The November Poem of the Month is Sticky Notes by Maria Vouis and the Commended Poem is Ice-shelf by Jules Leigh Koch.
Sticky Notes by Maria Vouis
Signs everywhere,
of your studies,
like a litter trail
of sticky notes
bookmarking your passage.
Thumbprint punctuation
on wrists’ transparent skin,
ink-stains between clavicles,
fluoro highlights doodled on breast-cleft roads,
sweat runnels blurring
intertextual references,
a slurry of metaphors
scribbled into my navel,
cyanotypes where your lips loitered,
a palmist’s prophesy printed on a bare buttock,
thighs propped open like chapters
at the plot’s peak,
your back-catalogue of luminous lines
indexed and bound between my hip bones,
your name graffitied,
with possessive apostrophe behind my knees,
and a tiny tick-tack pulse
on my throat
typed by your tongue.
Ice-shelf by Jules Leigh Koch
I walk along the darkest horizon line
between belief
and disbelief
through air colder than
an open freezer
follow needle pricks for stars
wait endlessly in hospital corridors
while each moment slices
through the muscle of words
I can no longer find
Before re-entering a room full of hope
and fear
where I sit
for hours
with only the pulse of the monitor screen
to keep me awake
and mark time
by the nurses'
changing shifts
until finally
grief
breaks off
its ice-shelf
and drips intravenously
through my subconscious