Juliet England

No Boxes to Pack

No boxes to pack
No children or mortgages
No joint accounts to separate.

Just a single star-shaped earring
That we’d searched in vain for on your carpet
After it came out
The last time.
You push it across the table now,
Your hand reaching out,
But not to meet mine.

That just leaves
The touches, the kisses
The hugs and caresses.
I still have some of yours.
You still have some of mine.
So what do we do about those?

Juliet England lives in Reading, UK, and is a former journalist who now spends her days as a corporate copywriter but longs to be able to write about things other than new gritting machines and winter maintenance of highways. Her creative writing is spectacularly unfocused, erratic and undisciplined. But she has somehow managed to appear on the Snakeskin poetry web site and the Tall Lighthouse Poetry Review. Not to mention the newsletter of Reading Cycle Campaign. She is a regular arts reviewer for BBC Berkshire, and won a local paper writing competition in 2004. In an unrelated incident, she was bitten in Sri Lanka as a child by a monkey belonging to the writer Arthur C Clarke, and has not been the same since.