Jarred Thompson
Misty Weather
He loved misty weather.
The way it made us cling to bedsheets
and each other, like vapour clinging
to its former self.
He loved misty weather.
His lampshade hands sheathing the sun
whose rays made us spy shapes of families
out a blurred horizon.
He loved misty weather
for how it swirled round the drain
of every pore, promising to hold you in a deserted field
with nothing in sight, but the whorl of his smile.
He loved misty weather
because he was like it:
rolling in before you wake and gone
before your eyes could strain
the flesh from sweat.
Like misty weather he was everywhere
and nowhere: able to be seen from far, to be walked with,
but never to be kept in place, never
to be reduced to droplets running down
a window pane.
Jarred Thompson is the author of Twilight People (Praxis Magazine Online), one of seven manuscripts chosen for the 2019/2020 digital chapbook series, selected and edited by JK Anowe. Thompson’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Contrast, Typecast Literary Magazine, Type House Literary Magazine, Outcast Magazine, Esthetic Apostle, and Sky Island Journal, as well as anthology Best “New” African Poets 2016 Anthology I (Langaa RPCIG, 2017). Also a fiction writer, his stories have appeared in numerous fiction journals, as well as in the anthology Transcending the Flame: The Writivism Mentoring Anthology (Black Letter Media, 2018), edited by
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Today’s poem used the refrain (a repeated word, phrase, sentence, or line of poetry) “He loved misty weather.” Write a poem on any aspect of HIV/AIDS, incorporating a refrain into the structure of your poem. (Notice how the last stanza includes a variation on the refrain—try using that technique as well.)