Brian Evans-Jones

Still want the knife

quick slice
through—

cold edge
hunting
what made me weak

let them empty
the musty chambers
let it all
fall

            red beads

I string together
in dried, flaking
lines

*

I’m playing pain
            again—

staging it
              glorious—self
slaughtering the past—

yes—but also
            weapon, to cut
to truth

or the worst
            I can do

as if, at the end
everyone goes home
clean

*

shadows come

and I wield

the knife
open, calling
                hand

                        and mind
calling
            the knife

against
            the unzipped flesh
           

just words—

Brian Evans-Jones is a former resident of the UK, now living in New Hampshire. His poems are published or forthcoming in The Café Review, Eunoia Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, A Book of Matches, Outlook Springs, Riddled with Arrows, and other outlets. He won the 2017 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, and was the Poet Laureate of Hampshire, UK, in 2012-13. He teaches poetry in schools and online.