A flower with a single petal, plucked:
he loves me not. Sideways glance,
pursing of lips, progeny of silence.
The insides of a button. Smudged
paintwork on dice and Babushka dolls.
Wall-scars from a broken picture frame.
Freckles, sunspots, puncture holes in
the folded skin of an elbow.
A glass slide under a microscope.
A star and a comet, distance measured in decades.
Angelfish, frogspawn jelly, fly fodder,
twin geese arriving late to migration.
Mushroom sprouts, a derelict shell crusted
with moss and a snail discovering death.
A plughole, blocked. A keyhole, jammed.
Two tunnels split into the attic’s
ridge beam, letting the light burrow in.
Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Visual Verse, Neologism, Atrium, Paddler Press, Canary, and Brave Voices Magazine. Find her on Twitter @PoetBex.