joanne burns: textile

14 February 2008
the tram lingered in another century

              locked in hearts betrothed to other echoes

                          more exquisite than a hamburger's flip

                                they had exchanged tickets for heart beats

                                           what if the absence of encyclopaedias

                                                   were an impediment they would sway

                                                         in the patient carriages

                                                                     as if belief was still

                                                                             a subscriber to the loop

                               the island sprawled in a coma just

                                                beyond the window there would be no horizon

                                                        left in the traveller's lexicon just

                                      some humdinger cloud as far as a brain could smell,

                                                giant and nauseous curtains with no beginning or

                                                                end       an eternal theatre

                                                                     that had foreclosed its stage
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joanne burns

About joanne burns


joanne is a writer of poetry, prose poems, short fictions and monologues. Over a dozen collections of her work have been published in print. A new collection of her work amphora will be published by Giramondo Publishing in 2010. footnotes of a hammock (Five Islands Press 2004) was joint winner of the 2005 artsACT Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Her most recent poetry collection an illustrated history of dairies (Giramondo Publishing 2007) was shortlisted for the 2008 NSW Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize. kept busy, a cd recording of joanne reading a selection of her work, was produced by River Road Press, also in 2007. joanne lives in Sydney.

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