Georgia Conlon is a poet, essayist and tutor with an innovative approach to poetic form. She is currently completing her debut poetry collection and she is writing a series of essays on poetic craft. As a scholarship-winning graduate of the Newcastle MA in Writing Poetry and an award-winning poetry podcaster, she is equally passionate about the art of writing and art of engagement.

WRITING SAMPLE

Vitrine
“A woman must continually watch herself. She is
almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.”- John Berger

He showed you to your room in the gallery,
covered you in silver foil and placed you beneath
a heart and feather on scales, inside a vitrine.
You lacked privacy in the sunlight hours
when people would arrive as you breathed
against glass, drew pictures with your fingers
like a child on the window of a car. They watched,
trying to work you out, looking around for context,
because you came uncaptioned, although you realised
you had been highly curated when you could not open
the door from the inside. There were large pieces
of ripped cloth hanging from the gallery ceiling,
half-smoked cigars you could not smell, a young
boy’s photograph and rusted bikes, coat hangers,
scraps of bark and iron filings. All of this you
could not touch. The scales stayed balanced.
Often you closed your eyes, avoiding the visitors.
You could not believe people had paid to see you.
You wondered how they saw you, what their brains
were saying, what they focused on about your clothes,
hair, the patterns you made. You decided, after three days,
to be cruel, to scratch on frightening phrases.
Their facial expressions changed, they stared less, moved
into other areas of the gallery, a section with windows,
a section that didn’t sweat and piss when you peeled away
the foil, that didn’t reflect the hidden parts of them.
From the scale you took the heart and it did not move.
From the scale you took the feather and it not move.
The artist never came to see what they had made.
When a week was over, the gallery manager let you leave
without any praise.


 First published in the Aesthetica Creating Writing Award anthology 2024.