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Likestarlings is a place for talking in poems. We pair poets with poets and they write a sequence of six new works by responding in turn to one another. Our palaver blog goes beyond poetry to discuss collaboration in theory and in practice. Please take a look, and feel free to add comments, opinions and suggestions here. Read poems here
 

Counting to one


The trick is, to nick the knife
smoothly under the wooden topknot and peel

back the waxy dimpled rind smoothly
in a single coil.

Then, to ravel it up, conceal
the pithy white flesh wounds under

the eponymous skin so it looks quite
like its old self again.

It’s five houses she’s done this in.
At the old table in the new room

under the thin white January sun
she watches her hands, knuckly

and thick-veined, go about their business,
the tail unfurling.

She lifts it, tucks the pith
gently into its own thickness round

an imaginary globe of air –
she can feel it turning.

And gently, she sets the complete
orange on a slightly crazed

January-sky-blue plate.
There it sits beside itself

in matchless duplicity.