Emma Jeremy

Emma Jeremy



Reveal

I repeatedly hold an apple to my mouth without biting it
and at the same time think about a woman
standing alone at a sink, washing her toothbrush.
Explaining something is very difficult when you don’t exist.
E.g. empty packets of tissues mean the end of something.
E.g. standing up in a dry bath can quieten feelings of wrongness.
If I leave this door open it looks like I expect to be followed.
And sunflowers actually do mean more than they let on.
No one talks about the sea. No one talks about anything at all.
Especially inside a family home.
Family homes are exercises in silence where we all hold hands.
The apple means very little when taken out of context.





EMMA JEREMY’s poems have appeared in Poetry London, Magma, Rising and Poems in Which. In 2018 she was a winner of The New Poets Prize, and her pamphlet Safety Behaviour was published by The Poetry Business in 2019.