Rowena Cooper

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This love

                     is a crow hooking a basket of sprouts in its beak / This love is a set of well-
stacked cups / This love wears a high viz jacket, waves semaphore flags / This love
runs from bees / This love is an unnamed colour / This love is birds lost in a cloud
mid-beat / This love is an outward blooming lung / This love is a fern unbending itself
sunwards / This love is an empty house flushing up with dust from a door-swing / This
love is the flash of a bulb / This love is not the first thing you remember / This love is
the first clap in a sustained standing ovation following an amateur production of Cats /
This love is a window ledge / This love is the feeling in your legs while you sleep /
This love is a sudden and intense night-time leg cramp / This love is a telephone box
repurposed to house a defibrillator / This love is a row of pristine thermometers / This
love is a bottle of settled fruit juice / This love is a cling-filmed bowl of yeast / This love
is a cuckoo / This love is its surrogate /  This love is a nest stretched by various eggs

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ROWENA COOPER is a poet and playwright from Oxford. In 2019 her poems were awarded the Shooter Lit prize, shortlisted for The Plough prize, and twice longlisted in the National Poetry Competition. She’s currently writing-on-attachment as a 2020 Playhouse Playmaker.