2 Poems
Bex Hainsworth
Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and has been shortlisted in the Welsh Poetry Competition, Waltham Forest Poetry Competition, and the AUB International Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in The Coachella Review, Atrium, Okay Donkey, bath magg, and trampset.
Her debut pamphlet, Walrussey, will be released by Black Cat Poetry Press in Summer, 2023. Walrussey is a collection of odes to the beauty of marine ecosystems, but also a warning about the devastating impacts of climate change.
Twitter: @PoetBex
Instagram: @poet.bex
Valley of the Whales
Wādī al-Ḥītān, Egypt
In the middle of the desert,
there is a strange oasis.
Amongst sandstone pillars
dressed with shells
is the ghost of a lagoon.
A bright bounty
of bones, this dried bowl
provides unexpected fruit,
56 million years in the making.
Whale skeletons have
risen to the surface, once
buried like kings with
trinkets of turtle shells.
The sun disks of their stomachs
reveal a jumble of skulls
smoothed by the wind.
It is an odd afterlife.
The gods of an older pantheon
nose through the dirt,
shedding their earth skin
like serpents. Spines
and ribs carve out
a map scattered
with the memory of salt.
In the middle of the day,
a fennec fox sniffs at fin bones
curled into a foot, then bolts
over a horizon that crackles
and shimmers like water.
Thetis
Portent-bound, I folded my cold limbs
and squeezed under a rock in the Aegean,
waiting for divine hands to try and pry me away.
I knew their fear was not for me, but for what
I might create: the terrible artistry of my womb,
a Pandora’s purse of prophecy.
Peleus came like a fisherman with a hook
and a net like a noose. We wrestled. My barnacle-
dusted knuckles found his jaw, his ribs.
I wished I was water, but didn’t cry out.
The coupling was quick, cosmos-sanctioned:
I knew the gods were watching, satisfied.
Phthia went without fish for months. I sent storm
after storm, span whirlpools like webs,
and clawed out riptides with dripping fingers.
As for the king, at night he smelled salt.
Half-waking, he found me scraping
against the bow of his body like a rockface.
My soaking hair clogged his mouth
so he couldn’t cry out. Siren of vengeance,
it was almost enough.
Later, my belly swelling like a tide that never
recedes, I squatted in the shallows
and dragged the child out by his heels.
