2 poems by Jake Reynolds

The Strid

She tells him it comes from stryth, Old English

for turmoil, and while his fork scrapes marks

in congealing sauce, she fashions a makeshift

diorama with recycled napkins: here, she says,

a river turned sideways. Like a cut that carries

across the skin, bleeding, then slips under it:

more faint, but still there. A hairline bruise.

Later, in her bedroom, over wine, videos

of a camera on a wire, tossed into the depths.

Bubbles that deep should alarm you, she says.

The current just pushes, pushes shit down.

Before now, no human who has seen it

has survived. Every ten minutes, he scoops

with a finger small flies from her wine, offers

a fresh glass, but she wrinkles her nose, says

she’s fine. The next morning she throws him

off her, noticing that the crack in the plaster

of the ceiling is growing. Now imagine,

she says, that crack comes down. You and me,

say we’re newlyweds, say we’re walking.

We’re in love and the air feels different. Well.

_____________

Jake Reynolds is a poet from Lincolnshire. He currently lives and works in Norwich, where he is completing a PhD at the University of East Anglia on John Ashbery, populism, and the first-person plural in contemporary poetry. His poems have been published widely online and in print.

These poems were chosen by Anthropocene Guest Editor HLR.