The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2026. For June, we are delighted to publish three new works by Melanie Marshall. The first of these, ‘Dark bordered (Epione vespertaria)’ is published today with two more poems to follow throughout the month. 

---

Dark bordered (Epione vespertaria)

 

Repelled by cedar, I learn, and at night they curl and skim around chimney smoke and

security lights in courtship

agitating

secreting

and never sleep on the wing.

 

Seeking more

 

Minds flat, spread out, colouration dwindling

Dorsal vessels beat

with secondary hearts

Pacified by ultrasonic song.

 

Equinox warm, day, from fired beech to a halo

A fascinator, at night

In torpor

Smiles in the wall; archived in sun.

 

Many have drowned here

 

No thought, all predisposition,

Wings pepper a kale leaf. Do they witness time passing?

Fend off winter?

Can’t even slow it.

 

It will be better there

 

From copse, over fields, thorn and thistle,

tailing a sham moon

Disrupting.

 

In sky/in water

Where they should not go

 

In through the casement, past mullion, lintel and sill

Speckling

The bright, the bright

The wet

Nauseating

Here again. Can’t get free. No longer can. Don’t want to.

Pinned.

Melanie Marshall is a freelance editor who lives near a Neolithic long barrow in Somerset, with her husband, son, daughter and two cats. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from UEA and a BA in English Literature from Cardiff University, has had poems and short stories published by The Moth, Momaya, Pen & Inc Press, The Ghastling and Prole Books, and her novel Noir Gris was longlisted for the Mslexia Prize.