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Charlotte Runcie

Charlotte Runcie is a former Foyle Young Poet of the Year and winner of the Christopher Tower Poetry Prize, and has a pamphlet, seventeen horse skeletons (tall-lighthouse, 2010). She has been published in magazines including Magma, FuseLit, Read This and The Dial, and is former editor of the Pomegranate poetry e-zine. In 2011 she graduated from Cambridge University with a First in English Literature and has appeared in the Salt Book of Younger Poets.

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Staying In

I watch the city shrug its clothes back on.
An appaloosa spatter gathers scent
that hits the brain the way it hits a lawn:
it quenches, hard as mint. I think it meant
to come inside, but only leaves a note
in droplets on the door; at Hogmanay
it settles in the lungs and in the throat
and whispers too a hush of seaside spray
that sweeps below the ribs and keeps its snow
flakes back from hopeful tongues. I’m breathing when
the rainsmell pours my throat a dram, and so
I open up the window wider, stand again
here in our cloud and wincing, hats and boots,
a pearlish weeping reaching for the roots.


‘Staying In’ © Charlotte Runcie. First published in The Salt Book of Younger Poets, edited by Roddy Lumsden & Eloise Stonborough. Reprinted by kind permission of the author and Salt Publising, 2011. 

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