You arrive with soft spots and sutures designed to smooth your passage from there to here and to protect you from the hard knocks of learning how to be in this strange new reality. Knowing fingers measure and assess until the last tiny window closes and your pulse can no longer be seen beating like a moth against its delicate pane. You root and suckle, startle at the smallest noise, even your own bodily sounds. Catch me, I’m falling! You were made to be loved and lulled. We marvel at your otherworldliness, your palms and soles still wired to clasp and perch. You fence and step long before you’ve a mind to.

All good and as it should be.

Before we know it, a milk-white click on a plastic spoon heralds a future gift for a make-believe fairy.

Another box checked.

shooting star...
my adult ears deaf
to pipistrelles

Claire Everett

is the author of two tanka collections, twelve moons and The Small, Wild Places; and co-author of Hagstones: A Tanka Journey with Joy McCall, and Talking in Tandem with her husband, Tony Everett. In 2017, Claire joined the editorial panel for the Red Moon Anthology. She served on the editorial team for Take Five Best Contemporary Tanka (Volume 4, 2011), and in 2015 she edited the Tanka Society of America’s Members’ Anthology, Spent Blossoms. She served as tanka-prose editor for Haibun Today [from December 2011 thru September 2016], and as founding editor of Skylark Publishing and Skylark: the journal [from the inaugural issue in April 2013 thru the final issue, Summer 2019].

Claire is mum to five children and step-mum to two and likes nothing better than to be cycling through the Dales with Tony on their trusty tandem Tallulah, or walking on the North Yorkshire Moors.