WA Poets Inc Creatrix 67 Poetry

Behind his hotel
Lenin spots
A pair of drawers
Fluttering from a tree,
Pink, lacey, unmistakably feminine!
How did they get there?
Bourgeoise or proletarian?
The pinkness and lace
Suggested bourgeoise.
But then the bourgeoise,
Of this strange
Antipodean land,
Purchased proletarian
Fealty through
Cheap luxuries.
Did this include
Pink, lacey drawers?
Lenin decided the matter
Worthy of further study.

Koorijee Warranup / Upper Warren, 22nd September 2024

Ananda Barton

Look up

I become bored reading
poems of broken love
that don’t sing to me

decide to close the book
stop reading the obscure
riddles, self-absorbed angst

idly, I turn one more page
find two lyrical odes that
dance and sing to me in

a Puccini of soaring melody.
A comet of colour and light
flashing a tail in the night sky

poems, not about the poet
but capturing the silvered
beauty of cascading rain

or the light, textures and
humanity of a photographer’s
subjects and landscapes

Yes, look out at the world.
Cease watering that withered
love with your tears

plant a new and vibrant rose, let
the green leaf unfurl, bring new
wonder to your days and nights.

Maria Bonar

Popping Clogs

I think about death, now I’m old. Will
my time run out before my wordly task
is done and I’ve achieved all I want?

None of my family has reached eighty
quietly expiring in their seventies.
Thankfully, none have ended up in
nursing homes, sans teeth, sans everything.

It’s customary for them to die in their own
beds, which is a fine family trait to follow.
I’m partial to my own queen bed and doona

If I hear time’s wingèd chariot approach
I’ll switch off my beloved electric blanket
don’t want my flesh to pre-cook at home
after my spirit drifts off to hell or heaven

and I’d like to look good in the casket, in case
anyone wants to kiss me goodbye, or stroke
my cheek fondly in that old-fashioned way

before they reunite me with my former
husband in Pinnaroo, in quiet consummation.
Won’t he be surprised?

Maria Bonar

lostnesses

one hundred chairs for sale
a box of rusting tools
seabirds in a howling gale
incinerator fuel

a candle flickers in the gloom
competing with the setting moon
the leader of an empty room
ponders his role in its doom

five clean dinner plates and knives

wilted herbs in pots once thrived
a ring of water where something dived
a million million lives

Mar Bucknell

A Response to the ‘No’ Vote

“It’s nullius”
we shout    alongside our ancestors.

And the words blast chasms
of vacuity within hearts as bleached
as droughted camels’ wind-
skinned bones while we sacrifice
the hopes of first nations peoples
upon primordial Uluru’s altar
drenching it with blood
as ‘blue’ as a November super moon.

Hopes to be excavated one day      perhaps
along with visions of an ideal country penned on
crumpled parchment by a suede-shoed integrity —

blushing red as a dwarf star       and massing
as negatively as that dark fluid cosmologists claim
explains that missing 95% of the universe

so that it skews our revolutions
with dusk-soft sighs     causing us
to wobble like lopsided planetoids
through a cosmos where our fables —
no longer stark white but a gritty
asteroidal grey — ignore the tramp
of shadows as vague and terrifying
as dystopian undead   baring spears

and whisper-weaving threads
of unforgotten histories into palls.

Peter Burges

What sense

then

in words, in life,

when mind veers
between the meters
of nanometric flickers
and galaxial sludge

only to be suckered
into a darkness
so profound
nothing escapes?

Not even an echo.

Peter Burges

The Skies That Shower Blessings

Beneath the skies that bear sweet falling stars,
Across oceans and mountains yet by far,
A sweet serenading music plays,
As stars shall fall onto earth’s acquiescing arms days;
A breath of life shall thrive by heaven’s call,
And thou shall witness a dandle with hands enthralled,
A sweet dance both feet shall ever make,
Before a crowd of the wilderness and sweet love’s lake;
Entwined before heaven’s grace and the beauteous earth,
As love’s walk gave a pavement’s birth,
And yet paved with glittering kindness and oceans of passion’s worth;
A gift of benevolence forever to lay,
Onto love’s grace and sweet circling day,
For bound forth sweet elating music,
Onto hands of time it shall frolic;
Forever from a wonderful day into the night…
Where both hands clasp tight…
And tonight…
Love from falling stars fall…
…and thus, shall endless be heaven’s call.

