Erinma Ochu’s poem ‘How to read the atmosphere’ was highly commended in the Best Single Poem category of the 2025 Disabled Poets Prize.

The Disabled Poets Prize looks to find the best work created by UK-based deaf and disabled poets.

How to read the atmosphere

I am wondering how to let go of

dreams that no longer want me.

two days of sun

two days of rain

and today,

the wind beating against my face.

How to read the atmosphere 

when this totalising climate, 

the weather 

is a cartography, 

a map of human violence. 

As if reading my mind,

you lean in for a kiss,

I feel the warmth of a distant sun,

dragonflies flit,

meld together,

make love mid-air.

We reach below the earth’s surface,

sink our hands into the soil,

twist human taxonomies

with a hermaphroditic turn,

slithering, folding, mulching

desiring an earthworm’s toil.

Everyday violence,

metabolises and decays,

its fragrant wretchedness

composted,

glimmers of a fractured planet remade.

About Erinma Ochu

A biologist by training, Erinma turned to storytelling through performance poetry in the 1990s followed by screenwriting on short films and artist moving image work as duo, Squirrel Nation. Erinma is reinvigorating their creative writing practice through the lenses of self-love, queering metabolism and epistemic justice based within Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio as inaugural Researcher in Residence. Erinma is a member of the Forest Writers group, UWE Bristol’s Digital Cultures Research Centre and the Stuart Hall Foundation’s Scholars and Fellows network.