Crista Ermiya is of Filipino and Cypriot-Turkish parentage and grew up in Hackney, London. 
She now lives in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She is a co-editor of OTHER POETRY magazine, and is the 
managing editor of DOGEATER (www.dogeater.co.uk), a small independent poetry press which 
she set up in 2004.

Her poetry has appeared in the anthology A TASTE OF LIQUORICE (id on Tyne, 2004) and in 
INTERPOETRY 8 (April, 2005). A short story, ‘Surf Scoter’, was recently published in the 
anthology WONDERWALL (Route, 2005).

 

Mock Turtle

Midsummer heat and breeze,
film and dust and flicker,

like net curtains, or candles, or dreams.
And outside steps the lobster quadrille.

The sun shines through clouds over Elgol.
A fizz-pop sound rises through rock

like a child dancing on bubble-wrap.
It is possibly the sea

on its way to Camasunary
Bay. Or maybe, or maybe

it is the plainsong of seaweed
shore-tossed, unsung, beached.
 

In the Garden of X and Y

all the roses are overblown
and have lost their scent.
Petals fall to the earth.

We are dressed the same
           you and me
as if we are twins

even though we are
           boy-girl
and I am taller, older.

We undress, to listen, to dance 
with the replicator
- a weird dream of a dead lawn
mower cobwebbed in the shed –
and the rabbi;

are left bare-foot, bare-
headed and bare-handed.
The sky hisses television snow.

A woman 
leads us out of the garden,
over a bridge, to wait.

Buses roll over the bridge.
They list no destination,
no route; 

where a number should be
there is no number, 
just a letter  X.
 

Moonskin

sliced sunlight, skinny moons,
new, poppy-strewn nights;

he dreams in time-stilled motion.
junky sheen flickers

behind his eye-lids like film.
selenic oceans crust his limbs

brittle as calligraphy.
score-lines slip into craters,

moon-mountains in his skin, 
his veins so thin, needle-slim pen

painting signs on flesh
turned palimpsest.