Poetry by Helen Laycock

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

Summer Night

The cotton sheet is
as warm as skin and
the hungry
tongue of heat
slathers me for salt.

I twist from the bed,
a wrung cloth,

toe-tap
down the stairs,
barely touching,
and spill
through the door
to check the lost sun,

to moonbathe,
naked as its light.

Cold slabs
soothe my soles
as I slip
into the silk of darkness,

and my body cools
in the flow of kisses
from lips that night
has specially iced
with stars.

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Helen Laycock is a Pushcart-nominated poet, and recent winner of Black Bough’s Chapbook contest. Her poetry collection ‘FRAME’ has previously featured as ‘Book of the Month’ at the East Ridge Review.

Publications include: Black Bough, Reflex, the Ekphrastic Review, the Cabinet of Heed, Visual Verse, Onslaught Press, Folkheart Press, The Wombwell Rainbow, Poetry Roundabout, Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis, Paragraph Planet, Serious Flash Fiction, Flash Flood, The Best of CafeLit, The Beach Hut, Popshot, Lucent Dreaming, Full Moon and Foxglove, The Caterpillar, The Dirigible Balloon, Literary Revelations, The Storms Journal, Broken Spine Arts, Fevers of the Mind, The Winged Moon.