A poem by Ruby Butler.

Morning tightens its belt of mist.
Something unhooks in me,
a lark’s note caught low,
where the body keeps its weather.

I have known this ache before:
not pain or hunger,
but the iron-taste before rain
when the ground remembers old heat.
It tucks itself under the ribs,
a curled animal, warm and watchful.

Your name is nowhere here,
yet the nettles flinch as if brushed.
Sap runs bitter-sweet in the cut ash,
ambering the air.
I stand too close to the thrum of it —
that quickening,
that wrongness which knows how to sing.

The land is moving me on.
Fields loosen their stitches.
The road darkens with thaw,
and stones speak once, then fall quiet.
Behind me, the house keeps breathing,
walls salted with touch,
windows holding a light I didn’t earn.

I carry only what won’t stay still:
a pulse, a smell of crushed fennel,
the bruise of last words not said.
Even the river turns its face away,
shouldering south,
taking the long way round the truth.

By evening, a new sky opens,
clean, unpromised.
Swallows score it with their knives of flight.
Something in me loosens its grip,
though the taste remains:
dark honey, green leaf,
the sweetness that knows its own undoing.

*

Follow Ruby on Instagram here. See her poems previously published on the site here.