April
There is a place in Lisbon where you can see an imitation statue of Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro, and a bridge similar to The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
This moment is nostalgia
before nostalgia is:
lurking at the shore
of my premature thoughts. I’m gazing
at myself through gauze & taking
these gills & thrills & you for granted.
My worship ship was sinking and I capsized
it:
sat by a river
that disregarded
the neaps
and springs of
us.
Shoures soote only there –
months are not cruel, but me
I am a drought, drowned
in the unholy waters of Leman.
There was water so I did stop and drink
and by the rock I could not stop or think.
An alcoholic tongue:
a thing we’d never done.
The redeemer glares & my justification?
It’s not so simple
as rosaries and recitation.
The gate is gilded & these years are
something like such imitations.
If My Brain Were Spain
Exoticise my mind
like a language you’re hungry to learn
– its poli tics are a broken tongue –
and you like the validation it feeds you.
Move in there
and publicise it.
It is your neuro- bureau.
Let the confession echo, through that windowless hollow
to which
I dragged you,
Without realising
I’m now trapped too.
Anna Nightingale is from Coventry, UK and studies English at the University of Cambridge.
Bindweed Magazine 