'Willingness' by Hadley-James Hoyles

The cleft in her face wrung her out every evening, barred away from the glare of lamplight, TV-backwash dulling the frenzy of indigence, bitter and untested in the sudden whitewash of the newest day.

Ever a new test, ever a sentence to be carried out from lips too cracked to murmur the silken codes needed to catch the lucid in the present. A stumble, a broken prayer held out like an orange, half eaten but half not hope for the best, it will be enough for the newest day.

Lift the salted hands, spray the castanet symbols from the skein she finds ardently looping, out of place in the glistening spring-bank where the beads lay.

In the bead, an eye glazed, wilting and molten, sent away from the corpus, a gesture lived rather than performed repeats clatter about like a dying wren.

A folded hand, a socket whispers oncoming runes are impatient for the vivifying chant. Auspex littered with last-minute deals holds it all, keeps quiet in the buried haze.

Copyright. Hadley-James Hoyles.

Hadley-James Hoyles is a poet, musician and teacher from North Yorkshire, who bases much of his work on the relationship between the landscape and the psyche, the echoes of the ancient peoples of Northern England, and the impact of the natural world on the individual lives and actions of select characters. He has been published in Yellerzine, The Inkwell, Poetry Lab Shanghai, Together Behind Four Walls and The Klecksograph, and his debut pamphlet was released in March 2021 by Wild Pressed Books.