Poetry by Kaisa Saarinen

             Colby Stopa CC



spectral anguish 

it is simple to become a ghost
      still bones
      still heart
remains in solitude 
wintry windows pitch dark screens 

good girls shall be seen not heard
good ghosts stay in forever waiting 
(i know that is not true) 
(nobody ever told me that
   and yet)
no destruction in my fingertips 

i always wanted to sing but 
opened my mouth to be terror-struck 
how does a child like that ever learn to haunt 

(one day one bright blue day may come
of being exorcised by you my love)

a phantom pain in the larynx 
a fading light on the switchboard
i will never make the call  

​



one rainy sunday reimagine the wheel 

lovers on a honeymoon high hot air balloons 
everything that goes up must come down 
stretching and stretching isolated horizons 
til they break down in threads of synthetic fibers

gazing at a world choked with plastic and concrete and seeing 
normality 
the heart of green growth is a black hole of greed
what grows from soil like this? 

the most parasitic executioners are the most bright-eyed dreamers 
whimsical birds of prey true believers in a righteous pecking order

everything appears to be in its right place
nuclear cooling towers and glimmering oil fields replaced 
by infinite solar panels blanketing the earth
walk closer and see they are covered in mould and algae 

‘the flooding around here has been crazy, they were not designed to be
waterproof and now they’ve been submerged up to fifteen hours a day’, says
an exasperated engineer. what is there to do but nod and sigh 

from afar, it was such a beautiful vision 
geometrical grids of picture-perfect postmodernity
one where we need not cannibalise the earth for buried treasure 

in a world like this we hide the ugly innards
a perfectly paced series of minor chords 
more thrilling than lived-in heartbreaks
give me a silhouette of a windfarm on a pretty coastline 
and i’ll smile for the rest of the afternoon 

citizens of orphan ideologies in darkened nurseries
may find themselves closer to each other
when you have nothing it isn’t easy to share, it is essential 
when you are part of everything 
a process with no conclusion

​
​

Kaisa is a research analyst and writer trying and usually failing to make sense of the world. She grew up in the Finnish countryside and escaped as quickly as possibly, ending up in London via Glasgow, Tokyo and Oxford. 

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