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Corinna Board
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the poet
Corinna Board teaches English as an additional language in an Oxford secondary school. She grew up on a farm, and her writing is often inspired by the rural environment. Her work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in And Other Poems, Anthropocene, berlin lit, Propel Magazine, Spelt Magazine, Atrium, Ink Sweat & Tears, Magma and elsewhere. Corinna won the Gloucestershire Wildlife category of the 2023 Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust poetry competition, and was commended in the 2024 Verve Poetry Festival Eco-Poetry competition. She published her debut pamphlet, Arboreal, in January 2024.
the poems
Picking up my prescription
‘Sometimes as an antidote to fear of death, I eat the stars.’
~ Rebecca Elson ~
There are no stars in this city.
I nibble on concrete,
sip cocktails of NO₂. I’m dying
for a decent constellation.
Would some of those neons do?
Or the flashing red lights on a high-rise?
I FaceTime Olivier in the Pyrenees.
He points his camera at Ursa Major,
Cassiopeia, Orion’s Belt …
Star after star devoured
through my screen. I whisper Merci,
then sleep like a baby.
When the woman in Boots
tells me I’m glowing,
I say it must be the new meds.
I keep quiet about the stars.
On the tube ride home, they twinkle
in my stomach like a Tiffany’s heist.
My uncle brings back a
fox tail from the fields
He is carrying his rifle, brandishing the tail like a
trophy. A week ago, the fox (was it this one?) got
into the coop and slaughtered all the hens. My
uncle is grinning. The tail is cleanly cut, bloodied
at the end. It hangs from a nail in the big barn,
swinging like a corpse on the gallows. For days,
I'm scared to touch it. The fur is coarser than I
expected. I comb it with my fingers, breathe in its
musk, close my eyes and pretend it's whole. Later,
I run wild with my cousins. We are foxes — and I,
the eldest, am the mother, the vixen. Driven by
hunger, I burn through the fields, my cubs left
hiding in the ripening wheat. The wind ruffles my
coat the wrong way. Too late, I pick up his scent.
Field notes
1. field noun:
an area of land, used for growing crops
or keeping animals, usually surrounded
by a fence.
2. Green as far as the eye can see,
then the brook. Water-mint,
pebbles bedraggled in weed.
3. A six-year-old girl with a net, a bucket
full of bullheads. Friesian cows bellowing,
tick of the fence. Where did the years go?
4. Before he died, my uncle planted
a rowan tree – there in the tall grass.
5. When we first saw the barn owl,
it could have been a ghost. It flew low
over the field, wings whispering.
6. If I buried my heart, what would grow?
Perhaps a sapling.
7. Today, I have counted three kinds of
butterfly: marbled white, common blue,
speckled wood.
8. Dear Field,
Do you ever dream of picking yourself up
and striding off over the horizon?
Be honest now.
9. I don’t know what I’d do if you left.
I love you, field. Please stay.
10. Are you crying or is that rain?
11. In the field, I’m a child again.
All this green, all this sky.
I could disappear.
12. Meadow foxtail, yellow oat, timothy.
I am the field, and the field is me.
I am , the field is .
Publishing credits
Picking up my prescription: Anthropocene (July 2024)
My uncle brings back a fox tail from the fields:
Modron Magazine (Issue Four)
Field notes: exclusive first publication by iamb