Carnota – Elizabeth Gibson

 

We are in a glass dome of summer – pick us up and shake us,

and pollen-dust will swirl around us. The delirious strip of sea

is the other side of our zip: we curve and arc into each other.

Life is reduced to blue and green, with dots of pink and yellow,

and all I could ever need for fullness again is this sea and sky,

these hills of foxglove and gorse, and long Galician granaries,

their stone frames warming lizards and cats. We stop, to sprawl

among the brittle mauve patches of seaweed, watch dolphins

spinning like cogs, in and out, in and out of the wave machine.

Hey, I see a whale – well, I see spray – but no-one believes me.

We find the corpse of a small creature – a porpoise, maybe,

all beak and curve, now brittle with sand. Across the meadows

are chubby brown goats, and foals gulping from patient mothers

whose fringes tumble like kelp. It all keeps circling in on itself.

 

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Elizabeth Gibson is a Manchester writer and performer, and the Editor and Photographer for Foxglove Journal. Her work is often inspired by her travels, as well as themes of queerness, community, body image, and mental health. She has recently been published in Aurelia Magazine, Giving Room Mag, Lighthouse, Popshot, Queerlings, and York Literary Review. She is @Grizonne on Twitter and Instagram, and she blogs at https://elizabethgibsonwriter.blogspot.com.

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August 10, 2021 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: A Coruña, animals, Carnota, colours, creative, creativity, death, elements, Elizabeth Gibson, Galicia, landscape, life, moment, nature, poem, poet, Poetry, sea, Spain, summer, travel, UK, writing 1 Comment

How it was – Elizabeth Gibson

 

There was a storm out there, on the sea of ferns

and small spiders crept in and out of old burns.

Roaming the desert, a dog found the dusk

and in a flower somewhere, red-pink with musk,

a fairy curled up in the arms of a bee.

 

The midges were swirling like water back home

and in the sky, a jellyfish hung all alone.

Under layers of ice, a horse in a hole;

in a meadow of gold and blue starlets, a foal.

Far out beyond grounds of new comets, you saw me.

 

 

Elizabeth Gibson is a writer and performer based in Manchester, UK. She is also the Editor and Photographer for Foxglove Journal. Liz has won a Northern Writers’ Award and been shortlisted for the Poetry Business’ New Poets Prize, and her work has appeared Cake, Cardiff Review, The Compass, Confingo, Litro and Strix among other journals. Liz blogs at http://elizabethgibsonwriter.blogspot.com and you can find her on Twitter and Instagram as @Grizonne.

June 10, 2020June 10, 2020 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: animals, body, change, colours, creative, creativity, elements, Elizabeth Gibson, encounter, home, love, Manchester, memory, movement, mystery, nature, poem, Poetry, senses, time, UK, world, writing Leave a comment

Octopus dusk – Elizabeth Gibson

 

in the hills above Vigo, Galicia

 

Perhaps I look lost up here, heavy and alone – but I have the pines and firs,

and I wander down the slopes of the mountain campus, catching Pokémon.

 

The air turns cool and soft. I catch an octopus. I take photos of the pink sky;

they will never come out right. I catch a bird, a fish, more strange critters

 

whose proper names I never remember. I stand under the chunky building

they call a bunker, but to me can only be a boat, slicing through the tree-sea.

 

Barely anyone lives up here, only us in the student digs shaped like a spider.

We sleep in its legs, in little rectangular rooms with long, tall windows

 

giving us ribbons of view: grassy mounds with orange cats, a pond of frogs,

a night full of crickets, heavy like me, and alone – but somehow also not.

 

 

Elizabeth Gibson is a writer and performer based in Manchester, UK. She is also the Editor and Photographer for Foxglove Journal. Liz has won a Northern Writers’ Award and been shortlisted for the Poetry Business’ New Poets Prize, and her work has appeared Cake, Cardiff Review, The Compass, Confingo, Litro and Strix among other journals. Liz blogs at http://elizabethgibsonwriter.blogspot.com and you can find her on Twitter and Instagram as @Grizonne.

April 26, 2020 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: animals, colours, community, creative, creativity, Elizabeth Gibson, Galicia, landscape, Liz Gibson, Manchester, mountains, nature, poem, Poetry, Pokémon, senses, sky, solitude, Spain, travel, trees, Vigo, writing Leave a comment

Map logic – Elizabeth Gibson

 

How simple you are: a strip

of land, two big roads going

up like arteries, nothing more.

A thin triangle, a lone figure.

Past your head you crumble,

scattering fragments of earth

and water, hair that is rocky

and damp with storm. I can

place my hand over you and

I can ache for you. Yet I feel

distanced. I wonder whether

you were ever mine, really.

 

Here I am in the hexagon of

dreams. It is like a parachute

stretched out, the sort we ran

under as kids. It is also like a

star, as gaudy and as hot. We

are vast. We are a bloody big

country, you forget how big.

From Paris roads spiral out,

pulsing, like the white lines

of an orange. How can I feel

so alone here? We are so big.

We are connected. And yet…

 

Elizabeth Gibson is the founder of Foxglove Journal. She is a Masters student at the University of Manchester and a Digital Reporter for Manchester Literature Festival. She is a member of The Writing Squad and her work has appeared in The Cadaverine, London Journal of Fiction, Far Off Places, Octavius, Severine and Ink, Sweat and Tears. She won second prize in The Poetry Society’s 2016 Timothy Corsellis Prize. She tweets at @Grizonne, Facebooks at https://www.facebook.com/ElizabethGibsonWriterPoet and blogs at http://elizabethgibsonwriter.blogspot.co.uk.

October 23, 2016February 25, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: Elizabeth Gibson, geography, home, Liz Gibson, loneliness, nature, poem, Poetry, travel 2 Comments