A sample of poems from my first two books, and one from the collection-in-progress.
Please contact me first if you want to copy them or print them out or use them in some way – I will almost always say yes, but there are some situations where I will not. If nothing else, I’d love to know where the poems are finding their readers.
Enjoy!
Hysteria
says the magazine he looks up from,
claims one passenger on average every
couple of hundred flights. My fears
are stowed in the overhead locker,
clenched in zippered teeth.
Jet fuel is twenty-percent lighter than water,
and burns at eight hundred degrees,
the magazine man tells me, and laughs,
smelling of barbecue sauce.
There’s a stain the shape of Africa on his tie,
which tells me that no woman loves him.
Long-distance commercial passenger flights
typically cruise at nine hundred k’s,
three-quarters the speed of a bullet.
Victorian ladies pursed pins in their lips
when travelling through railway tunnels
to guard against strangers trying
to kiss them in the dark.
The grass beside the runway is sparse
and straggly, like his hair.
Taxiing now. It feels like late summer
afternoons in the old ute,
bumping along the river flat
with a bale of hay in the back.
He’s speaking again, but I keep
my eyes on the road ahead.
published in Landfall
Galanthus in rain
Soft rain bends the necks of winter flowers –
penitents in white veils and green blouses,
meek beneath the copper beech that towers
like a magistrate. And all my powers
of persuasion cannot alter how this
grim gallows-verdict falls: you are now hers.
Shapeless as salt water, thirty hours
since you left. Who knew we were such cowards?
– good wine set aside until it sours.
The house fills with rain. And I allow this.
published in tumble, (OUP, 2021)
Lydia of the Lace Doilies
Of course, she always had hordes of lovers—
so whenever I saw her, fat and placid
termite-queen of the nursing home
I imagined her naked, lying
on a bed of animal fur,
small
moustachioed men, smelling
of horses and sweat and woodsmoke
taking turns to lose themselves
in her plump white breasts,
her eyes closed, her full-blown
rose lips
parting and unparting.
published in The Summer King, (OUP, 2009)
A Dark Feathered Art 