i.m. J.H. Prynne
When the last snow went under as an idea
of snow, a hemisphere briefly and then away again,
we laid, one final time, a radius across the fields
that hold the winter’s counsel like a boat at depth.
The unsayable spoken in the hull of a sentence
and the swerve a meaning makes before it shares, within,
the small economy of heat, two strangers lining each other.
Thereafter, in the melatonin morning with no slope left unread,
the starlings reconvene over Cambridge as a single nerve,
and you, one hand still in the cold, hold one hand adrift
among the last snow of the year settling upon this small planet.
Aaron Kent is a working-class poet, publisher, and teacher from Cornwall. Alongside his wife, emma, he runs the indie publishing press Broken Sleep Books, and advocates for the degentrification of the creative arts. His debut Angels the Size of Houses was released by Shearsman in 2021, followed by The Working Classic with the87press in 2023. He has had work published in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, and The Rialto among others, and has worked with MIND and Stroke Assocaition as a mental health advocate. His Selected Poems will be released by Shearsman at the end of 2026.
Copyright © 2026 by Aaron Kent, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.