The night our dog gorged herself      on boiled sweets and lostall interest in the scent of meat —      chewing and chewing the aniseedflavoured candy papers into a ball      and eying me with the glazed resolutenessof an addict I saw myself   when I didn’t write —too full and crushing the poems    that found me into the street’s shadowseven as their journeys were rising    beneath my feet — or else I stuffed them inside letting     their verses sing in and outof my other thoughts — their sounds glowing —     licking the space betweenmeaning and feeling    to thinner and thinner slivers until I finally let them tumble away     from me like beetles flickingthrough wet grass and into the throats     of magnolias, useless and rollingin the stickiness of scent. The night our dog gorged herself      on boiled sweets and lostall interest in the scent of meat —      chewing and chewing the aniseedflavoured candy papers into a ball      and eying me with the glazed resolutenessof an addict I saw myself   when I didn’t write —too full and crushing the poems    that found me into the street’s shadowseven as their journeys were rising    beneath my feet — or else I stuffed them inside letting     their verses sing in and outof my other thoughts — their sounds glowing —     licking the space betweenmeaning and feeling    to thinner and thinner slivers until I finally let them tumble away     from me like beetles flickingthrough wet grass and into the throats     of magnolias, useless and rollingin the stickiness of scent. Jenny is a working mum and writes whenever she can amid the fun and chaos of family life. Her poetry is published in several printed anthologies, magazines and online poetry sites. Jenny lives … Continue reading →

I’m the Writer and the Woman Buying a Bus Ticket Louder than the island’s trafficcicadas’ shake a tinder percussionfrom long, straying grass. They are as unseenas a writer, whoyears away, will tap at a keyboard and listen to a printerscuttle … Continue reading →

Improvisations We have taken to living lifeas if it were jazzrouging wan dayswith bright notesborn from barren weeks hollow as the tin-can lanternsrecycled and strung upin the spindly birch treesby kids, next door.Each cylinder’s dark interioris pierced with geometric patternsso … Continue reading →

Grief we row, hearing only our oarspluck the sigh of ripples freefrom the lake’s swish of midnight and silence, lifting water to suddencold light, cutting and breaking at the dampfloat of moss that clings to the cold wooden skin of … Continue reading →