Camber
My nose is pressed close to the mirror but it is as if I am looking at something far far away, past the cathedral and the factory and the fields we once lolled on during the summer months so long ago, sharing the fancy seasonal moments like little rare foreign coins with small animals on them.
The meadows stamped their feet. The flowers tilted their broadsides. The compunction made itself known as the pressure of a great body of water will make itself known to some frail object deep beneath the sea, not out of malice but a stupid kind of love, calling things the same names, doing the same things at the same time, so it renders a colour out of what was once translucency.
But broken umbrellas line the streets on an otherwise cloudless day. They will classify us in the annals as butchers of flowers. Our heads are bare in the face of the deep valley of the blue blue sky, copious but unavailing.
Joe Dresner is 25 and lives and works in London. He was born in Sunderland. He has had poems published or forthcoming in Poetry Review, Ambit, Stand and Envoi.