Sherry Caayupan

A Dr’s Day

A life of giving to others,
everyone says how good,
how kind and
thoughtful,
I am.

When I stop and listen,
slow,
my breathing,

I can understand this
expectation,

Even agree,

with a halt in my breath to look
inside

myself.

Each day feels like Brownian motion,
a set of collisions
that come at me from everywhere,
at any time,
in any direction.

I am also a Mother,
a wife,
a child of parents,
a friend
to
many.

I am Me,

Eddy Campbell

Night Marsupials

On the Strzelecki Track
fluttered strings of wind
needle the desert bee.

Pounding heat beats the sweat
from each pore, each mouth of parts
to swill dreams in the haze
as country consumes mile after mile.

The red earth pulsates hill after hill
in a repetition that mesmerises
stupefies as the land rolls
to an infinite horizon.

The elongated slash between
earth and sky that shimmers
in the midday haze, cools the evening
mood until it falls to black.

Within the immensity
there is a place, a space
for one heart beating the slow
rhythm of sunset/moonrise.

The collective collection of bones
that is ancestry in a country older
than old. Worn to featureless plains
plucked of trees, a place where scrub
is the rule and insects and marsupials

whisper with the wind
glare red eyes
in the trace of light.

Gary Colombo De Piazzi

not my place to name

kalari peek
over granite boulders
arrow-shaped heads
jaunty, keenly curious
scramble along black
and ochre pebbled crags
elegant tails flicking
pause like a photo pose

———————————————————-plump bellies, speckled
———————————————————-orange and brown
———————————————————-bodies, row of black-rimmed
———————————————————-dots along their spines, minute
———————————————————-scales on their fawn legs,
———————————————————-delicate toes
———————————————————-with finely-pointed claws

scatter and scamper
over knee-high
catchment walls concreted
into rock contours
funnelling rainfall
filling town dams below
pioneering defacement
another footprint
one hundred
thousand tourists each year
scale ancient stone cliffs
outnumbering reptiles.

Kathleen Dzubiel

Sanur Sunrise

Nusa Pernida sleeps like a lizard
comforted by a cumulous doona,
while tourists hypnotised by a wizard,
the Sanur sunset, lulled by its crooner
into a balmy Balinese stupor
abandon their mobile phones for a while
except for a few without a stupa*
accompanied by only a smile.

It’s an experience many won’t know,
cruelly confined in an internet cell,
media stunted, unable to grow
or to escape an AI induced hell.
..Perhaps I look through a boomer’s one eye,
missing so much as it passes me by?

*A pass used during Apartheid to confer legitimacy on non-white people in whites-only areas.

Derek Fenton

in the taxi home
time is still dewy on my skin
if the driver stopped
I might leap out
take the angled path
past pots of Bougainvillea

their stunted stumps
chopped into bonsai
like gnarled old men
with magenta udeng
in terracotta squats

by pass the foyer
race up the stairs
be changed in time for dinner
on the patio with an icy cocktail

a beachside breeze
secretive in the almond trees
red leaves falling
from squirrel paths
the moist warm wind
sharing scents of barbecue

I choose to dine on mahi mahi
with lemon and herbs
sweet pink prawns
dragged from the sea
not long before morning

when I awoke
to catch the plane
and hail the taxi
time still dewy on my skin

Ann Gilchrist

breakage

unbalanced in the kitchen cupboard
with a chip on your shoulder
I am too broken to sit at the table with you

you and your little, brittle white chip
a deglazed bite on your black rim
a nibble, a peck, a hastily banged spoon

too small a flaw to be thrown away
you carry a history of sorts
but a piece of you is lost

