You can read several poems in our tenth issue that were written by this week’s featured contributor, but one stands out for the vivid series of images it ties together into poetry. Astrid Alben’s “The Post Box” is a work that perfectly mixes elements of rain and sunshine to tell a relatable story, which also happens to reflect the season. So celebrate those wet, cloudy, primaveral days with a poem and enjoy “The Post Box” just as it appeared eight springs ago in DB 10, Spring 2009.

“I spot a pigeon on the pavement.
The pigeon is limping on one leg.
It doesn’t know it is missing the other one.
It just keeps swinging the phantom leg
in front of the real one…”

Astrid Alben read English Literature and Philosophy at Edinburgh University. Her poetry collection Ai! Ai! Pianissimo is published by Arc Publications. She is a Rijksakademie Fellow, a Royal Society of Arts Fellow and a Wellcome Trust / Clore Fellow 2013/2014. Her poetry, essays, translations and reviews are widely published, including in the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, Blackbox Manifold, and others, and have been translated into Romanian, Slovenian, Dutch and Chinese. Alben has read at, among other places, the Writers’ Union of Romania’s International Poetry Festival, Cheltenham Poetry Festival, SOAS, the Troubadour, the Days of Poetry and Wine Festival in Slovenia, Cambridge University, Sheffield University and the Aldeburgh Festival. She is also co-founder of the art and science initiative Pars. Her next collection, Plainspeak, an alter-ego-thinker-out-louder book, will be ready this year. To find out more about her work visit astridalben.com.

Click here to read “The Post Box”

Vintage DB 110: Astrid Alben’s “The Post Box,” DB 10 was originally published in DrunkenBoat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.