Jo Langdon
Jo Langdon lives and writes on unceded Wadawurrung land. She is the author of two poetry collections, Snowline (Whitmore Press, 2012) and Glass Life (Five Islands Press, 2018), and was a 2018 Elizabeth Kostova Foundation Fiction Writing Fellow. Her recent writing is also published and forthcoming in journals including Cordite, Griffith Review, Island, Overland and Westerly.
Performance
Sure—there were flowers then
petals where they’d trembled
their own lovely heads loose. I wrote
in thanks & the reply came, ‘Is that it?’
I guess it was—an ending signalled
well before the roses’ demise.
We offered each other nothing
of consolation—the flowers & I
at odds, though they might have told
that they wanted no part
in this production, that it all came down
to hyperbole and waste, whatever
there was left to feel rotten about.
The flowers were worn out
like similes—contrived
in the roles ascribed to them, parts
I confect for them even now, long gone
though they are. I am sorry
only that I neglected
their certain beauty, neither exchanging
their fetid water nor giving
much mind to their final
dignity—how they towered even as
they came undone.