Jessica Boatright
Haibun in Recovery
I am wearing yesterday’s storm on my feet. Even in the meditation of swaying through air, there is a fire crackling under the skin of my forearms, where lightning charged synapses and left a memory of adrenaline.
They tell me in order to recover, you must take the burning wherever you go.
So today I carry my sparks onto the waiting hillside, each breath a balm to the pocket bird I saw in the mirror on waking, trapped with vibrating wings.
Later the flames will give me a quiet mouth and crystalline eyes - but I'll let them.
Steps dowse like water
Fire always morphs to ash
if you allow it
Jessica Boatright writes from a colourful house in Lincoln. Her poetry has recently appeared in Magma, The Alchemy Spoon, York Literary Review and Anthropocene, among others. She placed third in the Disabled Poets Best Unpublished Pamphlet Prize 2025 and was highly commended in the Kathryn Bevis Memorial Poetry Prize. Jessica is founder of ‘Raising The Fifth’, a creative digital space for writers without children.