Inhale

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Elaine Kelly

poisoned bladder
ash tray
stopped clock
dead air

a screen door
is smacking a
metal frame,
sounding
a death rattle

a screen door
is smacking a
metal frame,
sounding
a death rattle

a screen door
is smacking a
mental frame,
sounding
a death rattle

street lights
parked cars
hills hoist
dead night

a broken
kitchen tap,
drips its water
hitting
a steel basin

freeze frame
still image
flash broken
red eye

a woman is
smoking;
her lips kiss
the butt
she sucks in
deep
breathes out long

sucks in deep
breathes out long
her lips
kiss the butt
she sucks in deep
breathes out
long

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

To Sana Solia the Sand Princess

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn
you bubbled as the salt crept into freshwater lenses,
wind wrenching the iron roof
wailing, gurgling storms
drowning
grief

grain
by
grain

oceanic breath
breaking over the shore
whispering inhaling exhaling us.
it echoes the name of the old princess
as it erases the prehistory of the archipelago;
it swallows us, leaving a smear of sand
at the mouth of the coastal atolls
washing away the evidence
of monsoons, mushroom clouds, dances, Micronesia

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

Supermarket

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Lucy Mitchell
Painful fluorescent light is the first thing you realise
It numbs the noise for a second or so
Then that arrives too
Rushes into your ears
Disturbs the depths of your soul

You wish she would stop staring
But she is everywhere
In all the windows
In all that gloss and shine and noise
A lie of perfection, she fits into this place of deceit

Trolleys whirl, an appendage of the people
Filled with not needed things
A child screams
Maybe they see it too
Luckily children only disturb their parents

Mass purchases of drones shape the economy
With more noise
More purchases of water in plastic
I think I saw bananas wrapped in plastic
Maybe they were the ones being thrown out

Don’t be dramatic, this place is not a warzone
Just the cascade of convenient consumption
But that diamond sparkles with the memory of someone who died for it
And the red of that bargain shirt is coloured
by the child’s blood that seeped secretly into it

And below us the earth quickly burns.

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

Freeman of the Embassy

Posted on February 1, 2019 by RP Stoval

Has anyone heard of Jimmy Clements?
I did as I drank coffee from a chipped mug
Aunty sitting in a broken office chair
Her feet splayed on the dusty ground
The fire is low but the heat
Mirrors the fervour in her eyes.

In the parliamentary triangle
A fire burns
Hegemonic history says since 1972
But I heard another tale
And I watched as the proof
was scattered, charred and lost.

Burnt, crumpled photos
and yellowing newspapers
swept away in the same
inexorable wind
that tried to scatter the people
but could not.

Has anyone heard of Jimmy Clements?
I did as I gathered twigs for the fire
Surrounded by tributaries
Of concrete and metal
An ancient undertaking
In a modern world.

In 1927 parliament house was opened
The duke and duchess of York attended
Their finery and pomp
A cavalcade of wealth
Met a barefoot man
And his loyal dogs.

Has anyone heard of Jimmy Clements?
The Duke did when he met him
Acknowledging Jimmy’s sovereignty
Of the stolen land they stood upon
A sideshow to the ceremony
But no less weighty for all that.

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

Domestic Violence

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Sophie Parente

the vicious cycle
perpetrator to victim
victim to perpetrator
normality
an abomination
one woman a week dies
spitting words like daggers
intentions
malicious
designed strategically to inflict pain

It looks like
obsessive love
an intense man
volcanic
in eruptions of
love and hate
a thousand repeated threats
abandonment
worthlessness
a thousand repeated I’m sorry
unconditional forgiveness
issues of dependency

I am educating
young people
topic discussion
major issues of society
caution
sensitive
only one girl
knows
the real-life issues
Hozier’s video of Cherry Wine
strikes a puncture of realisation
resulting in a
mirror reflection

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

Rites of Passage

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Victoria McGrath

You are a piece of shattered peace, a maelstrom
scattering the fragments of your childhood
wildly on the wind.
And now
you’ve claimed your adolescence like a rainwash,
sweeping both of us down slopes of saneness
‘til rock-bottom seems a target
that we’re never going to reach.

But this isn’t really about puberty,
your ripening,
those hormones brooding you in moodiness
and thunderbolts
and bite.
Nor birthing,
the queerness of my belly’s sudden emptiness,
the way my foreign body
so readily transfigured
whimpers into milk.

This is about
your first external storm,
the one that howled a tantrum
through gnashing gums outside.
You clung to me, my umbilicus. I thrilled to hear
your breath grizzling my ear, your head nestled
tight in that concavity
where shoulder meets the neck,
a niche so vulnerable
that it doesn’t have a name.

