Charlotte Murray won the Silver Prize for Poetry in the Creative Future Writers’ Award 2023, and second place in the E.H.P. Barnard Poetry Prize 2023. She has been published in various magazines and anthologies, including celestite poetry and Mancunian Ways. She is a member of Hive Poetry Collective. Twitter: @charlouwriter.
Touching Leaves
On
our walk
she pauses
to press leaves
softly between her
fingertips, exchanging
prints, a botanical version
of shaking hands. She anoints
them with descriptors, this world
that has allowed us to rest in its folds.
This one is tracing paper. This
is velvet, this a bird’s wing.
And this one, she
says, is like
skin.