Ginny Darke

How to express concern

Unstick yourself from the dark to discover great views every now and again.
It’s possible you are already doing it without noticing. Speak carefully -
Not carefully as in polite but carefully as if carrying a very full cooking pot.

I haven’t got any plans tonight. There is no form in folding the quiet in half.
I can rest in peace between liquid and ghost, turning a deeper shade of not-quite-right.
I can eat a whole rotisserie chicken to myself in your car. I chew the last of the cartilage

and feel more honest than I deserve to. Pocketing the last of the black napkins
and going to sleep only to wake upside down whilst a cicada screams
the morning in. Elsewhere, a magpie sits, thoroughly still. A fish mouths the surface.

Ginny Darke is a Welsh poet based in Bristol, U.K. Her work has been published with Poetry Northern Ireland, Anthropocene, The Remnant Archive, The AI Literary Review and Ink, Sweat and Tears. She was Foyle Young Poet in 2018 and has been shortlisted for the Poetry Wales Award (2024) and the Creative Futures Award (2019 and 2020). She works at a craft brewery in the east of Bristol.