EA Hopson: Two Poems

[Image description: close black and white photograph of a circuit board. The metal appears as white or silver, and the plastic and background as black.]

Nikk / Creative Commons

The Machinery

As a child of four
or five, I heard beeps
and whistles

and once, after an attack
of premature heartburn

I found a triangle
on my tongue.
Part of my circuitry

I thought; a brain-cell,
a damaged part
expelled.

 

Hokusai’s ‘Great Wave’ Printed On A Pair Of Leggings

Here at the crease between my thighs is the foam of a tsunami; when I was a child we called it white horses after the unicorns in a book. Here at my knees, that particular shade of blue inside a wave when it rears and reveals the tendons of seaweed. 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn' - white stars and froth. My legs wear Hokusai well: the long and narrow boat along the seam of my inner right leg, the stitched scared faces of the fishermen, the high crest across the widest part of me with its fingers curled down, nails full visible, clawing for shore.

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EA Hopson has been published in The Manchester Review, Catch Up, apt Online, Smokelong Quarterly, PANK, and Expanded Horizons, and in 2015 won a Literature Wales Writer's Bursary to aid in the completion of her first novel. She resides in a cottage in Wales and can be found on Twitter.