Jen Feroze

i pass the tattoo parlour twice a day

And feel my eyes pulled
through the windows to calves
and shoulders, reddening thighs,
that swarming machine hum
prickling flowers, crescent moons, dead dogs
and Disney characters.
Shadow and shading and depth
til the skin is part gallery
part memory
part look what I love.

Sometimes I think about asking for a bee
in shades of grey, to feel it sting.
But what I’d mean, as I lifted my shirt,
what I’d mean to tell the girl with the gun
is please ink me with June sky,
kitchen discos and rum sours,
and tea stirred anti-clockwise.
Needle the way to bedsheets and pine trees,
breakfast bagels and the whale deep hymn
of me without you.

I’d bite my tongue.
Pretend it’s cos it hurt. Leave
with a honey bee the size of your thumbprint,
singing quietly over my sternum.

Someone Once Told Me That Love Is The Anticipation of Grief

In my grandmother’s house
of tinned peaches and ice cream,
patchy velvet cushions, the same few magazines,
like new each time; I think of Monet at Giverny.  

Leaves
        becoming fretwork
   becoming water. A burnishing
of lilies,       everything autumn.
No            edges any more,     and even blue
      merely       an idea   a      dream you once had,
a dance    whose   steps    were second nature,
the way you were lifted     from the floor
     and felt sure
that your head      might brush the       stars.
A refusal to move
from the water’s edge,
       as the     dark
deepens.

Jen Feroze lives by the sea in Essex. A former Foyle Young Poet, her work has appeared in publications including Poetry Wales, Magma, Spelt, Dust, Atrium and Annie. She was a winner of the 2022/2023 Magma Editors' Prize, and her debut pamphlet 'Tiny Bright Thorns' is forthcoming with Nine Pens.

Jen wrote the following about her poems:

When faced with anything overtly ‘poetic’ in real life (a sunset, a waterfall, a murmuration of birds… you know the drill) I find my brain gets stage fright. Instead, I tend to write into the seemingly everyday and try to interweave something otherworldly into the ordinary. This often gives a wistful or nostalgic mood to my poetry, as I lean towards a sometimes confronting blend of childhood magic and adult reality.