Lucy Diver
New Year's Eve walking on the beach, items found:
a puffer fish
very dead
stiff mouth
dry eye
sockets
a spaghetti of clear cord once for fishing
sole of a scuffed shoe
one small pink jellyfish, sitting
mangrove seeds
worn smooth wood
(sand, obviously and everywhere)
shells
with other shells
inside them
a shag, sprawled on the dune
feathers ruffled, dirty feet
how did it die?
Next tide, next year:
terrain dimpled with wave prints
same pattern as the clouds
reflected in the wet sand
clean and fresh, a shag in flight passing through this dual surface
Items Not For Display
lost thing is destroyed
pencil shaving like an eyelash
the sound of thinking with a blunt pencil
clumps of pubic hair torn out in loneliness
Sappho’s bellybutton
fireworks through foliage
the outer country of the body in the bath
61 things you didn’t know about Friends
hard blueberries and warm strawberries being crushed against the roof of the mouth
fragment of a royal nose
it is easier to plant trees than to paint them
its unusualness makes scholars doubt its authenticity
Lucy Diver was born in Germany to New Zealand parents, grew up in Auckland, and is currently living in France. She has been published in New Zealand in the College Herald, Sunday Star Times and several NZ Poetry Society anthologies. In England she has worked with the Oxford Student, Cherwell, ISIS Magazine and The Mays, while completing her BA in English Literature at Magdalen College, University of Oxford.