Photograph by Kev Howard
The Red String
Frost on the rooftiles;
the low afternoon
tongues the grooves.
Pleasure, tell me again,
twice over, so it will go in
this time, the legend
of the string of fate
in which our bodies
grow as transparent
as whispers, except
for the forest of veins
reaching beyond
what we think of as skin.
I make a pinky truce
with the fading light:
to wait for its return.
It tries to hang around
a few moments longer
but it slips on thin ice
off the sugar-coated roof.
Bob Beagrie has published numerous collections of poetry and several pamphlets, most recently And Then We Saw The Daughter of the Minotaur (The Black Light Engine Press 2020), Civil Insolencies (Smokestack 2019), Remnants, written with Jane Burn (Knives, Forks & Spoons Press (2019), This Game of Strangers, written with Jane Burn (Wyrd Harvest Press 2017), and Leasungspell (Smokestack 2016). His next collection, When We Wake We Think We’re Whalers from Eden, is due out from Stairwell Books in 2021. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines and has been translated into Finnish, Urdu, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, Estonian and Karelian. He lives in Middlesbrough and is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Teesside University.