I am too broken to eat from you
and you retreat into a dark corner
low in the wobbly stack of things

Ann Gilchrist

——————-out, out into stillness
——-where the litter of one shot rum bottles
————————————–keeps me mulling.
——————————on the morrow, the moon will flesh
——————————————fully, smg as one.
——————-like a cloak, scent of mother sits on me.
———-oncology – correct number of syllables,
——————-vowelled end grinning without cadence.
———-I’m back walking the ward now,
————————————–not looking through doors,
——————-walking ‘neath the rain of fluorescence,
————————————-a hiss I won’t hear
———————————————-until I leave.
—————————-shards of imagery in rude
————————————————–sunlight –
—-wet hessian skin across the back of her hand,
————————————–taut where drip fits neat into
——————————————–vein, the feeding sea.
——————–rum bottles, 50 ml, the wrong feeding?
——————————out in stillness, an ache through me,
———————————————-like a jazz chord –
—————————————-minor ninth – unresolved.
———–piano notes decay and through the
———————haze of unthinking,
——————————instinct mood.
———————plastic decays, faux stained glass,
——————————-flotsam of crows.
———————————————-skin frays to kin,
——————————-the hour chosen

Kevin James Gillam

I ride the notes back to celebrations
when my children, in a simmer of excitement
unwrap gifts, then wade across the lounge room
through a litter of torn paper
to thank brother or sister
———with a kiss.
This part was my gift.

Playing Christmas with Conniff followed by The Chipmunks
——–was mandatory then, and it kept our place
——–as reliably as a book mark, as every year we plunged back in
where we’d left off the previous one
——–and everyone remembered their lines.

These days we have Michael Bublé and Celine Dion
——–to reliably carry us back. Gift exchange is
secondary now; mostly it’s memories
we love to hand out against coloured lights
——–and songs we never tire of.
But it’s the tinsel of memory and the baubles of optimism
——–that every year most prominently
——–decorate our recall of the last season,
and our anticipated welcome
——–of the next.

Fran Graham

Some things you don’t want to return
while others make impressions
that stay with you
as a type of fossil imprint
of where you’ve been.

Like me and my African uni mate
standing amid Pinocchio’s nightclub
midnight crowd after a Joe Cocker
Concert in July ‘77 Google tells me

and at one point a tall man was exiting,
pushing his purpose through the crowd
as I stepped backwards and behind him
came Joe Cocker looking as worn
as those long chorus lines.

I backhanded my friend in the chest
That’s Joe Cocker! I cried, pointing
and then my words were left behind
as we raced after him and his bodyguard,
through the front door to his limousine.

Joe was pulling faces in the back seat
with a couple of girls and we called out
and banged on his window repeatedly
until Joe gave the driver the nod
to open the window and let my words
flood the inside Great concert Joe!

and thrust my hand forward
as if sharing a joint
which he took, saying Thanks mate
and my friend did the same.

I later thought, I came that close
to one of my Rock idols and yet
may have never been without inspiration
taking the first step to where
second thoughts had yet to be.

Mike Greenacre

There was a boy who refused
to eat bone
sizzled with spuds
and pumpkin beside the lamb.

He liked drumsticks, chewed chops
sucked the marrow from osso bucco
but not white, stripped bare bone,
exposed root, the unnerving touch.

Halloween bones, skeleton fingers
dangled in your face in the dark
as he swept past cobwebs
through screams on the Ghost Train.

Now a man who likes parsnip, but won’t eat it –
shuns all from the underworld–
in his pan beside the roasting flesh puts zucchini,
golden pumpkin, capsicum, fragrant fennel.

