Gone Lawn
a journal of literature
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Gone Lawn 44
Spring equinox, 2022

Featured artwork, v903 (Dark Oddities Series), by Joe Lugara

New Works

Irene Watson


Different Coloured Days

Particularly on orange Tuesday, lull ties itself in knotted tea-towels, scooped around my back. It gives time to what if and why did I. Bright shards cast across forest floors lighting frilly aconites; sour breath and beads of sweat form at the wrong time; (when is the right time, I am not sure) people have fallen from un-footed ladders, walked off the precipice. Burrs get caught in tasselled edges and I spend an unfilled light drinking apple tea on pavement cafes, flicking thorns apart from threads of cloth. I focus on these closed windows, take them on journeys down unlit roads: high hedges of blackthorn thicket-filled with questioning beaks, you should have, you shouldn't have.

Monday was brown as it had always been, from before I could first give name to day. Each new sunrise held colour and I had noticed a pattern later being known as pace. Yellow day was box of cream cakes, green day was a middling: sugared toast for breakfast, lunch-bread with jam filling; sometime later in days, at belly empty almost tearful-time: ham-egg pie. Orange day wasn't as difficult as brown day. I had torn away already. Got used to it. Red was running, slap of sandshoes on tar day. And blue was nearly cake day. Even with tired eyelids, she was coming home.

So, brown day seems appropriate for my actions. I climb to tree-tops, the one with tails of monkeys that lets me swing across to others and I speak with Squirrel who advises me this was the better way to transverse canopies and keep safe: marauding dogs below. It feels high. I feel high. My head is a thin shoestring and ground reels toward me. I pull my shirt over my face so no-one can see-me-seeing the spiral of woodland. In softened light balance returns. I look through gauze to what's beneath. Sniper's view. Unseen. Watch myself fuss. There I am, pegging mis-match coloured socks in rows on lines amongst swelling creepers.

Beyond the tizzy, white puffs of seeds, catch in faint webs. Clothes pegs colour musical notes, tune-chiming. In spaces, long clamours of holding beats: blue dawdles time, yellows—a sacred lotus of highs, quavers of pink-purple chinkle flamboyant rhythms, bring to me the washing and the blackbird chirps a melody as it hops across the grass, orchestrating with his flash of beak.



What They Seek They Deem to be a Good Thing

Aldo ties himself up in packets and parcels, fetters his body with puff and stuffed drapes; reduces his face in peagreen screen and gashes his view with lashedup glass. Trussed with distrust of what's out there, why does it crush and rush, he wraps his food in clingfilm pages and skims his sheets with whilk and wilm; consumed by jitters of it all leaving him. Paperchase thickens, he likes their safedistance. Friday comes, she eats his clothebinding. Chewedup curls mouthfuls and gulps, shreds of dogbed with newly caught buck, devouring hulks, gnawing pulps. Saturday sees her lift button tins, topsy-turvy, upside down, crashing a mess around the bed, mayhem of clutter to hodgepodge his days. She defaces the red lines, disfigures his blight, impairs the waymaking of covers and tie-hides. She spies buckles and buttons, sewn-in-neat, wraps them around, forever safetight. Sunday sees her strap knots together, utter softly into his ear, I will lash us securely together, in here.



Irene Watson is a mid-career artist and poet, based in rural Perthshire and is currently studying for an M. Litt in Creative Writing at Dundee University. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Gone Lawn, The Dillydoun Review, Words for the Wild, Poet's Republic, Obsessed with Pipework, Pork Belly Press, Moss Puppy and others, and, she was recently shortlisted by Emma Press for her essay collection.