A Poem by Carrie Etter

These Days

for Sarah Watkinson

A week alone in Norham, two-
pub village on its way to one-,

I opened every window; I courted
flies and bumblebees and 

the swifts nesting under 
the back eaves just to see

that cursive up close.
Yet to ask is to receive 

something else: tortoiseshell
butterfly after butterfly

—this one keeping watch 
over me all night,

this one in the lounge 
as I read Angela Carter. 

When the weather cooled, I
closed up and yet

expected wings at the glass,
black and orange 

omens of possibility.

Carrie Etter is an American expatriate living in Bath and teaching creative writing at the University of Bristol. Her most recent collection, The Weather in Normal (UK: Seren; US: Station Hill, 2018), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and individual poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, and the TLS, among others. She also edited Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010), a TLS Book of the Year, and her former student Linda Lamus's posthumous collection, A Crater the Size of Calcutta (Mulfran, 2015). She also writes short fiction, essays, and reviews.