Image by Jason Eppink. Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License. Anna Karenina

Everyone has a future

but some have more than others

Lucia has made seven for herself

pails full of oil

all dark and density and difficult

for a girl to carry

with two arms and a yoke

Auntie says ‘Do not worry so

much over your future’

but my future

– there is only one –

my future is heard this

and is become loud

Biography

She is a 23-year-old poet of indeterminate origin. Her poems have appeared in swimming light reflections, the face of the incredulous Meister, Christ’s translucent orb, and elsewhere.

The Saints

The saints watch all our meetings

from my first dream remember

the one with all the fear

those flaming scrolls

They are fitful jealous

not understanding

reckoning our exchange

in terms of hate

Perhaps they know

how a phone call from you

is a deathbed summons

how I’ll take what I’m given

I’m trying to work it out

but the details are sketchy

like a drawing of a dog with a shadow

is funny somehow

the latter having become equated with souls

You were so warm that night

they elected to speak through you

suggesting how you might solve your fever

by way of an equation

how an offering is itself a kind of equation

Sophie Collins is co-founder and editor of tender, an online quarterly promoting work by female-identified writers and artists. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Poetry London, The White Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is currently editing an anthology of experimental translations due late 2015 via Test Centre.

These poems first appeared in The Lifted Brow: Digital, Volume 16: Don’t Call It a Comeback.