Albion Poem by Emerson Roberts

Bitten and cut,
Tattoo smeared,
Injected with liquid magnets
And helium scorched tornado trash,
She strained to recall the evaporated dead,
The vapor trail of a delinquent historical thread.

She disliked executions
Shied from the blood they left behind
But never shunned reports accurately described,
Slaughter tallies,
Or thumbnails of the ways they died.

Chunnel paychecks littered our graves,
Hearts and hands of the Industrial Revolution,
Our bones, tender ossicles, were dumped into sifters,
While the swirling seagulls explained,
“Les jeux sont nonpariels.”
Our legacy was jettisoned by the imperial present.
The workers dug like truffle pigs
Ignorant that
No regulation devised by man
Could protect them from the poison
Accompanying the evaporation of the sacred.


She wandered into the water
Land weary and ad blind.
And notwithstanding hiccough and slip,
She opened the way to Pas-de-Calais.
Her friends saw her wandering,
Royal hams shamelessly churning the trench,
Lungs perfuming the bloated dead
And the shallow discontented,
Triggering the well connected chatterboxes
To blanch at her condescension
They cried out with tongues whisking egg white
Puffing froth across the crispy swells.
Needs impeded creeds,
Allegiances disengenuflected:
They unbuckled
And flew like leaves from a tree,
Breeze beguiled,
They struggled, buzzed and then sailed,
Releasing as a group into the rancid light,
Like flies from a jackal bite.