Walking in nature is essential to Annemarie Cooper’s writing. She has had two pamphlets published Seeds by Fkarestack, The Flight of Birds by Soaring Penguin, and her poems have appeared in Dawn Treader, Obsessed with Pipework, and Tears in the Fence among other magazines.

 

Ideas I procured greedily but the song

came all of its own accord,

 

The muscular arc of the bramble

balancing a nest on its thorny back,

a sculpted mossy cup.

 

I was knackered. Said I’d do it later.

Finally got down to it, welding this theme onto that.

Lost the song completely.

 

That night an owl flew into the room

– oh no a bird in the room – tried to grab it –

only small – it flew down to the floor

then in came a cat – pounced – got

a wing – the owl wrenched itself away

but the cat got after it so quick, so ghastly

I woke up hoping the owl was dead.

 

A dark-haired woman listened when I said

I should have let it fly round, poke about.

She approved of that idea and she had authority

but I know where the dream got her from,

 

Free mag in some paper, a model wearing

metal plates on her chest, a little older,

slightly different from the rest, a woman

who had finished with girlhood.

 

All the words I gathered,

eggs in a stone-cold nest