‘Monuments are interesting mostly in how they diminish all other aspects of the landscape.’
Anne Boyer, ‘The Innocent Question’, Garments Against Women

58.4056 x -3.6244

our grouping into thick mist cover & tented
a doubled spore: take such moss as specific
to a communal, confused stretch: sample
good deeds. Sleep over. Dear, outward.
Remain fuzzed into contempt, remain
pigmented blue & enraged, studied
as if on softness composed from
the microclimate of contextual lapses
a break, like an updraft held
within an ice wind within
a tropical storm until dropped
more silent, lower and lost
against wild slurs
a tentative quiver

58.4963 x -4.2189

the common
sounds we inflict in constant
rhythm along a mostly
under-examined timestretch
even only outwith
articulation, without cause
for a spectral undoing. Underoccupied for
reaching a scrubland murmur,
months unmade lucked out
to prismatic land, like a torso,
like a sour cut woven with frost
to displace perennially and grow
bluntly through daybreak my
glottal song, my splinter tongue

 

Mike Saunders’ work has been featured in various journals, most recently Gorse, Adjacent Pineapple, and Sight/Unseen. He is currently writing about land and money and water. New work is forthcoming in Hix Eros. He lives in Edinburgh.