Gret Heffernan: Two Poems

WOODLAND

A timbre of voice

body as landscape,

a clearing, there, not there

the sound of snow.

Face against thin sun,

a skin letter held up,

gathered in small clusters

at dawn’s edge and read.

What we hold,

we hold blind,

glacial and slow.

The boroughs of us

veined, calligraphic

each a one sentence story,

tip-traced in the soft fall

of prehistory and alive, alive.

MOOR

The sunrise heats the rocks, red smoke rising

like blood mixing with pure solution,

pinches memory to a standstill.

Hail wind-whipped chips of grindstone, the shattered decisions

we press, dent into the skyline, black Macs clutched at our throats,

the unsaid gasping

we lie to step out of it, to step out of a wanting lost to the wind, the red

pulp of the howl, pushed to the side by the climb,

the effort of preservation.

At the top, it’s so cold it’s strangely hot, and words fly from our mouths,

winged and lured by the light, then crystalize and crash,

break against thoughts,

that metal we habitually press our tongues against and rip and rip

and watch the torn buds of self shiver against the steel like small

beginnings, dying.

Gret Heffernan is the author of three novels, two short films, a lyric essay and multiple zines. She is the founder of Backlash Press CIC and currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing at King's College London.