Alice Tarbuck

rosary

The silent boy inhales
his stars. A plastic rose, a
plasticine peach in a Sistine 
chapel pot-pourri bowl.
He coughs, each 
cough blows a portion of the universe
that caught itself in his alveoli 
back against the velvet curtains,
black as eternity, he doubles up
— his
grandmother sprinkles him with holy water
half-way out of her wolf costume.

good as grain

When I was married, I was good as grain,
But now I hide in summer, wounds unhealed, 
the forests catch my hem: I cry again, 
and beg for salt with which to scour the field
to close it off. Nobody needs to see
the ram’s head in the corner, hear
distant music, mournful and 
as white as roots. When I was married,
I was good, and now my dress is ragged,
wicks the mud, and I can’t sing. Let me climb
the two tall trees at the end of the field
and ask the birds what August means,
suggest they take me with them, then.

Maybe the day is broken, I reply,
not meaning it until the train slows down,
and everyone is too tired to wonder why
the great green trees have started to climb on.
The sea is eating up the coast in gulps,
the rain helps every tide to wash it down,
the ships they try to sail come back in lumps,
and only we are scared of it. The town
is resolutely waiting out the flood,
and forestation, waiting for the flown
birds to start returning, for the good
to settle right back over them. They won’t.
Maybe the day is broken, I suggest,
or maybe the day is doing what it wants.

Alice Tarbuck is an award-winning poet and writer. Her debut non-fiction book A Spell in the Wild: a year (and six centuries) of Magic is published by Hodder & Stoughton. With Claire Askew, she is the co-editor of The Modern Craft, published by Watkins. She is a previous winner of the Scottish Book Trust New Writer’s Award for poetry, and recipient of their award for programming. She has taught Creative Writing at the Universities of Dundee and York, and is a Lead Reader for Open Book. Alice is currently Writer in Residence on the AHRC funded Print Matters project at the University of York. 

Alice wrote the following about her poems:

The two poems attempt to deal with the seemingly infinite layers of possible perception - I am interested in how objects come together to partially compose a scene - and what else is required to create a final composition. Both poems deal, too, with leaving, or closing off some sort of cycle. 'Good as Grain' is composed of two loose sonnets, where rhyme is doing the work of getting in the way of forward momentum, making the reading surface sticky