an aubade of collective nouns
By Bex Hainsworth
for a messiah of birthday mornings
I wake next to a harpsichord of husband (singular)
his fingers trailing a rewilding of stretchmarks
above my hips snores tickling a hill of moles
humped across my neck there is a stigmata
of cranberry extract tablets on the bedside table
along with a panic of anti-anxiety meds
and an alexandria of tbr piles
my phone buzzes with an insistence
of notifications trying to outnoise
an apostasy of birdsong filtering
from a necropolis of gardens
I am thinking about the collective noun
for unfinished poems a nettlebed a compost
a pigeon nest a scaffolding or perhaps
an invocation
an ovum
a potentialBex Hainsworth is a 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 Poetry Wales, The McNeese Review, Sonora Review, Nimrod, and The Rialto. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is published by The Black Cat Poetry Press.
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Just lovely. And I learned the meaning of ‘aubade.’
I love this.