Freya Jackson

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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

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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.