Two Poems by Imogen Forster

Underlying

In late age the body’s elements reveal
their articulations. The hand’s buried
utilities emerge, a flowchart in arterial
red and venous blue, the congested
B-roads and the broad blood-highways
that carry their traffic under the skin.

Thighbones do a ball-and-socket dance,
an ankle lies at its slackening anchorage;
arms brandish elbow-irons, knobkerrie heads.
And here’s the ribcage, a bony xylophone,
an anatomist’s percussion instrument;
the knee-plate, a disc you could hold
in your palm, a puck, a piece in a game
you may imagine but will never play.

Bird/Machine

Botaurus, the ventriloquist
bittern, unlocatable, works
the bellows of his chest,
camouflaged in dry reeds.

Crex crex, the corncrake,
keeps his creaky time
from a bed of nettles,
a rusty metronome.

Troglodytes, the wren,
a little wind-up toy, his
loud song broken at mid-point
by a hard metallic rattle.

Imogen Forster lives and works in Edinburgh. Her pamphlet, The Grass Boat, was published by Mariscat Press in 2021. She has an MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University, and hopes to publish a full collection within the current year.