Cownose

By Bex Hainsworth

A flapping tapestry, leathery pockets
          unstitch, become capes, pageantry. 

Ten thousand rays slot into chainmail.
          Waves of spearheads, gold teeth,

shark scales; a fever, but without
          frenzy or fight. Instead, a slow

procession, silently scooping water,
          nudging forward with snouts,

not upturned in snobbish airs,
          but bovine benevolence.

They are a festival of kites,
          tails swaying like strings.

A trove of irregular coins,
          green and grey and gleaming.

This is pilgrimage, the journey genetic:
          they follow ancestral urges home.

I wish I knew what it means

                               to be this certain.

---

Apocrypha

By Bex Hainsworth

My grandmother is sitting
in her usual chair,    bandaged legs
elevated.    A bruise orchids    beneath
one eye from    a fall,    but her gaze
still sparks    when I come    to her side.

At ninety-four,     her mind is     crochet,
with  soft   threads     stretching          across
the    gulfs     of memory,     a web knitting
together     years     and towns     and faces.
Her home     of seventy   years         has photographs
on every wall        and windowsill:      a living album
to help    shrink          the gaps,    tighten stitches.

I moved away       ten years ago,
and every       visit, she       tells me
the same set       of stories.       Travelling
with       her father       to Leicester       to sell wool,
their dog Peg,       who was       bow-legged
with       knock knees,       how she       defended
her against        taunts from       local boys,
and Aunt Nora,       who never married,    even though
she was       once engaged        to a doctor.

I know these     tales by heart,
shared,   repeated,   remembered,
our family’s history held safe between us.

---

​Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Wales, The McNeese Review, Sonora Review, Nimrod, and The Rialto. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is published by The Black Cat Poetry Press.