by Christy Hall

One steel gas canister—                                                                                         
not from round here; I knew
from the area code.
White letters on dulling blue paint.
Discount Supplies written on one side.
Empty now though, pushed over pebbles
by wind and
light enough to throw.

Five types of wood shaped
as a gathering by the tide,
stacked like an amateur logging pile.
A six-by-six with three inch nails:
almost straight, rusty, blunt.
A section of fence, lost in a clear out,
washed up on its third shoreline.
Cheap two-by-four, scarred and soggy.
All held in place by a charred section of oak,
the proof of a summer bonfire.
Crumbling in layers, chip by chip.

A pair of solid tubes—iron.
The shanks of some larger mechanism:
hollowed out wheellock pistols.
Upturned sections of an exhaust pipe.
The ruins of a lost docking point.
The tail end of antique torpedoes, now diffused.
A sharp shot of lost port engineering.
—their identity left unknown.

Lost Pirelli tyre:
worn down, rubbish, flat.
A kick will push the
rubber all the way
to the metal rim.
A blaze of copper
and tangerine flakes
adorn the tin and
make interesting
patterns in the lens.

Christy Hall is a Northern poet currently residing in the South. He has had poems published in print and online, on both sides of the Atlantic. Recently one of his pieces was used in a literary pamphlet which helped to secure Hull’s bid to become European City of Culture for 2017. He graduated with a Master’s Degree from the University of Hull in 2010. He is currently writing his first full length collection, which will hopefully be launched sometime next year.