Guest Poem by Janet Dean

Janet Dean was Highly Commended in the Bridport Prize 2022, and won second prize in the Yeovil Poetry Competition 2020. She was commended in the Poetry Society Stanza Competition, and her poem Callin’ is featured in the Northern Poetry Library’s Poem of the North. She is widely published in anthologies and magazines in print and online. This poem is from Acumen 108.

Angels in the Air

Morning spills sand from its bucket, a clock ticks
one Mississippi, two Mississippi.

Deserted by an outgoing tide, an afternoon
spread flat and dreary, wet with longing.

She spent years learning to silence the ticking clock,
change her voice, open vowels, add an aitch or an ing.

Now her brain cowers in my skull,
her shadow lurks at the edge of who I have become,

makes an imprint of angels in the air
in the space between her there and me here.