Zoë Green

looking through a window at dusk

I could just buzz her I thought, standing
by her block but then I turned, walked.
Now in the garden by the water tower 
two dogs are fighting on a lawn; some kid
has graffitied SAD on the flaking door
and a passerby says that's not why I’m
here. A boy flies a dinosaur balloon
and the dogs scrap on. If she’d look out  
she’d see me sat on the bench beneath
where the grass gleams like squid ink. 
I read this quote that when a friend leaves 
you should shut the door, keep out the cold.

ultrasound 

Dusk on Eberswalder Strasse and through the rain 
a woman approaches a café she doesn’t know. 

When her friend arrives late she places an envelope 
on the table. Inside, captured through Vaseline,  

skin, womb, amniotic fluid, swims a grey glistening
in the dead light of the café where they sit without 

drinks. The younger friend words: I’m so fucking happy 
for you though she is sinking into herself, thinking  

another good woman down. If a CT scanner unskinned her
they’d spy a rupture where Right Feelings should live.

Zoë Green has been published by The Interpreter's House, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Wales, Under the Radar, Southword, The London Magazine, One Hand Clapping, and Poetry Salzburg. She won third place in the 2024 Gregory O'Donoghue Prize, was Highly Commended in the Edward Thomas Prize, and had her work selected for Best Scottish Poems by the Scottish Poetry Library. From Montrose originally, she now lives in Germany and teaches English and Drama to teenagers. 

Zoë wrote the following about her poems:

I originally wrote these poems over a year ago but wasn’t happy with them; this was a lesson in giving poems breathing space and coming back to them months later with the ability to see them clearly. I wanted to write about female friendships and what babies and families can mean for them as the lives of those that do have children, and those that do not, suddenly or gradually diverge.