by Hannah Linden

We watched ourselves, snow-clocked tidal
floes in a melting landscape. We were
crystals held together by the cold, our home
disintegrating around us. One by one

we felt ourselves dissolve, disappear
into the brine. The hardest of us
tried to hold on, hoped the sea would
carry us back to where we belonged.

Falling and rising, rising above the salt,
the memory of how much we had known
below the surface growling inside us,
all those pockets we’d kept locked, fizzing

into nothing, our rainbows melting into the blue.
And we added what we could, watered down
the salinity, brought what we could to the mix.
And for a while, we did manage to float above it.

Hannah Linden is a Northern working class writer based in Devon, UK. Her most recent awards are 1st prize in the Cafe Writers Open Poetry Competition 2021 and Highly Commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021. The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press) is her debut pamphlet (shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023) . Hannah is on Twitter/X @hannahl1n.