skyfire | Imogen Edwards-Lawrence

I built a sky of my own on my bedroom ceiling.
This sky is bold & bright & blue and I know
the birds will fly away, but it’s okay.
Sometimes the clouds make slippery patterns
on the walls and I long for birdsong to send me to sleep.
So I build the sky again. It’s wild & grey & flashes with light
when you don’t expect it. I didn’t expect the grey I found.
It’s cat-soft & silky & I wear it next to my skin like bedsheets.
I know the birds will come back. Now I sing to them too.
I’ll build them a new sky straight out my window, throw
out a blanket to cloak the world in, night-bright & pillow-blue
& silence. Maybe this time the birds will stay.

Imogen Edwards-Lawrence is a Latin teacher and postgraduate student of Political Economy in London, although her first degree was in Classics. During that time she spent an excessive amount of time writing poetry, and not enough studying it. Her work has previously appeared in the White Box Review, Buttr Press, the Isis magazine and others. She tweets at @spreadsheets1ut, often about Diet Coke, and sometimes about poetry.