Sea Grammar 1: Fowle Water

August 25, 2021
A photograph of Niagara Falls with a bird flying in the spray
Photo by michael_swan / Flickr

Alternatives could or should be basin or lagoon or pool or puddle or
small body or was there a motive or I got here by myself
iterating through conversions or turning toward any other
synonym of conversion is sea change or changing, simply
the gulls are always here or sounding in this land-locked space
they scream and I hear home or familiar or distance
there is no process just one inappropriate thing or the other
resulting in draining and relandscaping or adding or removing scenic rocks
they did this in Niagara; a 1969 dam or dewatering
12,000 years of flow suspended or in freefall or uncovering
two bodies – dead – but this wasn’t the point – instead,
look toward conservation or mastery over nature or
American fantasy or general maintenance but
what could be more sublime? I’ve never been there
personally, but I’m watching niagarafallslive.com or
nothing at all because its 05:14 est and dark or the
camera is off or both – converging.


Briony Hughes (@brihughespoet) is a visiting tutor and doctoral candidate based at Royal Holloway University of London. Her publications include Dorothy (Broken Sleep Books, 2020) and Microsporidial (Sampson Low, 2020). Briony’s limited-edition bookworks have been collected by the National Poetry Library (UK), Senate House Library, Foyle Special Collections: Kings College London, and the BookArtBookshop. Briony is a co-founder of the Crested Tit Collective (2018–2020) and editor at Osmosis Press.