untitled
The first time you slept beside me, I felt stiff as a board. I saw your arm slithering towards me and coiling itself around my torso, a snake saying you’re mine. The silence hissed it. I own you.
Minutes earlier I’d been as close to you as possible,
whispering in your ear and then trailing my pink, poking tongue around your lobes, soft soft and ticklish. Trying to tease it back out and let it fall back in to my mouth where it came from, like throwing candy in the air.
I found the dot to dot scatter of freckles below your hipbone, drawn out like a bouquet of birds taking flight. I traced my fingers to everywhere they might be going and found where they might have come from.
You said, on the cusp of an ‘oh’ - ‘I’ll definitely be back in here’.
I burrowed in to your collarbone with a smile and hoped that the little cove that caved in between your bone on your shoulder would catch my sweat. A pool of me.
With your white skin against the white sheets and a mouth that I could not stop sticking myself to, I could not say no to you spending the night even when my heart beat so fast that I thought it would throw out a key and open the gates of my rib cage to come bursting clean through the skin of my bare chest and break all over you.
Bed space is mine. Night time is for me, for my dreams do cartwheels out of my brain, escaping through my ears and turning and turning through my nostrils til they’re flipping around the room and kicking me in the face, jolting me up and throwing me to the window to look up at the sky, trying to find the face of God to tell him to stop.
When the lights go out control is converted from a force to a measly nine point Scrabble word. It is made from a material so slippy that even if every finger tip held a thousand miniscule fishing nets, it could never be caught.
That night I stared at the ceiling going through the alphabet and silently naming an animal for every letter until my head became a safari park and I had to grab the sheets to stop my voice box from letting out a roar. I wanted to wake you up to help me with X, but then I’d have to explain why at 5 in the morning I was gripping on to everything solid around me like my knuckles had only just learned their power to go white.
In the morning when I felt the small of your back stir against my tensed belly I squeezed my eyes shut so that I saw fireworks in my eyelids and pretended to wake after you. I watched you leave and then rubbed my fingertips against every inch of sheet that you had sprawled and stretched and arched on, and your perfume hung everywhere like glue. I liked it better there than on your own skin. I closed my eyes as was only kicked in the teeth once.
Ten months later and I feel stiff as a board. Now, I’d give anything for that snake arm, I’d let it shed it’s skin over and over so that I had a blanket to always keep me warm. Since then I learned that an animal beginning with an X is a Xantus, but no thoughts of that bird, even with its feathers that look like someone has shaken the yolk from the sun, can make sleeping without you any easier.
I’m yours.
Now. 2012.
double entendres
‘Come to my flat, we’ll talk there’
and we did,
but more with our bodies than our mouths:
a yin and a yang,
curling around and circling,
meeting at the other end,
coming together.
2011
Reflection
Reflection
Spring has come and he
is alone -
around him are others
yet he is alone, existing between them.
His eyes snap from the river
to the cotton mill,
far away, yet tall, imposing.
In the sea of his mind, memories float, resurfacing:
thick cotton dust, thicker coughs,
spinning, both cotton and himself from the heat
and the noisy hum – a bee in his eardrum.
He will not return,
not to the ten and three hours each day
nor to the nostril clinging smell
causing sneeze upon sneeze.
A splash sounds
to his left
and he returns
to the river.
A romance begins
between his sockless feet and the grass:
long strands like ribbons of silk
twist around and tickle his toes,
toes squeezing tight
keeping them there, their green playmate
for one second, two
before flattening them again.
A boy of eight or nine
is humming softly
as if copying the river’s rhythm.
It was he that caused the sobering
splash.
With busy hands as small as they are strong,
he washes his black beauty,
more than a foal, not quite yet a mare.
Small waterfalls run from her and
she is glittering,
her raven coat a blanket of miniscule diamonds
catching the rays of the sun.
The silver river has become
a rainbow -
reflections of azure sky,
grass more emerald than green
and running from the muddy horse
warm red and brown,
like the underbelly of a thousand salmon. *
In the wise and slowly blinking eye
of the sparkling horse
he catches a glimpse of himself,
solemn and calm
like the clouds floating above,
flirting with the sun and birds.
It is then, under the leafy shade
It comes to him, the realisation
That he is not a factory boy,
or a child
like the one before him,
but a man,
hopeful and unyielding.
*This is a recycled image, it appears that I’ve used it more than once in different pieces, oops. Must take heed.
- 2010
Lake Burley Griffin
Leaves have a golden coating,
as if dipped in honey.
Some burnt by the sun before
it disappeared with summer.
A few remain green, late bloomers
or evergreens.
