Three poems

By Tom Nutting

Dust Archive, or, Field Notes from Anthropocene Strata

Lauren Goldie, Burial (2023), bronze, pewter, sand, resin, limestone, and plywood

They buried them carefully,

these sacred fragments

of metal and glass,

edges smooth by descent,

their forms housed in limestone shrines.

Each object is unique:

twisted shard, spiked anchor,

molten seed.

But there is consistent symbolism:

propulsion, metamorphosis.

The density of debris

suggests ritual accumulation.

We believe they believed

the sky hungered for objects —

that such sacrifices

could earn them light,

or absolution.

Note the layering:

plastics, alloys, carbon ghosts.

An architecture of collapse.

No bodies, only traces:

radioactive signatures,

thermoplastic blooms,

microfilaments patterned as skeletons.

Their faith seems not to have been

in escape but in permanence.

They launched relics into orbit

in numbers too great to count,

constellations of devotion and denial.

When the sky began to fall,

they built monuments

from the wreckage —

we call these Impact Crypts.

Still, no sign they stopped

their launches.

No sign they understood.

Shared Myths

Joseph Bird, Some Shared Myths (2024), oil & acrylic

ochre hum

            folds into bruise —

not quite sky

but the oily memory of sky

from our paper-thin houses

we contracted angles

to extract shadows

  like breath from stone

            (gently, endlessly)

geometry stutters:

 a triangle fails to be a mountain

        a plane remembers being whole

myth lives in the seam

        where pigment slips

             into hush —

we are echoes

  of the nameless resource

         we classified

listen —

         the earth creases

           not in rage

         but in

             refrain

Climate anxiety

Outside, the street is dully rinsed by early rain – those tasked with maintaining illusion: street cleaners, a mother ramming her double pram over the curb, briefcases marching into the city as coffins, & a shopkeeper wiping all that grimy yesterday from her windows. The sky’s ceiling hangs low, swollen by breath, exhaust or grief. You should write that down – something about how memory works. Inside, sugar & cinnamon shimmer into your lap; sunlight always finds this spot – the perfect geometry of the café windows. The waitress wipes tables in circles, again & again, her phone-heart glowing bluely in her shirt pocket. A man & his son sit not eating or drinking, as if politely waiting for when those windows shatter, their faces open so easily you almost spit out your coffee. Remember letter openers? Your friend films his latte art – his face half gone, scrolling endlessly. You ought to write this down: lines arrive but don’t form sentences so no poetry forms to sooth this gnaw – only scratched marks, like alarms, or sirens, not even unfinished messages. I haven’t heard from you in ages, you say, smiling with eyes that no longer close. Your mother calls – you don’t answer. Megaphones or men stream past; you really should read about that new law. A girl walks by with a bright placard heavier than her own body. A balloon or a drone follows her. You have thousands of unread emails now. This knot or glass shard in the chest tightens daily. Sirens, again.

Tom Nutting (he/they) is a writer and psychiatrist from Bristol, UK. He writes on queer ecologies, activism and mental illness. He was shortlisted for the Starkie, MĀNOA and Aurora poetry prizes, and won the Lisa Thomas Poetry Prize. His writing has appeared in Magma, The Stinging Fly, fourteen poems, The Hopper, and elsewhere.