2025 Competition

Sharon Black

Fractals

She draws our attention like an artist with a ­sable brush.

Close your eyes, she says, and we do.

A square of fabric, length of wood, red balloon

come to rest in open palms. How does it meet our skin.

What does it remind us of. Texture, size, weight –

do we act on them or let them come to us. What

is the sensation in our bodies now. And now.

In uni digs I bought a poster: a psychedelic fractal,

reds and yellows unravelling into violet, neon arms

expanding into ever greater detail the nearer I stepped,

infinity behind the closed door of the 2D glossy print.

Can you see the writing. Can you read the words. The letters.

The mind enters like slow lightning, travels muscles, nerves

and cells, each tissue unfastening like the pages of a book.

Hold the soundshape in your ear. What colour is it.

Rare orchids grow in the field below my house. Tiny

flushed pink petals, flecked with magenta. You cannot

move an orchid from the place it grows, the soil subtle

like the taste of a word we haven’t heard for years

but which our grandmas spoke. Her accent from a slightly different place,

the talc smell of her skin, her fingers cool around your hot hand,

the soft wool of her cardigan, how the word

feels in our mouth, its taste, its weight, the texture as it spreads

across our tongue. Like this. Now this. Now this.

Claire Petitmengin is a teacher of micro-phenomenology, a method of study of human experience founded by neurobiologist Francisco Varela.