Issue 7: Jill Jones
[Two untitled poems from Senses Working Out]
IN THIS WEIRD interlude
perhaps the boxes will fall
on me or the switches
will fail even though
I told you about the
dragon at the window
waiting while the planes
fly backwards and sky
is covered in indigo blue shag
while the shallows become
aquamarine and quiet for once as
the highway liquefies at night
runs the voodoo be careful what you
have made the phrases stumble
over the phone and you can’t
put them together in the wind
the next day and the next day
are screeching at the entrance
their hours are now disabled
because of the fuel you spent
walking back streets with
their carpets and jewels and
late-flowering jacarandas
it seems extreme the quiet
and layers of dung among
spring roses is everyone
auditioning for a horror movie
ten takeaways, nine androids
eight who do you loves
seven splatter flix, six dollars
five frantic (inwardly)
four butterfly taboos, three
chocolate prayers, two women kissing
one stupid law, no exit
due to construction
and still I feel tender
as if it’s the night’s fault
or the morning’s which follows
so soon after the dream
which showed no quarter
as though your life should be
relived in motion
rather than stasis
no-one wants to hold anything
and someone keeps counting
on their hands but you know
each number is a fool
only for you
***********
WE ARE ALL making works, I hear
us in the fences, the metal
quavers and muddle tumbles
in time with our hands and
our breaths, we make a blow
or a tough thumb into patches
of water grass cotton cement
parsley phrases gas conversation
we have tools of self-worth big crunch
and absences of the wheel
o we are rolling, our high
pitched handles and pulses
wheezing even as we hang
walls and move votives around detours
or heave loins and icicles
as if it’s not a question of
happiness or learning flight
although coverts involve themselves
at heft and in the build
strokes through the breath
but if we are yet to be
skeletons we are still yet
to be making because
and there is nothing, nothing
without this bread, if fresh
burnt mould dry delicious
with our shoulders
Jill Jones’ latest books are Broken/Open (Salt, 2005) and Dark Bright Doors (Wakefield, 2010). She co-edited, with Michael Farrell, Out Of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets (Puncher and Wattmann, 2009). She has also published five chapbooks, the most recent being Passages: Annotations (Ungovernable Press, 2010), an e-book of poems and poetics. She is a member of the J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide.
