hope is the thing with hollow//ed bones
tallow groans wrestling through // to fill
the marrowspace
pneumatised kaleidoscope stoppered
// speared into soft flesh
avian bones are hollow to maintain a
lightweight body and facilitate oxygen
intake, which is how biologists have come
to understand their ability to take flight.
but really it is
because the air is [without] and
the air is [within ] and we
we who live in rock and flesh and earth we
cannot see they are full // not empty
full of their home
full
he asks us if we could be any animal,
which would we choose. a bird, my
mother replies, with no hesitation. why,
we ask. because I want to fly, she replies.
marrow anchor sinks heavy between
her shoulder blades
peacock feathers on her mantle
donned in her dreams, angel glittering green
above the dishes and the dependents
peacocks on her mantle, magpies on mine
magpies are notorious thieves, but the
latest research suggests they do not truly
have a penchant for stealing shiny objects.
in fact, they seem to be afraid of them.
sticky fingers snatch silver quick
all that glitters all that burns sparkler soft
fingers tipped with candle wax red raw beneath
white knuckle score crescent moons in palm flesh
fist full of not nothing of the air slipping
through the cracks to be filled
with more and more and more and
and hope is the thing with hollow bones
and faith is the thing with claws and
love is a thing of air it
soars
and it is all flight
Sav Altair Hamid
Sav Altair Hamid recently completed his Bachelor’s degree in English and Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is also an alumni of the HarperCollins Author Academy, a program training and supporting Black and Global Majority writers and designers to become commercially successful in publishing.
Sav enjoys using his writing to explore the fluidity of language beyond the traditional
expectations of poetic and prosaic forms. Bending rules of structure and language allow him to resist and write against traditional, exclusionary narratives surrounding the world of art and literature. Their first full poetry collection, ‘FLOCK’, engages with connection, lineage, movement, and identity through motifs of nature and the avian. He has been published in the Young Writers annual anthology and his poetry will appear in The Elegist Collective’s upcoming Rage zine later this year.
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