Freya Jackson
Half-life
Things are very difficult now
they have uninvented death
& we spend our evenings quietly
eating beef & peaches
from inside of our long marriages
instead of reading the newspaper
for the lists of dead & remarking
for now we have no more funerals
to look forward to & will never
know again the dark joy
of choosing the correct dress
to bury our mothers
the relieving grief of knowing
we are our own mothers now
FREYA JACKSON lives in Leeds. She was awarded a Northern Writers Award in 2019 and shortlisted for The White Review’s New Poets Prize in 2021.