Journeying
I watch
by the window
as the pigeon eats the lettuce seeds.
I should shoo it away
and, if I had planted them, I would
but these are my daughter's seeds.
Let me fail in my own way
she says. And the post arrives
on the mat: the bills, the letter
I know she dreads.
The pigeon has been scared away.
Or have the seeds all gone?
I stand.
I sit down again.
Hannah Linden is from a Northern working class background but has lived in Devon for many years. She is a bi, single mother, with work included or upcoming in Acumen, Atrium, Lighthouse, Magma, New Welsh Review, Prole, Proletarian Poetry, Spelt, Stand, Under the Radar and the 84 Anthology. With Gram Joel Davis, she won first prize in the Cheltenham Poetry Festival Compound Poetry Competition 2015. She was highly commended in the Prole Laureate Prize in 2015 and long-listed in the Rialto Nature Poetry Competition 2018. She is looking for a home for her debut collection, Wolf Daughter. You can find her on Twitter here: @hannahl1n.