Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2025
Vermont, poems by Justin Lowe.
Vermont
I am sitting at a co-op coffee shop
riding out the morning
under a shock of silver hair wrenched
from some dark dream into this bright town.
people pass the window where I’m perched like a stylite,
wave and mouth good book?
pout at the empty page, the pen hovering over it,
the high wire act that is me, the gravity working on me,
and the no safety net flyer stamped to my forehead –
doubt, the sea of all things.
my breath on the window
the little storm in my coffee,
the kindness of strangers just galls me.
Article 48
a couple I squandered,
the rest I am holding back for a rainy day.
it is why youth in a man my age can be so arresting,
why my handwriting changes from one day to the next,
like my politics and my predilections.
I have never been voted the one most likely,
and yet I have always been considered a contender,
the man stood tall at the back of the meeting,
watching, listening, saying nothing,
silently correcting the spelling of the placard-wavers
without bothering to absorb their meaning.
Rescuing an Old Table
I found some trestles in a roadside skip.
someone had removed the hinges,
but they are otherwise intact, painted a smart navy-blue.
if fidelity had a colour, that would be it.
I have had nowhere to set my wine down
for a whole troubled year,
since an angry wind passed through.
the surface survived,
not a single crack in the glass,
but the legs were all twisted and broken.
and so I have taken measurements,
sounded my mornings,
the press of my elbows where I would read and eat,
bought the wires and joists, the wing nuts and screws,
sawed and hammered until the sweat poured off me,
and one country after another fell to the oligarchy.
© Justin Lowe
Justin Lowe lives in a house called “Doug” in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney where for 18 years he edited international poetry blog, Bluepepper. His ninth collection, “San Luis”, was released through Puncher & Wattmann in October 2024. His next collection is close to taking some sort of shape.