Two Poems

Daisy Odey

Colour Riot

A black swallow stains the grey-blue sky,
Orange dragonflies’ tumble in the air,
Three fluorescent lizards fly past
disappear into the future.

Two brown boys in a corner
Prod a brown bird’s corpse.
Over their head, a brown roach,
slithers into a crack in the wall.

Before we see the paper guns.
Before bullets ring through the air.
Before some-body falls.

The cloud shifts and lays its golden egg,
shadows return and lie at the foot of the trees.
The air over Naraguta is saturated
with a mother calling some-body out of its death

What was lost finds its home

No one calls the brown bird, no one asks
whose nest is empty tonight.

Period /ˈpɪərɪəd/

Noun

1. A fistful of time

I imagine Eve licked the fruit clean off its peel
and Adam’s first taste was her after taste
and Adam’s sin was willing his tongue to remember.
I rummage through our room, hands desperate for memory
Each finger, a friend,
each one smudged with
the betrayals I am losing count of

2. A disease running its course

Everything you touched grew a wound,
I try your clothes, your lipstick
call your shoes mine
but these things are no one’s.
Raindrops slide across the window
the empty yard stands like a screen
playing a silent movie.
You sit there,
writing to me from the other side,
telling me everything
that’s led to this.

3. An end or conclusion 

We all leave something behind.
A dead part of ourselves
hunting for the body
it used to fill.
I rummage through our room.
Everything I touch becomes a wound.
Each finger, a lover,
another one smudged with
The betrayals I am losing count of.