The card given out at his funeral
has no obituary. No order of service.
Just his name, curlicued and slant,
year of birth, hyphen, year of death.
Above that, an old print plate of his
reproduced landscape-wise, its surface
sectioned into eighths, each eighth quizzing
depth of cut, luminescence, blackness,
how acid bites, how resin resists.
‘Fig. A’ points to pale ripples:
a thumbprint in negative,
dabbed there momentarily –
his brief experiment in flesh.
Born in Hong Kong, Claire Cox now lives and works in Oxfordshire. She is Associate Editor for ignitionpress, and is currently a part-time practice-based PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London studying poetry and disaster.