underground 📕
poem 4/10 from warm blooded things (Nine Arches Press, 2021)
CN: AIDS
underground
beneath the cave-painting of a cubicle-wall with its smudge of numbers and nazi-signs,
he lies his head on the tile and pushes an ear into the cold
fossil of another man’s handprint and imagines him
wild and unashamed
before a disease blistered all that history between them:
fingers squeezing snow into something they can hold,
both their tongues tied under a train...
under and over and over again.
[💽 AUDIO COMING]
Previously published in Magma (2019).
Shaun Hill (born 1996) is a poet, somatic educator, and working-class survivor of decades of multi-agency failings, living in the British Midlands. He’s the author of warm blooded things (Nine Arches Press, 2021), A Mushroom Wastes Nothing (Substack, 2026) and the developer of Loop & Line: Experiments in Physical Thinking.
He’s over 40 poems into his second full-length collection, And Now The Body Speaks. He writes for the voices who will dance medicine twenty years from now: a taproot decompacting the soil of the unspeakable.