Jenifer Hetherington

Who stands at the bottom
when all starts falling down?
Who is it waits far below,
holding the net, waiting, waiting?
Does he know the moment?
Can he tell with precision
when the scissors
cut the thread?
Nothing is left
to hold, to climb, to hang.
So much unknown, not even vague speculation,
uncertain of everything.
The path was
always upwards, sometimes hard, often cruel.
Others shoved aside for no reason, only standing in the way.
Is this the journey:
no hallelujah, no victor’s laurel,
only curses from those
along the roadway,
bitter and broken, the ones who went before,
not wanting any other to succeed?
And so the wheel turns,
spinning around, around,
the circle relentlessly diminishing,
the cord tightening, choking.
The hangman calls, calling my bluff.
How long can I hold my breath?
And you with some of the scrip,
playing my hand in laughs, hoping to have the last one.
Hold them or fold them:
should I walk away
or run in desperation?
But you can’t escape
the Oracle’s prophecy.
I’ll sit at the table for one more round.
Deal the cards, I’m already damned.
Day breaks, light comes.
All is new one more time.
The pattern is persistent, reliable.
It’s what goes on in the interval
between sunrise and moonrise
which is confounding and sad,
which throws goodness away.

In the days after days of my life,
I remember only fragments
of the promise repeated each morning.
My time is insistently upended.
The choices between multiple possibilities
are mostly errors of judgment,
mistakes going in, failures on exit.
And yet I wake each dawn
to find I’ve been made another offer.
This morn calls out boundless hope
to seize the day, hold on tight,
let go the ties of caution.
Except one:
don’t look for trouble,
believing it inevitably comes.
Don’t look back!

Ruari Jack Hughes

Winsor & Newton*The Synaesthesia Range

I sang a sour song once
Lemon Yellow it was

Once, under hellfire sun, stranded on a rock I saw a bird
And it was Zinc White

I read a book once, very slowly, it took almost a year
Green it was

Once I almost drowned in The Med
I swallowed merde avec French Ultramarine

Have you ever listened to a poem and not heard its colour?
Though it would sound swell in Puce

Hear this just once
And you’ll think Tangerine

Ross Jackson

*Winsor & Newton is a manufacturer of Artist’s paints

black scaled, I glisten,
slithering serpentine, deep in a growth
of shaggy grass and rampant weed.
My forked tongue tests the air.
I anticipate your footfall.
I have no arms and hands
with which to protect myself,
no legs and feet with which to run.

I slide upon my belly
along the ground, keeping low.
I must be ready.
If I’m seen, unexpected,
you may raise your club or gun
or maybe you will run.

We first encountered one other
a long, long time ago,
under the tree of knowledge
of good and evil,
that meeting not forgot.
Millennia of mutual avoidance
have since passed.
Still you misunderstand me
and i remain wary of you.

peter knight

Always alert,
avid for news,
he’s a nosey-poke.
Sharp eyes,
bright with watching,
beak, poking into everything,
probing and prodding
other people’s business.
He snatches
at worms of information,
tasty tit-bits bolted down,
gulped in haste,
each snippet adding spice.
He makes a meal of them,
persisting, until
the slivers of secrets, the deceit,
the scraps hidden in shadows,
are totally consumed.
Lately,
he’s noticed a foul taste,
a rancid bitterness
lingering in his mouth,
loitering in his mind.
Dug in so deep,
he’s mired himself in muck,
mouth smeared, stained by filth.
Barely able to swallow, barely able to breathe,
he’s suffering from moral indigestion.

Veronica Lake

The fox got into
my chook pen.

I ran for the rifle
loaded quick bullets.

Air split with
squawk and flutter,

flash of the rooster’s
plumage, spurs ready.

Two hens lay dead
one, my favourite red.

The fox flinging himself
at the wire fencing,

plume of his red brush
magnificent!

I aimed for his heart,
shot two bullets at a tree.

Mardi May

The Weather Man

My father was a weather man, kept a
length of kelp dangling by the door,
its resilience, his daily barometer.

He sensed a shift in wind as keenly
as a bird feels the air with its wings.
A mashed potato man who relished the
comfort of cumulus; a fisherman who
delighted in the sight of a mackerel sky.

Yes, he was a weather man who well
could read his wife’s impending storms.

Mardi May

I have seen you grip the neck
of bronzed surfer gods, teeth
tight around the chakra of the self.

