About Annie Clarkson:

Annie Clarkson is a poet, social worker and fiction writer who grew up in East Lancashire mill town and now lives in Manchester. Her first chapbook collection of poems and prose poems is Winter Hands, published by Shadowtrain Books. She has been involved in several collaborative writing projects including: The Embedded Project, a collaboration between poets and printmakers (www.embeddedproject.co.uk); and The Big Picture, with Jackee Batanda, Pauline Keith, and Chris Fittock - one writer from Kampala in Uganda and three from the North West of England – exploring the commonalities and differences in world views. This project ended with a reading at Lancaster Litfest in 2005 and a publication of writing and commentary The Big Picture (www.litfest.org). Other poetry, short fiction and book reviews have been published in anthologies, magazines and on the internet, including: Only Connect - an anthology of poems by Cinnamon Press, Transmission, Sleepingfish, Mslexia, QWF magazine, Ginosko Literary Journal, Shadowtrain, Stride, Dream Catcher and Book Munch.

Quelle: poetry p f

Cloud

Today a cloud the size of a mill has descended and I am breathing its cotton dust deafened by the chatter of its looms.

You point at me making hand gestures the shapes of moons and mouths. You are the other side of the room, light from the windows shattered by stones and pellets, crow wings flapping out omens, calling us dead.

We might be dead today, if being dead can be temporary, we might have stopped the beat of our hearts as if a key could be turned, a machine snapped shut.

I watch your mouth form half-words, your arms slow-wave messages as though you might reach me.

first published in Sleepingfish: Issue 0.9375