The Caught Girls

This side of the bank is for waterboarding witches,
cranking handles to reel them up and dunk them down.
This side of the bank is where the slippery women drown,
weed skimming thigh, breast, the rest of the river slick

with swallowed names. The caught girls, they call them,
organs the shape of babies, every one of them: liver,
lungs, spleen, all with large heads, tadpole limbs, tongues 
choking throats like umbilical cords. The caught girls

are baby-makers, dark-haired like their mothers, feel no pain 
in brackish waters when temperature drops and dykes freeze.
You can train a whole line of them to tilt their faces
to the surface and when you chip through ice you’ll hear

their hearts beat in unison, the creaks of their bones as skin 
loosens and falls away. Some nights when the moon’s proud 
you can startle a caught girl by aiming your torchlight 
into shallows. Flesh always reads paler underwater. 

It’s hard for them to pronounce innocence when tide pools
in their mouths. Their faces look bloodied, but that’s just 
the mud, or muzzling. There are no wolves here now.
There used to be, when witches and caught girls were ancient. 

It was tough to tell which they were, floating face down, naked 
in a tangle of sweetgrass. These days when twilight’s hidden
itself in water, you can sometimes catch sight of a trainer’s glint 
but it's harder to find their bodies and who put them there.

Commended in the Winchester Poetry Prize, 2026

Daughters of the Marsh

They pull her body from the bog, out on the tide-worn marsh
past Whittlesea, a reel of ribbon, all bad and dirty, twined around it,
sludge or afterbirth shrieking down thighs.

There were no screams on the wind, just the slap of tractor tyres
rutting the ground and the suck and ooze sound that clay makes
at this time of year as if a thousand tongues devour the earth. 

There’s a smell on the wind though, catches in your throat 
like lightening, but thinner, like how your legs collapse when you hear
someone’s died or you’re told something terrifying.

Here I am in a scarred field forty feet from where she was planted,
a missed person hanging out with nettles and canary grass, singing stopped.
What was it she had been singing that made her feet dance?

I can smell fox, feel the heave of thunder overhead, know the blink 
of each bird in the trees is in time with mine. I blink five times 
before taking my next step and there’s a hush of disbelief in the trees. 

This is the same thunder from my youth; I crouch in the same way 
I did then, pull my knees to my chest, squat in a ball so nature spins 
beyond me and out, out across the fens and all this flatness,

this peatland plain stretching its blackness to coal. I hear her eyes
are dark, the farmer with the drooped shoulders says, like her hair. 
He has muck up his shirt from where the tyres fought through mud, 

from when he bowed down in the earth to pull her out, so they wouldn’t hurt her. He’s still bowing when the blanket’s spread and the rain we were expecting 
pecks her shoulders like tiny birds do for insects on windows. 

I walk home the long way where blue lights flash their urgency along
wordless hedgerows and my body’s charged like lighting, a cut throat, 
a snapped neck. Walking the short cut is where women lose their daughters.

Shortlisted for The Wells Open Poetry Competition, 2026