chorus

Kit Byford

in our next body, our fresh

  design of matter, we will

 

describe the nighttime world

   by listening: fall into the dusk

 

on wings small as ginkgo leaves

   threading the ragged arms of trees

 

with torn-off wads of cumulus.

   below us, wingless bipeds

 

will squint at our transfigurement,

   sift the sky for us, mystified

 

if they could hear us they

   would know us as a choir,

 

screaming over their heads,

   DESIRE DESIRE DESIRE, all but

 

ultrasonic, the words untrapped from our chest

    glittering the bliss dark. we can author shapes

 

from resonance alone, find substance

   in charged air, euphoria—

 

from nothing at all we will create

   ourselves into the world.

 

Kit Byford (fka Katie) won the 2020 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and was shortlisted for The London Magazine Poetry Prize in 2024. They are an alum of the Barbican Young Poets and The London Library Emerging Writers Programme and they were a Britten Pears Young Artist 23–24.

Kit is writing their first full-length collection of poems about bats, plague and queer voices. They were a co-founder of the Dead [Women] Poets Society and their pamphlet, He Said I Was a Peach, is published with ignitionpress. Their work has been published widely in journals and magazines, most recently bath magg, Magma and Poetry Wales, and in anthologies from Bloodaxe, Macmillan, Bloomsbury and Rizzoli UK.