Poetry Archives | Giramondo Publishing

Cats and comets / are cousins. / With arching tails / and bright orbiting / mating swoops. / I used to sleep / hugging my cat / I used to sleep / my nose buried / in her fur.

How difficult it might be to abandoned and alone, at Easter, at Roma Trastevere Station, watching trains arriving and leaving without you to all sorts of exciting destinations; knowing everyone else was on their way up to the mountains, or off to the seaside; to visit with friends and family; to partake of festive wine and cured olives and fattened, delicately spiced, young lamb.

when I did bleed, some months later, I found that same / humiliation, the conversation I’d rehearsed, how to tell / my mother I was somehow now more grown, a mush / of words I could not say: instead I tried to hide it: and

While travelling in the mountain realm I discover in clear weather how unbusy the Earth / can be mountain after mountain as far as the eye can reach. / Lonely, I make myself noticed by touching with my left elbow and right big toe / the beginning and ending of a hundred-metre-long white thread.

i’m not scared of anything / the door’s just nicer shut / and so are the windows / and the drains, taped over / but the vent’s wide open / because i cannot reach it, / so i watch it like TV and / huntsman comes right in.

Mt Gulaga becoming visible, something / ending, something beginning, the first / smoke of nightfall / thin over the canopy, / deep of it / rising steadily through the trees.

the goldfish pepsi / bumps into / her double in the / mirror glass of the tank / would she try to eat herself / for breakfast we could / play her the tape of dorian / gray

When I was young, I realised my body / was something to be held back or kept / in its place, so I have mastered the art / of observation, how to watch faces for / a frown or grimace: signs of weather.

Avoid doughnuts. Doughnuts sprinkle your lap with sugar. / Avoid, for the first day of travel, all right turns. Travel light. / Wear one of the five new sweaters you bought for the trip.

We’ve turned it into emotion – / red pickle like the night’s heat, ice creams so / smooth they enforce silence, orange- / flavoured kisses, conversations directed by rum.

Anemograms from years you can hardly remember / handed round at an evening garden party. / Empty envelopes the colour of envy, / sparkling wine and cautious laughter.

The Leech / You’re a sycophant, repugnant. Vile bacchant— / you suck and glut, fill like a slimy phial. No denial / of the claret in our veins. Fat phlebotomist, / yes, you were used to treat ailments—fevers, gout, / haemorrhoids, headaches, clots, bleeding wounds / and gums—you thrived, made doctors rich.

8) he followed me on Instagram, I followed him back / just to be kind, and he introduced himself as a physicist / building a time machine and asked if I / was interested to go back to the precolonial Tapanuli / because he had the white man’s guilt, / the Dutch person’s guilt, the coloniser’s guilt, / but also the urge / to verify if my ancestors were really man-eaters, / ‘Aren’t you at least a bit, teeny, tiny, curious?’ / he replied, ending it with a chicken leg emoji

I worked them, sharpened hooks / for high-rollers, sewing my special rigs. / Bridles for bonito, live bait that / trailed the barbed viridian in our wake.

The eyes are faulty interpreters. They pretend to know / The language but do not listen to accents / And are too confident for their own good.

Cat’s Pantoum / Cat in curve, perched on the side table / She said, holding out her hand / House cat leans forward, leaps: / A dislocation finds its moment

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Poetry

Comets

Three Poems

Television Poems

Four Poems

Three Poems

At Bunga

Two Poems

from Ars Poetica

The New World and Finding It

Two Poems

Anemograms

Animal Poems

Three Poems

Two Poems

Parts of us

Four Poems