Wild Garlic
By Anna Maughan
The sound of birdsong and water. Scent of wild garlic, its white-star flowers delicate above tender green leaves. Hart's-tongue ferns and bracken unfurling, green flames and fiddleheads. A tree covered in verdant moss, growing in fractals around its trunk. The stream chuckles quietly to itself, in a hurry to get somewhere, but for once I’m not rushing. I am soaking in birdsong, surrounded by starry carpets of flowers, by the intense yet intimate smell as my boot crushes the leaves. For a moment I am still, present, alive. Not yearning, just being right here.
Wild Heart
By Anna Maughan
There is a wilderness inside my chest, bursting with wildflowers, the sunshine of dandelions and buttercups. I am quietly, secretly golden.
Anna Maughan
Anna Maughan has been writing ever since falling in love with John Donne and the Liverpool Poets at school. She writes a lot about hope, to remind her to reach for it, to hold it in her hands, to feel its weight and its softness and its warmth. She is passionate about open and honest dialogue regarding mental health, as there is still such a blanket of shame smothering the topic and so many of us are fighting to stay alive. She is partial to a chocolate biscuit or two.
Website: basementofmybrain.co.uk
Twitter: @dullandwicked
Insta: @basement_of_my_brain
Photo credit: Pascal Debrunner
Apricot Press 