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My Loom Births the Arborist
Pascale Petit
From the darkness came two dragonflies clashing wings, mating skeins of threads hovered over the waters, created new colours. My tapissier art conjured a girl with a fawn body, chimera doe with two human faces, her velvet heads both ends of a budding rainforest canopy, her eight legs with their supple hooves not yet set, her fawn spots sun speckles through foliage. I wove her arms among millefleurs humus carpets. She was half orb spider half double-deer. How fast her antlers sprang to make a treehouse her two minds could retreat to. How, when midwives wanted to kill her, she climbed upwards, over thorny boles of silk to overstoreys where wind blew through her tines a melody I had forgotten, roused by spirit mahogany groves. She’d live where clouds drew shapes of golden lion tamarins, marmosets, flying squirrels, agoutis, far from the noise of the Interoceanic Highway, and our kind.
Pascale Petit was born in Paris and lives in Cornwall. Her latest poetry collection, Beast, published by Bloodaxe Books in 2025, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her novel, My Hummingbird Father, was published by Salt in 2024. She has published nine poetry collections, four of which were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Mama Amazonica won the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the inaugural Laurel Prize for eco-poetry, and Tiger Girl was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and for Wales Book of the Year.
