Karen Dennison

Wivenhoe, England

Karen’s second collection, The Paper House, was published by Hedgehog Poetry Press in Spring 2019. Karen won the Indigo Dreams Collection Competition in 2011 resulting in the publication in 2012 of her first collection Counting Rain. Her pamphlet Of Hearts is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books. Karen is editor and publisher of the pamphlets Book of Sand, Blueshift (longlisted for the Saboteur Awards 2016) and Free-fall. As an artist, she collaborated with poet Abegail Morley on her pamphlet The Memory of Water. Karen is co-editor of Against the Grain Poetry Press.

4^th May 2020

Now time has stopped

After Edward Hopper

She sits on the stripped bed,

hugging knees, clasping shins.

Her shadow on the pillow

foretells the night.

Time, the trickster, folds in

on itself, distills the past.

Alone in silence thoughts

slip like emulsion.

This sky she has loved

is now an imposter

and sunlight exposes

her blue-tinged skin.

Loneliness infects her cells.

She knows how you can die

of a broken heart, how your body

can betray itself.