Lincoln Jaques

Auckland, New Zealand

Lincoln Jaques holds a Master of Creative Writing. His poetry and fiction have appeared most recently in Milly Magazine, Mother Mary Comes to Me: A Pop Culture Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing), a fine line (NZ Poetry Society), The Blue Nib, Mayhem, Fast Fibres, Shot Glass Journal, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook, and Flash Frontiers. He was a finalist in the 2018 Emerging Poets. He lives in Auckland.

Poem written Monday 11 May 2020.

The Roommate

I almost killed the cyclamen

that sat behind my monitor;

the radiation curled its purple

petals, crisped the buds, dehydrated

the leaves.

I brought it back to life. A jumping

spider moved in, took a liking

to the one blooming flower.

Daily as I worked, it would jump

out of the cyclamen, hop over my

desk, onto my knuckles,

slip on the QWERTY keyboard.

Stopping sometimes to look at me

(spiders are excellent at staring).

Once it landed on an open book,

covering the word “velocity”.

It jumped and jumped, covering

words, creating a language. I noted

everything down. It was writing poetry—

or so I hoped. But maybe it was just lonely.

I never saw another jumping spider.

One day I came to work at my desk,

I checked the cyclamen that now

grew more leaves. It was gone; moved out.

I miss you jumping, my little jumpy friend.

I hope you’ll remember me, and that first

word we shared:

“Velocity”.