Category: poetry

the soil beneath your fingers

and here in the winter sun and the August wind which today is gentle, you are seeking more gentleness, gazing at the sprigs of lavender and the tuber leaves extending their tendrils from the damp soil and

though the arugula has gone to seed before its time and the terracotta planters are cracking at the edges, the yuccas are still reaching-

this is a planet of reaching-

and here in this nation of fire and flood and medicationtokeepmovingmovingthemachine

you are scanning for kindness, and you’re not fit to be around people today, not fit for anything but staring and scribbling

calloused fingers moving through a medicated mind, and you can press word to page, soil into pot, metal string to note and your fingers are moving and

your eyes, they’re scanning for kindness

beyond your medicated mind and beneath your fallow fingers you are searching

for signs, for earth speak to whisper,

rest child,

here, here in the dirt, amongst the trellis of youthful climbing peas and purple lettuce gone to seed,

there is softness here,

there is beauty here in the breaking and the reaching and the dying and the living

look child,

the soil beneath your fingers is nothing but kind.

reasons for not returning*

*a letter to my mother

because this is the nature of our dance
I step out of time and then you yank me into place
to always feel hunted,
because my earrings, junk shop, metal, painted teal and gold
offend you and still 
my thoughts are too silent for you to grasp 
and my denim is ripped, and my eyes are kohl rimmed and aside from 
liner I wear no other makeup and I am too much gypsy punk for 
your boomer aesthetic
and I collect degrees like magazine coupons
so you can be proud 
though my bank account is in arrears and 
yes of course I am still 
not good enough

because I have spent years stripping the interior of my skull
removing thoughts that were not my own with scraper and acetone and forever chemicals 
that may one day command my cells to grow uncontrolled
because my heart is smeared 
across the brass bedframe you slammed
me against and I am too weak
too shameless 
to wipe away my own blood 
and I am still searching for cleavers that you hid around the house
or that kitchen knife for boning chicken and cutting pork
when you invited me to die with you
and I was only 7, maybe 8-

and because maybe you knew 
and maybe you didn’t
anyway, I forgive you, I forgive you
because how would you know, really know 
even though there were whispers and warnings 
but he always took me in the shadows cast by 1970s home décor
a crystal green disco ball that cast lurid pools 
contracting with the edges to never tell
so how could you know
about that architecture 
that interior aesthetic
breaking a child against the canary yellow walls
beige carpet/
tan bedpost/
cream door frame/ teak bed head
pink satin coverlet he held me down upon until
I finally screamed but by then I had fractured into carbon
and nobody listens when dust begins to speak

because you loathe me even though the science says 
a child alters its mother in the womb
chimera cells so the mother is also child
because this is how I speak now and do you remember
the gaffer tape plastered on my mouth, my arms, legs, torso
bound tight with orange sisal rope for tying boar and game
and because it started then, the words filling up 
the cavities in my mouth, the hollows of my throat
and I couldn’t speak or move
eventually the words leaked through my skin
lacerating into scar tissue and cigarette burn craters
and though I couldn’t speak I learned to write
I couldn’t stop writing
because you said ‘what can I say you are/ what profession/what worth’
when I studied literature instead of law,
because what can you say I am?
I cannot stop writing/ is all I am
I am simile/syllable/syntax
I scribble into voluminous sound
my fingers are always screaming.

my light is not for either of us

A difficult conversation….

“No she’s nowhere here,” she tells him/her/them.

“Don’t you know what they used to do during wartime? when the axis was flying across your waters, and the prescient foretold of sky exploding into fire and desert sand crystalizing into iridescent glass because in a certain slant of light even plutonium is radiant, not merely radioactive and-

don’t you know they’d send their light to the countryside, to till the fields and live amongst the forest sprites, and no you wouldn’t believe in trees though you believe in a man three days dead ascending to the firmament, and that’s beside the point, I don’t want to argue-

this is only the second date.

You ask where my light is, well she’s not for you, and she’s not for me-

when the soldiers reached my skin I sent her away, she lives there now, through the door too subtle for humans to see-

What?

No.

No, I won’t be calling her back.

I am too full of shrapnel, muscle macerated by bullets built to rip through skin. See, from the neck down, I am simply metal teeth and scar tissue and besides she’s happy in the other space-

Of course. That’s where my heart is. So you can see this is why I can’t love you even though you’re loveable and it is your right to be loved. But you can have my thoughts and words and even my good deeds,

and no, no, you’re right, it is not enough, but it is all I have to give.”

folklore

listen, a bowl of raw rice mixed with salt keeps the slighted spirits away, or the unsavoury sort of ancestor, the kind that raped himself into the family tree, and if you’re living in lean times save the rice grains and bribe the local Tom to wait at the door

forgo the pedigrees, the Siberian, Norwegian, Persian!

listen, Filipino cats are good Christians and dutiful, they’ll trick the devil, and if the devil comes to your doorstep, the cat is your sentinel, all riddle speech and slight of paw-

you can enter if you count all the hairs on my body

and when the cat won’t freeze for the fur count,

the lore demands Satan seeks souls elsewhere, perhaps in a household that keeps dogs-

you’ve got cats, of course you do, you’re single and forty and therefore an unquantifiable threat and yes you could manage the devil yourself, haven’t you always sorted these things out? You could coax the tuxedo to the window,

place the calico at the door.

today you’re wanting white rice, and you’ll share some with the errant spirits because life is hard on any astral plane, besides you’ll all feel better for some fat rice, high GI short grain or jasmine, soft grain clouds, starch bowls that feel like love instead of satiety, and this is what you think love is,

carbs that switch to sugar and nestle in the forever belly, and

when you lived with your aunt who was not really your aunt but your mother’s lover, the rice cooker sat pride of place, electronic hearth, and heart

and that night before your mother took you to the Philippines to murder your stepfather’s girlfriend, you ate at the Australian Chinese take away that sold crinkled McCains Frozen chips deep fried in lukewarm oil, but you chose the egg fried rice with salted ham and tinned corn and peas, because your mother was too livid to cook, and you were eleven and this counted as a treat in a regional Australian town.

Even still

it’s not safe to drink water from the sky anymore,

and the soil is laminated in plastic.

even still, the egrets have returned to Cooks River

and across the Tasman the Waitangi has human rights

the plagues won’t stop because the tundra is melting,

because the not-us creatures are homeless and searching.

even still, the winter wattle is in bloom, and all along the estuaries, yellow scrub grins.

and we are a treadmill species moving not moving

even still you see lorikeets glide across campus, nesting in the cabbage tree palms

and when they ask you where do you see yourself in five years ten years

how far on the treadmill would you like to have run, there is the only the treadmill

‘even still,’ you say, ‘I will step into the empty space beside the machine

where do I see myself?

Beside a reborn river,

playing Celtic reels

and speaking soft sounds

on sacred

ground.’

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.