The Sentence

Free Verse by Hayley Gibbons

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No-one talks about how the world looks
on those mornings;
those mornings we wake up to do it

The serrated grass and the mist, like cold
steel on your inner thigh
No-one talks about the benzo silence in the car,
or the bleeding roadsigns screaming Stop.

The building is all.
You merge with the stench of it,
to the cat-calls and the pleading.
You wait on a wooden bench. 

You don’t know the time or the day,
only that it’s March –
March is three months.  Not five or seven.
So maybe someone will forgive you;
your mom or your best friend

You remember the night it happened,
play it over and over in your head on the long drive,
as trees tick by with the road markings
and you dream of shredding your palms on
the endless tar

You wail as you cross the border – miles from the
swollen sheaves of latin verbs,
from the words like those on an ancient tomb;
far from the row of bitter men, heavy with their
barren wombs

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Hayley Gibbons is a wife, mom and English teacher from East London, South Africa. Her poetry has appeared in various online poetry journals. She likes listening to Sting with a cup of hot coffee and writing poetry whenever she gets the chance.