A study of walnuts
Tight-fisted baby hands
something in them
I want or an ear
that doesn't listen
shrunk from a man
known long ago
or a map of a mountain river
in Bhutan, glacial washes
pouring sediment
into its gorge.
A traveller's tan
or stained wooden chest;
a feeling of ambiguity.
will this piece last?
a good, edible thing.
a brittle kernel
so difficult to extract whole
even holding the key.
eaten in quantity like gravel.
The space between eating
as large
as a child's christmas.
Bridget Khursheed is a poet and geek based in the Scottish Borders. She is a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award winner for poetry and her video poem Dead Loss features in the current Scottish Poetry Library Vision 2020 project. Her pamphlet Roads to Yair is published by Twinlaw and she is widely published in magazines including Ambit, The Rialto, Abridged, New Writing Scotland, Zoomorphic and Gutter. When not writing she has been studying for an MSc in cybersecurity. You can find her on Twitter here: @khursheb.