Poetry

Tango Boleo (Pocket Poets, Ginninderra Press, 2019) is a sequence of reply poems in collaboration with poet Avril Bradley, inspired by the passion, sensuality and melancholy of tango. And it is launched! Available here: https://www.ginninderrapress.com.au/poets.html

Here’s a sneak peek.

Get you (at the Satho Tango Milonga, Vienna)

He
places her tired face
in his favourite frame
directs her to move slowly
into the baroque space
designed for such things

She pauses to note sawdust underfoot
smells the air for the familiar

He
directs her to slip the curtain cloak
from bony riding-hood shoulders
Sequinned breasts catch fire
from tears of a chandelier

Men
pay for this
leaning forward to inhale
the divine arrangement
of random symmetry

They blow smoke her way

She
catches her breath
to consider the tilting way of it all
Cells divide in a lunar forest
heels lift and fall

Dust
rising in the glare
takes the shape of

Woman
wide open in the moon’s shot beam

Poems appear in the current issues of Plumwood Mountain, Curlew, The Journal, Not Very Quiet and are forthcoming in Island, Poetry Salzburg, Under the Radar, Verity La and the Smith/Doorstop anthology on running, The Result is What You See Today.

This poem was written after trips to Far North Queensland after a hurricane and to the Central Desert after a drought and is currently appearing in Anne Elvey’s Plumwood Mountain edited by Jill Jones.

Salt Wind Salt War

As cumuli mass in platoons
over Tribulation
they strike me as bones of a whale

but what they are for real
are supplicant fingers of pure palm
tumbled by the muscle of a cyclone

Fronds shudder and click
like pelican beaks
in times of famine

tearing breasts open
to feed chicks
straight from the heart pure blood
leaving stigmata
on parchment feather

In drought they quietly
pile the dead for shade
roll eggs into death cairns
Little abortions cloud about
skirts of Kati Thanda Lake Eyre

not here where death comes in all weathers
peace time rare as ambergris

stacks-image-81d8b36 lipscover_1024x1024 94dc148c-a74d-4192-b0e3-6e402da6ab3f Maclean Cover wisj front (2)