Three Poems by Kayleigh Campbell

Lunar Eclipse 
 
She stares at the triangle between her legs,
the darker tip of it like a snow-covered
 
mountain top. She lifts her foot from the water 
and suspends it as a skin-covered moon.
 
She lifts her right hand as Zhenyi 
might have, scrunches it into an earth-fist.
 
She holds her left hand up, palm flat, fingers
outstretched into a pygmy sun and pauses: 
 
she aligns here in this moment, 
before letting her limbs go limp.

Dear Vera Shimunia 
embroider me a star  
splattered night sky  

and sew my body so beautifully  

into a constellation so I can hang myself  

and the universe  
on the kitchen wall.

Andalusia 

She licks crisp schnapps from her lips  
as she watches palm trees sway in Balearic breeze. 

She fingers pages of The Handmaid’s Tale, 
as she examines the body language of sun loungers.  

She spots her fiancé in the pool, hazy with cheap beer
and chlorine. She imagines it is a stranger.

She begins to imagine a different holiday,
where she is alone.

She looks beyond the resort, across the beach
into carolina sea and imagines

she could be crystallised like salt
and drift away from here.

About the Author

Kayleigh Campbell is a third year Creative Writing Ph.D candidate at The University of Huddersfield. She has previously volunteered for Stand Magazine based at The University of Leeds; she lives in Leeds with her partner Joe and their daughter Eliza. Her pamphlet Keepsake is available from Maytree Press. Her work has appeared in the likes of Anthropocene, Butcher’s Dog and Ink, Sweat & Tears.