Sarah-Clare Conlon

Will Finches Inhabit Me?

If I sit still long enough will finches inhabit me?
Will wrens take me for a willow as weeds take back town?
The wheezing tractor razes the river verge, releases
a stash of small mammals to those Corvidae crowds;
this trampled cloverbed smell like lifted groundsheet.

No passing trade now,
grass reclaims the streets
– green tablerunner
the length of my road –
recalls wild Welsh lanes
I, young, rode horseback.
Ferns creep from cracks, crash
paving stone parties;
periwinkles spring,
string up fairylights,
sprinkle their starshine
in the gutter, where
I spy, with my bird-
like eye, oxalis,
exotic, afraid,
her bruised heart all splayed.

What has never left cannot resurge, they said.
At the bench of the two Susans hovering water’s edge
silver plaque gone not forgot I hear things different
see the burgeoning blather the motorway a blanket,
baffling. I’m sorry, can you– can you repeat the question?

Sarah-Clare Conlon is an editor and copywriter based in Manchester, where she studied French and Creative Writing, and is Victoria Baths’ inaugural Writer-in-Residence. Bridport shortlisted and a Salt Prizes winner for flash fiction, her prose has been published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Lighthouse and Stand, and her poetry by PERVERSE, PN Review, Poetry Scotland and Firmament.