You, who feeds at night,
devouring salted sponge,
you beast, encased in beauty.

Your shell resembles a mouth,
a spiral coil that wraps
to hide your juvenile whorls.

Your fleshy cloak, a mantle
that extends from both sides
of your toothed slit.

You have been revered
as tender, used as coin.
Economies have been built on you.

You are
the empty nest,
the artefact, the jewel.

When the surfer laughs
at my joke, I imagine you,
all tongue, licking tan from his skin.

Scott-Patrick Mitchell

The new girl can’t tell wheat from oats or barley,
her Irish skin fried in the sun first week,
but she’s not browned off yet.
They all stop at the pub after work, words got round
it’s like the boat’s come in to this outback town,
trying their luck with the colleen called Eimear.

They struggle to pronounce her name tag,
laughing blokes with dust-stained caps and fluro shirts.
She struggles to remember their names flying fast
across the bar, but she pulls a pint with flair,
no worries, she’ll get there soon enough.

She’s not the first to try her luck braving heat and flies
or the lonely moan of the haulage trains
clattering up the snakelines of rail, stopping traffic
on the one road in and out.
Now she’s ridden in trucks bigger than a council flat
in Dublin and battered away offers of moonlit
rounds in endless paddocks inside a header.

Sooner or later some bloke will woo her sweetly,
she’ll join the hockey club and run sausage sizzles,
their kids will turn up at kindy.
Her arms have tanned and she”ll take the
new barmaid, from Dun Laoghaire, under her wing while
the trains roll through and the lads line up again.

Virginia O’Keeffe

The boy grew up with feathers in his beak
and as he grew to man, all flowing clots
of haemoglobin turned to viscous chlorophyll.

Between the two he perched, then sat, rooted
finally in earth so wound it felt like tumbling
into a vat at the Show where magicians spun

hot sugar until, like a spider’s breath, it
narrowed to fairy floss – or garden webbing.
In the early mornings these silken threads

had been laced to droplets by overnight dew,
had morphed to catching both wet and moth,
held lessons for breathing, spinning, being.

These fine wisps of other finally made the man,
let his former blood run free to catch and hold
oxygen from engulfing atmospheres, enabled

metabolic processes to run and churn inside
his singularities. The green parts of his life
played similar roles, took in carbon dioxide,

spun that with water sucked from rooted, turned
it into complex molecules: sugars, proteins, lipids.
These chemicals make his brain spin, a vertigo.

A man once told me that you reap what you sow,
but I’m not sure. I just don’t know if the bodies
of my various selves, have ever sown or reaped

selves enough for enabling a hidden self to show.

Allan Padgett

Opportunity Cost of Buying Things For War

$1.3 billion for 200 (two hundred, not two thousand) Tomahawk missiles –
from the insatiably insane & rapacious l’Amerika.
Cheap at half the price: a minor rocket for only $6,500,000.
Made by Raytheon Technologies. Skin crawls & shingles cuts in hard.
They blast & roar & fly for 1500 kilometres, then shred a target.
China? Indonesia? A Tomahawk shot from Darwin could land on
Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, Sulawesi, PNG or Cape Tribulation.

Fire 200 & the cleanup cost closes in on close to zero – it’s all stones
& dust. $1,300,000,000. If a house in the burbs can be built
for around, say, half a mil – then start counting the cost of not.
Rough as guts, but around 2,600 new houses. Just guessing,
but that would take some pressure off the lack of stock & likely
save a lot of lives worth living. Or, $50 for every living Australian.
Not worth counting the dead & gone; they don’t give a fig for saving.

Hmm, beginning to look like a bargain. Add the $800,000,000 for
high mobility rocket launchers, and around 60 extended-range
anti-radiation guided missiles for a mere $430,000,000 – the total
cost for all of this eclipsing thunder plugs in with spark & raging fear
at a mere $123,000,000 & the number of houses pops to around
another 2,460. Not enough to stay the accommodation crisis, but
somehow this total count of around 5,060 houses starts to make
a lot of sense. Question for the decision-makers:

Who the hell are we gonna bang anyway, & why?
A sobering thought if we get too tough: China would torch
the hair & skin off every living thing in Australia if we hit fire.
1983’s WarGames led to thermonuclear war. Just sayin’.

