Author: myfwilliams

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-

Mind-field.

So, now. The search teams aren’t coming-

the fog’s devoured the deep ravines,

swallowed boundaries of ground and non-ground

elevation and air.

So, no one is coming, no one is safe

on this trickster terrain.

And now. The cavalry was never really deployed.

Though they’ve set a gift of artillery and gunpowder

at the border and

it’s all for you,

all the prayers and murals and hashtags

and kindness and never again’s

all for you, the one-person army.

Because now. The enemy doesn’t just look like you,

the enemy is you, all the many yous future present past tense-

Know this now. No one is coming. Not now but

maybe later to pick the bones clean,

to conduct a moral audit

to assess mistakes made and

codify/ ratify /enshrine the never-agains.

To logic

the illogical.

So, now, there is no police back-up inside your skull battleground,

No heroic dog to sniff tripwire in your mind-field

because the enemy is you

earth squashed between bone and air that pulses

across the neuronal superhighway,

where thoughts ignite and reignite.

And because strangely, everything is beautiful

during ceasefire/truce/evening’s pause.

And there is stillness as you sink exhausted

into gyrus and sulcus, enfolded into mind earth

gazing into mind sky,

where electricity is energy,

dancing across this silent space.

At what age

At what age does a woman become

a spinster and a spinster become a witch?

Let me jump the line, sneak to the front of the queue.

Let me be the witch now, before spinster,

before woman.

I’ve read the archives, surveyed the scripture

and sepia daguerreotypes.

I was always the witch,

the herbalist,

the storyteller at the edge of the forest,

on the intersection of reversing poles.

Shunned until you brought yourselves

broken in bone and spirit

admitting need.

That’s why you burned my people.

We remind you that male is also human

and that all humans break.

Lightnoise

Sydney is obsessed with illumination. Fireworks when smoke encircles the city, old growth forest turning to charcoal. Light that dances on still winter buildings. Air that burns in the chill.

After the plague, people slide from beneath their doonas, step away from their streaming subscriptions and wade through the throng of crying infants and their parents, who are also crying. Inwardly.

After the plague they stand in the winter winds to watch colour move.

How many migrating moths fall to the ash covered pavements, seized by their own epilepsy, their inner compass broken?

That’s Sydney.

After the plague.

How contagious its lights, its movement-

frenetic,

garish,

intrusive.

After the plague we must keep moving, even if the sound of light invades the silence and

Give me stillness.

Let the sky breathe.

Leave the architecture be, let the buildings slump into night’s cocoon.

Let it be.

One woman

And now, I think I can play in 6/8 slip jig time, though my bow slides out of its third lane and is maybe a bit too scratchy for classical, but might fit in, for folk, for trad music-

there’s always a story with a Celtic fiddle tune, the story is as much technique as the ornamentation, the slides, the rolls, the double stops-

I can almost play a double stop now, so it sounds like two violins are playing simultaneously

when really it is just me, one violin.

One woman.

You always said I was magic, a witch.

This wasn’t an insult, you said.

So, there’s always a story with a Celtic fiddle tune and I can do that. I can tell stories. Of how I started playing beneath the paper barks, under magpies and currawongs, listened to music from the West Coast of Ireland, Counties Clare, and Sligo, and no I won’t forget Donegal where the fair folk still emerge in the gloaming-I can tell you that I listen over and over until the music merges with my bones and I feel a rhythm moving through me, and the rhythm,

the rhythm,

brings stories and though I live on stolen land-

I can tell new stories.

I can do all this.

You said I was a witch.

It wasn’t an insult, but maybe a warning?

I am one woman, with rhythm moving through her.

Then you don’t know me

Then you don’t know me.

You don’t know how much of this life I’ve walked alone, that I’ve had to be my own lighthouse, and if this is what scares you, well…

Maybe you’ll learn.

You’ll learn brick by brick, with spirit level, mortar, and grout. Eventually you’ll gauge the right elevation, where to cast your lamp and from which headland. You’ll learn to pick from the dashed bodies of your broken self, you’ll learn which cargo can be salvaged and what must be discarded.

You’ll learn that so much of your self is simply this:

Detritus.

Or you won’t learn. That’s ok too.

But I have no time for the blind, the easily seduced, searching for siren’s lights.

Lost in a shipwreck of their own making.

Fat Rice (non-fiction in progress)

I am craving white rice.

Fatty rice. Fat rice.

Happy rice.

High GI magic filled with carbohydrates and calories and sugar. When we lived with my aunt who was not really my aunt but your lover, there was always a pot of cooked rice. There is a joke circling the internet currently, an Asian man runs out of rice and though there is other food to eat, he has failed his family.

Despite countless diets, low carb, high protein, low fat, it is white rice that spreads inside me like a warm hug. The hipster European in me says eat the brown rice, the quinoa, the zucchini noodles. But white rice feels like home.

Fear and guilt also feel like home, but these days I’m all for harm minimisation. This is what I’ve learned after years of therapy, after training as a therapist myself. Eat the fatty rice.

….And about potatoes, and meat.

When I was a child, I thought that potatoes were an expensive food. You rarely bought them. On those rare occasions that you did buy them, you would buy a single potato, chopping it finely to put it in a casserole dish. Or there would be mashed potatoes, a treat and not a staple side dish. It didn’t occur to me that potatoes were not a Filipino staple.

I always liked vegetables and rice, a symbol of poverty in the Philippines. And yes I liked meat that didn’t taste like meat. I remember watching you fry bloodied meat or boil pink chicken legs with blue veins turning black in the boiling pot. It seemed counter-intuitive to eat what was once alive. Perhaps these thoughts are a mark of my privilege. When you are hungry, you will eat anything that is edible, and things that are also inedible.

These days I am vegan, another choice that might leave you aghast.

Children can be disappointing, one of my colleagues told me.

Excerpt from “A debt that cannot be repaid.”

Voice binding (non fiction in progress)

I talk for a living, but I cannot speak. I’m not mute, my voice box can form sounds, and the relevant areas of my brain (Broca and Wernke’s) function perfectly well. But I cannot speak.

I haven’t spoken to you in twelve years.

Neither of us is dead.

I am a writer, and it is only through my hands that words become true. The sounds that I make are rarely true sounds. They are scripted, declarative, procedural. I can lecture and teach, but I cannot use my mouth to form the right words. When I like a person, I cannot tell them that I like them, and instead I use my mouth to fill the air with ideas that filter through me but are not from me. I can talk about the history of criminology, baroque music, renaissance art, the current geo-political situation. But I cannot speak the truth inside of me.

So, I haven’t spoken to you in twelve years. For those who don’t know my why, I am at best, a gullible child influenced by nefarious elements, or at worst, a cruel and ungrateful daughter.

Evil.

We are all born with such potentiality, an encoding so once we are ready to walk, we walk. And then we run, and then there are the fine motor skills. I was born able to speak, but my voice was bound before I could ever learn the resonance of my spoken words. Yes, not foot binding but voice binding. This is the best way to describe it.

By using this phrase, ‘voice binding,’ I can explain why I haven’t spoken to you for over ten years. I am not being spiteful. I am afraid. I am an educated woman, reliant on only herself.

But you terrify me, and I cannot speak.

Excerpt from “A debt that can’t be repaid” (Non fiction work in progress)