Carbon Year

 

 
 
 
waiting for a bruise to turn gold.

midas light & again I unfolded

the day & called it good. breathe

to forget, every winter that has

passed like a sickness. glory.

mouth. quickening. down the long

distant horizon are skeins

of ripe corn, newly cast off

& wilting again – all the children

I will never birth. in this body

of years, everything we know

is some place foreign & searched

for. the sun will rise; the house

covered with warmth

so choking that we claw

hours apart. find our palms

breaking from use & the memory

of being so young, we were not

alive. & i’ll imagine the empty

field, to break it. yellow before

brown. canola. rapeseed

jaundiced past our unmovable

waists, pulling in thorns,

this spring, when I would

have become a mother. & how

it shucked hills of strength –

how, at once, the land brightened

& opened to that airless, smog-

-made room, where I forget.
 
 
 

A Foyle Young Poet in 2015, Annie Fan attends Rugby High School in Warwickshire, England. Their work appears in Ambit, Powder Keg and CALLISTO, among others, and has been recognized by Christ Church and Corpus Christi Colleges, as well as Hollins and Lancaster Universities. They are a prose editor at TRACK//FOUR.