by Dr. Alice Twemlow

Droppings—green, chalked.
Goose duty for a morgen’s sward
of plush grass grazed
before arrowing on south.

Logs, bundles, tumble.
Unfastening into the brack water,
where salt meets sweet
and clay slip-silts its cycle.

Deposits dissolve.
Phosphates prosper, mineral milk spills
scud the puddles,
exchange with counterfeit clouds.

Soft compost, still strives
Though the third tide seeps, tithes due;
skewing skyward
with each plunge-suck of my boot.

Droppings—in suspension.
Solute seeds yearn to disperse
over the dyke,
boot-boosted to drier muds.

British-born Dr. Alice Twemlow lives in The Netherlands where she leads the Design & the Deep Future readership, a project situated at the intersection of design history, creative practice research, and the environmental humanities that seeks to contribute interventions and imaginaries to climate justice research. Twemlow is a member of the Amsterdam-based International Writers Collective. One of her poems was chosen as one of the seven Honorary Mentions in the 2021 Fish Poetry Prize. She is writing a series of poems about punctuation marks and a novel about a cantankerous octogenarian wild swimmer with a dark secret, which is based on the events of the Great Flood which decimated much of the south of the Netherlands in 1953. She is on Instagram @alicetwemlow