All Events: Poetry

She sabcos the floor with the babies on it

sitting amongst the saucepan lids and cake tins.

She moves them round as if sweeping them up

they love the ride and the ruckus

as she slides them across the floor until

a wet patch puts the brakes on. 

Lids bang on pots as she

muscles her way through the chore.

It’s a happy tin can slum of a kitchen floor

the early prototype of a ball pit.

Soon they’ll go down for a sleep

when she can sit outside and roll

a ciggy, relax while hubby’s

at work greasing the Jesus cap

on the copter rotors at Hawkers then

drives home using the egg shell method

to survive the petrol shortage.

Later she’ll watch them sitting in the sandpit

like small loaves leavened by fresh air.

They are ripples under her skin

itchy and breathless for food

at the end of the day and

she’s almost unhinged with fatigue.

Her home is a tightly run ghetto of achievement.

She rings the bell at the end of another lap.

It’s not a record 

but like every other day

it’s a personal best.

For her, home was

A syruped thickly of honey

And that newlywedded sunhumming glow.

The soju that sat oodled in pools in rings in spoken

Atop the verot-black, back verot black bench,

Their percussion of food and drink

In drunken love with the sound of each others voice and laugh

And when pregnancy test showed double dash

It was indulgence

Never ailed with the early morning nauseous twists women disliked;

Bloom cheeked peaches

Under a drippy sugar sky

The happy feel good – pulsing and humming her veins;

But the birth told her no.

No, it changed her

That epidural curdled, hurt her

A blunt numbed push spoke her into lulls of deep sedation

Edged her further from four walls and fireplace,

Further into the mind – thick with graffiti and snakey tangled spit

She is sat as sickle over tea

With son purring in cotton clean clothed coil

In the hairline crack between wake and rest

The sky above hissed down with showers

The door clicked unlocked, brushed open.

And for the first time, the dining table was scalped bare

The air stayed stale flat and greyed

Wading in stagnation

The rot ate and spat and giggled back sick

While varicose veins vined winding up her thigh

Face me, love

And for a moment she did,

He saw her again

Saw her, wife, woman

Brown deep eyes wise wild wonder

But the glassy glaze stared back thick

It sounds as sure as

the concrete echo of a 

closing steel door

but I’ve come willingly within

these resonant walls

to the warmth of the kitchen

to children clattering down the stairs

to this chair in a pool of light 

to the sense of you near

and as the dark descends

our home encircles us

and expands

We bought the star from

the same store every family goes to.

The star with its withered limbs,

was almost dying. We took it home,

slipped off the packaging that read:

 

Real Authentic Stars, mined straight from the sky!

 

We put on the instructional video,

at 13, it was time I learnt to make the

ornamental tree topper.

I hollowed it out, scraped its

night-bleeding insides with a butter knife.

We had the special disposal bags marked:

Biohazard.

It was only an extra dollar fifty.

 

“It was already emaciated,

starved of joy, so there’s no need to worry.

You haven’t done a bad thing,” the video said.

 

Copying the instructor, I blew open the husk,

huffed in my carbon dioxide,

set it in resin and coated it in glitter.

 

It will shimmer and shine silver for us

at the end of the year.

“You gave it new life.”

 

And what of the glitter that falls down the drain?

My family and I sang in tune with the screen,

 

“The fish will thank us for the sparkle in their scales!”

The husk is broken, cracked
wide open. The fourth wall      between
us and
Disasters are stressful, challenging, exhausting
Meanwhile, in a comfortable house on the canal,
B & G play scrabble as the rain bombs.
‘OMG! You’re taking this very seriously,’ texts B.
‘Maybe… It’s just that I’ve never seen the canal this high’.
How high is high enough? It’s just stuff people
are trapped / food drops are being done
Helicopters trawl through sodden skies.
It was the community that
                                     stepped
                                                 up
Dark smell of mud stagnant water & mould, so much mould!
Creeping into the bones and sinews         of things.
15, 000 warm wet bodies / Those displaced by the flood
ravaged Mullum ‘paradise’         for some
Swollen creek / swollen minds
The smell of things stirred up, ugly things, dark things
and we, ‘the lucky ones’, wrinkle our noses
as we leaf-blow the drive.
The most striking aspects of ongoing flood
molecules     of recovery, stunned recovery
              hang
                        in the moist air.
The issue caused great anger / It’s really insulting we don’t get that extra
money.
Morning and a rainbow hovers—
translucent through light rain.
On our canal—a rarity of two black swans.
Gliding, webbed feet invisible.
Their necks bow down to the glassy surface,
no longer mud-churned, forming
wine-glass shapes, reflections looping
into twin infinity-symbols.

When Earth’s unrest ceased
twenty times a thousand thousand years ago
her great south land stirred, split and spread,
covered herself in lava spill, lay soiled     still
breathing deeply      listening —
Then spirit warriors woke from dreaming Bundjalung,
did battle on Country
and the land bled red.
Red dirt still lives in russet scars
etched in this volcanic cauldron. Its plug warns mariners,
banks northern rivers and remembers a big scrub thick with future.
Basalt ranges the border where old growth stands
reserved in remnants, it caps our weathered hills,
looks first sun in the face, shoulders the sky and backs the sea.
Red dirt settled selectors
when cedar getters cut red gold from ancient forests
and cattle farmers pioneered their presence in the storied past.
Now, in this rainbow region
creatives drop in, dig the culture,
belong to red by going green.
Tree changers retreat to hinterland towns,
locals find balance in hidden valleys
where trees flame summer and water falls where live poets live.
Muscled deep within this vital landscape
beats our dirty red heart. It’s red, pumps iron
in soil that’s twenty million years old.
Wollumbin, big fellow mountain,
cloud catcher, shields this sacred place
where purple light shifts and rocks change shape.
This painted landscape where the earth is red
was, still is Widjabul land. We all belong here.
Without this place there’d be no us.
It keeps us.
Always will be
scrubbed place where red dirt lives.

Seagulls float backwards on the current
Whimbrels hunt on the sandbar in dips left by estuary stingrays
Raptors arc overhead – now an osprey, later a sea eagle.
The wind tickles the casuarinas, or do the she-oaks reach for the breeze?
We laugh, drinking G&Ts on the deck.
Happiness muddled with finger limes, mint and berries
Light on the blue waves
Each sunset more glorious than the last.
The city’s fragments of sky, carved out by high-rise and terraces,
Long behind us.
Memories of smoke haze, traffic and nearby sirens drop
Like our blood pressure.
Soothed, calm, we watch the water, blue tranquillity.

Until the rain.
Until upriver’s overflow mounts the bank and threatens to join us, no
welcome extended.
With sandbars and birds disappeared,
We monitor tides by word of mouth, news bulletin, app – the height of the
bricks on our wall.
Too late to leave, we fill plastic bottles with clean water,
Pack bags too big for a rescue boat,
Wonder how to get the dog onto the roof.

We turn our backs on the waters
Face distant high ground until the app tells us
To check the rude swiftness of the tide’s ascent.
We hide from the river, cannot bear to watch
The churn, the mud, the silt, the logs, the unprecedented, the it’s-neverbeen-
like-this-before.
Breaths shallow, we spray the spiders that rise ahead of the water.
Our glasses, sticky with dregs of G&T, wait in the sink,
For the drains to clear, the river to fall, the blue to return.