Five Poems
Jill Jones
Wake-up Theatre
All meat and leaf, bone
and branch kiss me alive
like a yellow bright tree
Life’s not a dream, even
dogs can’t be quiet
Undergrowth rebukes me
loads up my shoulders
exhales its eternal grass
I think of what I do now
as if it’s still night-blooded
No-one sleeps when life
remembers its dream
Stranger?
Trees tip sky into crazy deep green
Smoke crawls along tiles
wracked and yellow
A red brassiere wraps round
the sign at the bus stop
Another saviour gapes
from lines of white announcements
‘Please do not desert me utterly’
A baby’s alone on the square
shaking its blue booty
What will I find beyond waking?
Stranger, what will you bring me?
‘Sometimes, almost more’
Some people have never felt rain or seen snow
Fifty-two weeks is twice the alphabet
Seventy per cent of house dust is skin
I was once the youngest person alive, though briefly
There was no full moon during February 1865
the last year Emily Dickinson ventured beyond Amherst
‘Drifts were as difficult then to think’
A hummingbird’s heart can beat 1,260 times per minute
It’s claimed female ladybirds experience orgasms lasting
up to 30 minutes
My tongue is my strongest muscle
But is it true that one is the loneliest number?
Some people never fall in love
[all words in quotes, including title, are from
Emily Dickinson’s poem No. 995, sent in a letter
to her cousin, Louise Norcross, in March 1865.]
Longings
All confessions lie in their accounts
twilight rearranges its geography
A mountain doesn’t blame its height
water falls with memory
There’s a number easy to ignore
it hears distance in an insect chime
Background shapes into weather
fallow wastes beyond the verandah
Mortality and love are inseparable
longing at the foot of a hill
There’s pressure on valves of the heart
its miles of rustling glades
Could Escape
The world’s panels and gears
are squeaky, that we admit
You can wait for the big moon
but this is no time to howl
Ghosts of the nursery
hang longer than
the ghosts of our theories
Any of us could escape, that’s true
past airs which ring
too much with tinny muzaks
Or let’s dance in the faithful double
of the chest’s beating
Jill Jones lives on unceded Kaurna land. Her latest book is Acrobat Music: New and Selected Poems. Her work has appeared in Arc, Blackbox Manifold, E·ratio, Jacket2, The Manchester Review, Meanjin, Poetry, Poetry Review, Shearsman, Southerly, The Stinging Fly, takahē, and many other periodicals in Australia, Canada, Ireland, NZ, Sweden, Singapore, UK, and USA. She currently writes and teaches freelance, and previously has worked as an academic, arts administrator, journalist, and book editor. Jill Jones is on Instagram and on Facebook.