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Styx<\/strong><\/p>\n A felt-tip pushing back the skin. Spotlights. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2028William Thompson<\/strong> was born in Cambridgeshire in 1991. His work has appeared in Lighthouse, The Cannon’s Mouth, Stonecoast Review, Bird’s Thumb Poetry<\/em> and the Bristol Poetry Anthology<\/em> 2017.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Styx A felt-tip pushing back the skin. Spotlights. The high-pitched wailing of a sternal drill. Latex gloves, polyester gauze, brute strength. Then the ribcage lurching wide to surface a cleft-lipped, peach-like underearth. Next the forceps\u2019 lyre-string intricacy, needles releasing pressure valves, scar tissue forming like an ocean trench. Then the surgeons coming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19862"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20321,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19862\/revisions\/20321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe high-pitched wailing of a sternal drill.
\nLatex gloves, polyester gauze, brute strength.
\nThen the ribcage lurching wide to surface
\na cleft-lipped, peach-like underearth.
\nNext the forceps\u2019 lyre-string intricacy,
\nneedles releasing pressure valves,
\nscar tissue forming like an ocean trench.
\nThen the surgeons coming up for air \u2013 you
\nstill weepy in your undone dressing gown.<\/p>\n