Haikus
Amy Ellis
Street scene
She holds a box of
doughnuts, lights a cigarette
in the morning fog.
Airing out our apartment after a fire
I hoped that the smell
of stale smoke would make you keep
the windows open
but we have closed up
tight, breathing in yesterday’s
soot until our lungs
turn as black as the
walls in the hallways they burned,
left us to live in.
Quill
My bones are hollow
and brittle like bird feathers
plucked and dipped in ink.
Personal
I found a condom
wrapper on the kitchen floor
this morning. Not mine.
Amy Ellis has a BA in Creative Writing from Longwood University and a MA in Digital Publishing from Oxford Brookes University. She used to pay her rent self-publishing her writing and now works in publishing in London. Sometimes she writes poems. Amy Ellis is online at Amy-Ellis.com.