She believes herself to be a field creature
Nessie is losing her mind
boiling cotton with bleach all year long.
She stalks lands and fields
at twilight, fashions
a dress from a beetle’s shell.
The women in the dormitories
don’t sleep a jot for her murmurs and hums.
Sometimes the caw of a crow
flaps black into black. She’s cried
the John Clare of Catrine,
place of her personal paradise, crawling
and flying beasts in throng times.
Maggie Mackay’s debut collection A West Coast Psalter was published by Kelsay Books in early 2021. This month Impspired Press published her second collection The Babel of Human Travel. She reviews poetry pamphlets at https://sphinxreview.co.uk (Happenstance Press) and collections at The Friday Poem (https://thefridaypoem.com)