SK Grout


You are a thing to love wildly

We are drinking just baby-girl-wine
shrieking through the sharpness
your body impressing like a censer
before me, swelling almost too sweet
to touch. I enjoy trying. You are a thing
to love wildly.            

We dance for dead stars scissored
in night-sky hope. We stare into past,
understand the poet’s silence shaping
their man into monster. You are a thing
to love wildly.            

We want to sing out the language
that the wind knows, forest flowers
and slip-slide oysters against a world
shrinking into exams taken as eleven
year olds. Dream big. You are a thing
to love wildly.            

The night is ecstatic with green, warmth,
a disremembering. The clocks are on repeat
telling only the alarm of joy. You read
years of Lorca into space, en estrellas,
and I revel. You are a thing to love wildly.


SK Grout                           

SK Grout (she/they) is a writer, editor and poet. She grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand, lived in Germany and now splits her time between London and Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau. Her debut pamphlet, ‘What love would smell like’, is published with V. Press (2021). She holds a post-graduate degree in creative writing from City, University of London, and is a Feedback Editor for Tinderbox Poetry. Her poetry and reviews are widely published in the US, UK, Europe and the Pacific, including Ambit, Cordite Poetry Review, dialogist, Glass, Poetry Wales and Finished Creatures. Website: https://skgroutpoetry.wixsite.com/poetry