after Wu Hao’s Duke Cups

The china cup is frilled at the rim
like tired lace and all over it
ceramic tentacles extend
to whisper if you drink me that way
I’ll poke your eye out, you
can’t quite press your fingers here
your lips – like walking a mountain ridge
at night with some romantic
ideal ahead, you are not
not figuring each step among
the rocks –
there’s want and caution
caught in you and a new
vocabulary of pouting to be learnt.

 

Isabel Galleymore is the winner of The London Magazine Poetry Competition 2015. Her first pamphlet, Dazzle Ship, was published by Worple Press in 2014. Her work has featured in magazines such as Poetry
Review, Poetry London and commissioned by Bristol Festival of Ideas. Isabel is currently finishing her thesis on ecopoetics at the University of Exeter and working on her first full collection of poems. She will be the Charles Causley Trust Poet-In-Residence in January 2015.