Wager
I need coins.
Not for my eyes but a wager, a circle
of risky bets. Emptying my purse,
I find a handful of silver,
drum it on the table.
And then I dig in, find
actual shrapnel. Wounds become currency.
Silent mouths gape punctuation.
The woman in Army boots and a white summer dress
laughs, picks up the dice.
Jennifer A. McGowan won the Prole pamphlet competition last year, as a result of which, her pamphlet, Still Lives with Apocalypse, was published. She also won the mountain writing competition in 2020. You can read her winning poem here . At time of writing she has had Long Covid for 14 months and is heartily sick of it. Jennifer is a re-enactor and calligrapher/illuminator who spends all the time she can in the 15th century, only returning for hot showers. Find out about her books and the anthologies she is in here