by Scott Lilley
Last time David found it in the basin of a Center Parcs penny press; all that mass fingernail thin; The Queen’s face limb-darkening the edges of a leafy dove logo; her crown a sunspot of elongated hydrogen and helium. He reckoned God must have cranked the lever in heat, occulting blinding sheens emitted from that machine with swathes of beard and robe.
The time before, he found a miracle of light throbbing in the synapse of a broken bulb; a sphere of plasma shrunken between a snapped filament.
This time, David considers it stolen; bundled onto the back of a Trundholm chariot, into a Maltese megalith or cobra-nestled and hauled around by Ra.
Perhaps David will find it underneath the saddle of a guitar, smoking against wood, lost in its sound hole.
Or else hidden, making scrotum translucent as the single new teste of a neutered dog or rattling in a hollowed-out glass eye.
Scott Lilley is twenty-two years old living in Shropshire. He recently graduated from Lancaster University and is currently reading towards an MSt in Creative Writing at Oxford University. His previous work has been included in The Airgonaut, Poetry NI’s FourXFour, Eunoia Review and Three Line Poetry. He can be found on Twitter @scottglilley.