Allan Padgett

Aerodrome at Maylands 1942 Settina

Maylands they called it back from
days during the War. Our train
puffed past, up the hill between
river and planes. The river
between obscured as smoke puffed.
Trains, didn’t save us those days—
from dread warplanes nothing may!

November, 2024

Glen Phillips

Photograph of a place
that deceptively seems like yesterday.
Where vowels are remembered as soft and open
and everything is covered in sugar-dust.
Three generations of a family
artfully arranged on two tiers of steps
smiling into the camera lens.
Lips closed eyes straight ahead.
Hiding what was said before and after.

Elena Preiato

Before I go, just a few parting words
of special thanks to the countless
fellow-travellers who’ve stayed with me
through thick and thin, for better or et cetera,
playing vital parts in my welfare
though we’ve never formally met: the whole
host of nano-Lilliputian denizens
busy maintaining the Brobdingnag of my body —
which, being in turn their host,
bountiful provider of food and shelter,
ensures the benefits are mutual.
I’d like to say I’ll sorely miss
their jam-packed microbial company;
but consciousness, it seems,
can hardly survive my imminent demise.
As for them, they’ll manage ok, no doubt.
Bacteria, viruses, archaea, fungi,
the teeming mass of colonisers will begin,
the moment I leave, to work on my recycling
till only teeth and lonely bones remain.
Can’t really complain, because right up to now
we’ve always been one another’s
staff of life. They’ve gorged greedily on me
while I’d have been lost without them long ago
and they’re now my sole material legacy.
So cheerio to them all, and best of luck!

Ian Reid

Thoughts on a Treadmill

I hear it at night. This nocturnal pest,
an unexpected guest, persistent
scratching, now in my head.
Just like a rat, to bother me,
pitch black at 3.00am.
Incisors chewing the
fabric of my thoughts.
I lie awake, anticipate the noise
that some nights never comes.
Silence now disturbs my sleep.

Sunrise breaks, the black
dog barking outside wanting in,
the black rat inside, gnawing away.
I keep it at bay, occasionally
seeing it, when I’m moping
around the house, always there,
showing itself somewhere, around
a corner, behind a wall.
How easily it slips through a crack.

William I Reid

an afternoon’s meditation
enhanced by the gentle notes of Satie
played quietly on a piano
as I sit
comfortable
relaxed
at peace with myself
and others whose persona
seems to drift
slowly leaving their bodies
to mingle amongst the rafters
looking down on the feeling of serenity
which no words interrupt
as the verses of music
dissolve and remove
the insoluble issue within me

a wayward son who was to come
again shrugs me away
his disdain biting deeply into my core
already badly frayed by repeated rejection
but the music plays
and as I listen
absorbing the atmosphere
the tranquillity
he moves away
drifts to an outer orbit
a place of insignificance
and although I know
he will penetrate that core again
the future a facsimile of the past
there is now the strength
a resilience
which enables me
to repeat in my mind ‘fuck you’
and more significantly mean it this time

the quiet has cleared my mind
the issue floats away on the strains of a piano
replaced by the knowledge
I am strong
and whilst what I thought I needed
may not be
I will be alright

Barry Sanbrook

i
Sunday morning detonates—
pieces of shrapnel scattered
in a cacophony of
mowers, blowers, and trimmers—
those tenuous moments of hush
before nine slashed with a pull cord.

ii
Peace lives here—among the dunes,
in the froth of sea on sand—
burning feet and aching thighs
seem too small a sacrifice.
God be damned—there’s not a soul
in this world but the ocean and me.

iii
My finger bones in x-ray—
sunlight filtering through flesh—
neutrinos carve through slices
of cells and DNA while
a mouse plays dickory dock
with the corpse of a dandelion…

Jill Taylor Neal

Salt

Gentlest lover—she laps
at my throat, fills my skin
with the salt of her being,
her fury receding,
advancing,
receding—

dissolving the air between us…

The essence of me is the essence of her—

her undulation lulls me
into her back and forth,
tugs me from my moor,
drags me into her depths,
fills my lungs—each inward breath

a new drowning as I drown
in the burning salt of her being.

