THREE EAST COAST SONNETS

Becca Drake

Clay

On a day when the air is language overwhelmed with words

we go down to the beach where meaning forms not in strands

but in [p]articulate scatter to gather pieces small enough to

dwell in: headland [soil] [footprint] [chalk] [grass] [seed]

[guano] sea [algae] [insect] [bird] [blood] [lung] [skin] [silt]

cliff [fissure] [feather] [moon] [slippage] [burrow] air [stir]

[whip] [slice] [wick] [smoke] [cavity] [salt] pebble [quarts]

[igneous] [horizon] [river] [glimmer] – mud[dle] language

with knuckles nails to matter – sand [grit] [dust] [shell]

[wrapper] [rivulet] [rubber] – press flesh of clay [head]

[arms] [legs] [face]; flattened; then lift palms from the text –

it clings to skin peeled from dirt in creases, its flesh a stain.

To a Seagrown Tree

Mirror [sea] disturbingly. Bad weather day. Voice silent. To

shore pacing. The board discarded at cliff elbow. With rocks

weighed down. Shore pace. Tepid lagoons rock pincered.

Needle chill outspoken. Leg backs. Fish shiver. Hands limpet

graze. Underfoot weed mucus slides. To wood lee. There

bruises clay. Sever-ally submersed hightideline straggling

figures. Re-formed [un-word]. Flōded [old word]. Flowed

[allways word]. Soft catch warm. Skin crease. Dampdry

snag. Heavy weighs touch: hoar hair; in particles, touch.

Algal scent. Giving flesh. Skin tag. Bristles. A kiss. Bones.

Under membrane smoothe. Sun-warmed boulder. At anchor

clutching roots.

Bempton Cliffs

A bird is its own epistemology. Sometimes I feel too much,

sometimes I feel nothing at all, but a bird knows of sky when

to waver and when to plunge into gale, when to hurl itself

breathless from cliff and when to dive arrowswift in pursuit

of glimmers aslant – the poet’s plaintiff silver scales – of

knowledge, of forbidden fruit. A bird revels when winds

bend back its feathers, cries out of place, intertarsal, ulna

carpal joints turned away from human form; it errs in

self-scrutiny among the rocks. It calls to the precipice of its

beginning, its end, its fall: awaiting answer, knows how

silence is all:

Becca Drake is a researcher and poet based in York. She/they completed a PhD in medieval English and Icelandic literature at the University of York (2023). Her/their work focuses on east coast histories and literature, maritime environments, and the place of the human in the natural world. Becca was poet-in-residence at the Hull Maritime Museum (2021). Her/their chapbook The Maritime Museum & The City (2023) is published with Thin Ice Press. Becca has poems in Reliquiae, Black Bough, Fly on the Wall, and was highly commended in the Hive Young Writers competition (2022).