A woman in black // strides across sunbeams backed by green velvet on a walk-down morning; walk, I say, down from the East // yellow and glove soft like autumn is floating, distilled in this moment and she, moving props – her elegant shadow crisp as flung ribbon // while the light wands dance and … Continue reading I just glanced her way
the calendar says summer's done three months of lowering skies // slices of rain poised above hillsides soft dagger grey it fell and fell and now the light the sky’s own eyeballs done with watching slip down against the green fence strips of moon carved, I suppose, as part of night’s geometry all so cleanly … Continue reading “To everything there is a season…”
in a pearlescent gloom where voices penetrate unheard like bird beat carols or the milky secrets of she-oaks we three (the off-white dog, and sadness and I) share a moment crooning for a currawong chick fallen among the detritus of last night’s storm snail trails and pine whiskers and the scribbled stains of gum leaves … Continue reading baby bird
(i) The back of all certainty is gifted in a slice the cut of another’s life and we’re spun like leaves that faun and flutter around the wheels of a car All relationships birth a string tenuous or riddled or armed like anemones and the snip catches at throat’s every rib (ii) I wake to … Continue reading A Ghost in the Throat
into any day might walk a shape vaporous like tea genies or the scarves of dancers or the seventy-nine shadows of Jupiter’s moons we draw constellations in the stars navigation lines between sure pricks of light but only jellyfish rise in cnidaria blooms softly gluttonous and blind what I mean is, amorphery’s womb bred ghosts … Continue reading Fear
A to B expressing travel skin like a map ticked with freckles she somehow glittered with her silver Nissan ZX and curls like suspension springs at first I liked the way all her vowels issued from her top palate and her thin legs in wide pants crossed and dandling without a child in sight her … Continue reading Jayne
we live in our rectangle crouched over by a beard of old sky a smell of toast and muffled slap - bare feet on yesterday’s dust floors of ruled trees voices ping on hard surfaces the hiss sing of water through plastic tunneled rivers lawns in measured boundaries this battery life shrubs eeked to careful … Continue reading this battery life
The bed looks blue, like cold lips and so still, clothes tucked ‘round; the kitchen, its tiny yellow kettle and fridge that grumbles all night long; and her mother’s chair, the dents for buttocks and head just resting… always in the coarse weave of floral chintz. Those roses on the upholstery stay alive, while vases … Continue reading April
“I don’t know what happens after death but I’ll have to chance it.”- Desert Snow, Jim Harrison after the avocado dip ingredients mashed to unrecognisable without my glasses and after being stiff - a wooden marionette rising from every rest... I see myself, slow as bessemer, apples in my cheeks picked off by William Tell … Continue reading Clouds Fishtail In
When the bulldozer came for our house we sewed signs into the windows that said “panegyric government perpetuating poverty” and the great machine purred there like a cat contemplating a lizard’s tail. Then a bloke yelled from the driver’s seat “What does it mean?” and we yelled back “Look it up in the dictionary!” He … Continue reading In the Way of Progress
on our walk through the knee deep waves of grasses - seeds all feathers and spears and tiny baubles like the art projects of fairies – a dead butterfly was slung before me fallen in grace, veined wings splayed across a swooping stem, legs mid-pedal and eyes still grazing the hovering blue such delicacy crossing … Continue reading Chance
it’s not mathematics I’m just offering dry instant noodle crumbs to the sun and laughing at how the stainless steel slippery slide blinds the photographer just before her shot The roos know that summer is twitchier than fly wings and that light so whistle spit clean heats the neck quick as ember juice At my … Continue reading Playlists for the Apocalypse
loropetalum against the beat of light she stands trooper tall a thrumming ladder for the prisms inside the book of difficult fruit my eye let fall these sachets of glitter pain refracted a purple glow such gentle edges see how she stands to bruise / to bleed the beat of light plum gorgeous Written in … Continue reading The Book of Difficult Fruit
(i) on the ridges trees in death black arms still flexed for holding up the sky but it falls strung between them whitely broken such soft caressing of their limbs now rain comes the marching of time slick silver arrows (ii) we walk in a valley torn flat trees prostrated by flood the tinny upper … Continue reading Two Years After the Fires
