I S S U E  10

Tiffany Atkinson

cold tv

When i was your age Mim i say/  instead of mental
health we had the bomb/  & skies throughout the
eighties looked so breakable/  the window of our
dormitory was cold tv/  sometimes we felt our bones
light up like lilac cutlery & drifted hand-in-hand
above ourselves/  the school/  its semi-risen jesuses/ 
the whole world//  if you blinked hard it was there
behind the eyes/  the sunsplit/  then a boiling calm as
everything you tried to think about dropped dumbly
off its bone/  though what we didn’t know back then
was that we loved it/  like you love the notion of
your own birth/  absolute yet barely anything to do
with you/  i mean a lot of us grew up as shadows
of the arrows of ourselves/  unlikely to hurl love in
chubby handfuls down the stairwells of the future/ 
or perhaps that’s just me// anyhow/  the heavy
vapours redistributed themselves to fall as different
& indifferent rain on all our million/  million/ 
infinitely/  precious  little  bunkers & that’s history/ 
or half-life//  although what you want to know is can
i hold your native unsplit sadness like the sweet new
fruit it is & hell/ Mim/ what do you think/

Tiffany Atkinson’s latest collection Lumen (Bloodaxe, 2021) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and winner of the Medicine Unboxed Creative Prize. She received the Cholmondeley Award for Poetry in 2022. She lives in Norwich and teaches at University of East Anglia.