by Kate Compston
The other world is here, just under our fingertips. --Charles Wright Child in the garden mines the winter soil for worms to tempt a cocksure robin. The pulsing of a worm, of earth within the worm, shocks her at core. No-one has told her all the world’s a dance. Woman in the darkness plays her lover’s octaves of vertebrae, rehearses notes and space between the notes, teases sonatas out from bone, skin, woken whisperings of blood: a music played by heart. Mother in the dawnlight soothes her baby: sorrows for her own crass roughnesses, is awed by contours of her child’s unblemished landscape. Under the fontanelle, a dragon huffs a lifetime’s threats. Mourner in the hospice strokes her father’s watercolour hands; wants to paint in oils to bring back colour, vibrancy. Under tissue-skin, the merest flicker — as though he stops to bless her. Then the slipping past. Kate worked as a counsellor in the NHS, then voluntarily in a hospice setting. She lives by the Atlantic in Cornwall, has been involved with XR, and is trying to learn BSL. (She dislikes abbreviations …) She feels writing itself is enough to quicken the blood — publication an affirming bonus.
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January 2025
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