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the poet
Elizabeth Loudon is a novelist and poet living in southwest England. Her debut novel A Stranger In Baghdad was longlisted for the Bridport Prize, and won the 2024 International Fiction Book Award at the Sharjah International Book Fair. Her poetry has appeared in Blue Mountain Review, Amsterdam Review, Saranac Review, Whale Road Review, Southword, and Sho Poetry Journal, as well as in Best New Poets 2025. When not writing, Elizabeth likes being outdoors as much as possible.
the poems
Fireflies
We’d made lunch-time love against
your kitchen wall and I’d sat
at my desk all afternoon
gutted and gloated, unable to turn
a page. I wanted to show you
the riverbank fireflies at dusk,
their morse code flashes of desire.
We were ankle-deep in stars,
my shoulder-blades a crescent gleam,
a floodspit of driftwood flamed
paraffin blue above the river’s
easy, repetitive flow, but our timing
was ragged. On my thigh you tapped
a sonata whose syncopation
you still had to master.
An inch can drown us. You unwrapped
your legs from mine and we left
the theatre of high jinx empty-handed,
crossing one lamplit island
to the next until we reached
my moth-spattered porch.
You told me once it’s bad form
to linger when they switch on the houselights
and lower the lid on the piano.
Performance is never personal.
I didn’t look back when you left.
The grass was dark and unintelligible.
I Put My Life To Bed
You know what I’m up to.
I’ve come to tell you a bedtime story,
and then I’ll turn the lights off.
We sat on a wall in Toronto,
leaf litter at our feet,
and you said there’s nobody else
with whom I could have come back
to this place. We drove to a lake
under a heartless winter sky
and you showed me the narrow bed
where eighty years ago
you slept out the war. Remember?
You shut your eyes, alarm pulsing
at your throat as I burrow into the
hard soil of your past.
Little life who used to cartwheel
over cut lawns, where are you now?
On a hotel balcony, snow streaming
off a mountain’s wings?
Or once more in the cold room
where you cradled your baby,
Victory confetti swept away,
your teenage arms too weak to hold her?
They gave you four days to feel
her heat and suck. Afterwards, so what.
So what a velvet sash at my waist,
the bitter spritz of Italian lemons.
So what other small hands to hold,
pale and curled as slugs. It’s indecent
to dig this deep into somebody else,
but here’s my last chance to hear the secret name
you stitched into the hem of every dawn.
You ask me to turn off the overhead light.
I can’t, I say. It’s the sun.
Money
Now we are old we like to remember
how we carried you home from the hospital,
strapped into the back of our shiny blue car
in a seat designed to protect you from the worst,
how we feared everything, from the sluice
of rain on the windscreen to the mailman
strolling from door to door, how we
cradled you against our bodies
and tested your bathwater with our elbow,
your temperature with the flat of our hand.
We invited friends to admire you.
They arrived with armfuls of flowers in
emerald, ruby, the colours of abundance.
In their eyes we detected the skitter of envy.
We said, Our money is sleeping, tread softly,
although only a bomb would awaken you
and we worried when you slept.
Oh baby we said, fly east to the saltwater bays
where storms are cooked and splay your
great-feathered wings like a cormorant
on the pilings of abandoned docklands,
a thrash of silver-fish in your beak.
Let us admire you! You described
a vanishing wheel in the sky as we watched
from the bridge, keeping company with
skateboard dancers and mystic drunks.
In the tidal mud below lay bottles and shoes,
reminders of when we too were wild,
our wanton lives unborn.
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb