Loneliness Explained by Jenny Blackford (Lucent Dreaming Issue 8)

Perhaps a clump of hair and teeth
grinning ghastly wordless at the world
inside of me, inside of you,
is all that’s left of some poor vanished twin,
a monstrous fossil of comfortable shared time
within the womb.
Each and any of us could have been a twin,
our singular loneliness explained
by half our flesh and bone
gone missing, lost to us,
off alone somewhere
in space and time.

Like the four-legged human prototypes
so cruelly sliced in two in that strange story
told at Socrates’ love-hungry feast,
we wander the green earth
forever snatching, grabbing, clutching
at hands and hearts,
hunting our other half –
the only one
who’ll ever understand
the scars, the gaping
vacancies that edge
our selves and souls.

Jenny Blackford is a prize-winning author and poet based in Newcastle, Australia. Her poems and stories have appeared in Westerly, The Pedestal Magazine and many more Australian and international journals and anthologies. Pitt Street Poetry published an illustrated pamphlet of her cat poems, The Duties of a Cat, in 2013, and her first full-length book of poetry, The Loyalty of Chickens, in 2017. Her new collection from Pitt Street Poetry is The Alpaca Cantos. Eagle Books published her spidery, ghostly middle-grade mystery The Girl in the Mirror in October 2019.
@dutiesofacat | www.jennyblackford.com

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Lucent Dreaming is an independent creative writing magazine publishing beautiful, imaginative and surreal short stories, poetry and artwork from emerging authors and artists worldwide. Our aim is to encourage creativity and to help writers reach publication! Subscribe to Lucent Dreaming now, support us on Patreon and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.