Pale yellow-green tears pool in the fruit bowl. I choose one with a blush, hoping its shyness foretells flavour. Under a running tap, my pear gleams and drips. I use a tea towel to dab away its fears, buff the delicate skin, inhale its honey breath. I bare my teeth, sink them into gritty flesh, […]
Tag: Open Link Night
Mirror Magic
The mirror in the garden pond is cracked with rushes, irises, rotting leaves and watercress; a single poppy lingers on, pale petals promise oblivion. In the mirror of the garden spade, a toad with its glittering topaz gaze, legs akimbo and puffed up body dangles from the shiny blade, toxin flooding warty membrane. Mirror, mirror […]
Baring your Soul
Sand is resistant to your feet and teases tight muscles in your thighs. You brave the boisterous breeze buffeting distinctive scents of salt and life. Through a pall of blue spray the sun burns bronze, then vanishes altogether; you close your eyes on the drab despair of weather. Screaming gulls spill into the sea and […]
Do you dare…
to open the ramshackle gate and enter a shadowy place where gems masquerade as pebbles and bones; disturb the sleep of a petrified gnome; dig up burly clods of mud that turn into unblinking toadstones? Do you dare to feed them with earth-bound worms that squirm with spells cast in sifted loam; to purse your […]
Hauling in Winter
The ocean sings a melancholy tune with its infinite whispers of tide and moon. Whiskey coloured waves wash and tumble sand, where fishermen haul in, hand over hand, a net of jelly fish and tangled mermaid tails, shark fins and teeth, up to the whale- backed dunes, where the season gives russet hair a haughty […]
Nobel
no church bell no alarm bell just the body clock warning and a stormy morning outside the window later, the man on the radio says the Nobel prize for literature has been awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro, whose stories will never let me go unconsoled in the pale view of hills, an artist of the floating […]
Fading
The last honeysuckle of the year airs her fading blooms. They no longer exude perfume, nor do bees come near; their candy colours have faded, outdone by copper costumes trimmed with berry red and drenched with autumn’s overpowering leaf mulch scent. Kim M. Russell, 2017 For dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night I wrote this […]
Book of Words
My note book is a testament to bitten nails, ragged and rent, and heretic bleed of cuticles not neatly trimmed and beautiful but ripped, picked and gnawed while searching for the perfect word, the one that shines with serendipity, arriving as an epiphany and written down to be used in stories, poems and reviews. Kim […]
Transparency
She saw through him, the last glass eel of summer, tinkling and shattering up the river with a shiver like a lost star in an alien galaxy, a long way from the Sargasso Sea. She felt sick as she let the slick predator slip through her fingers in whirlpools of emotion and he abandoned her […]
Day Tripping
Wind-buffeted, we listen for quiet waves below the pier. Filtered through a bank of low-lying granite cloud, August sun is determined to shine on Southwold. Day trippers brave the sea, build castles on the beach, while in brightly coloured huts, flustered mothers hand out soggy egg and cress sandwiches that crunch with sand. In the […]
writing in north norfolk 