Warren Mortimer

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& my daughter eggs me on to tally up
this menagerie of wise & wandering foes

who live behind the sofa or in dreams
making their din across the mourning sands

the lance-wielding clatter of sahagin
arrives like magic   a cockatrice cries

while golems bed in the salted playa
the way flesh is drawn to sobbing flesh

& does she know we left the other world
of bleached stoneware   of stone-faced jokes

& anti-bacterial wipes   or has she realised
no mother is coming to find us in this life

of hiding eyes in dry & darkening hands

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Warren Mortimer placed first for the Jane Martin Poetry Prize in 2023. Warren is author of the pamphlet Fruit Knife Autopsy with Green Bottle Press. To date, Warren has been published in The Frogmore Papers, Magma, Orbis, Poetry Ireland, and Stand.