Home
This is home: you could be happy here.
Spangled lights fill the hallway, a painted smile.
From the outside it sounds like a party –
high-pitched screams, music turned up way too high.
Look around you, no-one's laughing.
Smoke crawls into their throats,
everyone's trying not to breathe and some succeed,
lie sleeping. Clamouring hands reach out to nothing;
erase the lights, the colours, everything.
Autopsy
The boy, as he had been,
who'd loved her first,
lay before her sleeping,
dreaming – she was sure –
not gone as it said.
She wanted to hold
his mangled heart,
feel for signs of care,
instead she allows a finger
to glide over those lips
as if to kiss them
but there is nothing,
no quiver,
and it isn't the same
so his curled fingers
she gently eases
between her own –
here we are
she says to him now,
the two of us,
the living and the dead.
• Juliet Humphreys say “About me: I would like to be a poet who teaches but too often it is the other way around.”
