Issue 12: June 2006
Julia Bird | Jane Holland | Gregory Leadbetter | Andrew O'Donnell | Adam O'Riordan | Camellia Stafford
GREGORY LEADBETTER
The Astronaut's Return
She looks familiar; yes, she is my wife.
Her hair is longer; it's been months.
I don't think she expected to see me again.
She doesn't talk as much as I remember
and when she does she's speaking to a child.
I notice how her body moves beneath her clothes
and when she's naked, in the bath or in bed;
how independent it is, in spite of her.
When she sees me looking she turns away.
When I touch her skin she flinches.
The clothes she says are mine no longer fit.
Eat, she says, please eat, and I love you.
I soothe her as best I can. I tell her that
I'm learning to come back. But my eyes,
still wide open, sparkle like topaz when I sleep.
Who Put Bella In The Witch Elm
words painted on Hagley Monument, Wychbury Hill
The spelling makes sense when you know
she was found in the yew, folded up
like a foetus put back in the womb,
her knickers soaked with the last
of her voice, a clot in her mouth.
They chose the Iron Age as a fitting
place, the lee of a hillfort
fretted with trees, top shelf
magazines if you were lucky,
spirals scored in the bark.
Fire had so hollowed the trunk
that its weight vaulted the empty
space where she was hatched,
where I found wild flowers laid
in a guesswork bouquet of runes.
Knowledge
The mosquito lit on the bulb
is pinned by its shadow,
wings shock-straight with the glare,
legs soldered to the heat —
months later, still poised
as if just landed, its hold unbroken:
my pointing finger,
frozen as it touched the sun.
Gregory Leadbetter was born in Stourbridge in 1975. He writes for the BBC radio drama Silver Street and is currently researching for a PhD on Coleridge at Oxford Brookes University. Two poems, including 'The Astronaut's Return', were commended in the 2004 Arvon Competition. In 2005 he was shortlisted for the Strokestown International Poetry Competition and awarded second prize in the Kent and Sussex Poetry Competition.