Mr Green Thinks He is a Book
by Hannah Linden
Mr Green is walking across the sentence again, his paragraph feet sticking themselves into the indentations. He thinks he’s a new movement, someone who could turn the page, perhaps, or make himself into a feature.
Mr Green knows that everyone judges the cover so he’s taken to summing himself up in pithy phrases and name-dropping people who have said anything nice about him.
Mr Green thinks like an ISBN number that he’s translating into a barcode. As he tucks himself in at night, under his covers he imagines himself in the Boston Spa library, neatly in place on an appropriate shelf. He imagines people putting in special orders and himself travelling back and forth between carefully caressing hands.
Mr Green has started to list his life into chapters. He watches to see if anyone has arrived at an inappropriate place in the plot and needs to be edited out.
Hannah Linden is neurodivergent, queer, from a working-class Northern background but lives in ramshackle social housing in Devon, UK. Her most recent awards include 1st prize Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021, Highly Commended Wales Poetry Award 2021, and 2nd Prize Leeds Peace Poetry Prize 2024. She is published widely eg in Acumen, Atrium, Blackbox Manifold, Iambapoet, Lighthouse, Magma, New Welsh Review, Poetry Wales, Setumag, Shearsman, Stanchion, Stand, Tears in the Fence, The Rialto, Under the Radar etc. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky, (V. Press) was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. BlueSky: @hannahl1n.bsky.social