And this is about
your first steps,
when you were in such a rush
to be everywhere at once
that you weaned your neediness with bruises
and broken bones:
it scared me that everyone would think
I’d battered you,
as you proudly itemised your battle blemishes,
the mnemonics you’ll always list upon your skin.

This is about wanting to push fast-forward:
to confirm that all those yesterdays
of I don’t know,
and later on,
and maybe, maybe, maybe,
and close the bloody door,
will form a healthy scab; that we’ll both recall
the delicate cord we used to share, the melody
of syncopated hearts,
the effort of letting go;
that one day you’ll be content to carry
a little bit of me around with you.

And I will touch that precious hollow
that doesn’t have a name
and remember how it feels
to hold someone you love
when the world roars.

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

Household Accounting

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Madeleine Dale

isn’t like departmental budgeting
at all.
No amount of funding pie-chart
will turn the lights back on
if you don’t have the five-digit password
to the email account
where the bills are. There is very little
put aside for guns. Coffee
cannot be bought in bulk, in barrel
drums like bombs,
without a business number or official
credit card. When someone dies
everything in their name
stops.
Per capita per annums readjust but
they don’t tell you where
the rent money came from, or even
how much it was. Not the wi-fi
or Netflix passwords, not the code
for the safe. Nothing
can re-fill the quota, the profitability,
the efficiency matrix—
the space in the garage, the cup
of tea gone cold on the counter, the heart
half empty.

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

patterns of abuse

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Pascalle Burton

Source texts: Sheridan, D.J. and Nash, K.R., 2007, ‘Acute Injury Patterns of Intimate Partner Violence Victims’, Trauma Violence Abuse, vol.8, pp.281–289, and Simplicity pattern 9219, 1970.

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

Waking in the Blue

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Maria Takolander

Addressed to Robert Lowell

The night attendant at the service station, garishly lit
when I had thought the world extinguished,
pumps $10 of fuel into our tank.
My plastic moneybox looks childish in the car’s backseat,
but the silver coins that spill from its plughole
perform an unexpected magic.
My mother has nothing, and I see how much it matters.
She parks the Toyota on the side of the highway beneath some gums,
their white trunks streaked by the comets of passing cars.
My sister and I have my favourite blanket, gilded with synthetic stars.
At break of day we enter the police station in our dressing gowns.
Two faceless men escort us home
where gravity has finally pulled everything down.
On the carpet are light fittings; the vacant box of the TV;
the roots of plants forced from hiding;
drawers and their contents (folded maps, loosened photographs);
volumes of an encyclopaedia, their hardbacks torn off.
A more comprehensive list is not necessary.
In truth, my room is not as damaged as I want it to be.
My sister’s has been carefully destroyed.

My father is discovered in his bed, eccentric and confused
as one of your old-timers.
But the police know to stay, while my mother picks through the debris
for a bankbook and some clothes, and then
the men in blue lead us away.
There is a brick house with bars on every window.
A room stuffed with bunks and a cumbersome wardrobe.
At the kitchen table, women stub ashen cigarette after cigarette
into a tin ashtray, battered as the moon,
playing show-and-tell with scars, picking over the ruins.
My sister has faith in another miracle of creation.
But I am a child, not a visionary, and I see our mother
has already surrendered to the diabolical romance of return.
My father, cleanly shaven, stands at the door.
Inside, the furious pull of the earth has gentled again,
allowing the furniture—what was left of it—to right itself.
The place looks enough like our home
and our father’s naked face enough like contrition.
We restore our toothbrushes to the bathroom shelf
where our father’s glistening razor sits.

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

Blood In The Kija Sand

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Nola Gregory

If you were still alive today
And I could sit and talk with you
What would you tell me Great Nan?
Would you reveal something new?
There’s not much we know about you
Just that of your violent death
Was there blood in the Kija Sand?
As you took your dying breath
We would love to learn your story
To find out who you were
Not just “Maggie Full Blood”
As it was written, without a care
But day after day we hunger
And year after year we look
And search through worn out pages
And in every historical book
But if I could just sit and talk with you
Just a little, little while
Would you tell me your broken story?
And would I be angry and wild
I know some hearts would be mended
We have cried for so very long
To hear of your Kija story
The Country to which you belong
There’s blood in the Kija sand
It trickles through every grain
It’s the heart cry of our fallen
To a ghostly white skinned stain
It is a permanent reminder
Of a past full of blood and heat
And it is there as proof to all
That history should never repeat

