.

Cutting Back the Tayberries

In her head, Granny hears Satie’s Gymnopédie No.1,
the CD Grandpa bought her.

She is pruning the tayberries away
from Galloway Beltie cows.

The stalks beginning to brittle.
She sits on a stool to garden.

She shuffles back to her bungalow
with tiny feet that shrink over time.

Time for her tot, whisky and ginger ale,
with not too much ginger.

She sits on the patio, her back supported,
sips her drink, watches the sun fading.

 

Edwin Stockdale’s debut pamphlet, Aventurine, was published in September 2014 by Red Squirrel Press.  He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham with Distinction and is researching a PhD in Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.

Lung Wood

I stand in my wellies,
a camera in my hand.

The land remembers the Border Reivers.
An abandoned sheep dip lies

at the side of the burn,
stones sculpted by hail, rain, snow.

A cheviot sheep’s skull coils
like an ammonite.

The pines mutter,
guard their secrets.

A gaudy pheasant, smug,
looks at me.

In the lung of the wood
pine needles now claim the mill-leat.

I disturb a roe deer;
she bounds.

Only the bracken knows
where she will hide.

Just before I came here
my Grandpa died:

the burn flows
as if nothing happened.

 

Edwin Stockdale’s debut pamphlet, Aventurine, was published in September 2014 by Red Squirrel Press.  He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham with Distinction and is researching a PhD in Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.