Shelly Jones - To the Highland Queen
Let us count the darkening
​
days until Beira climbs down
​
from Ben Nevis, staff scraping
​
glacial ridges as she trudges
​
across the ice-crusted mountains
​
she carved for her sons so long ago,
​
to sip again from the well of youth,
​
and feel its hoary water glaze
​
her rust-covered teeth before turning
​
to face the yawning sun, her grizzled hair
​
blooming into azure once more.
Shelly Jones, PhD (she/her/hers) is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Delhi, where she teaches classes in mythology, folklore, and writing. Her speculative work has been published in Podcastle, New Myths, The Future Fire, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @shellyjansen.
Photograph: Worth Forget by Seth Crook
Seth Crook lives on Mull, is transitioning into a seal. His poems have appeared in such places as The Rialto, Magma, Pennine Platform, Northwords Now, Poetry Scotland, Streetcake. And in recent anthologies such as The SHOp: An Anthology (Liffey Press), The Centenary Collection (Speculative Books), Places of Poetry (One World). He has a new pamphlet of visual poems Chalked on the Path (Dreich Press).