No Tom Toms in the                   70s, growing up

   was knowledge                           acquired like palm

   trees, tall as the rain.  At six I cracked my forehead

       on a kombi’s bench ftch ftch ftch ftch, forming

     a new topography a nurse’s sickle and a zip-shut

 line. On my map road tar bubbled like tiny lungs

and the kitchen steamed words like ‘campur’ and

 ‘menggabung’  Who am I now? Ubud aged 9 buying

   a Kylie Minogue cassette. Name on a map, geography

                           unknown. My walkman singing “ooooh

                            locomotion”. And then economics reared

                              like a newly woken volcano and kabumi!

                                My Earth shook, latitude and longitude split from eye

                              to tongue. Yana’s flat, cane basket tossed peanut shells to

                                the breeze and the papaya tree lost its head. My artless brain supposed itself enough.

                                  We moved to Australia ‘for good’; weatherboard & horse dirt, brown crescent fingernails

                          I hid beneath my desk. A new map with white-washed school-yard and taunts

                                 I didn’t understand. Who am I now? Grammar School                                    gorilla girl,

                            compass-less and shrunk like an ant without a line.                            ‘You’re so ugly!’

                   in a boy’s spittle, ‘Too poor to get a TV’ in pulled hair:                                      My classmates

                                 marked me like cartographers I learned to walk without myself                     wearing my

                                     leg hair like indifference. Down the road, between an iris’ purple lips. A

                            bee is sucked in, a creature sure of entry and a koel cries again and again. “Are you?

                          Are you?” My only friend is marked too: eczema wounds like blood-countries on band-

                             ages, eyes like orbits in depth-of-sadness brown. “You collect lame ducks,” said a teacher,

                                                                                                but I was one too. I’d learned that Kylie wasn’t cool

                                                                                                          but failed to learn what was. We didn’t do

                                                                                                                                             cool in the tropics