Kneel with me, smell here: dirt turned red from white.
Look up at the open canopy, shadows
You made for us. It’s the hellfire of night
Where the ouroboros ends and rage grows.
I inherited this anger chest-to-chest with my mother,
As we watched the hillside, the eagles, burn–
Listening to the cries of ancestors
Holding hot leaden breath, waiting our turn.
Call me an animal? I’ll grow canines.
Didn’t your forefathers tell you, warn you:
Don’t bring a dog leash to a genocide.
I want to hollow out your chest, fill you
With the scorching ash of my matriarchs–
Them ones you insist you left in the past.
I often hear Western scholars preach about the ouroboros, without knowing how it feels to lose a beginning. Black Summer is the story of the displacement of my family. At 16, I wanted nothing more than to see somebody else suffer for what happened to us. I wished that the boiling force inside me — that one everybody kept calling ‘teenage angst’ — could cheat time and blow apart the hull of the first ship to touch these shores. These days, my matriarchs tell me how proud they are, that I choose to unleash my rage one day at a time.
I never saw your face. Only your hair, green like the ferns in a fog-filled forest. Such a bright and vibrant colour, so out of place in the utilitarian station platform in this strange city. A city where everything was larger than life, a thousand conflicting needs and wants rolling over one another and crushing themselves with their own crippling weight. This world left no room for empathy for those that were trampled in its desperate stampede. I could see this subtle cruelty in the spiked surface of the bench, comfortable enough to wait fifteen minutes for a train, yet too painful for one to sleep on.
Perhaps I empathised with your hair. I too was out of place. Out of place in the power and tumult of this city. Out of place in my family, who had grown accustomed to this life while I fell behind. The looming scale of this new world emphasised how little I knew and how uncertain I was of my own purpose. Yet I was not like your hair, which dared to do battle with the expectations and judgements of this world, proudly declaring its own identity and existence in a world which had no place for it. No, I was not brave. I let my role in the world be decided by the conflicting wishes of those around me, too scared to make my own decisions. I was scared I would be left alone. Left behind.
In that moment, I fell in love with you. I loved the way in which you leaned into what you were reading. I loved the way you let yourself sink into that world, oblivious to the judging eyes of those around you. I loved the quiet power of your presence. I loved your green hair. Yet, I lied when I said I loved you. I did not know you. I did not know what you were reading. I did not know where you were going. I did not even know the story behind your beautiful green hair. So, I could not have loved you. Rather, I loved the idea of you. The elaborate persona I had created to fill in the empty shell created by what little I had seen. I loved your green hair and all that it represented. But I did not love you.
Perhaps if I were a little braver, half as bold as your hair, I might have tried to talk to you. Perhaps, you would have looked up at me and smiled. Maybe your face would have been coated in tears, black mascara forming stalactites upon your cheeks. Most likely, your expression would have been one of confusion and annoyance, perhaps tinged with apathy. It would not have mattered. I would have seen your face. In that moment I could have begun to know you. Instead, I walked away. I let the train sweep you up and let it carry you away into the bowels of this strange and terrible city. If only I were a little braver. I would have seen your face. Perhaps I would have even loved you.
Originally published in Woroni Vol. 72 Issue 2 ‘To Be Confirmed’
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
Let yourself be whole now
With your hands in the Earth
Your feet in the crystal shallows
Your core grounded and unshakeable
Let yourself be swallowed
Taken entirely
By the evanescent tide of you as complete
With no gleam or hesitation
Saunter on
To the greatest motion with no name
Where you do not have the answers
Only the tools
To carve and make space
For your wholeness
To breathe
Originally published in Woroni Vol. 72 Issue 2 ‘To Be Confirmed’
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
It’s a bright day, warm and lazy. The kind where you might describe a nectar-gorged bee zig-zagging towards the hive in the park, though there aren’t many this year. Grandmother always kept a beautiful garden, and it’s taking full advantage of the sun this year. Brilliant colours line the flower beds. Lavender, rose, orchid, chrysanthemum, daffodil, and more sprout and bloom.
