Planetary Wobble

Rosie Garland

Earth refuses to draw clean circles.
In a seven-year itch, she shimmies round the sun with an inbuilt deviation

from the true. What is truth? Not colouring inside the lines,
nor toeing the line of little laws. Her fractal swing delights

in shapes swerving off-kilter, a rock-and-rolling calligraphy
of bad behaviour along the scroll of orbit. She sloshes oceans from neap

to spring; a dizzy, uncircled dervish swirl, close to God. I
am a whipped top, spinning only a moment

before tipping from equilibrium; the gravity of doubt skews
my axis and I can’t stand straight. I will go on, tilted.

The Science

The orbit of the earth is unsteady, and tips off the true (a woodworking term, where ‘the true’ (noun) is a physically quantifiable condition of squareness / flatness / evenness). I find this rather consoling, not to mention encouraging, as I've never been able to toe any pre-determined line either. There's no such thing as a perfect circle, even for planets.

The Poet

Rosie Garland is a novelist, poet and sings with post-punk band The March Violets. With a passion for language nurtured by public libraries, her work’s appeared in Under the Radar, X-Ray, The North, Mslexia, Spelk, Ellipsis, Rialto, and elsewhere. She’s authored three novels: ‘The Palace of Curiosities’, ‘Vixen’, and ‘The Night Brother’, which The Times described as “a delight...with shades of Angela Carter.” Her forthcoming poetry collection ‘What Girls do the Dark’ (Nine Arches Press) is out October 2020. In 2019, Val McDermid named her one of the UK’s most compelling LGBT writers.

Next poem: Primordial Soup by Alan Wagstaff