Eliza O'Toole is an emerging East Anglian poet. Her poems have been published in Shearsman Magazine, Tears in the Fence, The Rialto, and Fenland Poetry Journal. Muscaliet Press published her first pamphlet, The Dropping of Petals, in 2021. Forthcomings are a diptych of pamphlets: Writelinge - I send you blue and The Formation of Abscission Layers also from Muscaliet Press. Her first collection, A Cranic of Ordinaries, will be published by Shearsman in 2024. She was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year 2023/24 for her pamphlet The Unpinning of Moths. She nurtures more-than-human companions, grows wild flowers, and is a moth(er).
SLIP FACE
it was a stone & then it was an
abstraction of standing
it was the flaking of flint
& the sparks lit by it
it was the skin thin with it
stretched over &
particulate
it was wind brimming & it was hard silicious driving rain inarticulate
it was the land & then it was
an abstraction of property
it was the movement of glaciers & then
when the mountain intervened it was sand
SLANT CUBITUS
A fletch, a call of fox, lambs ululating, a curve
a circle declined, a Crow moon
a fall, three stars aligned. Jupiter inclined the Plough dissected. A nebula catched,
stretched a finger, a nail, a bone, an ell, a bow, a cubital rest,
slant-jointed, drawn aversus tip to wrist
hatched, prone, low strung & sloped,
eln-latched cubitus
leaning, bent of bow, unhinged,
forearmed & flung, the ulna of the owl.