JOSHUA JONES
Strings 3
‘tongue for water’
May 2025
Seep
In the glass screen of the bus stop, in which advertisements for McDonalds
and private healthcare professionals endlessly scroll, a door opened.
I stepped into it without a moment’s thought. It took me the same amount of time
as the distance between pressing the button to take a photo and the flash
igniting your loved object’s frozen smile. Jean Baudrillard took photos of cracks
in the pavement, holes in walls, spaces where the world behind ours seeps through.
He would have had a fucking field day with this. I stepped into the sheltering
darkness —It really was quite dark in there — no one seemed to bat an eyelid
to be honest. How many dead today? Numbers explode around me like fireworks
but hardly light the heavy dark. A woman dozes on the bus stop bench, the trench
lines of her face slack. Suddenly a drop like a slick of tape on the cutting-room
floor, or perhaps the removal of a comma from a poem. Clean teeth off pavement.
Blood floods her hood, the puddles in the pavement. There is a hole in this woman’s
face like there are holes in children’s bodies and holes for houses and holes instead
of phones and holes instead of wells where we store our grief and there’s holes
for hands and holes in the walls of our world. Onlookers put phones in pockets
to help the woman. They unlock their jaws to dial an ambulance the way
hatchlings call for mother. I cower behind the door, watch my bus come and go.
My thoughts, knots of themselves, wringing strings of wet breath, frayed ends.
My phone is blood, the streets of my city, my mind, my news feed. How many
dead today? I learned a new breathing technique this week — 3 in, 4 out, 5 in, 6
out. I’m still anxious. How many dead, I need to know. How many more
taxpayers’ missiles fired at civilians. Oh, my love. Don’t forget
your travel pass. Your blood will become one with the street.
Elegy for Mothers
In an apple skin
my teeth, a crowbar, wreck the body
from the sour, exposed self.
Juice, sticky as an old scream,
trapped in the throat;
haunting the childhood home.
To gorge in the dark allows me to feel full.
Sacred was the fridge light before it broke.
Buoyed by my bloating stomach
in the part of the river that falls
into, upon itself, pulled back by its own story.
Flowing river of me; I am a room.
I have never found comfort in the construct
of a room. Have never belonged
to a place — brick, sky, a stomach’s
sound with an ear pressed against it.
Sucking sweetness from under my nails
like a piglet nuzzling its mother,
I consider becoming new.
An apple that falls to the ground
begins to decompose
as soon as it makes impact
Witness
Like the bird under the wheel of a family carrier
survives, and nibbles its wings on the rooftop
over the bakery. There will be a moment
where you are you and a moment after, when
you are still you, and not a new you, but … you. BUT
there will be a change, like your lover’s new haircut —
almost imperceptibly similar to their previous haircut except
one comes with expectant eyes — and you
will say you love it. Not quite the same. It’s the closest
I can get. How many birds fly into the mouth
of an incoming car, how many every day — how many
survive? Have you even thought about it until now?
JOSHUA JONES (he/him) is a queer, neurodivergent writer & artist from Llanelli, south Wales. His debut, Local Fires, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize & Polari First Book Prize. His poetry pamphlets include A Fistful of Flowers (2022), Three Months in the Zebra Room (Hello America Stereo Cassette, 2024), and The City on Film (Bread and Roses, 2024).
