Purple Lady

Big City
Busy Street
People catching buses

Sit down
Wait for bus
Next to purple lady

Busy busy
Coming and going
Lady unmoving, staring

Odd smell
Is it me?
Hope not

There again
This time stronger
Sweet but unclean

Purple lady
hands unsettled
Mumbles under breath

I look at her

I look

I notice

Short hair once highlighted
Clothes seem neat
Like for travelling
She wears a zipped up purple jacket
Neat and tidy over black pants
Cowboy boots underneath

Clean complexion
In her 30’s
Rather pretty except

Staring vacantly
Waiting for the night
Alone and withdrawn

She is not catching a bus

Should I offer to help?

Last few times
I received fear and anger
I hesitate

Bus arrives and I am whisked away.

…

A few days later
Walking in the crowd
Face marked with dirt and a white smear

Clothes are the same but
Dirty and unkempt
Greywhite t-shirt hanging out raggedly

The days have been unkind

She is washed away
River of people
Lost in the crowd.

I am filled with sadness, loss, and feel ashamed.


Kim Robertson (Queensland)
First published on the author's blog

The Footings are Poured on the Future

Trying to be a man of the people
(no people in particular, just people generally),
I got out where the limo stopped,
(having blown a tire, or run out of fuel or something),
there was no time to arrange a media opportunity
so I engaged one of the workers there in conversation
(to keep my hand in, so to speak).
He was grimed in powdery dust
shovelling at cement with curt monotony,
behind him, scaffolding and rebar
brooded and coagulated in uneasy geometries.
I asked him what he was building,
but he could not tell me what he was working on,
(evidently, contractors had been called in).
Wouldn’t you want to know what thing was being made?
He gave me a short grin as I walked back to the car
(like a Unionist disembowelling a contract negotiator).
We never get to see all the plans on these rush jobs.
There’s a lesson in that, he said.


Damen O'Brien (Queensland)

Korora Beach, Dusk

What did I see or thought I saw
as the slatted sun closed down the beach
and the crescent-sanded shadows reached
and fishermen pulled their hooks from the wave’s jaw?
I saw a man step helplessly off the break,
or perhaps an oystercatcher sewing fish.
I wonder if my breath was a windy wish
held gulped and filtered by flathead and flake.

What did I see, or hope I saw?
I saw a man step silently into the panes
of glass and steel, but who knows if he rose again.
Soon I’ll pick through the lantana’s claw,
but marking the site of a cormorant’s plunge, I stare
at the grey water, until the sandpiper wind steals a blink.
He’s swimming somewhere out there still, I think,
with the strange strokes of a seal, coming up for air.


Damen O'Brien (Queensland)

Jet Ski Ride

Eventually, I rode a jet ski.
I waited for the cacophony to clear,
left behind by speed
and a surge of freedom

but my thoughts churned
on their usual continuum.
I revved the engine harder,
felt the jolt, the smack of waves,

though that made me worry
about fish swimming below.
Would they bite on my toes?
Would my sunglasses fall off?

sink to the bay's sandy depths?
I imagined angry fish
swimming off in sunglasses.
And then there was the need

to ride around in circles —
figures of eight at best —
the man on the beach running
in zigzags, wildly gesturing,

and so, still, I was trapped
in tight arcs of monotony.
A pure, straight line to the horizon
and I'd be caught, eventually.


Jane Frank (Queensland)

Elegy, with Sorghum Amplum

I keep remembering
that you are dead.

I remember
the sorghum fields, the fissures
in the earth running through them, running
to catch ourselves on the wire fences.
If you wrap your hands
around the barbs slow enough,
you don’t break the skin

I remember you, lying on your back in
the dead grass, the blades of it
sticking, brown and flyweight, to your shirt;
a girl pouring milk into your eyes
because you’d burned them
staring too long at the sun. Milk,
filling the hollows of your orbits,
and drying on your cheeks; milk
rolling down over your temples
and into your hair like tears.

I wonder if they found my clothes in the harvest.

I wonder if your eyes look like that now,
white and glazed.


Madeleine Dale (Queensland)

Gecko

Small translucent oracle
please tell me,
          is it time?

Your echo call on blast
of sour night air
          brings me hope.

Are your toes
          drumming       against skirting board,
          tinkling          against stale bottles,
a code tapped out in your scuttle language
          that says,        pack your bags?

Are your throaty brays
          chk chk chk   laughs of disbelief
that I've stayed this long?
Or are they
          a warning call:
                                  leave! right! now!

Tell me soon
for my ears are tensed
to your cries and to his keys scratching
stumbling to find the keyhole of the door


Rae White (Queensland)

Hallowe'en

Under this flickering blue light,
in this sea of tapers
and taffeta,
saccharine bite of toffee
and floral pattern of
too-sweet wine on my tongue,
I am indifferent to the hollow
faces that cackle,
jolt their heads like dolls.
It is hot in this room,
another place I have to be:
there is nowhere else to go.

The empty road is a release,
the car a coffin
where we breathe out of sync.
On the petrol station counter
pumpkins leer
and when Hotel California enters my head
I know it will loop too long.
The man steaming the floor
in a zombie mask
says ‘have a good night’
and I totter in high heels to the car,
the sky, no stars,
locked up in clouds.


Jane Frank (Queensland)

Vaccine

A small boy stacks blocks
on the surgery floor.
She gives his mother
a flu shot.
Its like this all day,
the pinpricks,
the swabbing,
the perfection of sterility.

Minutes before
it happened
her son was sitting
sorting pine cones
at her feet.

A June morning.
The clearing,
the mountain pool,
air astringent pine,
water’s surface
webbed in light,
his compact body floating,
as if in solution.


Jane Frank (Queensland)

Chine

You may be forgiven
for thinking that love
is a butcher's ritual: your body
starved and trembling, meat and bone,
both temple and sacrifice
for a devouring god,
a raw-eater, Bacchus with his teeth bared at your throat.
But you — the most wary of wild creatures
— you do not bare your teeth, and
you do not bite to break skin,
and you do not snap your jaws shut
like the steel trap at the heels
of the young flesh: meat
dripping with unpalatable bitterness
yet sweet enough on the tongue,
if carved thin.
You bare your throat to the stars —
back arched, spine a summit hewn of ivory
— and at daybreak you pull the knife from your gut
and leave your offering, in thirds, at my altar.


Shastra Deo (Queensland)

My Body

Wake me when the star jasmines bloom
and the turtledoves no longer hide in their leaves,
when I no longer find bleeding lines on my skin beautiful
and the empty rumbling in my stomach is no longer music.
Wake me when a size 12
clinging to curves is
gorgeous,
when it is delicious
that the muscular thoughts inside our skulls
determine who we are
instead of the length of our hair,
the width of our waist,
the height of our beauty.
Wake me when every bite that enters our lips
does not drown us in guilt,
when I can stay afloat and keep it in my stomach,
when I can eat it at all,
and when my ribs are not precious coins to count.
Wake me when the men cover themselves
if we must cover our beautiful bodies
like curtains on stained glass windows
to deter temptation.
Wake me when equality smells sweet,
when the star jasmines are in bloom
and the sap bleeds white and gooey from the stems.
Wake me when my body is mine,
but until then
let me sleep.


Taylor-Jayne Wilkshire (Queensland)

Semper vivum

Green little bodies, green little eyes.
Dead little snails. Dirt under nails.
Blue little buckets, blue little skies.
Dying little whales. Lying tattletales.
Red little princess, red little thighs.
Poison chemtrails. Strong ship, torn sails.
White, stained covers. White little lies.
Going off the rails. Overflowing jails.


L Parsons (15) (Queensland)