Night Feed with Summer Solstice

Are they different, the winter’s children?
Held tighter in the diurnal maw? Light
stirred less thick in the blood?

Two hours across the squandering dawn
I’ve tricked this ounce of milk to the small cave
in the pebble of your gut, and what luck
the day we’re growing into

― the peach of it, the dove coo’d size of the thing
rearing up improbable as a giraffe’s head
all eyes and wide cheeked in her stall.
Morning

and somewhere else night falls
on the other side of the year. Our days
lessen while theirs unfrond.
Things tip inevitably back to the centre

this room, the hour. Awake
my long breath in your ear calms you.
Yours is hot and short in mine.

…

Luke Palmer’s debut pamphlet, Spring in the Hospital, won the Prole Pamphlet Competition in 2018. He won third prize in the Winchester Poetry Competition this year, and his debut YA novel, Grow (Firefly Press), will arrive in July 2021.

Grandmother
For Jean Walden

I am cutting your name out of the clothes you used to own
when you could own things. They make a modest pile.

I work in silence, listen to the scissors and to your daughters
making arrangements for your funeral.

These cardigans and scarves will hold the smell of you
until someone washes them. I am folding them slowly, gently

like the bundle of your names in marker pen or stitched tape
on the table next to me. A nest.

When I have finished, I will take that cradle of thread
in my hands. Its fibres will tickle my warm skin.

I will carry it to the window and, whatever is inside of it,
with this delicate and tender care, I will release.

…

Luke Palmer’s debut pamphlet, Spring in the Hospital, won the Prole Pamphlet Competition in 2018. He won third prize in the Winchester Poetry Competition this year, and his debut YA novel, Grow (Firefly Press), will arrive in July 2021.