O:JA&L Mixed Forms: Haibun
Shelley Tracey
MY DOUBLE
still lives in the same small house in the same small town in the same old country. The same red car still squats at one side of the garage, with space left over for the bike I might have owned. In the blue spare room, there’s still a cat on each twin bed, not run over or dead of sour old age. In the outsize wardrobe, rows of glossy shoes I could stand tall in. The long back garden crammed with flowers that never used to thrive – white roses free of aphids. Plentiful begonias pillowed on their leaves. The nectarine tree where the children liked to climb has resurrected after lightning strikes.
in my living room, another place, another time. A wooden box, two layers of varnish, where I keep the single earrings that I’ve never found the partners for. In mismatched photo frames, my mother long before I knew her, my father’s quiet face fading. The curtains that I brought with me the wrong size for these windows.
a starling with a broken wing
drags itself
across the grass
About the writer:
Shelley Tracey’s collection Elements of Distance was published by Lapwing (2017). Other poems have been published in The North, Orbis, Abridged, Skylight 47, The Haibun Journal, Stag Hill Journal, Drifting Sands Haibun, North West Words, Honest Ulsterman, Bangor Literary Journal, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and Bray Arts Journal. Poems have also appeared in Bloody Amazing, Lighting Out, Recovery, Washing Windows V, and North Star anthologies. Poems have been shortlisted in Poems for Patience, Second Light, Over the Edge and Bangor Poetry competitions. Commissions include poems for ‘The Way It Is’, Community Arts Partnership, and reminiscence poems for c21 Theatre Company.
Image: A Quiet Street (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. Public domain via MidJourney AI.
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