Clare O’Brien
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Across from my tenth floor window, the Tower glows red, blue, red. The lights remind me why I fear this city. Bright, primary, intrusive. It is insistent. It is unforgiving, harsh, it lives for power. Floodlit and impregnable. If you do not fight it, it will kill you.
As the darkness deepens, I make my way – the old way, step by step by step – across the river. On the bridge, a girl with old razor scars on her arm sits in the dirt. The winter is beginning to bite. The buildings are frozen stalagmites, ice shards under a cold sun. I keep on walking, past the theatres, past the steaming manholes and the shouters and the shops and the beggars, ending up in the Square as day tips over into night.
The lights stream from the tall towers, cliffs rising from a sea of people. The flashing digital billboards screech like seabirds. And I am adrift in a freezing ocean, surrounded by life but isolated from it, suspended like a swimmer as sharks circle in the murk. Above me, birds gather on ledges and the tops of trees, singing in the unnatural light, a dawn chorus at the wrong end of day. In front of me, a tree grows up through a glass atrium, imprisoned in the belly of a building. Its branches cannot find the wind, the birds. I hear it scream, its leaves stilled behind the bulletproof glass.
I take refuge on a metal chair beside a café and order a drink to protect me from questions. I keep my head down as the weather in my head explodes. The tears fall into my glass but the sky stays dry as paper. As terror twists my stomach, I keep on trying to survive.
Clare O’Brien grew up in London, but moved to a house by a sea-loch in the Scottish Highlands, which suits her much better. She has been a schoolteacher, a journalist, a politician’s PR and a rock star’s PA, and was 2025’s Poet In Residence at the National Trust for Scotland’s Inverewe Garden. Her 2025 poetry pamphlet ‘Breathing Out Becomes White And Snowfall’ (Intergraphia Books), followed her 2022 ekphrastic collection ‘Who Am I Supposed To Be Driving?” (Hedgehog Poetry Press). Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, and she’s working on a novel and a full poetry collection. Find more at her website
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Read more from Clare:
TSS Publishing – ‘An Art Deco Sideboard‘
Sextet – ‘Watching Grace at TRNSMT and Death Sentences‘
Here on Trash Cat Lit – ‘Body Positive‘
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