Here’s Your Star Sticker Back
for Laith
I steal a star
sticker from your bedroom
wall and hide
it in my wallet.
You point at my back pocket
as it glows. I used to win
them for high marks at school.
Every time I treat myself to a coconut slice,
I see your star
and think how you shine in swim class,
of your husky new giggle.
When we share the night
sky and spot
a shooting star,
that’s the one
passing
from you to I,
our time together:
me handing it back to you.
Watching My Wife Rowa at Three Cliffs Bay
You soothe rock edges
with your twinkling swimsuit, adore
our son – he titters into moats,
kids in the waves glance back.
I crouch in a rock pool – whelks
for toes, watch you net the sunset,
grow taller against the tide,
arrive with the current under your armpits.
I catch fresh eyes in the ocean
gazing at near-finished castles –
built then sunk over generations.
Pupils plead to play with our buckets.
We clutch ancestors’ hands,
mould turrets with Laith,
face the whispering waves of past:
we’re bolder as our castles rise.
I hum over seagull
squawks serenading our sandwiches,
my salted lips,
breath heavier than the gale
now whistling of foundations we’ve made.
Laith lifts high his bucket and spade.
The Sea Steals Our Picnic Blanket
and returns cling film cleansed. Scrub
your fingertips in the fairy-liquid waves,
my captured goodwill floats away in our lunchbox.
At the scene of the crime you tilt your soaked
face to evict ear-squatter sand, ask why
I’d positioned us so close to the sea. Shells prise
my protestations. My eardrum bursts, wax surfs
on pulsing waves. Jellyfish fireworks
sting the sky. Rocks thud like bailiffs:
I’d dragged our blanket, four-course platter
and cava down to the shore. A downpour
threatened, even the tide was leaving.
But in a final assault it nicked our basket:
a week’s wages feeding the fishes. My wrists
freeze under my seaweed-soaked shirt.
Your pupils are beads from the seabed
drawn by nature’s net. I want to pick
at your best bits, before you leave again:
this open shell won’t close.
Flights, Issue Nine, June 2023
Flight of the dragonfly 