Third Prize
Anna Wigley, Cardiff, Wales

Alchemy

I'm making jam from a pound of scabby damsons
plump as testicles,

watching as the frostfall of sugar melts,
the black skins burst, and flesh
the colour of Shiraz jewels the pan,

with enough juice to drown a cat in.
It bubbles as I sit and write,
a thick soup flecked with the thin white pits
rising to a cluttery scum,

until the room and my head are filled
with the tang of damsons
dark as Huysmans' black tulips,
sticky as sex;

and I think of the tree we came across once
at a roadside in Hereford
where for months the hard green buds
had fattened slowly, clustering like olives,
with nothing for company but a hedgerow hawthorn,

until we pointed to their jewels from the car window,
stopped, and crammed our pockets with booty
from nature's open safe,

and made off like diamond thieves,
hugging our haul of rocks to our bodies
and later forgetting them,
letting them rot to a pool of rose-coloured gum.