The Parakeet Feather of the Great North Wood

In the dust, shimmery lime hush. It tastes citrus-sour
and sugar-edged, livid-soft as canopies in evening light

streaked with chatter. Thought dissolves close to the
ground, and smoke and burning roots of cyanide,

they cut its poison to the quick, cherry laurel’s hacked-
weave a hiding place, a folly, in shadow of Sessile Oak

and the city as in a dream submerged, allotment-flung,
inaccessible, washed with toxic-haze-in-pink like the blush

of unripe damson and Cox’s apple. Someone warns you
that the blackberries are fume-dusted and rat-nibbled

and you think of the long soak, hard water marbling
purple, of sugar boiling the burst juices until the point

of metamorphosis: dark matter, conjuring the suburbs
to consume the city at its furthest edges. Peckarman’s

swiss chalets, unpaved roads, Pissarro crescents, all those
Victorian mansions shining in their proximity to crystal,

evolution flaming in the pit of a cracked jaw, lofty, hollow
as a ribcage, these relict bones picked apart for new homes.

Francesca Brooks is a poet, writer and researcher based in Manchester and working at the University of York. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in PN Review, Lighthouse Journal, and Structo, and she was recently longlisted for Primers 6 with Nine Arches Press. Her first book, Poet of the Medieval Modern: Reading the Early Medieval Library with David Jones is published by Oxford University Press at the end of 2021.