Pourrir

by Bex Hainsworth

Junel Mujar

to decay. A verb that rhymes with death.  French is the language of everything I have lost.  A childhood spent wandering the beach roads of Audinghen, picking up concrete nouns like potatoes, lifting their amber weight to the sun,  feeling the lumps of their strange letters.    Two decades later, they are a vinegary web of earth, an orchard rotting. I didn’t know this tongue was only temporary.  My mouth is parched, fluency curled  back like a scroll. The cow sentries  standing in sand-blown fields low  in unfamiliar vowels: meaux, moux.    I search out the sea, wandering  like an amnesiac past the broken bones of farm equipment which are red with memory.  Sharp consonants of German pistols are buried beside ammonite-shaped cedillas.    There is a collapsed carcass of bunker in the dunes covered in a crown of brambles. I crawl under the circumflex of its grey ceiling, among  the cigarette butts that are scattered like a dropped  wind chime, slip into the shadow I left here years ago.    This world is overripe, plumped with the past,  but the letters are silent. I cannot get them back.

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Bex Hainsworth (she/her) is a bisexual 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 Heavy Feather Review, Ethel Zine, Atrium, Okay Donkey, Acropolis Journal, and Brave Voices Magazine. Her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry will be published by Black Cat Poetry Press in 2023. Find her on Twitter @PoetBex.