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

You Left

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Emma Darragh

I can’t pretend I can’t sleep
to get up and interrupt you
anymore
You’re not on the walls
or in the bathroom drawer
You don’t pour
milk into my mug
Dad does
(he adds extra Quik)
but he can’t
ponytail my hair
or boil breakfast eggs
You’re not cutting
carrots into sticks
or standing
like a thumb
in the mix
of other mothers
at the school gate
You left
empty shelves
where your books used to be
I don’t hear the kettle
boiling for your tea
I don’t hear you
singing at the sink
pink lips and rubber gloves
I can’t dip my fingers
in the suds
I can’t see
your curly words
on permission
slips
or on lunchbox lovenotes
underneath my ham and cheese
You don’t put
your hands
on your hips
You took your dresses
and
you left us
in boxes
Your voice
is on the end
of the phone
When you come home
you kiss me with
chewing-gum breath
leave
a lipstick print
on my cheek
And then you leave
I can still smell your perfume neck

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

Paleontology Archeology

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Mike Ladd

At twelve, I wanted to be a paleontologist
digging up bones in the paddocks round here,
easing a scythe of jaw from the creek bank –
not Diprotodon, but horse. Still,
I remember the thrill carrying it home
through that raw suburb, layered now in my mind.

Those strange creatures that evolved there:
Mr F. tuning his finicky engines,
Mrs H. axing the heads off chooks
their beaks still gaping on the bloody stump,
Mr B., a grey floppy hat among bean rows,
Mrs P. parading in her negligee
and beating her son with a hose.

In bed at night I pegged ancient shallow seas,
looking for life stamped in stone,
the dream coins of fossil joy.
And now there’s not enough time,
I want another go –

Digging under this new estate,
a chaconne of grey mortgages,
I would excavate the swamp that was here:
a gift of water where blue cranes
teetered into their westering
and the moon behind them rose from the weeds.

I would sort and classify those sounds:
the dour claxon of the crane,
the crickets and frogs still calling
from the storm drain.

Shall I dig further?
Past the middens of the Kaurna,
proving their earlier claim,
exposing old theft and murder.

Where is my heartland?
What if I dug clear through the earth,
emerging in Skara Brae,
that Orcadian flint in my family?
What if I climbed from the harbour at Kirkwall,
entered that shop with the soundless bell,
stood at the bench where great-grandfather Flett
finesses ships’ chronometers and doesn’t look up?
His clock faces stilled to stone.

Would these people want me back?
Should one lie down with ancestor bone?

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

Widower

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Ron Pretty

in the sink his hands
his weathered palms
he barely breathes
at flowers springing into bloom
bursting into fruit
a love he can’t deny
scratching in the dirt
bloodied feathers
he barely notices
and the dread that’s risen in him
crossing his path
sliding under the house
the book lies open
the only comfort
still in the water
the unwashed dishes
as he stares unseeing
at buds on the trees
his back aches as it always does
broken eggshells scattered and
in their pen the hens
piled against the fence
his eyes are blurred by tears
unseeing he watches
a red bellied black
behind him on the table
words underlined in red
for his fallen face
Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

Hoop Girl

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Andy Kissane

As the trishaw rolls to a stop,
I spy a girl standing on the footpath
in Rue Catinat, near the Continental,
twirling a hoop around her midriff,
spinning it with enough torque to hold it up—
the supple undulations of her stomach
propelling it round and round.
A dark curtain of black hair falls
across her face as the bracelets
on her wrists catch the sun. For a moment,
I see Mai in her nightgown as she runs
into our bedroom and leaps
at the mosquito net, tumbling across the bed,
all veiled and twisting, her giggles
announcing her presence like a pealing bell.

I have a sudden urge to throw a handful
of coins at this girl to buy her hoop,
even if I have to pay more than ten times
its worth so I can send it to my daughter.
But I can’t post it to Hanoi.
And what if she doesn’t remember me?
I haven’t explained my absence, why
I left in the middle of the rainy season,
how one evening I was lifting her up
to light the sticks of sandalwood incense
before our ancestor shrine and the next
day I had fled. She laughed when we saw
the sandpipers at Haiphong, wading
on the mudflats, their long bills
darting into the water like chopsticks
immersed in a steaming soup.
The sandpipers fly south to escape
the winter, before returning.
Yet two winters have now passed
since I last held my daughter.

