Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and has been shortlisted in the Welsh Poetry Competition, Waltham Forest Poetry Competition, and the AUB International Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in The Coachella Review, Atrium, Okay Donkey, bath magg, and trampset. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, will be released by Black Cat Poetry Press this summer.

***

Cysterhood

The night before her operation,
my sister materialised in my bedroom.
The moon of a cyst on her ovary
throbbed with dark gravity
and she begged for a distraction.
Despite my own ovaries being furred
with late-blooming follicles,
there was always a chance,
and I was a week late.
I took the pregnancy test
from the side table drawer,
an hour cold, still beautifully negative.
She asked me to talk about it,
examined the white and blue stick
like a delicate bone. I said I had been
in costume, a lavender dragonfly;
he was quiet in the dark, Darcy.
Soothed by shared words of our
troublesome wombs, she fell asleep.
Mirrored in her dreaming face,
I saw my own relief.

Exclusive to East Ridge Review

***

Evicting the Spiders

One Saturday morning, after the weather had turned,
we decided enough was enough. They hadn’t caught
a single fly, and the place was starting to look untidy.

Their only warning was the mechanical thwoop
as I extended the feather duster: a soft wrecking ball
for a gentle demolition. I started in the corners.

Strange, there were so many of them, but always
solitary in their delicate dwellings. The duster head
dismantled each lattice of house thread by thread.

We stripped away cobwebs built from the ceiling up,
their edges swaying like grey seaweed. We found bodies
in the wreckage, skeletons crisp in an anticipatory death.

He followed me with a takeaway menu and cup, sifting
the survivors for a short captivity, then threw them
out of the French windows like a landlord with a drunk.

I paused to watch as they parachuted down into the garden,
blithe bungee jumpers suspended from paper and plastic.
For you are nature, and to nature you shall return.

They went quietly, peacefully. We were careful –
no casualties. I admired the brightness of bare walls,
and couldn’t watch the news for weeks afterwards.

First published in the IceFloe Press Geographies 2022 series

***

The Woodpigeon and the Crow

Entering the courtyard to unwitting witnesshood,
I found a splash of blood on the gravel
and a mound of shuddering bird-dust.
The body of a woodpigeon chick,
proto-feathers catching the wind like ashes,
its tiny muscles tight in a final spasm,
then releasing, slick as an afterbirth.

Above the body, a crow crouched,
miniature reaper, blood glittering on
his granite lips. Sulphurous angel,
I see my pale, double silhouette coming to a stop
in the potholes of his dark eyes.
Unstartled, he stands over his kill.

The chick was a brief visitor to this earth,
a blurry-edged soul barely slipped into a body.
Soft cocoon of world-ignorance, they were
an easy target for ambush by a bandit,
charcoal vampire, goblin of the grey dawn.

Finally, the black wings lifted, an executioner
doffing his hood, and the crow rose, relinquishing
the guilt of gravity. I looked for meaning,
as Calchas once divined for Agamemnon,
but saw no moral, no forecast, only death.

First published in Acropolis Journal

***

;

A flower with a single petal, plucked:
he loves me not. Sideways glance,
pursing of lips, progeny of silence.
The insides of a button. Smudged
paintwork on dice and Babushka dolls.
Wall-scars from a broken picture frame.
Freckles, sunspots, puncture holes in
the folded skin of an elbow.
A glass slide under a microscope.
A star and a comet, distance measured in decades.
Angelfish, frogspawn jelly, fly fodder,
twin geese arriving late to migration.
Mushroom sprouts, a derelict shell crusted
with moss and a snail discovering death.
A plughole, blocked. A keyhole, jammed.
Two tunnels split into the attic’s
ridge beam, letting the light burrow in.


First published in Gastropoda