Jill Jones was born in Sydney and has lived in Adelaide since 2008. Her latest book is Acrobat Music: New and Selected Poems, published in 2023. Other recent books include Wild Curious Air, winner of the 2021 Wesley Michel Wright Prize, A History Of What I’ll Become, shortlisted for the 2021 Kenneth Slessor Award and the 2022 John Bray Award, and Viva the Real, shortlisted for the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and the 2020 John Bray Award. In 2015 she won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry for The Beautiful Anxiety. Her work is widely published in Australia and internationally and has been translated into a number of languages, including Chinese, French, Italian, Czech, Macedonian and Spanish.

 

I landed among delusion, with a lag
and a dogsbody. I was hauled within a millimetre
of someone’s brown balaclava.
I was a deb in line with a litre of jackpots
holding a new key and a gypsy.
I blundered past the icing, the pioneer pasties
until it became confusing.
There was some mug serving vol-au-vents
in the event of an accident.
The dogsbody left for a two-up game back east
and though I wrote to the mug
there were questions about indemnities.
I couldn’t tell if the lag had the only weapon.
They looked like blackballs or something
you’d wear in an airlift. I did not lose
though the vortex was faulty
too many yes-men hamming it up
for too many yobbos. The dollars shook down
their own catastrophe. I became a debacle
in pearls with a litter of Jaffas. I dropped
the lucky cards
the horizon got shonky. I gave up crystals
and tea leaf methodologies. I could not lose
though the yardstick was dodgy.
It was a blast in the blunders.
And thanks for the bluffs.





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