This selection, chosen by guest editor JJ Rowan, is from A Spotter’s Guide to Invisible Things by Laura Theis (Live Cannon Poetry Ltd. 2023).
what you meant when you promised we’d go to the circus
the spotlight is a pinprick
of sun through the blinds the lion
is a calico kitten asleep on the
windowsill the trapeze
is an empty bag slung over the back
of a chair the dancers are all
specks of silvery dust
the sad clown is me
spilling half of my coffee onto my
whitest dress because my hands are shaking
the magic trick is the lover
performing a very arcane
disappearing act
Laura Theis writes poetry, songs, and fiction in her second language. She received a Distinction from Oxford University’s MSt in Creative Writing. Her work appears in journals such as Poetry, Oxford Poetry, Mslexia, Magma, Rattle, and Strange Horizons, and has been widely anthologized by Candlestick Press, Broken Sleep Books, Pan Macmillan, and Aesthetica, amongst many others. Her Elgin-Award-nominated debut how to extricate yourself, an Oxford Poetry Library Book-of-the-Month, won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize. Her collection A Spotter’s Guide To Invisible Things won the Live Canon Collection Prize and received the Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors.
JJ Rowan is a queer nonbinary poet and dancer whose writing and movement practices have developed largely out of collaborative approaches and the pursuit of deep connection. They are looking for the places where the written line and the lines of the moving body intersect, where genre blurs and remixes and reboots, and where style and role reach maximum fluidity and deeper capacity. Their chapbook, a simple verb, is available from Bloof Books. You can follow their handwriting and movement projects on Instagram.
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