A Poem by Matt Howard

We all have needs

Take these, just two days back and hawking —
swifts, yielding such screams
low now after a storm over freshwater,
pressure unbroken, heat pooling, all nerves
running the length, each notch of vertebrae —
and their dashed couplings, drawing each body,
every call, each scream-chasing contact
to the re-entry smoulder of themselves.

All the more risk in the second thirst,
this next descent, level and lift —
mouth open, fathoming the right angle
to drink only at a skim, a slam of cold
that could douse the back of the throat
and down the head under these heavy shoulders.

Matt Howard's first full collection, Gall, was published by The Rialto in 2018 and was winner of the 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry, shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize in 2019, and won Best First Collection in the inaugural Laurel Prize 2020. After eleven years working for the RSPB, Matt is now the Douglas Caster Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds.