O:JA&L Poetry: All forms & styles
Shelley Tracey
Vacancy
The job that I needed. The job I regretted. The job that contempted me. The job in a Northern Irish town on a Loyalist housing estate, gridded with flags. The job in an end-terrace house, a crime scene smeared clean. The house impossible to hearten or heat. The job that started each day by lighting a fire with too little fuel. The job with a surfeit of d/anger and too little coal. The house with a door which never closed gently. The house where the water dripped thickly as pus. The house with missile-scarred windows and hate-worded walls. The job that deflected me, defected me, defeated me. The job that needed to s/tamp me down, ash me. The job anyone could do, no-one could do, no-one should ever do.
newspaper firelighters
twisted into butterflies
too quickly burnt out
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: Landscape with House (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L creative. Proprietary image. 2025.
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