States of Poetry NSW
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The dawn is only a thought.
The fulcrum on which we rest our newsprint, our toothless fingerprints, our balmy Paxil days.
Only a thought of the windy, dwindling kind.
Wake to urgent messages, to the waltz of hours crisp and fragile as thin pastry. To roulette of lightning yes. Of arid no.
&nb ...
The ‘greate fyshe’, terrible
colossus, dark cathedral of days
and nights, arrests
lost Jonah in his flight. Three
days and nights spent
in wet earnest pray ...
States of Poetry 2016 - New South Wales | 'Mouse (Wunderkammer)' by Kate Middleton
Cut out a sixth of the heart.
At a day old—furless,
close-eyed, resembling nothing
so much as an infant's thumb—
he can survive it.
The mouse can regrow that missing part
in three short weeks.
Aesop knew it:
to be mouse-hearted
is as good as wearing
the swagger of lion.
His heart
perhaps the size of ...
In black chalk the beast
brusques forward Silence Rubens
has stopped his mouth
with a single line He is already
awed by the den
he will find himself in even now
as his mane curls into wisp
of emptiness A study on paper
But there in white chalk the grim
pose brightens
into ...
The grass grows longer on the easeway.
A pelican swipes the sky
towards the seascape we can't yet see,
its webby legs outstretched:
& ...
Perhaps the best cells are the ones we can't kill off,
a persistence of the fittest, although mutation's
always painful. It's two thousand and fourteen,
and I know no-one who has been
uninjured. It thinks in me,
this shadow. I put on sunscreen, and am surprised
to come in contact with my skin.
In the same day, I'm chatted up in a café
by an aspiring nove ...
for Ian
And suddenly:
the men
are holding beers
and standing round
the trampoline,
and not the barbecue;
turning over toddlers,
instead of steaks.
The women
make the salads.
Fiona Wright
Recording
for Eileen
The light's older
in these sandstone suburbs,
jam-thick.
A clipped-haired man held a dog leash
saying one of us is single,
and even the leaves
had hunched their shoulders
in the gutters.
A waiter, golden-brown as a bread loaf,
squirted water at the pigeons
that sat cock-headed at the tables. My tart
Strange, that there are sequences
we live as cinema, if I looked
over my shoulder
I might recognise the front wall
of my bedroom
opened out towards the camera,
my furniture as hollow
as a stage p ...
Susie Anderson is a writer and multimedia artist based in Sydney, Australia.
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