By: Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki

Wingspan

A flock of gulls mob a blackbird
beyond the garden fence

Two stories high
a fat shirtless man washes dishes at the sink

We take the baby
to visit the old man in the nursing home

At the petrol station
there’s a gangly limbed ginkgo tree

Suspended somewhere between
the beginning and the end

Crisscrossing branches
at odds with ancient grief

Gardening

Sun-baked aria
Soft shield ferns in the quiet places
Dandelions copter in the clear sky
Somebody is carried away
Well-watered bodies glisten
Moving earth
From one place to another

Ghost

The river used to run right up to here

A bluebell wood, too
and thick stands of ash trees carrying the sprawl
downstream

It was bombed in the war, I guess
or an architect’s office

And rebuilt for us
in plains of plain red brick

Outside, a quad bike with no business
rips a tear through the tarmac street

Somewhere far away I pull ragwort from a field
so that the horses don’t die when it is cut for hay

The long dry grass bleached by the sun
looks a lot like sand on a beach

Every blade shaped in the undercurrent
beneath the ground

A buzzard takes out a house martin
mid-air in flight

I collect seeds in my shoes

The earth is dusty

Melianthus major

The sweet nectar dripping from the open throat
of a honey dew flower

Planted
in the hot spot in a big barrel on the back porch by the door

In the morning sun

A heat wave washing clean
all of the dark stains left by the cold rain

Silver leaves cool
or cut
the heavy weathered atmosphere with a serrated edge

The honeybee begins it silent feeding ritual

Making sticky
mid-afternoon memories licked from salty skin

I might taste you too

A sugar rush

Dangerous in my bouldering mouth

Resurrect

A honeybee comes down the chimney
and waits on the kitchen windowsill
to be released outside
the rabbit dies and wakes up again
in time to eat our breakfast
I pull blanket weed
from around the lily pad
like the matted hair of a body
rotting in the lake
my hand is the size of your whole torso
with my fingers splayed across your chest
the sound a crack willow makes
in a thunderstorm
before it falls
shushing us to sleep

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Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki is a gardener and writer from Birmingham, England. He writes about trees and plants (mostly) and people (sometimes) and other unimportant things. His work has featured both in print and online, including Pulp Poets Press, Lunar Sea Literary, Fixator Press, Password, The Lake, Sextet, Alocasia and 100subtexts magazine.