The red ones have fallen,
too hot to remain.
The pavement a crimson carpet,
feet sink in.
Crunching sounds everywhere,
a thousand apples being bitten.
Neck of purest white,
exception: a cluster of black speckles,
like paint, flicked.
Small head is brown, tie-dye feathers.
Beady eyes, like glistening jewels
holding the water’s image.
Pink feet, webbed, worn,
clawed and cracked.
Waddle to the edge and dive,
with a plop you
try to catch the reflection of
the sun.
Your charcoal black beak opens:
quack.
Blue sky bleeds
into blue lake.
Water ripples and ripples with
small boats and large sails.
The fountain is the focus
of the circle lake -
a manmade geyser.
Water rises higher and higher still
spraying
until
like a diver, it twists,
taking the plunge, down again,
splashing like rain.
Sunlight refracts,
and each water drop
becomes a small rainbow.
- 2010
An exercise on Point of View - my point of view, her point of view, a third person/onlooker’s point of view, a character sketch.
Spines - an ode to breaking
i – human
three and three vertebrae, thirty three.
columna vertebralis -
backbone.
hold me up, steady perpendicular.
crash
spinal cord: snip, snap, se par ate.
paralysis, paraplegia:
para, pledge.
body flopping, jelly like, limp parallel.
ii – book
octavo folds, stitched spine.
titled, flecked gold and shining -
enticing.
hinged – open me, break in.
crack
breaking and breaking more.
flex, flexing:
back in to yourself, one and ninety degrees.
stress lines, creases, consulted much: you are loved.
- 2011
Waking up at 6am
My teeth chatter, involuntarily – chip, chap, chip. Stop it.
The creases on the palm of my hands – you see those little folds? I’m clammy and they’re now rivers – a current of sweat. Wipe once and again and Okay, they’re dry. Repeat.
- 2011
Purple
We were given prompts. The prompts I chose were - ‘The man and the woman are different colours and I am both of them’ ‘Over the telephone’ and ‘You specialize, and it’s survival.’
This was the result (not autobiographical (only maybe 20% so))
The man and the woman are different colours and I am both of them. The man is blue and the woman is pink. I am pink on the inside, right through like a grapefruit, but on the outside I’m all blue. I am supposed to wear the pink exterior, but my grapefruit womb and my pink, floating ovaries cannot stop me – I feel like a man. My voice sounds pink, though – velvety. Over the phone I am ‘Miss’. And that’s okay; you have to have that balance – the pink and the blue. They both come out, and sometimes they even mesh so that I’m purple, a different colour from a man, a woman. You need to get them all right to know how to wear every colour, and like a perfect palette, know what they make when they mix. You’re a colour specialist. You specialize, and it’s survival.
- 2012
Daughter
You are my daughter.
When you came from me screaming I had a pile of clothes that are not pink but blue – I’d rather dress you in the colour of a sunny morning sky than one when God sends out a warning.
The shepherds would guide you back, but I want you to find your own way, use your body as a compass and know that your heart beats right to the tip of your pointer finger, your northern point – ‘HOME’.
In place of Barbie you’ll have a marble in the shape of a globe so that you can hold the world in the palm of your hands and roll it and drop it and feel no consequence.
There will be no pinched in waist, no hair that stays straight even when twirled, twisted, tugged – none of you looking at me with serious eyes, grabbing your own hair and pleading:
‘Mother, iron it.’
And those beach holidays with tanning and piña coladas can STOP
because baby, I’m taking you to Alaska and you’ll collect stamps on your passport rather than patches of sunburnt skin.
I want the Himalayas and the temples of China to be stuck to the inside of your eyelids, crafted like a film-strip so that the movie of these places will play out on a loop whenever you close your eyes.
Better that than a slide show of every boy in your class that might never be yours.
At bedtime we’ll count all of the plastic stars that glow like a thousand cats eyes stuck to your ceiling and make up a story to go with each one – we’ll leave behind those fairy tales with princess’ who see sex as salvation and are saved by a shiny prince.
You can open your eyes without a man, and will only open them to one
if you choose to.
In our house, cookies will be in the drawer closest to your height - and make up the furthest away, up so high that even with your toes en point and your finger outstretched like Lord Kitchener in the ‘Your Country Needs You’ poster as you reach and reach - your 10 year old self
can’t.
But honey
if one day, when you’re tall enough to reach that drawer and cover your face in cosmetic sparkles like fairy dust, and the cookie box remains full,
I’ll sit back and smile as you walk out that door,
hoping your compass will guide you well,
and if not,
knowing that the Shepherds will be there
somewhere.
- 2011
