Lees

It is two hundred years in the future
and we are sitting in separate bedrooms
I talk to my socks as I put them on in the morning
when you will not rise
I balance coffee cups on my nose, pull cigarettes
from inside my ears, and you are sleeping still

It is two hundred years in the future and
only now can you pick up the picture sitting
at your bedside
a small photograph of us, sleeping on a couch
in the dark, two hundred years in the past

Only it is two hundred years in the future and
there is no photograph, and we never spoke that
one last time, and there were other women but they weren’t me.

I never said it because I thought you would know,
closure is like love:
what you do not have, you cannot give.
This is a present you must make yourself.

By Jennifer Simmons

Christened

Magdalena, he calls me
when he is freezing outside in the yard
chattering into a mobile phone.

Magdalena, like the whore,
a woman who might sell her love
for bits and scraps of daily reprieve.

Magdalena, he cries,
it’s so hard when it snows and I
dream of you, knuckles taught.

Magdalena is not my word,
but I am dark with mortification,
and his throat winces at my name

Magdalena has no voice,
she is as frozen as the snow drifts
that make him call her in the morning dark.

Magdalena, he has christened her
for she has no heart;
she is but a whore.

By Jennifer Simmons

The Mouth

I heard them once say
my two friends, behind
my back, pink and parted,
‘Never again.’

At the sound of your name,
I bit them to pieces.

By Jennifer Simmons

Mermaid

My t-shirt doesn’t look the same,
her hair collapses against her back
and she is a blue sea beauty
landed on my sandy floors

Gasping in her legs and arms
and mouth, bone and flesh
She is gritty between my teeth
but she is still inside of me

fleeing, returning rightly
my arms recall her form each
time, a tidal wave I see but
can’t escape

And if I let her think a while
maybe she’ll love me better
and then she won’t call her
memories like breaths of air

flickers of cigarettes discarded,
and I’m siren-struck by that
hair, oceans on her back
I don’t taste nicotine, just salt

my little mermaid
my little seafoam

By Jennifer Simmons