On womanhood …
My all-girls’ high school taught me that advanced mathematics and physics were for everyone (as long as you applied yourself and didn’t sit at the back of your Year 11 physics class writing poetry). My mother, a mathematician herself, taught me that no physical task was insurmountable if one applied logic and a knowledge of…
We never did make it…
We never did make it to the Halloween party. Even though I was dressed as Eowyn, and you were dressed as Aragon, and we carried collectors’ swords and you carried a dagger that an elderly Asian lady on the train thought was a Samurai sword. The way we chuckled at her look of disappointment when…
A letter to all my creative friends
What is your art worth, my dear friend? I write this as someone who has been writing for 25 years, whose writing is infused with the type of experience I would not wish on anyone. I write this as someone who wakes at 4am to write with a broken French Press and discount Lebanese coffee,…
Rain-song for rogue women
Inspired by violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja I think I might love rogue women who hold their music under their chins, the first symphony she heard was rain falling on her Moldovan or was it Austrian roof and she was only four and maybe it was this same rain that gave her permission to walk barefoot on…
Things I learned from you
That nature is comprised of fractals, a golden ratio seen in a sunflower’s face and a fern unfurling, that a wave’s crest can be reduced to the rise and fall of sine and cosine, of trigonometry in motion, That nature smiles when you plant kamote leaves, that she blesses you with rain and sweet potato…
Remember
Remember that mixed cassette tape you made a friend in the 90s, before there was a Kate Bush renaissance inspired by Stranger Things, and no self-respecting teen would listen to that much electronic synthesiser in one song. Remember when you sat beside your old Sony Stereo in 1998 and recorded Kate Bush anyway, so your…
First date lines
I can tell you that I play the violin, albeit badly. But everyone plays the violin badly until their tenth year of playing. I can also tell you what the inside of a methadone clinic smells like: mildew and urine and cheap caustic soda. Home brand, no matter how private the clinic. I can tell…
The Flood
Sing, madwoman, as the spring harvest floats down the swollen river and the saturated soil rejects the falling sky Sing as adult children carry the sun beneath their shivering skins searching for a stolen summer Sing, madwoman for you built your ark long ago when you sank in human deluge and the sadness could not…
Things they taught me in Catholic school/transferable skills
Things they taught me in Catholic school: How to genuflect How to raise my cupped hands to receive Christ’s wafer flesh on my tongue In a way that didn’t leave pieces of Jesus between my teeth. All the saints, all the holiness outsourced In the first gig economy & Sin. Girls if you have the…
After the rain
So, I am wading through a La Nina springtime, past the mangroves bathing in a swollen river through sodden fields where puddles have turned to pools to reflect the dusk light sky and grey-pink clouds. After the rain I am wading through floodwater praying for an end to a muscular mind tightened into a fist…
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Word upon Word 