What I Should Have Worn at My Wedding

By LIESL JOBSON

 

Potato skins, not peach skin satin,
pills, not pearls for buttons at my wrists,
onions in my bouquet, for coming tears.

A headband of fists, not fuchsias.
The lilies should have stayed in the field,
calfskin slippers would have looked better
on the unslaughtered cow.

Our guests can’t take back the gifts
and I can’t unwind 15 seconds
on the clock—let alone 15 years.

Last week the diamond fell from my ring
while I watched shopping centre clowns
and the cleaner swept it away with popcorn
like so much confetti.

 

 

Liesl Jobson is a writer, photographer, and musician living in Cape Town.

Click here to purchase Issue 04

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

What I Should Have Worn at My Wedding

Related Posts

Cover of All Is The Telling by Rosa Castellano

An Embodied Sense of Time: Raychelle Heath Interviews Rosa Castellano

ROSA CASTELLANO
I’m holding a blank page all the time for myself. That’s a truth that I choose to believe in: the blank page is a tool for our collective liberation. It can be how we keep going. I love that we can find each other on the page and heal each other, too. So, I invoke that again and again, for myself, because I need it.

Cloudy sunset over field.

Florida Poems

EDWARD SAMBRANO III
I will die in Portland on an overcast day, / The Willamette River mirroring clouds’ / Bleak forecast and strangers not forgetting— / Not this time—designer raincoats in their closets. / They will leave for work barely in time / To catch their railcars. It will happen / On a day like today.