Porter Prize
What am I? A crushed hominid.
A can of couscous, seeding.
A shudder of my former self, a
self-defrosting fridge. Good
Taken as Required
by Ynes Sanz
An age ago, ill-matched,
ignorant but willing,
we set the rules.
‘Step by Step’, we said. ‘No Bullshit.’
Today, thinking of something else
I stumbled across the grey metal bracelet
you looped over that stick of a wrist
where your thin blood stained the skin
to resemble an antique map or a bad tattoo
(like the one they inked on for that photo shoot in the ’50s).
Jessica L. Wilkinson wins 2014 Porter Prize
Australian Book Review is delighted to announce that Jessica L. Wilkinson has won the 2014 ABR Peter Porter Poetry Prize for her po ...
To be alone in the wide room
in the house’s crooked elbow, turning point
for extensions as the family grew
and grew – and grew – to be alone in the one room
nobody needed now, though it might be resumed
like land, for guests or blow-ins, at any moment,
without notice (and that was part of
the appeal, the very tenuous feel of the place) to play the ...
sampling Jeffrey Harrison’s ‘Danger: Tulip’,
from Ploughshares, Winter 2006–07
Was I hoping to find my way to the creek, loud
with unseasonal rain, and to see, perhaps,
So there he was in the library, crouched above the floor
like a mousetrap, squinting into his rickety parallel edition
of the Satires. The paperback was from the late fifties;
Full-Bucket Moon
by Ross Clark
for Ted Kooser
(Italian, c.17th; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)
Life breathes in this painting like a child
pretending not to be awake,
or a skink metamorphosed to a stone
but for the flutter in its flank.
You have to lean and listen for the heart
behind the shining paint,
the lips half-open, and the glittering eye.
Velvet of the night. A ba ...
I stare from my study window into trees.
Considering all things, I watch the first snow spill
White seeds across the rubble where the barn
Towered over us with its cracked spire
For almost half a century until
Some feckless pot-head changed
The whole thing into fire.
canola’s chemical yellow rises above the fence line
Black Poles laze around a dam, ibis and egrets gliding overhead
wattle, casuarina, eucalypt, cypress, radiata
where the bitumen gives way to gravel
taking you deeper into shadows, ditches
tinder undergrowth of a bush block