Location  (For Emily)

 

I don’t know what kind of world welcomed you.

I sit here, blinking over a blank page, mind coffee frothed,

while the sky breaks open, and wheeling gulls call for attention.

 

We try to tessellate everything, all we’ve ever wanted,

all we’ve ever known. The handmade bricks, the sunlight

pressed into earth, pressed into something else again and again.

 

The doors fashioned from tilting trees, the city’s pitch and glitter.

The creeped out days when walls lean close, and we are small

and made of glass. It hurts so much to live the way that we do.

 

Dark drops easily here, and places ooze into us, we who set fires

and cast grits of resin. We who mutate like caterpillars, cocooned

for far too long, never knowing what our transformations will bring.

 

It is all here, with us.

…………………………………..The unreturned library books, the small key

you offered to open your heart for, the stethoscope that confirms

that everything goes on. You are always here, come in after midnight,

and hear a small voice whispering, I thought you might like this.

*

Biography

Alison Jones is a teacher, and writer with work published in a variety of places, from Proletarian Poetry and The Interpreter’s House, to The Green Parent Magazine and The Guardian. She has a particular interest in the role of nature in literature and is a champion of contemporary poetry in the secondary school classroom. Her pamphlet, ‘Heartwood’ was published by Indigo Dreams in 2018, with a second pamphlet. ‘Omega’ forthcoming in 2019.