Ali Jones
Oracles
Each year I am looking for signs: a white pebble, a dropped feather, shy shadow’s shape, red thread burning, how the beans fall in bright patterns, a walnut’s voyage in a silver bowl, sailing a birthday candle through night waters. I must hold onto something, wax poured through a keyhole, the last cherry leaf, kept, heart-sure in my pocket. I need these stories to tell myself, that the world is real, and the dead gather at my table still, misting the silver with ghost breath, appearing in mirrors by lamplight, revealing the way on.
Skeleton Leaf
It looks too complicated, bobbin bound. I imagine white haired women crouched in church, fingers flying, thread over, under, bone pins on stuck straw, that kind of bent necked circle, time-worn conspiracy. Like the mother at the school gates, who shepherds children to the light, yet carries all the shadows they give her home in her bag, to bide in the woodshed until winter. I wonder how much it hurts to come apart, let limbs shine. Hung on wind's breath, downcast into clagged earth, so easily forgotten, pulp pressed out, veins revealed. Like a timepiece, with all the parts opened, made bare beneath the adept eye of a clockmaker’s calm examination. I take it home, keep it close, between the layers of a book, consider how page and pressed remember what they were, and how we frame them otherwise; unlike, so at odds, with tall trees, who rooted, dreamed free, between firmament and dust.
Turkey Tails
Turkey Tails Like clouds fallen and caught by the slain, clusters fan round sleeping logs, zones of regulation proudly displayed, filament fruited, through fine fragmentation. It is always a surprise to find you conspiring, running rings together with tales of seasons turning, the hierarchy of spaces taken up, through sun dance and moon blink; hold on. Always life in death, deadwood delight, not as feral as we think, wildness woven in patterns, planned connections span spectacular secrets of all earth’s histories. When I am gone, weave my way in mycelium, and I will show you how everything is allied. Forest dream in an acorn, apple seed’s fruit promise, the cunning composition from oblivion, essence.
Alison Jones’
work has been widely published in journals such Poetry Ireland Review, Proletarian Poetry, The Interpreter’s House, The Green Parent Magazine and The Guardian. Her pamphlets, Heartwood (2018) and Omega (2020) were published by Indigo Dreams. She is working on a full collection.