Margins.

Hot sun on the saltmarsh. Crusted, cracked, peeling cakes of mud. Scurvy grass and sea thrift. Gun metal grey clay smears the runnels and funnels and channels making islands and lagoons. Birdsfoot imprints skitter this shore line, darting dragonflies. Lines of wooden stumps fetch out into the belly of the river, cockling and netting. A breach in the sea wall, the incoming sea seeps like spilt tea across a kitchen floor. A thrum of insects, the hum of traffic, mega pylons, the oil refinery’s intestinal tracts edge the land, wild, dystopic, a marginal co-existence. The tide is rising.