Tessa Berring

Not Actually A Title Just The Gentle Scent Of A Leaf

Put vinegar on the wound
with a soft cloth

or use this —

this old green T-shirt

What I'm really
trying to say is

look at the Eucalpytus tree

such a perfect thing to
leave inside a poem

with a clear glass bottle
and the silent break of day

The Unwanted Erotic Poem

in which the bath water
turns lukewarm

and foam-less

(but still cloudy enough
still just deep enough)

then ends quite suddenly

Tessa Berring is the author of Bitten Hair and Folded Purse (Blue Diode Press). Joke Book, a collection of fifty jokes/poems is forthcoming from The Silent Academy. Other work can be found via Tangerine Press, If a Leaf Falls Press, and Dancing Girl Press amongst other places. She lives in Edinburgh.

Tessa wrote the following about her poems:

‘There is both an inside and an outside of a poem’
I like to wonder what this means — how an image slips inside a poem, say, while simultaneously remaining on the outside.
The possibility of holding something twice at the same time.
I also like to think about how a poem has no inside or outside, but is simply ‘here’, a closeness, a puncture in a narrative of feeling.