The Starbeck Orion Issue #1 21 of 25
Hannah Linden
Of Being and Becoming i I thought I'd learnt everything there was to know about being. After my last growth spurt I gave up. So tired of outgrowing myself––splitting myself sideways and finding only a grosser version of myself. So many of us cocooned in the shadows of the cities. Asleep or worse. ii Did I die? I was not myself. A dreaming in me imagined the impossible. I think I did die or went crazy. I started to believe I could be more than the sum of my gooey parts. That's what happens when you lose it. When you turn into mush, pretend that you are more substantial than you really are. I think I dissociated. Floated in a sea of anything-but-self. iii I don't know what changed me. I'd always been soft, flexible. Somewhere in the middle of the me-stew I grew a new me––found a hidden strength, an armour tight like a spring in a cupboard, waiting for the door to open, desperate to stretch, to be more, to be able to go somewhere, anywhere–– iv It was hard, even so, to break it––this silk cell of my own making. I was bed-raggled, dazzled by the outsideness of living. Instinct must have taken over, given me the push to breathe into change––to trust that I can feel myself ahead of myself, this living, transformed self. v Legs, the size of giants, eyes that could see more than shadows, I'm telling you it was full-on technicolour split-screen multi-verse and wings big as the leaves I left standing. Was I frightened the first time I stepped into air? I was higher than feeling––I was dream-falling floating on streams of slide-air to taste through to distant nectar like sweet, sweet like nothing before and I could reach into it, suck it in, carry it with me like sex which was I blossoming––imago me, this self, this beautiful sexual self. Inside being and becoming grew the impossible possible thought––this is everything I need to be now. Hannah Linden won the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition in 2021, and was highly commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press), was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. X (formally Twitter): @hannahl1n