Sarah Gibbons
To be honest, when I took the bone from his side,
scraped it clean to whiten in the long days
I didn’t think it through. It was one of those times
when I saw the joins in everything I’d made
and as for the man, he did nothing well,
lapping at the rainwater that festered
in a hoof print, then sickening to a crawl,
yellow tears from the hogweed burns
crusting his arms with tracks of resin.
Then I found him noosing a ribbon vine
over an oak tree, and something had to be done.
For weeks, I kept the ants from the bone,
until it grew form, and very long black hair.
In truth, I thought they’d be good for each other.
Sarah Gibbons is in her final year of the MA in Writing Poetry, run jointly by Newcastle University and the Poetry School. Her poetry and fiction has been published in Mslexia, Ambit, South Bank Poetry and the Wolf Magazine. She has had work placed in various national and international competitions. In 2022, she was longlisted for the Rebecca Swift Women Poets’ Prize.
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