My mother is blinking like an owl treading water.
She has spatchcocked her palms, is strip-searching
the carpet, patting the sofa down, looking for her sight.

The world, transparent and the size of her pinkie-tip,
has fallen out of her eye and now, out of malice,
it will not be found. Or worse, it has sailed away,

intrepid coracle, to the dark side of her eyeball.
She tents her lid by its guy-rope lashes. I see inside her
it’s as red as a desert noon. A morbid rolling

hoves the fugitive into view. Retrieved, she lathers it
with spitwash, pinions again her Clockwork Orange eye,
deftly launches the tissue-thin glass bowl. It floats,

meniscus on meniscus, world upon world.

Kirsten Luckins is a poet, performer and theatre-maker based in Hartlepool. Her first full collection of performance poems, The Trouble With Compassion, is available from Burning Eye Books. She has been published widely by magazines including Magma, The Interpreter’s House and Ink, Sweat & Tears, and was shortlisted for the Wenlock Prize in 2015.