Night Trawling
by and published in Edition Five of Pomegranate
The whale inside my head
begins each night
formless
as a broken yolk.
Surfacing
dark and tarry.
Beams darkly through
grille of teeth.
I am allowed to run
fingers along
his oily hide,
his barnacle swells.
He makes a guttural cooing,
sometimes closing
grey,
pin-prick eyes.
I live with the worry
that I have trapped him,
but haven’t the strength to carry
a companion.
I sense his boredom,
he tries to escape
my ears
in a gurgle of brine and krill.
It is enough to drive me out of
chip shops
and cinemas
at the faintest smell of salt.
He’s aware
of the embrace of duvet,
dredging coastal cold
up from my toes.
And yet I have given myself,
loose flotsam,
carried companionably, through nights
impenetrable as blubber.
Lizzy Dening
Lizzy Dening is from Cambridge, and currently studying English and Creative Writing in Liverpool. She has been writing poetry for about three years. She has had poems published in the Times and the Rialto, and is shortly to be published in The Rising.