The Hunter's Wife

Cords of wind erase his fits
of movement from the hills.
The hunter is untied,
like a careless knot.
Her purchases of bread and cheese
await his scrubbed, pocked
lead-weight fists.

The milk-jug - empty.
The paper-wrapped fish -
hastily thrown to the dogs.

She will not bother to oil or
wrap his axe in rags.

Let it rust,
let it rust.

Heritage

Heritage seems as much about
Going as staying.

I'm from a vagrant line.
We don't waver in history
like muscled pioneers,
we drip
in, out of years and
leave our tree with missing branches.
Now I'm picking up sticks

and budding into
a foreign air like
a nipple
nosing out of a savvy bra.

It's a bit disappointing,
this forging ahead.
I like the thought of empty pockets
and rebellious daughters
on creaking battered ships;
maybe walking the plank,
maybe building a bank.

The coins in my pockets
collide, a tongue-less clatter
making good any lead to chase.

Regardless of doings,
I'm short on heroism -
Which I expect
will bore
spectacled academes
and great-grandchildren.

Sucker Punch

His eyes colour in streams
of borscht blood, the slight
flecks of marshmallow froth
starting to form at the nooks
of his toothy grin.

He doesn't smile for joy;
he smiles at tiny, tiny him -
a small soldier holding arms against
the crawling pace of
armour girt worms inside,
who triumph as his mercury
quickens.

He's off his meds;
and as Mum tracks the car in
on tacky candy gravel
he throws a spot-on punch
with a white-knuckled fist
into his pale
eight-year-old forehead.

Portrait

The trees have become thick pixels
because we are the foreground,
huge in the taut eye of aperture.

I'm small and glad .
I'm pressed to your brow
your arms rounding me like a bear.

The grin is relieved, we laugh into
each other's make-up and sweat
and proper dress;
we cradle ourselves
without grip or purpose
but with the same tender sling
that will draw a baby.

I trust you not to let go;
you trust me to stay, like the persistent
scent of jasmine.

We stand like that now, I think.
When we play and fight and cry and break
down to our very carbon
our very marrow
to the ground dust that made me your rib
and I feel we are still learning
to lean
upon each other like that.

Loose, but tight and still
inside our embrace.

Porch Light

The night moves around us like toffee.
It is setting, it is setting, mynahs scatter
from the porch as you posess the space.
Your hard body moves as it means, means
when it moves.

I crawl on you;
you aren't aware of the shifts you make
in me.
Little thrills, tectonic as your finger
slopes along my nape, to my lips.

O god. O god. You wan god.

I suck it in, in the flickerflickerflicker
of the curtain's shimmy.
Light falls through.
Inside white, outside black,
the pretty night binary hugging us roundly.

All is treacle sweet to me: but most?
The way you wake in my palm,
downsoft in my hand.

Shy, fragile life in my hand,
the drumming heart of a bird.

The Assent

Yesterday, methodically, I opened up
a black trash bag
and emptied my life into the void of it
a grin thickening my lips.
I was as drunk on this carthasis
as a clown on laughs.

I won't powder my face, I won't
colour my mouth.
I won't shave my pussy, I won't
cut my hair.
I won't wear clothes.

I wear rope now. It is my colour.
It is my entire attire

and who needs makeup
when you hold my face?

Blue House - by an anonymous friend

-THE BLUE HOUSE-


Little blue house

On a green hill

Wrapped in grey clouds

That refuse to rain

In the valley below

Where the lake bed

Lies desiccated, sucked dry

By a magnetic force

On the flipside of the world

The lake is full

Little blue house

Anchor me against

This magnetic pull