Young Poet: Jessica Brown

Jessica Brown is a 22-year-old, London-born poet, teacher and recent Oxford graduate. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bloodaxe Archive Challenge and she won second prize in the Barnet Youth Poetry Competition. Her work has also been published in various magazines including The Mays anthology, the Young Writers’ anthology, the Oxford Review of Books and Better Than Starbucks. Jessica has been writing poetry since she was five or six, having hailed from a long line of verse-addicted English teachers.

Lemon

A man threw a lemon into the air
And caught it up, on a February afternoon.
It was unseasonable: he didn’t care.
The air smelled of flowers and the day-wrong moon –
Or the woman-in-front’s expensive scent:
It was all one.
There was a brightness to the hour
That he had not seen or meant
When he’d prayed for sun beneath his morning shower.
The man sheathed the lemon in his pocket and went