Julia Webb
THE HIVE IS OPEN TO INTERPRETATION
The hive is wearing its jazz hands. Watch it buzz.
The hive is after your honey, honey.
The hive alive alive oh.
The hive is smoking.
The hive gardens the soul of something.
The hive in its prison stripes.
The hive working towards – the way the government wants it.
The hive – a pension of sweetness and a smear of jelly.
The hive says haphazard but the flowers tell it different.
The hive waxing lyrical again.
The hive, oh hello beautiful.
The hive, can you feel your skin crawl.
The hive, heavy legged and dog tired.
The hive, pollen poor and water sick, its logic board failing.
expansion of
the body harbours stuff/the pain centre feels expansive/and unending/spinning out and out/like it will never stop expanding/other times the painiverse is imploding/closed in on itself like a collapsing cake/pain assures you that it harbours no malicious intent/it simply is/the body has made itself into a shanty town/it gives refuge to pain/pain comes from far and wide/it queues up for food/pain wants to phone out for more pain/to advertise that this a good place to be/pretty soon the locals accuse pain of all the petty crime in the area/later they will accuse it of more serious offences/the body is unaware just how much it can tolerate/pain shows it how miraculous it can be/when pain disappears it is unclear whether it will be coming back/and where it has gone/has it left of its own volition/has it been imprisoned/is it waiting to be freed
WOODING
and you suspended
in the damp mouldy morning
we will mountain the trailer
in the space between farmland and gully
with rubber-cold boot toes
our axes biting
your chain-blade growling
while the fields around us shrink and darken
sail her homewards
clinging bark-fingered
down the tall lanes
through slop-brackened woodland
to where we will cut a path
kindling-crack and split-stump
on a bothersome tractor
down rut-lane and cart-track
down through the quiet places
work weary backs
squirrel-hole and bird-call
the bent necks of saplings
Copyright © Julia Webb 2018
Julia Webb graduated from UEA's poetry MA in 2010. She works for Gatehouse Press and is a poetry editor for Lighthouse (a journal for new writing). Her work has most recently appeared in Butcher’s Dog, Envoi, Oxford Poetry, and Amaryllis. Her first collection Bird Sisters was published by Nine Arches Press in 2016. She blogs at: http://visual-poetics.blogspot.co.uk/ and tweets: @Julwe1