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

It Starts Small, Just a Slight

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Colleen Baran

a quick burst that flies out
through the room
just a slight
ruffling
of your dress, your hair

so quick you’re not sure
what it was
you look up, look
around, but it’s still
he’s still, the window’s
closed off
it’s nothing
you must have imagined it

later,
it builds up, a gust
to a buffet
later,
he changes
form
shaking the door
rattling pictures

the after
shocks
knocking over books
breaking your coffee cup

you can feel it
in your bones
but it’s over so fast

he says you’re just
too sensitive

he says
you’re a lot of things
and you think it’s just
you

until one day
the earth slides beneath you
walls tilt inward
plaster begins to crack
and open in deep rents
chunks of wall barely miss your eye
as fronts slide away

you’d try hiding under the table
but it’s in pieces
too

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

I am (eschewing this room)

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Carl Walsh

the pane is cold to touch as I lean
searching the garden with starved eyes

are you in the vegetable patch
or among the rhododendrons?

breathing life into them.

can a garden feel lost?
neglected? alone? betrayed?

& this kitchen / the disorder
of the refrigerator hidden behind white facade

the smells of you / uncooked food
the unmade mess

is that the ghost of you in the corner
(staring out in windowless pain)?

I can’t bring myself to leave this doorway
& empty the dishwasher

packed with your hands.

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

when there is no more hair left to raze

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Metal Femme

drones whoosh past adobe towers.
they are black as some
villagers’ hair,
shining like freedom.
drones serve daily reminders
of a justice
the occupied are alien to.

militaries are ushered
by silky yarns of missiles to
tear hair off mothers
like trees off the land,
to pluck follicles of pleas
from the root upward.
they are at ease pinpointing,
precisely jabbing,
to swirl pools of blood
on mother earth’s scalp
and to leave civilians
pearling at the bottom,
invisible to the capital eye.

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

Kin

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Sue Peachey

I.

Those bitches at school can get fucked now
I’m an actress, I’ve made something of my life

lives alone in a bush hut without electricity
rats run over the food she leaves lying around
bags of clothes and a loaf of mouldy bread
stashed under the porch

fifteen hundred kilometres from Invercargill to Picton
takes the ferry, misses the connection in Rotorua
loses her bag forever in Tauranga
arrives frayed and worn as an intercity bus tyre

above our heads gulls sweep low along the beach
the sound of the ocean and rhythm of the waves
does little to lift the swelling angst –
was her medication in the bag?

a cosy room, clean sheets and comfy bed
hot roast dinner with all the trimmings
she devours it, takes a second helping
You’ve always been mean to me

she pecks at my crumbling composure
with therapists’ jargon
Are you sure you wanted to pick me up?
Did you have an issue with that?

buses to Auckland to catch her flight to London
leaves her passport under the bed in Nelson
the jumbled suitcase overweight with essentials
false boobs, high heels and beauty treatments

II.

she’s eight, we watch Fantasia for the third time that day
hiding behind the couch, her eyes wide
the Easter bunny a tormenter
at the fair she screams for silence

she’s a teenager, won’t touch door handles
Towels have a lot of bacteria
on the train the panicked call to Nan
she doesn’t know where she is

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

Charybdis

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Olga Dermott

i.
Your face sometimes does that key change:
no one else can hear it, but I feel the floor sticky
with tired arguments that I’ve only just mopped up.

I turn away to the sink, where the water in
this dishrag smells of old bleach, its straightjacket
stale and stiff by tomorrow if I wring it tight.

Most of the time these days I stay mute, lips as tight
as an empty washing line, shoulders slumped beneath
the plughole, drinking dirty whirlpools, waiting

for the next slammed door you bring home.
My jaw concrete, fillings cracked, leaking
stale washing up liquid at the back of my throat, yet –

ii.

I feel it coming. The day I let these photo frames
be clouded with someone else’s bruises, watch
the tarnish bloom like dusty grapes in front of me

while I find my new reflection upside down,
swimming, stretched, in silver teaspoons,
clattering my ideas awake against my teeth –

I will hear scratching behind the kitchen cupboard
grow to an insistent clamour, then sink my
plumb line tongue, roaring deep, so you understand

what it is to be me. I will feel the water crash –
that moment when I smash these plates as easily
as waves, and make you watch me leave.

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

For the Skinhead Refinishing My Floors

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Merridawn Duckler

Complete strangers in the same house, I wish you like me,
as I chat, you are silent, nose ring, tattoo of a crossed out yellow star.
The acrid scent of finishing burns between us, you see.

I mean everyone needs work and they have to have money,
maybe for some party memberships, but also for food, your kids, the busted car.
Complete strangers in the same house, I wish you like me.

