Glitch Meridian

tree, you are so full of time I can hardly see
what’s left of it, being this scorched addressing the torso
with oil’s last postcode
lottery. you wouldn’t download a mew
but shinies are everywhere, just ask pastoral.
friday I check the news, friday I feel this is love
but how would I know when the glass
is the glass is the glass
between us, all laudable scaffold
the world had died outside the world
because of the weather
blown sideways to such futures
& a poem begins with this inching through air
with my sherbet detritus
trying to reach the luminous egress of hours
erected, clicked to a locked conundrum
it’s like yeah, I already said
you are so full of time and the blush insufflation
of your sap is prime solution, lowest zero in a blossom
of jewelleries
I want this to be natural
comfortable, sporadic — whatever you want
to open with, adore you / adornment
resist this spatial discrepancy
exist to make
leaf with me

Small Deciduous Trees

It is a tender June
we set the rowans to bloom full-berried
before the fall. You lost your keys
and called me. I crushed tomatoes
to match our little talks.
There was a fire becoming embers.
“Could walk up north bridge
and meet on the way.”
The nighttime shining, shining.
You turn down the snow to sit with me,
we drink gold things that rose and rise.
Am I neglecting tenderness.
The tender cinders in your eyes
the blossom said, and blistered.
I felt for her on winter nights
and held a tender hand in time.
We owed the land
cocktails of seasons, rimmed
with sugar and blood and salt.
“Let’s reconfigure
space and time,” it was simple.
We learned to love
our bodies of water, lonely ovaries;
butterflies the colour of lava
I pulled from your belly.
Nothing evolves like it used to.
We sat and spoke and clinked the ice
we knew would melt. We felt
a tender February. Accessory fruit,
a useful fern. Softly, softly
inside me unlocking the door
it was you.

Maria Sledmere is working on a DFA in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. She is editor-in-chief at SPAM Press and member of A+E Collective. Recent publications include infra•structure (Broken Sleep) — with Katy Lewis Hood, Chlorophyllia (OrangeApple Press), Miss Anthropocene (Mermaid Motel) and neutral milky halo (Guillemot Press). With Rhian Williams, she co-edited the anthology the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene (Dostoyevsky Wannabe). A seasonal pamphlet series, Sonnets for Hooch, is forthcoming in collaboration with Mau Baiocco and Kyle Lovell.