Literary Vegan

Fingernails trace crystals, crushed,  swirled into wet wood. They dry the colour of coral cosmos under my eyelids. From petal to paper to petal. LJ Ireton c. 2025 (For Harriet Muncaster)

1. The morning spider web  makes a stained glass window of the world; fragments of life  in-between lines iridescent,  designed by a dot mind,  breaking the present into pieces to catch the future.  2. When the sun sinks, the sapphire birds come; circle the water and scoop one by one, ascending back on an infinity string  with full beaks. Who decides the sequence?  Outside of the group, orders are mysteries,  descending.  C. LJ Ireton, 2025

I curl myself  around felines wild at rest, their self-assured spines slow-dance in their sleep. Contentment  is always curved, round – a fur-covered word: serenity, with a tail. Even seconds can't resist; in the presence of cats they bend and ball themselves  into blankets. C. LJ Ireton 2025

There were waves today. But I was undeterred – I swam into the rise while it watched me,  then under the curve: unglamorous turquoise,  stirred with silt.  Standing, I could be pushed over, but I had already leapt, woven in – no floor to leave. I wondered if my spirit could mimic my limbs like this when waves surged on dry land; those that swell with no form, the force of unexpected feeling that is oblivious to the wind. C. LJ Ireton 2025

The heartbeat of the whale-throat sea  is slow, pushing a world's blood: blue heavy with history, into prophecy that licks into waves like a dragon's tongue frothy with wind and disbelief. But I believe – my red rhythm recognises something floating furious, my own pulse dances in the bigger beast's drum. And creature, we scream the dirt and silver of the storm, eroded limbs and salt-eyed strong breaking the line of water into a circle – myself into myself back up to the surface. C. LJ 2025 (Inspired by Six Wild Crowns)

Red Kite in the after-rain: a mountain-sharp survivor  of the apocalypse city – wild exists, wild lives  in your triangle stillness. Moth-tail, rust-tilt, lit-up by clouds, your feather-tips grip the wind itself; like you harness more than air – the whole sky is subject  to your clawed curtsey. I am – iron and balcony give way to dandelion belly, bird-bone beast. You do not warn. You pre-exist. Seagulls have just scattered at one glimpse of you,  gliding in from where God waits  with a gauntlet glove. C. LJ Ireton 2025

Just past the mountains, indigo at dusk,  the ducks form a shepherds' staff of finger-tip chevrons flying over  the string of filament lightbulbs bordering the lake. Innate order, bone high they complete a prophecy of mine that birds will always come over still water if you wait  but I wasn't waiting -- the sun upside down in my wine glass, a spear of hot star on blue stone, we spoke of salt nights and serenity while the ducks moved in the sky, knowing I needed them to prove my own words startling me with what I know -- forever poetry pointing weightless and breathing. C. LJ Ireton 2025