Tuesday poem #136 : Jenny Haysom : Scrapyard

A blue afternoon

and the gulls

patrol. No fish-heads

or dumpster grub

here, yet they angle

and circle, stirring

the firmament,

ready as angels

to salvage. Beneath,

forklifts and cranes

travail, and a giant claw

stacks wrecks

in polychrome

layers. Like mattresses

in a futurist

fairytale, piled high

for the shallow

sleep of automatons,

a strata in which one

white feather

––shrewdly inserted––

might awaken something

or someone.

Jenny Haysom lives with her family in Old Ottawa South. In 2011, her poem "Minnowing" won the Diana Brebner award, and in 2013 her work was long-listed for both the CBC and Gwendolyn MacEwen poetry prizes. Her writing has been published in a variety of periodicals, and she is currently the prose editor for Arc Poetry Magazine.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan