Content Warning: dark themes, bones
Georgie Evans - Sunless
I pressed my nose against the window.
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Something cracked: glass or bone.
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On the street a cry clipped
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through the quiet, and rest
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ambled away. I saw two cats,
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tails low like whips.
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My irises sulked till they were black
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and learned to shape the furniture
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using shivers of light.
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I divided the room into cubes.
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Wardrobe, twelve hundred. Desk, ninety.
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Hand, seven or eight.
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The ink in my pen spilled the wrong way.
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I began to wonder if I was left-
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or right-handed. Books softened
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into ponds, words grew scales
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that winked under the gibbous
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as I grappled with a rod
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that had no hook.
Georgie Evans is a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction from Halifax, West Yorkshire. She was the winner of the Telegraph Cassandra Jardine Prize in 2019 and the Walter Swan Poetry Prize in 2020. At present, she is studying an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths University, funded by the Isaac Arthur Green scholarship.
Photograph: Fish Market by Zainab Iliyasu Bobi
Zainab Iliyasu Bobi, from Bobi village in Niger State, is a Nigerian writer and photographer. She was a finalist of the voice of peace anthology. She is the treasurer Hilltop creative art, Abuja branch. Her works are published and forthcoming in Kalahari review, Blue marble review, PraxisMag, WRR, The shallow tales review, Sledgehammer lit among others.