Adam Flint

Adam Flint was born in North London and is currently based in Berlin. Previous poems have appeared in The Rialto, Poetry Salzburg Review, Shearsman magazine and Black Box Manifold, among others. His poetry has also appeared in numerous publications from Corbel Stone Press, and in 2023 an album in collaboration with the Cube of Unknowing was released on the Irish label Fort Evil Fruit.

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Sisabana III

“In the Other, everything is a poetics”

~ EDOUARD GLISSANT

Illyrian thistle. August wind

blows full solar into a stranded bouy's shadow.

Amethyst broomrape, God into that wind –

all the streaming lack of limit,

the rapid tracks and switching currents –

tarp crack, loquat, honeylocust-humbled trees –

blizzard of mineral and the sky scoured out

to desert leaf in a dry glint,

heading inland – yes, savannah –

glasswort, cordgrass, mint and green lavender,

almonding heart of a silphion laser

pulsing thapsian sun

To scruff-crested thekla lark – Where is my boy? –

picking over squills and wattles –

carob fruit, cork oak, hyacinth tassle –

ambient drone of sombre bee –

erica on the barrocal, grey felt leaves –

dune ripple – spiked magenta –

glittering lagoon

soon into the West where Death is avenged,

and youth,

there were rivers,

streams –

shelled things

scuttled – an island at the end of the water...

I crossed the patterned valves of mollusc

to rest in the shade of a boy.

From a distance beneath him I could see fine scratches

like snow-white splinters or patches of negative fur.

Sheltering from the son in the shadow of a boy –

more than the ventriloquism of a child's body –

his voice/my voice blisters and burns

coming to terms with long becauses

ones that made one rush to null –

in the film of a coiled eye –

body half in water, half in honeyed tide.

Surf fades from the sand the same

as a cloud's swift shadow.

The wind blows salts of a newfound son

into a stranded boy

yes savannah

Ilha de Armona, Summer 2023

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From 'Savin & Genevrette'

faces, canals

Heady must of greenwood shade. Thin files of haze-grass tempting senses to green.

Under drupes of Prunus, we stood on a brink of leaf and light. Drank dry sapphires. Their blue gold.

Forth under oak by paths verged nettle, making mosaics of memory and fact, we balked at lachrymal tracks in the bark – the dapple sousing our eyes.

Evening came and we moved our tears aside, spoke lightly concerning the night and felt each other relent. In the unsaid, we distilled the point at which the golden hour turns blue.

I sprinkled minutes to make of the day an icon in error, calling it truth.

We rose to go a changed way home. To come to the night and hide in the moon. Hide in faces, canals, anomalies. Any asylum we find.

dandelions

Piss-a-bed meadow. Sun strong as urine. Meanwhile, other wilds shine.

They burst and glitter – the ochres and violets – colours of light and duration. May pushed and all was burgeon: a speckled, curd-white blossom on the rows. The lions greyed and their manes refined blew pappus strands on the wind. Thus we walked through clocks in transit – Caduca tending to fall.

I told them of Brighton on white port and fighting to balance the blood; how I'd skinned my ribs on the tide, said – “Hello squire” to a shadow standing over me, and the figure had replied – “Hello son”; then I'd rejoined with – “Carry me home in your arms, my desire”, the next thing I knew: sensation of weightlessness before coming to. To sweet custody.

long commons

A tingle of aspens.

With tannins and quinnine through all the long commons, the open and low-lying broad situations, I ran with Savin crouching at roadsides, brookbanks, windbreaks and walls.

With the run of our hearts, light skipped over darkness. In more than one sense the light was false. Wrong on the face of the leaves. The spring leaves – little tipped-curve thrusts, once the sun, and cut in accordance with immanence – glisten like an inner mouth-part. Under the leaves. The inside of a cheek. Valiant at brambles and the tongue moves.

I am talking to you. Can you hear me?

Are you in there? Is it raining?

Carry me home, my desire. Carry me.

Home.

In your arms.

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