Two Poems by Katrina Naomi

The Source

Dive in / an unadulting / scabbing knees on rocks / Later I’ll watch the ooze and settle of its lava // Skin’s a leaky boundary / water like a missing father // Do I go further / back to the warm water chamber / where I sloshed for months / knowing nothing / but the tide / of my mum’s heartbeat / the rhythm of fluid / whether calm (Mum sleeping) / or bothered (how I like the sea best) / Mum maybe jiving or having sex // Do I go further / before I crawled from the waves / The image I tweeted of an unknown fish / its bright green spine (almost neon) / lover of colour / Ancestor

One Flesh

flap of skin between thumb
and index finger

this web
this water trapper

like a swan or mallard’s foot

Katrina Naomi's new collection, Battery Rocks, is due from Seren in July 2024. Katrina’s poetry collections have won an Authors’ Foundation Award and Saboteur Award, and she is a recipient of the Keats-Shelley Prize. Katrina’s poetry has appeared on Poems on the Underground, BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Poetry Please, and in the TLS, The Poetry Review, and Modern Poetry in Translation.