I S S U E 3

Lisa Kelly

Running at Dusk

It has been raining, raining hard all day.
Somewhere it has rained so hard,
flood water has risen. Furniture floats
in the living room, a framed family has dived
from the sideboard into the swirling waters,
but that is somewhere, not here, here it is evening.

The all-day rain has stopped, water has given way
to fading light, yet the ground remains ribbed
like the shell of a walnut. I am running
around the park because it is dry enough to escape
televised news of floods, as my arms swing
and my open hands pump air to help me along.

I think of the sign language for evening,
the shutters of the hands do not come down
in that final blinkered collapse of night;
instead, they stutter in a dance move of darkness
as if they want to wave in and wave away light,
a drawbridge with a mechanical fault.

Somewhere other hands are pumping
water that should not be inside, outside.
All these elements we want in perfect balance.
My hands pump on in their asynchronous swing
through the swelling dusk as a fiery bee hovers—
feeling for the flower of a linden tree.

Lisa Kelly is a freelance journalist who writes about technology and business and is Chair of Magma. Her first collection is A Map Towards Fluency (Carcanet, 2019). Lisa’s poems have appeared in Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press, 2017) and New Poetries VII (Carcanet, 2018).