Zenobia Frost
Zenobia Frost is a poet and arts writer based in Brisbane, Australia. Her most recent poetry collection, After the Demolition (Cordite Books, 2019), won the 2020 Wesley Michel Wright Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. In 2020, she edited a book on the history of Brisbane Community Arts Centre: Art Starts Here: 40 years of metro arts.
Broad Encounters’ A Midnight Visit – a touring multi-room immersive production – takes the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe as its inspiration. For Brisbane’s iteration, it transforms a soon-to-be-demolished building in Fortitude Valley into a funeral parlour and, beyond it, an uncanny, gothic dreamscape you explore at your own pace.
... (read more)
On Pompeii, 79AD
The violence of that night. I satnotating Livy, throughthe earth’s contractions.
A thin dawn-choked skyshook chariots. The crowd rolled backonto itself. Neptune threw up animals.Every thing convulsed. On the shoreacross, a great black cloud broke
with light. Shrieks rang out: endlessnight, with gods up and gonelike wayward husbands. Then:
the silent dark. We stoodto shake of ... (read more)
1. Toowong
A possum nestlesin the split crook of the kitchen’s plasterboard ceiling.
I shake my attentionback to the man who peddlesthe empty front room:
& ... (read more)
It’s a town with a veggie patchin the cop shop yard.
Outside the grocer, with shelvesof tins and faded VHS tapes,a boy on a scooter asks,Are you looking for wi-fi? as ifhe’s bootlegged some to sell.
In the café we bemoan the goat-trackwe drove in on: the Elephant Pass.Swaying huge and daft,the van was elephant enoughmid-slalom to have me swigging benzos.
The sweetshop lady, who hand-makest ... (read more)
Maroochydore, 1999 – After 10 Things I Hate About You
A girls’ weekend. Just me, Mumand Blockbuster, probably fish ‘n’ chips,surely chocolate.
Maybe I mistook the word menarchefor men-ache, watching Mum watch Heath Ledgercroon the song that she saidonce lured her into marriage: ‘You’re just too goodto be tru-oooooh—’ She sighed.
I sighed, her mirror, on the motel’stwin ... (read more)
\\ everything before wasfine \ sure \ orderly love\ I recollect \ aisles of exin home-brand \ sober\ procedural acts \ legby leg \ recipes for low-fat sex \ clear-cut \ pasttense \ a lab report onroutine me-and-thems
\ but \\ oh // and then
/ emboss the date of Iand you / you effortless /a looping tune / in fluentcursive-fever / static skin/ somewhere these handsmust start / or end / askthem-ups ... (read more)