Potholing by Catherine Redford

So I descend a little further into the yawn,

night spliced with a pit of grunting pigs,

weaving round intervals of whale vertebrae

that sing like singed tree-stumps in the round.

I meet a heavy argon sea of phosphorescence,

dip a bottle into the waters and watch it gulp

the flickering amethyst fish into its belly.

The waves fold in on themselves and turn their backs.

Tired soil will give up her secrets, and her bones;

in this swallowed world, avenues graft and split like veins from the galleries below.

Terra ignota, crawling into the unmapped.

The danger of wrecks is that they lure us into believing we can reconstruct.

---

Catherine Redford lives in the West Midlands. Her poem ‘Between women just grown up’ was commended in the 2021 Sussex Poetry Competition, and she has poetry published on Atrium and forthcoming in New Welsh Reader. She has also published widely on Romantic and Victorian literature, with a particular focus on post-apocalyptic texts and the Gothic. Twitter: @C_Redford_

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