The chicken preens. Filaments of skin, feather tip casings: fallen yellow like static on my sleeve. How readily it knows the art of being itself - a million tiny recollections of an unmet mother. But in the yard magpies ogle. I have my uses. written for dVerse Quadrille #151 (44 word poem including the word, … Continue reading Mothering a Chick
(a shadorma) Fist of cloud breaks through severe blue like mushrooms’ slow jeté... or is it just graffiti - sky paint from a can?
Friday night; silence falls charcoal belly pushes forward the mountains, dark as irony the western sky. and then rain clinking from a guttering sky. falling bells, voices of runnelling and, temperature unwieldy (floods in the body, floods from the sky),. middle age waits for a breeze... how to measure the age of a breeze? Air … Continue reading age of a breeze
A Cadralore (i) generous celebrations parcels wrapped in newspaper intriguingly initialed WLFMAD in thick black texta (ii) we’re all born a bit shrivelled sultana'd in the womb but my ears retained it curling from my skull sometimes I pin them back and imagine mixing two-part adhesive with a match stick on a small off-cut of … Continue reading Gifts
I try to think kindly of Icarus, waxed feathers and florid heat melted wax, & boiled tears he leaned into that bud of sun too far he believed & the hot rose beckoned greasing the sky with his epiphany the oily swathe of his feathered fall a grim sort of way to be a legend … Continue reading modern suns
Bring in the coroner. Let her stand before the court and speak. "Thank you, Your Honour and all the grand, wise jury. Here are my findings: What sinks is not the eye blue and white as granny’s delftware beside the tall vase of fresias: pretty things (our frames and lockets) get preserved for viewing, taken … Continue reading The Last Witness
(hopefully brief) we are all but sharks in the planet’s glowing tides snapping at spilled blood and exhausted by a need to grow teeth some days a deep breath means looking up... missing keystones and folded tower-blades, all in the seven greys of a dead fish, clouds raked into piles and societies bent low, as … Continue reading a failure in optimism
(The name "Molonglo" is derived from an Aboriginal expression meaning "sound of thunder") plum-skin lake placid marker of our city: an old river dammed, her soul confined to bed into her blank gaze, the sky is folded daily like sheets // keeper of lilac shadows and the bony dents of mountains her torrents are sent … Continue reading Molonglo
"Joshua Smith" by William Dobell After William Dobell's Painting Supposing him to be her superior was a bad start to any interview and, like a school ma’am on picnic day, she gathered herself into her face imagining the square root of herself emanating, dark and precise, from eyes as piercing as the tines of a … Continue reading Meeting with a Lawyer
Image: Ned Kelly by Sidney Nolan After E. E. Cummings' Poem [Buffalo Bill's] Dear Ned, born in a drink poor Irish lad aged 12, lost his Dad dressed like a letterbox & held up The Mail (to pay for his bread) your money or his life … hanging by that thick thread his last horse … Continue reading Ned Kelly
In the style of Kay Ryan In the backyard strands of trash plastic, twine or haberdash scratched up from decades now past by chooks. They don’t aim to be iconoclasts; they just scratch and their beady eyes seek bugs or roots or wormy writhe. And as they dig the little chicks check the minutiae of … Continue reading Watching Chooks
Twiglet #275 beached words: silver grain or threaded weed, fishy skeletons of age-old rules, evolution’s suck and stench that’s English frisbee words, handled with a strong wrist flat and placid, good for skimming. silver flick and thrumming rings that’s English pop-up shop words, noisy arcade or neon words, big-headed pushy words, elbowing to the front … Continue reading World of Words
the sun slouches slovenly as syrup down Mt Taylor's west side the small girl swings, white sandals, touching the sky, tiny toes flexed a dog scampers tags like tinkling shells, tinny as new stars in a paperback sky Written for NAPWRIMO Day #22 "write a poem using repetition" I was trying to repeat sounds
(i) do you remember our cave & the money tin full of dreams sitting in the bush crafting our souls among ant sand and the crumbs of Dutch Rusks one birthday we rode pillion on your Dad’s motorbike and music was playing “we wanna get out of this place” and you did. arms spread like … Continue reading Money Tins & The Milky Way
blue and food leaves some people uncomfortable we are the nudist beaches of the cheese world smiling sand finding crevices sticking to sunscreen it’s on the nose NAPOWRIMO Day 20 - anthropomorphise a type of food
"Roses" by Anna Eliza Hardy cut from the waist a fallen petal measures the weight of shadows written for dVerse poetics - using the name of a rose in a poem or as a title. I chose the name "Absent Friends".
