“Adventure” © Bonnie Matthews Brock
Dogs Don’t Need Aniseed Like I Didn’t Need Poems
The night our dog gorged herself
on boiled sweets and lost
all interest in the scent of meat —
chewing and chewing the aniseed
flavoured candy papers into a ball
eyeing me with the glazed resoluteness
of an addict
I saw myself
when I didn’t write —
too full and crushing the poems
that found me into the street’s shadows
even as their journeys were rising
beneath my feet —
or else I stuffed them inside letting
their verses sing in and out
of my other thoughts — their sounds glowing —
licking the space between
meaning and feeling
to thinner and thinner slivers
until I finally let them tumble away
from me like beetles flicking
through wet grass and into the throats
of magnolias, useless and rolling
in the stickiness of scent.
Jenny Middleton is a working mum and writes whenever she can amid the fun and chaos of family life. Her poetry is published in several printed anthologies, magazines and online poetry sites. Jenny lives in London with her husband, two children and two very lovely, crazy cats.
Bonnie Matthews Brock is a Florida-based photographer, as well a school psychologist. She loves hiking the urban and woodland trails of “anywhere” (and pausing often to shoot photos) with her very patient husband (and often collaborator), Ted. Her images have been featured on the covers of magazines such as Ibbetson Street, Wild Roof Journal, Poesy Magazine, Humana Obscura, and Arkansas Review; as well as on the pages of publications such as Oddball Magazine, Ember Chasm Review, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Beaver Magazine, and Lateral. Her works are archived at institutions such as Poets House NYC, Brown University, and Harvard University.