JLM Morton

no stranger to catastrophe

this place – dragons, etc.
axe men, abandoned
homes, whatever,
have you seen how many
flags this year, last
dregs, tractors
with their forks up,
cocksure the soil could be richer
not waiting for
the deluge
to break
through an empty
chapel, lobbing coins
from the ledge,
liquidating
the mints, launching
an origami duck
on the junk of the flow
what if those votives
weren’t a requiem,
but an otherlife
of hope
maybe
we could’ve done
more
but we didn’t –
stone spirals
on the font
pulling
us back
to ourselves
and our endings
again again
us glitches
in the cycle, us
questions like hollows
in the oaks
on the riverbank
filled with silt
where the floods pour through

The Future Arrives Earlier Than Expected

It was ten to three on a Wednesday and me
in my snappiest suit, when the floor gave
way in JobCentre Plus. The heaviest things
were first to go: cost of living, printer jam,
David from Accounts – how helpless
the underworld awaiting, with its callous
encrustations. Tomorrow, I could have woken up
a different person, declared a man reclining as he went,
trailing a whiff of urinal. Ballerinas encircled
the black plunge of their indifference – it was
almost holy; an opera chorus devoured the wretched
carpet, worn thin with waiting. And lastly, the rhythmic
companionship, the glooming wail, of Sun: you mined
the dark from me, burned it for light! fading out.

JLM Morton’s poetry has featured on BBC6 Music and in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Rialto, Magma, Mslexia and The London Magazine. She is the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer, Laurie Lee and Poetry Archive Worldview Prizes and was highly commended by the Forward Prizes. Her debut poetry collection is Red Handed (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). Borrowed Ground (2026) is her second collection, which ‘holds beauty and brutality in the same frame, insisting that attention is not innocence, but a form of witness’ (Poetry Book Society).  

Juliette wrote this about her poems:

‘Deep Country’ was a response to a visit to Deerhurst on the banks of the River Severn in Gloucestershire, an ancient settlement which has long lived with repeated polycrises. The poem circles catastrophe as a recurring, almost ritualised condition of place, a landscape that has known disaster so often that even its symbols of hope or protest (flags, tractors, votives, chapel offerings) become part of a long and ongoing cycle of damage, renewal, and resignation.  

‘The Future Arrives’ was inspired by my visits to the local jobcentre, this poem explores the notion of sudden collapse, when an ordinary day is swallowed by something larger: the weight of precarity, bureaucracy, and the strange holiness of despair. It stages a moment where the floor gives way and the mundane world becomes mythic, grotesque, and operatic (with a balletic nod to the government’s ill-fated Cyber First ad campaign).