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Cassowary<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n When I first loved you, shy flightless bird, our mouths<\/p>\n barely touched. You left your red-blue scarf<\/p>\n on the nape of my headboard, a slack talisman.<\/p>\n A reason for your return. I could not bear<\/p>\n <\/p>\n to let you go. You kicked your yellow leather boots<\/p>\n to the floor, said nothing for hours, suckling plums,<\/p>\n your soft sounds breaking the ripe silence.<\/p>\n I could not tell you then, bright ratite, could not love<\/p>\n <\/p>\n enough. So you tore your dagger claw into my heart,<\/p>\n poured your weight onto me until my breath fell short.<\/p>\n You slunk back, jet-black goddess, into your Northern<\/p>\n forest, before anyone could see the damage you\u2019d done.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Born in California, Aiko Greig<\/strong> lives in Scotland where she completed an MSc in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Aiko won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2015. Her poetry is published in The Edinburgh Review, Gutter, and Fuselit,<\/em> among others. \u00a0Blog: www.lionandsloth.com<\/a> \u00a0Twitter: @aikowrites<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cassowary When I first loved you, shy flightless bird, our mouths barely touched. You left your red-blue scarf on the nape of my headboard, a slack talisman. A reason for your return. I could not bear to let you go. You kicked your yellow leather boots to the floor, said […]<\/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":[139,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2015-poetry-picks","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9157","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=9157"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23800,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9157\/revisions\/23800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}