February 2012
4 posts
I want to write but I can’t. Nothing is coming. I’m the best Creative Writing student. Hmhmhm.
'Break'
There are words I never wanted to hear you speak. But you know, they sounded much louder, and felt more like a movement, when they appeared on the computer screen instead of falling from your mouth. 2012.
Moving
‘To build a home’ is our song, and I did - build you a home. Your home is in my chest: my heart is your bedroom. I hope you never move out, but if you do, i’ll cut a house shape out of your clothes, fabric that smells like the colour gold and I’ll stitch it on to my front pocket, to cover the skin of my fluttering breast. I’ll decorate it with sparkles and velvet...
A history of girls.
1. 15 years old, first one. You were like opening a new page. Grabbing at each other in alleyways. Walking in winter until our hands were blue. Sneaking to your house when your parents weren’t there, all shyness. Biting hips. Scratches. Clothing parted, but intact. Sitting on a bus afterwards, laughing up at the fluorescent lights, our mouths spilling with blueberries that you stole from the...
January 2012
21 posts
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...
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
waiting
when all is tightening inside naked guts - 2012
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...
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,...
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. 1. I met Jenny in 1998, when we were 6 years old and in the same primary school class. Back then she had strawberry blonde hair that fell in ringlets to her shoulders, a cluster of freckles spread across her cheeks and nose, and huge blue eyes. Now, the hair is...
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...
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...
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 –...
Colour Blind
Exercise - write a story made up mainly of dialogue. Of the given scenarios, I chose ‘a man has just been caught robbing a house by the police’ product: The policeman looked at the young man and sighed. “Name?” “It’s Mick… Michael. Listen big guy, just you wait a second, you’ve got it all wrong, I’m trying to tell you.” “I’m listening.” “This is my house. I just live her by...
Gran, Papa
It’s snowing, lightly, as if the flakes are in no hurry to gather on the ground. It’s swirling, and the orange light from the lampposts outside make the flakes look like a million tiny embers falling from Heaven. When I was little, my grandparents used to make up stories about where the snow came from. My Papa, whilst tucking me in to bed with a hot water bottle one evening told me that snow fell...
'Speak, Memory'
It’s the year 2001 and we’re up the Baker’s burn. The grass is long and has been bleached a blonde like colour by several days of full sunshine. A huge checked shawl is spread across the ground to stop the long grass tickling the back of our knees and on top if it there sits a wide selection of half eaten ham sandwiches which have been left for Mr Kipling French fancies. In the part of the river...
My name is Sam
More unreliable narration (child’s perspective): My name is Sam, like the fireman, and 2 and a half days ago it was my birthday. I turned seven and we had a party in a hall round the corner from my grans house that smells like dairylea dunkers. I had a bouncy castle and the best present I got was from my auntie who always picks good things out of the big Argos book. It was an action man...
Écouter
(created from stimuli - a black and white photograph of a male accordionist, given to us by our creative writing tutor) In northern Paris, on the boulevard leading up to Montmartre, Georges Boulet shows up every morning - excluding Sunday - at around 10am with his accordion over his shoulder and a small fold down chair tucked under his arm. Since he lost his wife Margot 5 years ago, this has...
Beguiled - an exercise on unreliable narrators
Beguiled Part I - Dana I have been coming here, to the sea, for the past 9 autumns of my life. In earlier years, my parents brought my sister Lily and I to stay in the pink house that reminds me of the underbelly of a salmon, and we would stay until father was sure that on our return the trees would be bare. Mother couldn’t stand the change – the green bursting into orange and yellow before...
5am.
Now: We curl, we twist wearily snakes coiling around one another leaving no space, only closeness. Like twin foetuses in the womb of this hotel. We are the centre piece on these ivory sheets crisp, unruffled sheets - we have stayed this way through each change in the binary code of the alarm clock that faces the opposite direction. What is time? Silver light squeezes in through cracked...
I killed you
aphotic black and bursts of orange
shallow grave and funfair in the clouds.
fists of blood, red burned by the darkness
emotional yo-yo.
colour and laugher and a coruscation of hope
erotic, lunging, inside i am filled
mist and bareness, lacking smiles
pouring it out, drowning, outside of my mind.
your tears; a silver string of razors
your infliction of the worst kind
yet i cannot fight.
...
jigsaw
have you ever spent a whole day, trying to piece together a period in time that you so desperately want to re-live, because you weren’t ready for those moments to end?
those moments that you were bursting out of your skin, lunging, clawing with everything you had to reach for the one person that made you feel like you had substance to your life, that helped you open yourself to love, that...
Sydney Harbour Bridge
Heavy heart, egg shell fragility applying maximum effort to smiles. Programme: mere existence I am a defective robot. Bound to melancholy, fused with bottomless pessimism, shutting down. Tequila tears, midnight madness deny the remaining slots their fill for I am a jigsaw girl. Towering structure, glittering chrome, up you, I climb. Trophy on Australia’s fireplace. Sun beams,...
The Mother
I sit here in this upturned vessel,
and i look at you, your grey eyes
and scarlet lips.
I see the child you brought into this world
who brought with it smothering melancholy
and infinitesimal joy
and i laugh
for the child is your world
yet the world is black
and lack of light brings deprivation
my gift to you, intensified,
and returned. - 2007