Green Flesh

The green flesh in particular
was what we kept finding when we scratched
The colour revealed itself like crab meat
only a wound, something to lick clean
long, tasting of shelled peas & soil
Green flesh the colour of the moon

Inside a fly bite there were never eggs
only green
flesh: green flesh like jelly
cubed zirconia rending their souls
teeth, a toothpick going through
The light so loud when the skin unsealed
sounding a lot more like cricket song
 

Green Flesh II

Every now and then a thick clump falls
off the hard cheese face of the hill

Somebody dies or
they don’t – it depends

Summer, what’s left of it
Typically goes up in flames

The ice-pick of industry
provides for families through land

Wood glue, my friends
spend mornings polishing chairs

Beetle parachutes against the thick sky
all too easy to imagine them land

We know things are caduceus
even nature has a bad back

People vote conservatively around here
whatever that means as an old man

Green Flesh III

What’s more, the total ground
leafiness of the evening – between four and six
blacker than a mug of river tea
branches hardened into a nervous system

The only thing you know with certainty:
black eels slip in the damp underneath
All river fish are an ugly breed
too many teeth

All teenage rats of our former selves
Our sodden trust wrung
out too many times, like a dizzy
boxer by the ropes of the ring

I can’t believe you just said that,
it’s not even funny to read
My old friends, elephantine

thrashing through our shared history
Finding nothing but a slippery Id
at the rock laughless bottom of it

Mud doesn’t harden when the weather’s this wet
our feet leave no tracks
Either that, or we become mulch

Livia Franchini is a writer & translator from Tuscany, Italy. She is the author of a novel, SHELF LIFE (Doubleday, 2019) and a poetry pamphlet, OUR AVAILABLE MAGIC (Makina Books, 2019). Her latest English-language translation is THE SKY IS FALLING by Lorenza Mazzetti (Another Gaze Publications, 2023) and a second novel is slated for publication by Doubleday in 2024. Livia is Lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths where she also coordinates The Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction. With Lucy Mercer, she co-edits TOO LITTLE/TOO HARD, a magazine on the intersections of work, time and value. She lives in London.