So, my friend kisses a horse on the horse's face, breaks it gently to me that my car is haunted, cuts the deck. We drive to the seaside. Around us, puddles cough up spits of oil, slips of clay, root stock, rock salt, this sky rains the business. This guy will get out of his car, she predicts, like early morning children's TV, give up memories of a pond he can’t place, of car chases and crows. There’ll be a grease-green 90s toaster smashed and abandoned at an angle in a skip, elements like limbs in a reclined seat. There’ll be a parting in the loosened area of reeds around the windshield, and we’ll find ourselves outstretched on the tarmac if not with the impact then with madness at how the sea can take a place over, behind and around your attention, grind the sharpness from glass, the ink from your eye. The nightless wonder of the unorbited, the outbid. Tassels from denim. Plastic from sand. Lean on the wing mirror with me a minute, OK? Did I tell you how big the sea has got?
POETRY May 5, 2023
Unusable Tarot Reading from the Passenger Seat of a Crashed Peugeot 205 (1997)
Fee Griffin is a writer from the east coast of England. She works part-time at the University of Lincoln and rides her wheelchair fast. Her debut poetry collection, For Work/For TV, was published in 2020 by Versal Editions, winning the Amsterdam Open Book Prize. Her second, Really Not Really, is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books (2023). She was a founding Poetry Editor for The Lincoln Review and has recent work published in Granta, Poetry London, and elsewhere.