Poem

Day flicks its cards, laconic. / Even in April, a flamboyance of colour: / stray perfume for the pent. Burnt leaves / drift away one by one, like concert-goers ...

Diamond Beach        

Heads down and shoulders hunched, we set off, trampling
The footstep-gripping sands of Diamond Beach,
Into the flat refusal of the gale,
Squinting into a distance we would fail,
Surely, ever to reach ...

On Clare’s Skype the beach mixed every coral colour: the sheen,
saw George, transforming their soft bedroom in her mother’s
Mt Druitt house to a Micronesian dusk. But this South Tarawa ...

A boy appears at school early
to lick the flagpole and speak different.
Scratch the ‘g’ from ‘listening’ ...

Commissioning deities:                   Aphrodite, Adonis, Gaia, Venus

Topic:                                                Beauty

Scope:                                               Internal audit

Auditor name:                                 Φαιδρα (Phaedra)

This is one of the times you won’t remember.
You are lying side by side with your father

as the radio murmurs, a ghost wind shifting
from magnet to magnet that does not ...

I forget tradition, a tray of sticky dates passed around the kitchen table, bismillah
in our mouths before we ravenously break the dusk, chew and spit back the pits. Ma ladling
lumpy lentil soup, abandonment pouched in her long sleeves, an old injury she does not
stop pressing. How are we still here? Made of garlic breath, violent affection, arrears.

Where are my bay leaves and charms, my bowl with crimson flowers
while he inexorable
has gone from my bed like a dress
Distance: spells of fire wreathe you ...

We bent the camels’ legs back at the knees
and bound them with rope, then we tethered them
to a tree and left them in the scorching heat.
The whole camp aromatic with onion, cardamom ...

i.
Look, said the sonographer, your sister says hello!
A black photo
where the future rival sucks a thumb-to-be.
Never in all history
was such a portent visible
without a guiding star ...