Gentlest lover—she steals me
into her to-n-fro,

devours,
reshapes,
reclaims

the essence of my essence…

Jill Taylor Neal

I grew up in a desert that is unredeeming
Why would I hesitate to leave this place
I see that there is a door at desert’s edge
Now is my chance to find something else

I go out into a tropical rainforest
The canopy looks like suitable protection
There is a steady rain I am soaked anyway
A thin fellow in a dazzling body suit
Offers to give to me a new worldview
I admit that I have an interest in this
He says I must leave but I’m not ready
I don’t know enough he wishes me luck

He points to another door I go reluctantly
It takes me into a square a hundred people
Dressed in grey slacks blue blazers red ties
Shoulder to shoulder almost touching
Most are talking loudly on cell phones
I am propelled into a tall office building
The elevator button for the top floor
Is labeled DOOR and I desperately want out
It takes me onto the roof high in the sky
Another door I run for it wherever it goes

Now a small room with a small window
A small kitchen a small bed a place to sit
The fellow in the dazzling body suit is here
I was hoping for a fine house I can see it
It has a long open front porch a swing
Wife and kids inside mortgage is paid
Saving nicely for retirement at 65
I ask where is the door to my dreams
He says he has no more doors for me

He tells me to make my own worldview
Find my own damn doors

Thomas Smith

Your Deal

We are at
the VFW Hall
playing cards
for pennies
Another Vet
comes over
and asks me
how long I have
I think he’s
asking about
my cancer
so I say
No one really knows

The doctor told a friend he had six months and he’s
still going a year later but then they say my cancer
is pretty aggressive that’s the word they use and they
aren’t hopeful but I can still get here and play cards

And the guy
says Man I’m
really sorry
I didn’t know
I wondered
how long
before you
have to leave
Tonight
I need a ride home
But I’m in no hurry

Neither should you be
I’m in, your deal

Thomas Smith

(“The Mucks” was a popular swimming spot on the banks of the Swan River, East Perth)

Deep green river hairs
with brown moustaches
line the riverbank.
Scent of oyster shell
cast along the shore.

Brown mottled mud crabs
scuttle and tip-toe into
hidden mud-caves.
Mother tortoise laden
with green algae
paddles up Claise Brook,
fleeing children who
splash and squelch
in mud pools.

Exuberantly wading and
reaching for clear water.
Bare feet slice through
the ooze and slip
of centuries of river mud.

Swirls and streaks of silt
stream and pour
with the river flow.
Kids scream and shrills
of delight pierce the
musty scent of mud.
Freedom on a joyous summer’s day.

Michael Stevens

The old photo is black and white,
enlarged in my imagination –
a table number scribbled on the back.
It’s me and a boy, his arm around me.

He’s no one special. Not a date,
just a friend of someone we know,
here on a spare nightclub ticket.
After tonight, I never see him again.

My smile is nervous, eyes wide
in the candlelight. On the table
are two cocktail glasses. Smoke
drifts up from cigarettes in an ashtray.

I have shoulder length curing hair
despite my efforts to straighten it.
With glasses replaced by contacts,
I feel different, somehow exposed.

I’m wearing my favourite dress.
In the absence of colour
it looks plain, not something
to wear on a big night out.

I remember that was the year
of the blue jersey fit and flare dress,
a perfect colour, just want I wanted,
on sale at a now extinct store.

Today the dresses are stunning –-
nothing like mine. I study the photo,
remembering that night, a blue dress,
and the beautiful girl who wore it.

Maggie Van Putten
________________________

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Creatrix 67 Poetry

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