Mark Antony Owen is the author of digital-only poetry project Subruria. He’s also the creator, curator and publisher of online poetry journals iamb and After… Mark writes exclusively in nine original syllabic forms, sometimes with variations. His economic poems – at times general, at others deeply personal – cycle through themes of love and loss and what we think we remember; shift, back and forth and unchronologically, between things observed and things recalled.

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All fields

To have stood here in the early sixties,
before this hill wore its necklace
of charmless semis – when this was still

‘all fields’, still ungrazed by herds of houses.
There must’ve been wheat, labourers,
communities sheafed to the seasons;

calls for planners to pick some other plot.
Now pinwheels grow in allotments.
There are paddling pools, dazzling the sun.

Exclusive to East Ridge Review

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Bloom

Every petal on their skin a mouth
for the light, digesting the sun
to make it sweet, make it edible.

Alchemy at work in the slender bones
slipping from dresses, print by print;
lawns showered by the tattering silks,

the scatter of magnolia feathers.
The trial of the bloom begins.
Reward us for the rains, for the heat.

First published by Black Bough Poetry.
Nominated by the readers of Black Bough Poetry for The Pushcart Prize.

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Song for a seed pod

Loose lining in a wet wisteria seed
pod comes away like the inner
of a leather shoe. Hazel eyes hide

in the hold of a tiny, tan hull, till split
seams slip them into soft soil. Gone,
the long grey tear, velvet rabbit’s ear,

listening hard for spring. Now, only a thin
wooden skin keeps its secrets in –
guards the future against a winter.

Exclusive to East Ridge Review

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At Pagham

You leave the waves like a long-legged wader;
leave the froth and fizz of a sun-struck sea’s sighs.

Patches of butterscotched sand made butter pats,
flattened and pebble-pressed by high tides and toes.

Your mother’s shutter, enclosing like weather –
up by our clothes, closing in on our ocean.

She’s shooting the shoreline, freezing us in frame:
a silver lip lapping, blown beach in our teeth.

Exclusive to East Ridge Review