Ellora Sutton
The dirt track is coughing up horses,
making sunsets of their steaming bodies.
I scuff a nectarine on my brown jacket.
I have failed in my errand to fetch milk
but this doesn’t taste like failure.
I have a papercut so devout,
it could be a miniature of Christ’s side-wound.
Nectarine juice glazes over it like the lips of a man, weeping.
This nectarine makes me want to believe in something.
A peeling fresco I’ve never seen before suddenly occurs to me.
What will we do?
I can’t remember the last time I worshipped as anything other than a tourist.
I don’t know how to fix this.
Perhaps in my next life I’ll grow fruit trees,
and be a saint.
Ellora Sutton is a poet and museum person based in Hampshire, UK. Her work has been published by The Poetry Review and Oxford Poetry, among others. Her pamphlet Antonyms for Burial was the Poetry Book Society Spring Pamphlet Choice, and her latest pamphlet, Artisanal Slush, was recently published by Verve. She is the poetry reviewer for Mslexia.
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