Month: August 2022

beauty

“what do you like most about her?” you ask

and his brow furrows and his face tightens into a pensive line

“her braces, ” he replies, 16 and certain

also today your friend demolishes a wall to rescue a trapped kitten, five weeks of tortoiseshell fluff and squeak and

your coworker shares her hidden drawer of Cadbury chocolate for those times of internal screaming

another friend sits in the rain and captures water droplets on winter magnolia blooms

and later you’re in a car with someone who feels like safety and together on Canterbury Rd in peak hour

your voices harmonise so there is space for both breath and laughter

and today a kid who has screamed and cried and thrown Lego at the wall for a month looks at you and smiles

for the first time.

day

well inshallah, the shop keeper says, when you shape your face in sympathy and say maybe the day will improve, she has a cervicogenic headache from a stiff neck and she’s alone with the spices today, no one will help, and the headache is bad, terrible-

and you’re only buying frozen okra today, because breathing is expensive, but your mother raised you to survive so you scour the ethnic supermarkets, Lebanese, Greek, Vietnamese, and when you return home, you harvest the green chilli from the plants that have turned to twigs and you pluck the calamanci from your tree and you call it calamanci because cumquat is an ugly sound in your mouth-

two days ago the doctor, he told you no, your heart isn’t dying quite the opposite, and you said what about the chest pain, what about the fist wrapped around my heart with all its grip strength, squeezing and he said well if you can run to the river like you do, then your heart is fine and your blood pressure is superb and your lung capacity is outstanding-

your heart is not dying.

inshallah, god willing.

this is what you know how to do. run. you run to the river, and you keep running so your chest breathes freely and the cormorants swoop to the river’s surface and there are butcher birds in the casuarina scrub, and you keep running-

inshallah, god willing –

the august winds usher the chill but there is always enough sunlight in Sydney even though it’s our turn to flood while other nations burn and you run to your tree that breathes upon the riverbank, the Moreton Bay Fig, whose branches swoop upwards and down and whose buttress roots shelter all the ground dwellers, invertebrate, vertebrate, human.

you run to her because you have many jobs in this octopus world of juggling, of hustling to death, but this is one job that doesn’t exhaust you, custodian, cleaner, protector-

you protect her from your world, as best you can, protect her from the world that makes fists out of hearts, and you pull plastic bags and plastic bottles and glass bottles from her body and inshallah your tree must breathe, she must not suffer under human refuse, she must never know suffering as you do-