Empty Mirror

a literary magazine

  • About
    • About Empty Mirror
    • Get in Touch
    • Support EM
    • Colophon
  • Submit
  • Contributors
  • Essays
  • On Literature
  • Poetry
  • Reviews
  • Art
  • Interviews
  • Beat
    • Beat Generation
    • Ted Joans Lives!
  • +
    • Fiction
    • Music & Film
    • News
    • On Writing
    • Book Collecting

Two poems by Benjamin Smith

Benjamin Smith

gramophone

On the Rocks.

That antique gramophone
Next to the suffragette lampshade,
Marble time measured in
Vinyl. Look at the dust-jackets:
Mint condition memories.

Warped voices warble in slow
Speed; 33 and a third, switch to
78, put the needle down,
Place it in the wax groove.
Get lost in the soundscape.

Sunday afternoon; Nina
Simone; on the rocks.

When We Were Young.

You fractured my glass jaw again.
Caught me with a sucker-punch,
A lucky left hook to the mouth-bone.
Laid me on the floor again,
Chasing stars; dizzy circles hurtling,
Blood on my lips and teeth on my tongue.
It wasn’t funny. You said it was, but
It wasn’t. Nothing is anymore. Nothing
Makes any sense these days. When we were young we
Thought everything was funny. These days we drink…
Drink whisky, drink vodka, drink gin, drink
Wine, drink cider, drink lighter
Fluid. Anything. Drink. Smoke
Twenty cigarettes a day, pass the time with fighting.
We fell into it by accident, didn’t see it coming, didn’t
Plan anything. We were just kids back then.
We didn’t understand a thing, we
Threw innocence at each other,
Threw ourselves at the walls, threw
Ourselves at each other.
We got lost in the taste of it, the smell of it, the
Evanescent sense of it – so bright at first,
So fleeting – just like the bottle,
Just like everything.

Share on X (Twitter)Share on Facebook

Benjamin Smith

Benjamin Smith grew up in Hebden Bridge in the UK. He's spent the last three years traveling around Latin America and I is currently living in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he's working on an untitled collection of poetry. A two-time contributor to Empty Mirror, his work is forthcoming in the December issue of The London Grip.

Author: Benjamin Smith Tags: poetry Category: Poetry July 25, 2013

You might also like:

Carl Solomon - Mishaps, Perhaps
Two Songs for Samson: An Invective Poem for Carl Solomon
overland
Civilization’s Lost: Poems by Jeff Bagato
berthusen trail -- denise enck
3 poems by Kyle Harvey
Five
5 Poems by Sam Silva

Comments

  1. Cherry says

    September 25, 2013 at 9:39 am

    When we were young – it does something, that feeling I mean

    Reply
  2. @Wojciech1986 says

    August 2, 2013 at 11:53 am

    “We threw innocence at each other…” 2 poems by Benjamin Smith at Empty Mirror —

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I accept the Privacy Policy

 

DONATE TO BLACK LIVES MATTER

BLACK LIVES MATTER

The EM newsletter

Receive fresh poetry, reviews, essays, art, and literary news every Wednesday!


Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

Subscribe Submissions Support

Recent features

  • My Father’s Map
  • On Waiting
  • Seeing Las Meninas in Madrid, 1994
  • Visual poems from 23 Bodhisattvas by Chris Stephenson
  • Historical Punctum: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard Through the Lens of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
  • Panic In The Rear-View Mirror: Exploring The Work of Richard Siken and Ann Gale
  • “Art has side effects,” I said.

Books

Biblio
© 2000–2025 D. Enck / Empty Mirror.
Copyright of all content remains with its authors.
Privacy Policy · Privacy Tools · FTC disclosures