1

I walked to the forest to write poetry.

I found the correct log in the correct amount of sunshine. It looked like a spot a bush

poet would write a bush poem in or an old boy poet would write a old boy poem

about the old boys of the war (the ANZACs are my heroes etcetera, I love my local

RSL etcetera, I put my pink five dollar note on the bar every day and every day the

barman serves me a pony of beer. One pony at a time etcetera. The barman calls

me Chook and this is my spot and I carry with me a photo of my best friend, my

special friend from when we were just teen-agers, he was only 19 etcetera)

I sat down

Felt the earth (Spotify wants me to listen to Carole King and so I listen

to Carole King over and over again) crunch beneath my shoes

(my Blundstones that were my good Blundstones until my everyday Blundstones

wore out and now my good Blundstones are my everyday Blundstones)

I picked at a pimple and listened to the birds and I thought about Britney Spears and

how she dances in the greige (see: sad beige baby) tiled space next to her lounge

room in front of her camera with her eyeliner thick and black just like how I wore it

when I was 13 and a few years into the choking freedom of adolescents (this is a

story about a girl named Lucky)

          and opened Instagram on my phone.



2

The humiliation of working at the desk, tied to the desk like a rat in a rat sized office,

while redundant

is so big and stupid and why did I buy the lie that a job at a bank will mean security

when you can just get the (cashless) cow for free (read: nothing).



3

I sent in my latest audition for DoorDash but I live in the country where I see a man

walking his Shetland pony down the main street like how the people here don’t walk

their dogs.

You don’t get DoorDash here. Or Ubereats or Menulog or all the other gig economy

jobs for when you’re overqualified but you can’t get a job elsewhere because we live

in this big, endless, racist Australia so big so boundless (no plains, no sharing) (no

hat, no play).
I humiliated myself for DoorDash and stepped on a crack and the devil broke my

back – fuck – from dancing too hard in my DoorDash audition.
Now I need ibuprofen, tiger balm (like my mother used to rub on her neck in the spot

where she whipped and lashed five years before my birth her car folded and was

placed inside out at the wreckers yard now my mother jumps and gasps in the car

and her passenger foot breaks like I’m learning)

My yoga teacher cancelled because she just can’t work out (and the doctors don’t

know and she’s on her third round of antibiotics) why her voice is just sitting and

refusing, gasping for air on the edge of her throat.

So I did yoga in my Cotton-On Body teal (not like the party) yoga crossback bra and

my Cotton-On Body black (like our coffee in bed with the sun in love with you, I read

in the morning) ribbed (for her pleasure when I worked for Durex not Dulux and then

my contract finished and my dad died and I lost the password to that account

anyway, we all gotta make our living some way, bring home the bread, be the bacon

winner, the winner takes it all) bike shorts on my Kmart yoga mat with Yoga with

Adriene (she’s free) (hello Benji)
And I am forced to watch a DoorDash advert before I can stretch out what I did for a

DoorDash audition

          so I opened Depop on my phone.