Living on a stable plate

while others tumble into the sea

you would think that maybe

we’re special

or chosen

to stay alive while everyone else

is swallowed by the sea.

Or maybe

because we’re so brand new

freshly shorn marines

we’re not quite ready to see the seams

of the earth

split open like a mouth. 
And in this strange

cookie-cutter of a country

where waves flick like some girl’s hair,

clouds scuff against a faded denim sky

the night’s LCD ticker tape of highways,

there are only wells,

holes that shriek,

baths being drained. 
Sometimes

you see them slowing down

drifting across a four-lane highway,

careening cats’ eyes.

The sky yellow and piss-coloured

spits warm into the bay.

Swimmers freestyle between buoys

and their goggles glint

as the sun sinks behind smokestacks

and empty apartment blocks

with the lights left on

by real estate agents.  
You can hear the blink of ships

slipping under the Westgate bridge,

the soft plonk of fishing lines,

tinny rambling of AM radio.

There’s the clicking and cracking

of the magnet factory

as silver discs spill towards each other

across the Williamstown warehouse.
Dreams here are black,

except for the solitary flashlight

of abalone poachers. 
And at night, lumps grow. 
They grow up

out of the local football field

that used to be landfill,

a suburban grand canyon.

The under 18’s have to dig out car wrecks

that rise to the surface between seasons,

old Holdens bulging beneath the pitch.

In the cancer ward at Geelong’s Mercy,

women wait like oysters to be shucked,

hands over their breasts

feeling for pearls.
We drive through Little River,

past the toilet block where my grandma

once found a finger,

a small bloodied pinkie,

black hair on its knuckle.

She stood there

next to the pinkie

and strewn paper towels,

waiting for the police.
*
I run.

I never jog. 
I fill the days with cups of tea,

checking on my laundry across the road

and visiting the painter downstairs

who does canvases for Ikea

to match lounge settings.

It’s all about safe colours, he says,

mulberry, chocolate brown and cream.

The post-September 11 palette,

he says the Swedes call it.
I read the newspaper.

A frat boy is found dead

post-initiation night,

his throat clogged with Hawaiian pizza.

They say his body was covered in thick black texta,

I take it up the arse

nigger lover

I suck cock

eat shit and cum.

The ink sunk in the rigor mortis

and the parents had to bury him like that,

covered in the haiku of a fucked-up generation. 
I can’t stop thinking of the girl on the news

who called out of my clock radio

at exactly 7am

– I’m drowning –

when she was being raped

in her basement.
*
When I met him,

his leather bat-winged jacket flapping,

smoking hurried cigarettes,

ghosts coming out of his mouth,

I knew I was going to take to him

like lightning to a lake.
He said, striking a match,

that before matches were red, they were yellow.

The factory workers in London used to glow

because the phosphorus got into their hands and faces.

People watched them coming home,

these human lanterns in the night. 
For an entire week he stood on a chair,

neck bent like Michaelangelo’s

mapping out the southern hemisphere

with 38 packets of glow-in-the-dark stars.

He copied everything straight from a map

except for the Milky Way.

That, he said, as we camped out in my one-bedroom flat,

he had traced from the freckles spilt across my nose.
While I slept, he worked.

Zooming in on strange pixelations,

wispy formations.

A police scanner alerted him to sites of homicides and suicides –

and he marked each ghost on a map of Victoria,

meticulously collecting life’s leftovers,

installing web cams

across the state and beyond,

trying to catch the rah-rah skirts of the dead.
In the dark

my hands would scramble towards him,

spiders across the sheets.

Sometimes he would take me

half-in half-out of sleep and

I would come with a film of moon

over my eyes.

In between bulbs

we ignited like headlights on the horizon

and in my bones

I could feel a deep dragging

as if something were pulling me under.
A jogger –

it’s always the joggers that find them, he says.

Clutching their ipods,

housekey on a bit of string.

They find the night’s bodies,

creaking in mottled light under bridges,

pink bloated pendulums.

Piss running down their legs

onto concrete footpaths

inscribed with teenage love affairs,

dreams coaxed to the surface.
Sometimes

the joggers note the small

squeezebox

of a heart.

A little bit of night

dragged into the day

like a cat with

blood on its whiskers. 
Out the window

I watch as the owner

of the Laundromat

pushes each machine back

against the wall

after they spent the whole night

shuffling

forward on spin.
*
In summer the flat is too hot.

The stickers on the ceiling peel off.

He laughs and says

Falling Stars.
In just a T-shirt I can see

on his arms the tattoos

he had done with another girl.

Faded mistakes, I can still see them

under his new artwork,

lingering in the way

only an ex can do.
I’m gangly around his ghosts.

Arms thick and legs pylons.

Boobs like water balloons.

I close my eyes and breath our way out of the city,

past the vegemite factory,

car rattling, an old Luna Park ride

up over the Westgate bridge.

The Vicks distillery, the treated pine yards

and treated shit farm.

We pass the toilet block

where granny found the finger.
I can smell this place.

The secret blimps in the sky,

the paused kangaroos,

ink in my fingers. 
Perhaps this country’s faultlines

are not so big and obvious like San Francisco’s cracks,

or shuddering like the earthquakes of Indonesia.

Maybe at the bottom of all the seas,

this place where letters land,

we are just a yellow canary

blowing out underground

eyes like poppyseeds.
Wrestling a jammed cassette

out of the player, I unravel the shiny tape.

Black streamers catch on the fingers of ti-trees.

Tomorrow the crows will line their nests

with Jimmy Little.
He slows near the salt marsh

where mum and me used to wade barefoot,

the cuts on our feet stinging

scooping up the salt in empty jam jars.

The egrets, those miniature storks,

would walk curiously alongside us,

poking their beaks into

the muddy holes

our feet left behind. 
Once,

we watched a fashion shoot

on the bulldozed mounds of salt

Models in ski goggles, puffy jumpsuits and beanies,

crouched on skis.

Men managed the light with foil reflectors

and the models stared

straight ahead

down a dirt road,

an imaginary Black Spur

where the last length of power line

lit up an abandoned soap factory.

Where his most prized

webcam is on the blink. 
Inside

I wait for him

beside an open container of rose-scented soap,

while he leaves footprints

on the dusty concrete floor and

hunts for ghosts

that stink

like potpourri.

This poem first appeared in Griffith Review, Autumn 2007