Walking Up Scafell Pike with My Father

After walking a few yards
you breathe like someone
who has slipped across the border.

I am ahead, you are far
behind. There are no rest stops
on this rocky path to the summit,

no hedgerows to distract
our lack of common interests
or silences broken up with ums

and ers. You wear a jacket
of rain and I nudge you ahead with tuts.
At the top, there is nothing

but what a view. We are at opposite
ends of the plateau with only similar
rocks bringing us closer.

Mussel

Every shell is dipped in night.
Place an ear against the ceramic
to eavesdrop on fox squabbles,
crows watching rubbish bags
left split open like unfinished
operations, brambles unfurling
their fruit. Humans, extras
with no dialogue. Open every
shell to reveal day — the glazed
pottery, a perfect sky. Of course,
there’s the meat: An orange muscle
on a ready-made plate. Quiet,
contemplative. I threw up the sea
the first time I tried it. Didn’t know
I was chewing its prayer.

Blue January

The floorboards are screaming again.
The walls are cracking under the pressure.
A plane tree opposite the church
is bowing from the weight of unresolved guilt.
There are no songbirds to paracetamol away
whatever is being carried in the air.
I watch people scrambling to find their mouths
on the pavement while crows repurpose
their voices into strange and unfamiliar tools.

The Onions

‘Onion smuggling rackets thrive as staple becomes a luxury in Philippines.’ — The Guardian

Some are easy to spot: A belt of joke
grenades trying to bypass customs.
Bigger varieties, the size of premature
baby skulls, bulge like hernias when taped
to legs and stomachs. Dogs laugh
at the challenge. Shallots, pretty
in bruise colours, sometimes slip
through. We win most of the time.
They are the in-demand gift, despite
turning houses the perfect shade of grief.
Banknotes, now, are origamied
into migrating birds which never return.
Brides wear a taste of their childhood
around their necks while the earth
returns pearls of dust and tears.
The onions carry all of this in their layers,
becoming heavy and deep as a river
which flows and flows and flows.

Pomegranate, Split Open

Suburban facehugger. Beaded starfish.
A splayed fist of plasticky muscles.
Starro’s offspring in some light.
This is you in another universe:
Worshipped in restaurants like the god
you are, with even the knives and forks
called for inspection, and your love
curved around the room and its contents
like a spoon, like a trick of space-time
designed to ground you in a moment of love
as jewelled and beautiful as the fruit itself.

Christian Ward is a UK-based writer who has recently appeared in Open Minds Quarterly, Double Speak, Obsessed with Pipework, Primeval Monster, Clade Song, Uppagus, and BlueHouse Journal. ‘Walking Up’ and ‘Mussel’ have appeared in Poetry and Places and Feed Lit Mag respectively.