Operations: Buffalo Antler Totem Mosaic
descent of darkness
hell-fire prowls antipodean skies
radiation strobe-lights country
freeze-frames bodies into rag-doll skeletons
a biosphere swallows
black mist
Maralinga Monte Bello Emu Field
deep in bunkers
watchers lie
ghost images fade to sepia
in photographs locked in empire’s vault
a country’s heart fused
into broken glass
Uranium Beryllium Plutonium
Yvonne Patterson is a New Zealand born poet living in Boorloo, Western Australia. Yvonne’s poetry explores borders and fault lines based on the choices we make in our social, political and environmental contexts and includes feminist and queer perspectives. Her draft collection
lineage: fault lines was shortlisted in the 2024 Flying Islands Poetry Manuscript Prize. Individual poems appear in such journals as
Plumwood Mountain, Not Very Quiet, Australian Poetry Journal, Writer Resist, Science Write Now and in anthologies such as Grieve, FourW, Liquid Amber Press, Brushstrokes and
Cuttlefish. Her poetry draws upon experience in her career as a clinical psychologist and in human service policy. Yvonne was in the WA Emerging Writers Program 2021-2023.
