Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries
Saxifrage
Our ten-year-old feet running along the drystone wall
between our houses, the saxifrage
slumped so thick over the bubbling stone, we didn’t
know there was a gap between
my garden wall and hers. Did we ever
recognise a certain lack of solidity
as we hammocked across the gap
between her and me?
Rockbreakers became
a favourite subject of Victorian art,
as focused on their task as children
at seaside slot-machines oblivious
to the beauty of the landscape around them.
Their feet will never travel the roads they make;
the stone being broken is the spirit of the man.
Saxifrage, stone-breaker, rivelling
away at the structure of our lives.
Belfagor in Mumbles
The weever fish ignores me
at a thousand decibels,
and the compass jellyfish;
the disgruntled of the world. Glass
splintering in their feet, bathers
abandon rockpools, their mouths
tight with salt.
I cannot remember my mission:
I wrote it behind receipts.
I already broke all my resolutions
for my new life. It takes
only a year to make my first
friend. He watches over his burger
as I heap gherkins with rock salt
and eat this:
a faux pas he cannot forgive.
He goes home to his work-life balance.
I could sicken him
with one clawed touch. I don’t.
I trudge calf-forwards
down the frilled coastline; water pinches
its clinking manacles at my legs.
I could drop down at any moment,
to my old shrug and ladle world
with its intricate parliaments, its rules
I cut into my chest. I do not, kicking up
the earth’s sifting skin, balancing
on eons of juiced lizards, relishing
the very name crust.
I could spend my life stamping
on any part of planet earth
and feeling that beneath it is not hollow.
Harrow
I grew nauseous to my bones when,
to make a point—
about blasphemy I believe—
the older generation wired me to a rotary harrow
in a red robe,
with a monkey dressed as a bishop
and set us both for a spin.
Once a whole field had been reduced to tilth
and my hands freed, I slobbered over ginger, wanted
to cradle the monkey. He escaped to the forest,
a drip about to drop; I spooned up mustard
between my lips until my ears
blew.
There’s nowhere to rest in the kitchen.
As the sun roasts the treetops
I wind slices of cucumber –
some just brocades of seed –
around my finger.
Only the small hands of that particular monkey
could pat and rub away the old pains
in my heart
without breaking my ribs.
Laura Seymour’s poetry has been published as a collection, The Shark Cage (Cinnamon Press 2015) which won the 2013 Cinnamon Press debut poetry collection prize. Individual poems have appeared in various journals including Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Poetry London, Acumen, Magma, MsLexia, The North, South, Glitterwolf, and more, and most recently in the OutSkirts anthology of LGBTQ+ poetry published for Pride 2025.