you never appreciated the way I framed your world fishbowl blue and swimming with clouds you never saw it from up here, an exquisite bauble tied to nothing except my one primitive eye. slowly, turn by turn this season of regret I watch fish meal clogging up the rainbows and your busy pumps keep drowning … Continue reading a letter from the sun
fracking ancestors on the internet exhuming distant graves neat as pixels paper dolls on desktops resurrecting stories their backs lit by the lamps of other histories slightly translucent frail leaves of biography in binary flight
the young man that clown lit match between thumb and forefinger pretending incomprehension as he dances swifter than blown shadows cackling like the dry boughs and the snuff of leaves his eyes caught flames of glee his pupils wick focused that lit match flickering licking fondly redly between thumb and forefinger and crackling in the … Continue reading that clown
I glimpsed you just missing the wall imagined head cracked open like Cerberus’s grin but with a wave like wattle blossoms you skated in body breaking water, splinters, a funnel of shattered stars spilled blue burnt to colourless on pavers’ heat meanwhile ladies in lightning that galloping nightmare my suctioned heart To be honest, I … Continue reading Ladies in Lightning
we walked early today, prowling the streaming tree shadows and feeling the dew as it clung and then sank into my boots a wattle bird, upside down in a callistemon, wirrooked as we approached and flung herself to upright with nervous velocity by the time I was close enough to look for her in the … Continue reading Stream of Consciousness
a snail’s death smear this splintered trail spiral unbound one sad stalked eye seems to regard body's liquid bloom
thunder scraped its knees across sky boulders i heard it coming cracked along by lightning’s febrile lash I saw light flung sideways from the garage it yellowed the carpet and prickled to glitter the dust on your keyboard while you sandbagged ready for the rain I slept anyway perversely oblivious to the threat, this flogged … Continue reading 4am
(i) in your paintings you found yellow tilting on ripple tips. And among pebbles where I had only seen a grey and shattered day (ii) outside Hong Kong glimmers the traffic of a million bulbs inside the tv screen blacks out somewhere a golf ball lands but in the dark square is just the gleam … Continue reading Awake Again
lady moon with beamish fingers tugs at corners ocean tides unravelling down beach breasts stars pucker up kissing crests jibberish light unsheathed among wave caps. Have you heard their butterfly giggles?
we are two, stooped to never kiss our loving, an uncrossable bridge like the eye bulges of caterpillars these are the must-nots of our age old twiggery wrapped corset tight its cocoon, its wobbly constriction our toes behind us, societal winding back our wings in broken silhouette the scapula ache of unfelt flight image from … Continue reading Love not Condoned
it was my boot that introduced us your beak snuffled in underneath perhaps mistaking me for a log your needles raised to eleven the wide open volume of your fear I bent to see your face brown eyes tiny as human tears needless to say my sole was yours as long as you needed it … Continue reading Echidna
I held breath for you that your leaden stare may miss my heart. A tetchy ally with heatless fire & prickled wrath, making toad skin of the battle ground. Beneath my ribs a war unseen... like the cat in the grevillea bush take your tumult and wield it with claws egregious as scythes Written for … Continue reading The Battle
“Mummy, if 10 x 10 equaled 50, would our paper planes fly straight?” I know the rain was heavy because the bedraggled underpass (with plinking echoes and the green glitter of smashed bottles) smells mysteriously of mint. I lift my nose and my voice to the early snare of Ravel’s Bolero adding other instruments as … Continue reading My Daughter’s Question
Fay Collins "Sunset and Squally Showers, Connemara" The falling shale of a thunderbolt’s bellow cracked wide sun’s yolk a glow like breath of dragons emanated permeating sky's shelfless larder cloud syrup skein on skein perspiring down toward pigmented sea and granite blade and the steaming gratification of rainfall Written for Sarah's dVerse Poetics - Fay … Continue reading Beginning
Some say we’re all star dust and I get it now, how we’re set by the exquisite geometry of constellations Flowers built around the houses of exacting pentagons or an eagle's flight feathers their sprayed precision, the acute explosion of wattle blossom tendrils, or my own hand, its splayed fingers and the triangles between. Water's … Continue reading Sky Ink
I remember those epic days full bodied calm still as vase water but even loved camellias’ heads droop to falling our pieces defying unity *** the man who was not a man belly outstanding concave chest short grey hair balding at the front I wait behind and a bit to the side absently misidentifying a … Continue reading Emotion
Out of the Cave 