Terri Metcalfe – Picking
Cutaneous - relating to the skin,
the uppermost layer of protective body cladding.
Atop the fat, the muscle and sinew,
fascia, bone, and blood - the gravy.
The scab that lies roughly a finger length
up from the tip of my widow’s peak
and maybe two centimeters to the left.
Help me
drop
a dressmaker’s tape along my parting
and I’ll try to explain the distance between self and self-obsessed,
the gauging of a person with fluid thought
against one who’s let life rule in
numbers, groups, and weight.
Is it normal to wait normal to want
for the crust of cell
upon
cell, to attack it, rip it, hair and all, as a trophy?
Where does the healing start, if not in the head?
In the heart?
Best viewed on desktop, please also find a PDF file available to download here.
Cumbria native Terri Metcalfe has been published in journals such as Abridged, Skylight 47, A New Ulster, The Martello Journal and The Storms. She was invited by the late Kevin Higgins as a featured reader for the 20th anniversary of Over The Edge. Recently she was chosen for the 2024 Open Window Mentorship programme, during which she worked with the poet Derek Coyle in preparation for submitting several pieces to the Cuirt International Festival of Literature.
Artwork (Haiga): Weathered by Diane Lowman
Diane Lowman is an award-winning essayist, memoirist, and poet. She served as Westport, CT’s inaugural Poet Laureate from 2019-2022. Her essays have appeared in many publications, including O, The Oprah Magazine; Brain, Child; and Brevity Blog, and she writes a regular column, Everything’s an Essay. Her first memoir, Nothing But Blue was published in 2018, and her latest, The Undiscovered Country: Seeing Myself Through Shakespeare’s Eyes, was published September 2023. Diane received her MA in Shakespeare Studies from the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute in 2017. She has explored other forms of literary expression in more than 2,500 haiku and in essays on and reviews of Shakespeare’s plays in various academic publications. Diane teaches writing, Shakespeare, and yoga, and divides her time between her hometown of Westport, CT, and her home away from home in Stratford Upon Avon, England.