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Lauren Thomas
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the poet
An MA student in Poetry Writing with Newcastle University at The Poetry School, London, Lauren Thomas has had work in various print and online publications. Her poems have appeared in Nine Pens' Hair Raising Anthology, Black Bough Poetry's second Christmas/Winter anthology, and most recently, in Lighthouse Journal and Magma. Lauren's pamphlet, Silver Hare Tales, was published in 2021.
the poems
Garden’s End
Once I found a fallen body
under leaves, beneath the pear,
kneeling at the garden’s end
with others in the dark.
I’d always feared those shadow trees,
the tenet of their bark,
their hard rust fruit with nothing
but the pull and barb of wasps
and browning apples bruised
and thick with slugs.
I shifted on the ancient moss,
regarded the sharp ends of grass.
Her wings were spread as if to touch
the purple edges of this place.
Eyelids closed, her slowing breath,
holding less than songs.
I put her in a cardboard box
offered up the vivid pink umbilic twists
of worms. Murmured drops of milk
as words, whispered less than prayers.
Far away my mother’s voice, was calling
to the garden’s end.
I thought of salvaging our lost
and sunlight trapped inside green glass.
Ysbyty Ifan
Ancient backcloth upland moor, shifting with the currents of a restless wind
Beneath quiver-grass parched runnels, lie brass rubbings potted into ground
A bronze-agronomist cured and historied within the glug and clag of peatland bog
His green shallow-pool whispers flow through leather bones, chambered underground
Iterations rotted into earthtongues, gills and seeds. A carbon keep, embogged
We patch the purple-orange hummocks so that muddied river crossings can rewind
Time speckles gold upon the Plover, returns Whorl-Snails and sculpts the bog
Back to ewer. Stagnant moss births fruiting bodies, rafting spinner silk enwinds
With Sundews trapping raptors, feeding rooting bonnets. This is when the earth regrounds
Upland bog. Oxidised Pitkins pink the wind. History sings through the quenched ground
L'Origine Du Monde
After Zena Assi
We found her floating in a stream
folded like an origamied boat:
a woman made of paper.
Her closed eyes did not reveal
the truth — her green roots trailing
anchors in the red-rushed water.
We thought she had been left for dead
after they had picked her up
and sewed her shut to stop the sound of sea.
We lay her flooded body underneath
a weeping tree, casting light upon a bird cage
hanging there in homage to her bones.
Cold wet fingers flayed her printed skin
like peeling robes from a drowned daughter
like lifting memory from stone.
We gazed at her beauty, peered inside
to see how she was made. Her catacombs
all glittering and lined with live grenades.
Publishing credits
Garden's End: Silver Hare Tales (Blood Moon Poetry)
Ysbyty Ifan: Magma (Issue 81 – Anthropocene)
L’Origine Du Monde: exclusive first publication by iamb