Gigantic Angels

Words by Angelica Krikler

Photography by Charlotte Dobson

Green Man

Trying to cross the road

I hear Bradford’s harmonica planes

Experienced just a scratch

of this city

and it reminds me that what is shadowed

shines

these memories are worthless coins

in my palm

Like when you kissed my hand

with the glove

still on it

and in the locker room of my daydreams

your fringe still brushes the heavens

Then the potholes

tripped us up;

his royal highness on a three legged

throne

made redundant (but I remember your holy knees

and how you smelt like cake from home)

I bet you’ll miss

wading through love’s treacle pathways

where grapes grew on the side

My hands, ungloved and

small

strike the earth

to find the cool wet

beneath

Grate the dead skin

from my shoulder

so that I can feel soft again

A moment at the lights

When the red one

Goes green

I decide what

That means

Colours of Now

Earth is hungry for us, wants to chew and swallow

The animals which made it a tired planet

Wants us out like lights squeezed inside a palm

So it seduces us with the cinema of above: clouds passing over a puddle

Malachite and amber, the colours of now

Heaven already found

We are our own gigantic angels

Living in a mossy afterlife, wet on the feet

But we read the sky as pin-pricked with stars

Not as it is: shattered coins briefly borrowed

From our godfather Space

Seahorse

She walks through the park, combing through the falling hair of the trees, the autumn waves licking the shore in the distance

The tree roots look like the tendons of someone’s neck, and when she gets to the house it has that nice wet cottage smell

Inside, she watches the caramelised world from the window, scrubbing burnt baked beans out of the pan

At night she dreams of a deserted house not unlike this one, where a pan of carrot and coriander soup is still cooking on the stove

She sees herself in the corner, eating sweet dates, weaving herself into gold. When she wakes she feels longing like a creaking door which hasn’t been opened in years

Flowers on the kitchen table grow and die, and on the shelf there is a preserved seahorse that still smells of the ocean, and a grainy photograph of him

They had once played a drunken game of hide-and-seek, where she lay in a patch of warm leaves, scarcely disguised, so that he could come and find her

She could tell it was love because she put her finger under the tap to make sure it was cold enough for him, one of the tenderest moments of her life