It’s my pleasure to introduce our May guest poet Jane McKie. We met many years ago on a writing workshop and are still part of an email group. You can find her biography at the end of this post. Cinnamon Press recently published her new poems and I’ve chosen some poems from Mine: vivid, clear embodied images with marvellous economy.

Mine

On nights when the wind drops, I hear it crooning softly,
not like a real bomb. A toothless, barnacled silhouette, wittering
to itself when the tide is low. My friends and I sometimes get close,
daring each other to nudge its rust. But what happens when
the music cuts out? Tonight, the mine’s a mute companion:
whiff of brine, cryptic fist. As my eyelids close, that’s when it—

Kevlar

I am the tattoo of a spider’s web
on a sixteen-year-old girl’s calf.
Traced from a drawing of a photo,
in time, I will thread up her thigh,
over her whole torso, in a riot of
silk that is stronger than Kevlar.

She will wear me like armour:
my vest of ink, her toughest skin.
Who wouldn’t fear a woman
fluent in the language of spiders?
Those twitches in cobwebs
that throb like old wounds.

Dreaming in an age of austerity

Not a single one finished: all mark time
until a rich developer completes the job.
Here, stone knuckles. There, exposed metal rods
stab at the sky like a mech-monster’s fingers.

Not vital or hungry, these resort Titans.
But not quite dead either. Gulls like to roost
in the pockets of them. Gulls dabble bills in
puddles that form from the absence of roofs.

Even small children play in the undead bodies
of imagined buildings, sneaking past tape
to be mummies and daddies in beautiful houses
that shelter insatiable, suckling doll-babies.

Polished malachite

on my desk, riven
with almost-blue, a pool
or algal cistern.

I touch it when I’m sad
and its green eye blinks, rippling
with souterrain light.

Biography

Jane McKie is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. She has written several poetry collections, including Morocco Rococo (2007), Kitsune (2015), and Quiet Woman, Stay (2020) with Cinnamon. Her most recent full collection is Carnation Lily Lily Rose (Blue Diode, 2023). She lives in Scotland, but was originally from the Sussex coast, which inspired several poems in Mine.