BIRDING BODY BIND

Mia Scattergood

Lose yourself in the water cut-glut-flood
They’ll pick up where you leave off                   I promise
Let the moorhen 
be next-of-kin
Be siskin

If you stop                              Exhaling
You won’t have to think about
A police bike for a toddler                    Plastic Blue Yellow White
Stabbed in the edges of the river
with the sewage spill / with the red robins / with the broken bottles and the poppers

If you lose yourself in the undergrowth
You’ll forget
There’s no shouting up/sitting in/living in glitter anymore
And there’s dead children
Whenever you open your eyes to see the sparrows

Later
Dog shit on the smear                    Men looking at your body
You’ve washed up all god-bloated
On the sod

Eyes closed
Covered by the grouted ground
O                             still burning
The birds
Moorhen, Siskin, Robin.

Mia Scattergood (she/her) is a poet and fiction writer from the North of England. Her work, often filled with ideas around the queer ecological body and mind, is published or forthcoming variously in The Flooding Place, 34 Orchard and The Greenhouse Magazine. She has been shortlisted for the 2024 Heroica Poetry Prize. A current BA English student at the University of York, she is working concurrently alongside academics producing poems aiming to increase heritage accessibility in York. Before university, she was a 2022 Foyle Young Poet and placed 2nd in the 2023 National Youth Flash Fiction Competition, amongst several other awards. She can be found variously on the internet @mia_typewriter.