Jen Feroze lives by the sea in Essex, UK, with her husband and two small sleep thieves. She’s been writing since she was a teenager, and is a former Foyle Young Poet. Jen’s poetry has been widely published, and in 2022 she was the editor of two anthologies – A Duet of Ghosts with Black Bough Poetry, and Lullabies For New Mums with The Mum Poem Press. Her first collection, The Colour of Hope, was published in 2020 and is raising money for Mind UK.

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Perseids

It’s not the bleeding heart scarlet of buses,
the flattening of hills and the pulling up
of skyline like a stitched hem,
the people and their speed,
their down-turned glances.  

The shock of London hits me
that Wednesday night, when the flushed clouds
are mirrored in the fox, slinking duskily across
the roof of my neighbour’s shed.
When they are wet blanket thick,
but empty of rain

and the lights of the planes flash
like distant torches. When, just before midnight,
the man I love calls me, and in a voice of fresh air
and starlight from somewhere else, he tells me that
the sky is falling.

First Published by Spelt Magazine

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The Potter’s Love Song

Mink grey silt and chalk white gulls,
a shoal of gentle stoneware fish
swimming through blue glaze
thick as buttercream.
He spins his quiet I love yous
in the cold garage – calm, thick fingers
hypnotising wet clay into curves,
into fragile pieces of sea and sky
forged from the earth.
He imagines her sitting by the window,
hands cupped around each bowl or teacup,
where ginger tea or spiced broth
makes lazy ripples the colour of autumn sunlight.
If he could, he would leave each vessel
quivering brim full with salt water and molten sunsets
– all honeyed heat and longing –
he would watch her tip her head back,
droplets of light falling from her lips
as her heart found its way
from the city centre back to the shore.
Where their hungry hands would press prose
and promises into each other’s softness
in the shadow of those grey cliffs,
those circling gulls.
Where they would shape themselves
into something new, ready for the fire.

First published by Doghouse Press

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Something Like Nostalgia

After he died, they turned his shop
into a flat. Lace curtains
filmy enough to peer through.
A legacy of sticky fingers on the glass.

God, years ago we used to queue
out the door and down
towards the square. Jostling in first uniforms,
first glints of pocket money white-knuckled.

Jars and jars and jars
on shelves that needed kick stools. A library
of gobstoppers and pear drops, sour apples,
cola cubes, orbs in every colour.

I remember his moustache. I remember him
in a surgeon’s white coat (can that be right?).
Other people used to buy shoe polish
and nails and milk – the trappings of adulthood
we refused to understand.  

The butchers went next, and the greengrocers
on the corner soon after. The village now
seems thronged with ghosts. Sweets
and trussed chickens and innocent children
and bunches of carrots,
still smelling faintly of earth.

First published by Black Nore Review

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White on White

In the Wildlife Photography exhibition,
everyone is searching for themselves.
A thin girl in red lipstick hovers shyly
around the robin, caught mid-branch
in a foggy Paris garden, unashamed,
its beak split open in song.  

There are men who steer their girlfriends
towards the big cats, wanting their reflections
recognized in the lean muscle of a leopard
flashing dart-like down the trunk of a tree,
or the depth of the lion’s gaze – pupils like flies in amber.
On her mother’s hip, a toddler points stickily at a young penguin,
more fluff than feathers. Their eyes have the same baby gleam.

Ambling happily through grizzlies and foxes,
I find us here too. Wings open, necks outstretched,
dancing clumsily at each other
on the frozen lake, our beaks proudly yellow
and yolk-bright against the snow.
Later, as we cross the road to the pub,
your gloved fingers brush my palms like feathers.

First published by Hyacinth Review