Wildling

Poetry
Pia Ghosh Roy 
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Morning has broken                         
open, bleeding into the river. 
The streetlamps are still on. 
Two swans float up in unhurried hunger 
for bread I do not have. 
Twenty-two huddle farther up the river 
asleep, their necks wrung
into their wings. A lull 
of white feathers on which water does not stick.
Their river is always dry. 
It is land.
​ 
My river runs by me 
reflecting runners, dreams and detritus. 
A life of moorings and unmoorings, 
a mirror of semi-truths - 
where the light of a dog-pissed streetlamp 
looks like flecks of real gold. 
I stand still, very still. Watching 
my body ripple and quiver like a wildling.  
A swan passes by and I shatter into pixels. 
But I can wait, I have nowhere I need to be. 
The waters will calm, I will patch together again.
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Pia Ghosh Roy grew up in India and now lives in Cambridge (UK). Her fiction and essays have been published in the UK and US. She was shortlisted for the 2015 Brighton Prize, longlisted for the 2015 Bath Short Story Award, and highly commended at the 2014 Words and Women Competition. She has worked in advertising as a copywriter in Kolkata, Mumbai, Bangalore and London. Pia is currently working on her first novel.
Blog: Peppercorns in my Pocket / Twitter: @piaghoshroy

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