November Poem of the Month

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

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