Staying

On her knees again
changing his dressings
My Grandmother’s
sunlit hands over
a wound that
never healed

Seven months and
still not showing

Why I’m here-
This growing inside me
drawing me toward
the women and their
understanding

They’re staying
home, watching
A Country Practice
leafing through old Bride
magazines
and its not cliché
it’s just what they do

I’m still going
out with the boys
in the utes, in my jeans
with their guns
and beer
It’s what they do

I think of the soft bones
The ones that aren’t
mine, hardening inside
my body, half-baked
bun in the oven

Your Mother is showing
me how to make cookies
for the men to take out
I want to be good
company

I want to know
about babies from women
who’ve had them

Which hidden parts
of us dilate, darken
or tear

Chambers

In my grandmother’s house
was a ginger cat, too fat
to walk, which no one admitted
ever feeding

Seven months and
still not showing

I have to shuffle my feet
through the soft lolling bodies
to bang on the roof, stop.
I can feel blood and fur
drying on my ankles as
I get out of the tray to piss

In the graded paddock
there’s nowhere to hide

I hear the returned focus as
behind me the torches catch
another set of eyes, sharp
cracks and ricochet fracture
the hard night

A cat, feral, screaming
now, sharpening
the air with pain
now and the boys
are laughing as I walk
back

Your face pale and
tight as the moon
I grab your gun

push past the boys elbowing
each other proudly and aim
at its head

As it slumps, the silence
releases us. You’re smiling
at your Dad, who’s jumping
around like a shot
rabbit- Jeez she can shoot
-My lad knocked up
a good one.

For what it means,
I grew up with guns

Matryoshka

Always on
my grandmother’s
bedroom wall, a picture
of a boy and a girl
climbing a tree
to a nest,
and now

Seven months and
still not showing

but, riding on the back
of the ute I’m feeling the weight
of the baby with every bump
hard on my bladder

The empty quiet
immense in the trees
circles us

The boys are shooting
rabbits. One, hit, backflips
about a metre into the air
and your father stands
in front of me grinning
His brown fingers slip quickly
into the limp body,
tiny but deep

They slide in and draw out
a glistening mass of pink
shapes, tied in a clump
Holds them out
toward me

The fresh, simple presence
of the dead mother
in his other hand

He laughs and says- I reckon
you’ll give us this many
-good thing
not all at once eh?



and there's another here > Another Lost Shark and if you keep following the links you'll find more :)

Gimme Shelter

Always an awesome event!


Its a great lineup and a worthy cause- every penny raised goes to supporting the homeless through St Pats community care centre.
Tics go on sale through heatseeker Mon 18th jan.
More info at www.gimmeshelter.net.au

See you there!!

x

Harmonic Points

One metre is one ten-millionth
of the distance from the Equator
to the North Pole through Paris
This is a useful measurement

Then there is the truth of ratios:
a bird’s wingspan to a room,
the opening in the window
it entered through, then lost.
The weight of a pair of hands
trying to free it. There is the lonely
side of dialogue. The pieces
of the map and the ground
covered by your body when you fall.
The cleverness you trail like
a comet. The circus and the flea.
Edson’s ambushed stone to
the size of his mother’s love. Some
giddy slippage, to all the harmonic
points on a line to infinity.
The curved eyeball to the keyhole
of the hostage, then, the walls of
the captive. Lullaby of bedrock
to all it cradles. The hollow
of your hand to what I would fill
it with. The rose and what rose.
There’s writing on both sides
of the paper. The sensation
of speaking in tongues. All those
centred deities of blind voyeurs
to the spectrum of a single note.
The other side of the river to
a fish. Totems and guttered stars.
Death, ash, fire, warmth and smoke.
A forced song of almost someone
in so many breaths, there is also this:

Made flesh: what I take in
from what was said.

Winged Things

Once you give something
wings you have to treat it differently
because the bones are hollow-
just the heat coming off your neck up close
might cause an updraft that could send it higher
than the sound of our breathing, past
the fist-shaped clouds and their drizzle
past the pelicans and stars

There was an address written on her palm
that’s been smeared by yours
She can’t remember giving you the keys
You can’t remember locking up the house

Every other word here is the possessive you both lack
each day is its’ consequence

You’re driving through the night with her head
on your thigh
her white hand on your knee
into the pink morning where the world is all
keys and keyholes
where there’s roadhouse coffee and a quiet
place near a dry creek bed to do things
with mouths other than speaking

Billions of eyes have slept through this
With no sleep to wake from
yours can’t see past it
It’s been days since she’s taken the steering wheel
She says movement is her only peace
opening the window

You draw a concentric circle around her
to see what gathers outside
Sweep up your tracks behind you
keep them in the glove box with the maps

At the appearance of heat puddles
ahead in the middle of the road
you sing her bridges of outlined plans
knowing she is calmed
by the weight of your intention

You use fuzzy words
because the clear ones are all being used
back at the supermarket and the primary school
and you know her ears are tired of them

Over and over you look at each other
hardly recognising yourselves in this heat
You stop the car, lean over to kiss her in the centre
of her chest, she untangles her sunburnt legs
from the dashboard and smiles a distance
you can’t turn back from

A billion birds perched in the clouds look down
and are blinded by the glare from the windscreen

Vasilissa's Doll

I am the house and the hut with chicken legs that turns to face us.
I am the sea cave speared through by the foundations of skyscrapers.
The glitter and shine of bare bones,
the scaffolding and crane, the tented buildings,
the outskirts of the forest with trees bent like ribs.
Strange enough without shadows.

Here I am, one hand in yours, the other searching for skeleton keys
in the soft cloth of her unwritten pocket. Private finger cave
of receipts, crumbs, stones and small change. Here is
the dull-eyed doll who comes to life at night,
feeding my cheeks of milk and blood
as my hair grows down to my waist.

I like to tell you this story, you, keeper of water and all
the paths it makes when trapped, bent forward in your chair
like the red rider, have asked me to close my eyes and feel
the quiver, Saraha haha.
I laugh, I know you’re winging it.

This is grown in the dark too, in the chambers of involuntary muscle
and it will go one way or another. I am picking
the black grains from the wheat.
When you tap me on the shoulder I turn
to nothing