schiele’s trees [small]
it is late autumn and you have reached so far toward it you have become the edge.
to cling is to plead new roots, anchors where there had been empty fingers.
the evening about you is white ash, hiding each branch from the others.
to grow at the angle of a pointed forefinger is to fall very slowly, as long as it takes.
the weather, like time, is invisible but for your shape, severed and devoted as a sign.
out of frame beneath you there is grass that is growing and hidden and turbulent.
schiele’s trees [winter]
you have cracked the flesh of the sky
quiet as a life needled through the universe
the sky that pink I’ve been all my life
and you the tree I’ve seen
pushing lines across my palm
into which time sinks, leaving
a ragged trajectory of segregation
skin folding toward itself as strange
I want them to hold the future like a page
so I know it is fated as leaf-fall
______________
Susanna Galbraith is from Belfast. Part of Abridged, her poetry has also featured in The Tangerine, Cyphers, Her Other Language, The Lonely Crowd, The Penny Dreadful, The Pickled Body, York Literary Review, HU, Icarus and Belleville Park Pages among others.Shortlisted for the RedLineBookFestival Poetry Competition 2019, she also received a second SIAP award from ACNI in 2019 which helped support the development of these poems among other projects. @susannaalice
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