Undertow
On my phone a newsreel shows a car boot lifting
just above the flood. Tail lights like eyes
caught in a comic gasp, while its body, like the carriageway,
lies under sixty million litres of last night’s rain.
Walking through town we find the storm has coughed
up through the tarmac on Brick Row again, drivers
glaring blame as they edge what’s left. They’re calling it
unsettled weather, but watching the floodstream push
through clods of muck like it always did
it’s the bricks that look presumptuous. At night
I dream roads winding under water. Concrete like flaking skin
or weed rising in glass-green depths. Scan through the earth’s crust
you’ll find tectonic graveyards, plates you might have mapped
in earlier oceans, landmasses in ribbons – now continents
of subducted fragments stirred in magma. We turn,
maps metamorphose with exhumed rock
like floodwaters that wash away the borders and the checkpoints.
The current of the road rushing out to meet all debris,
all small boats buoyed by nothing
but hope magnetised in a planet’s undertow.
Rhian Thomas has been shortlisted for the New Welsh Review’s Borzello Prize and the Laurie Lee Prize. Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry Wales, The New Welsh Review, Planet, IS&T, the Alchemy Spoon and the Gentian Journal.