I was raised to answer each burning bush, confront each difficulty;
support for the widow, orphan and you know, the stranger, no matter how bizarre,
the acrid scent of finishing burns between us, you see.

It’s ingrained in me, even if you’d orphan my kind without mercy
or so my fantasies run as together we lift and move a heavy bar,
complete strangers in the same house, I wish you like me.

I want to explain this floor is messed up because I cooked oily
Latke’s and also dancing with my husband in heels made these scars
the acrid scent of finishing burns between us, you see.

But you turn away and I feel history is harder to get out than blood or tea
as you mask your ringed nose and turn on your machines’ roar;
complete strangers in the same house, I wish you like me,
but the acrid scent of finishing burns between us, you see.

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

Gratitude

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Mantz Yorke

She’s glad the cleaner comes each week to natter
about this and that as she busies round the house –
mainly inconsequential stuff, but it’s a change from him

and a distraction from the pain of crumbling bones,
the heart attack, and a gut intolerant of pills.

Her Buddhist friends drop round for tea and a chat
when she can’t get to pujas, or – if she’s fit enough
to trundle her trolley out – take her for coffee and a cake.

They always make her eyes conspicuously bright –
and the breaks give him some precious time to write.

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

Domestic Help

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Judy Swann

My mother wants me to whatsapp her every morning. I do
and I send cash, though I’d rather silken, rose-colored clothing…
Woops, I have accidentally poured the wrong cereal for young sir.
We can always let you go, he swans (his got this from his dad).

Of course he has his penis, which he knows and does not know
at 6. Everyone should mollify, before he escalates.
His sister, too, who is 9 and as beautiful as Miriam Colón
without the comprehension or español – says Yeah.

When Columbus signed his pact with the Queen
she gave him the right to fill her coffers and did not ask
whether Taino parents were beloved of their children
or if the siblings killed one another like European royalty.

My husband whatsapps me about my mom. She is fine
he says, she ate a good bit of rice. With adobo? I wonder.

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

strings

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Ally Chua

i slice the ribbed pork; blood seeps onto
plastic cutting board. my mum says, blunt
knives are safe. i am not a doctor, but surely

clean amputation is safer than dull chop,
pulling and tugging until the decayed
spine snaps off. in any case, we’ve never

done things the easy way. it will not taste
good if we do not bleed into the mix. the
same secret recipe everywhere – prodigal

child returns. i keep separating flesh
from marrow, but what else can i fix-
ate on if not the uncut umbilical cord.

the day i turned legal, i laid under a man.
watched as he jabbed needles into my
back. the ink says, i will never be you. still

i grow into your skin, the same dis-
jointed smile. still i hoard grievances the way
you hoard old toys. still i have the same night

mares – my fingers, locked on soft flesh
until skin spills open, a mess of seeds
and clots. shhh, don’t let the neighbours

stare. i look down and see wrinkled
hands, spider veins, shaky enough
to fear sharp edges. i do not want

a daughter. i know the iron i used
to defy you will be forged
strong enough to subdue her too.

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

Baby Greys

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Anna Hayman-Arif

Weak, wintery sunlight illuminates the fine layer
of dust that has
settled on every flat surface
and
crept into every crevice
like a malignant fungus
hell-bent on colonising my living room.

I pace.

Jeans too-tight over my bottom,
the flesh that wobbles round my middle is as foreign
to me as this wailing,
scrunch-faced
bundle in the rocker.

Utterly alien.

He smells
and the sickly, sweet smell of excrement

curdles and
flips my stomach.

The day s t r e t c h e s
into infinity.
The sonic boom of a plane,
laughing neighbours and the hum of traffic
meld into a symphony of a world
I cannot get to.

The colour
seeps
slowly away and
all is grey.

The seventh cup of tea is tepid
and acrid
with artificial sweetener
that pretends to
melt
excess flesh from my frame.

Babyweight,
is the euphemism,
as if it is a shameful secret
trembling under
loose t-shirts
and stretchy leggings,
desperate not to be found.

I remember when I drunk
my tea hot
and sweet with sugar,
I had idly
stroked my growing bulge,
joyful in my ignorance.

The nappy bag
is sulky with disuse.
The myriad of
confusing pockets
and
insulated compartments are just
too much to bear.
Too motherly.
Too someone else –
who is
coping.

My friends call and call.
I cannot speak
for fear.

There is only so much fakery
I can perform.

The mask of motherhood
is a diabolical one,

I slip it off between these walls,
and it chafes when I am out.

Day fades
into a dull evening as I sit.
Beige and grey,
my brain is
stultified.
Counting the minutes, the hours
until I do it
all
again.

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged