Author: Sommer Cullingford

Stretched on light long and catlike, an image licks the curve, somersaults through my eye and bruises into view. The sound cartwheels in horrible geometry, still ignorant with the dew shrieking scalene from daybreak – and I am lost in my ossicles. Everything reaches me through tremor and trapeze – I cannot walk without wondering,…

Vigilant through windows and cracked sills, she is the insatiable witness. Lacquer-eyed and looming, her lungs gloom the glass and flakes of dead paint spot the stillness of her limbs. A slick hiss of cicada arcs electric through the suburb, the day as pale as a panic attack and unreal with ease. Its casualties cringe…

History, let us sleep with the softness of moths, pearled in worms turned white as knuckles, churned on old war grudges – let us die of each other under skies of loving larvae. O Rome, I’m a strung out symphony – the numbers furl from us like vellum smoke flowering along Watling. Mortal, the eye’s…

There is a hex on our time, a popsicle melting in the miscellany of summer days pooling the iridescent depths of the lens, each high noon startled to deep blue fluorescence and fraught immemorial, pinned like a moth against the montane spread of cumulous ranges. I watch as it all flakes to motes for the…

I will heave into the hands of hope, spitting from blood-thick mouthfuls – brimming with the ecstasy of once again having bitten off much more than I can chew. I will dislocate into each appetite, thriving headlong towards the outrageous fuchsia of some explicit garden, doomed to grow like a snake eating an antelope. I…

i. It bloats into a new hour and light’s all over me like anxiety. Flies fatten, nerves burst and as petals shed I molt creatures of keen sheets. Unhinge, seize abstractions from their skin! Undone, squint the big stars dim. ii. A quarter to ten so exquisitely tends this multifoliate host, surviving each of these…

i. Body of busy hills, I am an element on foot. When the distant cars hymned like bees in smooth unison, I fed them through a needle & pierced a hole into nervy noon; a blinking arrow through terse, blue linen, I seized a weave & knotted it at the nimbus umbilicus.   ii. A…

Absolved across the vast pearl of a horse’s hide, you flung from its eye and burst in like a bad neighbour overbears on brittle moments to where there is only me: runes, ruins, landscapes beyond the skin outwit by a wisdom of hips, deep into my liver’s wet stars. Tiny maelstroms of joy run slick…

There’s mockery in the freesia’s gruesome balm, perennial bells giggle a divine perfume that taunts the shedding skin of winter-tide winds, it cloys like the clock-handed grip of tick-tocks trickling down the back of each gust – their petals crushed; bruised, feathery cherubs shield stamen-eyed babies and ripen to the doomful horns I decapitate at…

Inspiration is as vital as the conspiracy of muscles to aid a traffic of vapours, and rouse the artful glee of strings; a sympathy of ligaments composed to perch primly as the peregrine, or burgeon from beneath like noble cultivars of evergreen. Expiration is as fated as the terrestrial grace and grit of reclusive afternoons,…

A new freckle marks a fresh trajectory, charting the northern bounds in memory to the death-mask purity of destination; the sinuous curve of that harbour is a covert smile for sleep in the gauzy, fertile fogs of that wildwood; but it fares foul with deciduous friends, who – in the green shade of their angels…

A clichéd sunrise’s overtures from the harbour heeds and breathes conspiracies while I sip through the jostle and pitch of the onslaught-hours, bowed unto the lip of silencing the external sounds.