Two poems by Jill Jones

Cirque du Suburbia

The thing you think of is jangling the breast bone

you don’t splurge or heave but it threatens like morning

Someone’s been hiding the ducks and tangling the burbsong

almost in jest, chirpy-chirpy cheep-cheep, as nuts with guns

short cut down classy streets with beautiful mullets and nipples

The whole town is tempted onto the showboat, even I

was drooling about the new weather, the way RayBans

fit an image that’s deceased or a tiara if you need

an unhealthy respect for precious minerals, abandoned atmospheres

misreading the lux aeterna through a plain curtain

Nothing repeats like television or spaghetti, we’re told to

save it with our golden slumbers weighing more than you think

Verisimilitude seems like a good idea until

the autumn snow of tax deals starts hackling the yard

Impossibility

Each day is impossible

I fight with contours.

My horizon breathes its narrow fog

militaries hedgehop by day.

Dusty trees tremble

in darkness.

Silver-plated clouds and tiny craters

slip stones into my mouth.

Here I wait for breaks at sea

cracks in holes made by language.

I’m a stone at the base

where each word will be stolen.

I head for a pale yellow distance

or die into my life.

Jill Jones has published six full-length poetry collections, most recently Dark Bright Doors in 2010. She recently published Senses Working Out, a Vagabond Press Rare Object chapbook. A new full-length book, Ash Is Here, So Are Stars, will be published in 2012. She won the 2003 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize for Screens Jets Heaven and the 1993 Mary Gilmore Award for The Mask and the Jagged Star.