Andrew McMillan was born in 1988. His work has appeared in print and online journals such as The London Magazine, The North and Pomegranate. A debut pamphlet, every salt advance, was published in 2009 and a second pamphlet is due later this year, both from Red Squirrel Press.
I am a broken half-buzzard of a man
limping through the winter’s lilac dusk
I used to make a killing selling proverbs
to the dreamers of provincial towns
something changed no one has the time for feeling
their way through hearing of the shaved
beaten man looking for his tooth in the snow
savage/beauty of pinned wings
hillsides stalked with suit pipe net
glass encyclopaedia
of specimen
thousands
frail arms crucified skin-tone lingerie
draped across vertebrae nerves
think of
a wife pulling pages from the embers
coming back from the brink
innocence is only innocent if we long to touch it
but don’t
innocence is only innocent until it falls
fogged out of trees
until someone pins it down
spreads the limbs
and names it
pigeon neck smudged
with the colours of the ocean
kestrel nursing the heavy wing
of its own fame at the rail side
starlings suddenly in flight
a brown bowl dropped shattered on the sky
© 2011
Salt Publishing Limited