"The Roaster" by Pablo Picasso this one feather-struck and cock-eyed and tongue hard-wired to drunken yell yodel yay eeeeee! he says do you love it? my self-portrait it's the psychedelic '70s so you see i am the dawn, ladies from wishbone to tail feather i am the dawn hear me roar he tapes himself on … Continue reading Disillusioned
rain hangs like sifted chalk under park lights, still as drama the stage is set: dancers, strung like puppets from a drop-down sky black cat-suits two dimensional against luminescent green jewel-glint & risque poses only bedraggled bark ribbons give the trees away thunder applauds Written for Whimsygizmo's dVerse Quadrille - a 44 word poem including … Continue reading Night Act #Quadrille 150
(i) my kite strings sagged, dragged like caterpillar lumps, the soft grass not offering any lift skies don’t laugh, just watch brightly; pale pinions and the rimming Earth and a quiet fleet of butterflies the ones seen and shimmering (ii) the paddock, wide as literature, finds me in the middle examining a ladybird, crawling on … Continue reading Five Answers
In the yard that used to be for the cats, I provide shelter for one tiny chicken. It scampers between my feet like it would with its real mother, and I must watch my every step. It’s growing feathers at a rapid rate and knows how to clean them and how to take dust baths … Continue reading Chick ‘n’ Chirrup
I am collecting the disliked bits: myself as dark, ridged stones, frothy with knitted-in flesh. I would change, given a wand and grace (that ineffable word, silver as a cat’s arch) but I’m spittle-shot and thin of eye unable to see a way out of the orange moon-glow. My conscience, an apricot clamour - juice … Continue reading Inner Voices
I was six and wearing the pink silk dress my mum made with a little lace strip around the hem. Six with hair like fine, blonde spider web; six and having a birthday party and my memory is that Dad made toffees. Mum says that can’t be true. Dad didn’t do much in the kitchen, … Continue reading A Dog Called Sheba
A Curtal Sonnet The lake’s skin shifts; stolen colour and flicked light, and already, as we park, my camera craves the view. The museum’s bright shapes, provoking modern lines and beyond a gulls’ shirred cry, a wake in foamy white where a wind-surfer-cloud sheers swiftly the lazuli blue and to the north, two cranes necking, … Continue reading Easter Saturday Walk
A Villanelle I have no interest in the news in which I can’t find a marbled fact, just people with power spouting views I feel I have to hunt for clues where truth and fiction interact I have no interest in the news I want hope, tea with kindness, light diffuse; not lies like eggshells: … Continue reading No News Nancy
birds-eye-view of the nullabor stretching like the mulga sky fell down map flat, and folded abruptly to the sea watch the blue Kombi inside, two brothers play in a cot skin stained pink from dust; used to long swims and tent sleeps and helicopters and camp food, lots of blokes around and school of the … Continue reading Introducing Josephine
(My Horse) My attention is drawn to the endearing pucker of skin behind ears the shape of candle flame, my fingers in your mane and your thick smell inhaled sunshine and chaff dreams like floating Sundays. It’s afternoon in the big shed: shreds of Earth’s skin flicker in long golden slides, an air-space slaked with … Continue reading Wahambi Bashar
#NaPoWriMo11 what is the biggest thing you know? asks the mouse thought, says the child it fills my whole day what colour is it? asks the mouse the child has to think it’s bumpy like the moon and at its edges are my eyelashes the mouse is impressed can a mouse fit thought in a … Continue reading Something Big
rain’s applause is welcoming as séance until evening sun draws me in this place where light is the forest strewn between i’m gargantuan as rainbows aching with rebellion stuck in your pose
Napowrimo #10 "she's a doormat" up-end that slap me down concrete flat and coarse like chuck beef nicely marbled with fact and it’s this: I will clean your boots and eat your feet but hurt I’ve got fibre the gristle in your teeth (you don’t complain about the flavour) beef sinew through a microscope is … Continue reading Alter Ego
NAPOWRiMO #9 Image by me The moon has lost her other half in blue. Perhaps some playful wave slipped its leash, and broke over this quaint brooch, this flex of quartz, and on next tide, some far galaxy will be beached by her smile. The prompt tonight (at NaPoWriMo.net) was to write a Nonet. A … Continue reading Tidal Moon
Out of the Cave 