Boy walks along the path up to the house. It’s distinctive, awash with colour in an insipid street, in a neighbourhood full of yuppies and middle-aged couples one bad day away from a mid-life crisis, the threads of their lives unravelling before them. The path up to Grandmother’s house is red brick and curls up the lawn to the porch. The door is black and an old brass knocker in the shape of a fish is set into it. The curtains are open, in the room to the left of the door. Boy knocks on the door, and presently a pottering along the hallway on the other side is audible.
“Who is it?”
“It’s ______!”
“Oh! Your mother said you were coming!”
The door swings open, and Grandmother wears a light shirt and some simple trousers, looking as if ready to go to the garden.
“Come in, come in! I’ll put some tea on!” Grandmother’s voice is already trailing away as Boy enters the house and moves to the lounge room, sitting on a floral-patterned chair, with a small cushion.
“It’s so good to see you again! It’s been such a while! Most of the time it’s just me running myself around here.” Grandmother places down a small china tea set, and a plate with biscuits.
“Yeah … Sorry I haven’t come out to see you more often. Did Mother tell you why I came to see you?”
“When ______ called me? She said something about some sort of school project.” Clearly in Grandmother’s eyes could be seen the glint of curiosity.
“Well, we have to interview our grandparents about something. Kinda like chronicling the past, or what life used to be.” Boy paused. “And I think it would be good to do it now, before …” trailing off. Grandmother makes no indication of having heard this comment.
“Well then. Did you have any questions in mind? Or were you just planning to ask this on the fly?” Grandmother chuckled. “I’ve got a lot I can tell you.”
“Pick a favourite for me. An all-timer.” Boy set down a small tape recorder.
It was the middle of winter, before ______ met me, before I moved here. In that time, if you were lucky, it would snow, but more often we got these bitingly cold winds, sleet and hail and rain. You’d slide across the road in the car and fall flat on your a-, A pause. -butt, walking back from the shops. I remember one time I’d been sent by my own mother to get lard and soap, and I came home soaking wet after tripping and falling straight into a puddle on the way back. Anyway, that’s how it was then – I could give you a million more examples.
On one of these days, some friends of mine from back then, friends from high school, though of course then it was the done thing to leave high school early, so we couldn’t have been older than ______ is now. They’d wanted to see something new at the pictures … I can’t for the life of me remember what exactly it was called now, something scary, though. So, we’d gone in, me and a few girlfriends and maybe a boy or two … my memory is lacking there. A laugh. Anyway, the movie, it started off in this old house, derelict, you get the picture. These teenagers had broken in there, heard it was the local haunt of a ghost, and at first they hadn’t heard anything. There were a few fake scares – like the teens scaring each other or playing around with something in the séance. But, later on, things started to happen that they couldn’t shrug off anymore – it started with things seeming to move, or scraping noises from below … Hm? Oh, don’t worry, I’m going somewhere. I’m just trying to set a- a mood. Another laugh.
Anyway, this wasn’t a big budget movie, so it looked corny sometimes. It was still creepy, definitely, but it- it was pretty funny in some parts, to be honest. At this point, too, we’d still not seen … whatever it was, that was terrorising these kids. It was just noises and shadows and flashes. So, about halfway through, we were following one of the kids, they’d been separated from the group, and the house seemed to twist and turn and morph around them while they tried to navigate …
And then sitting in the cinema, we just heard this … low, rolling boooooooom. It’s so hard to describe the sound. It went through your body and out the other side and kept going. The building shook where it stood. At this point … we’d all forgotten about the movie in an instant. The theatre was … was nearly full, and there was a mad dash to get out the door, get outside, see what happened.
And outside, there was a billowing pillar of smoke rising into the sky, and a lurid orange and red glow, mixing with the sunset sky. Grey smoke was twisting up and mixing with the white clouds. You could start to hear sirens now, and some of my friends had already hopped in their car, to get a better look and …
I had stood outside the cinema, fixated on the smoke and fire, and some of my friends had also stayed … And then after a while, I don’t know how long we heard – didn’t see –
Grandmother stopped here.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes … yes, but, I think I will have to finish this one another time.”
The tape recorder clicks off.
Originally published in Woroni Vol. 72 Issue 2 ‘To Be Confirmed’
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I have been speaking to my son. He is everything I would want in my child. Compassion rules his mind. His anger, so very masculine, he takes apart with clinical precision. No embers left to hatch new fires another day. He tells me of the world he lives in. A place drier than any desert I have seen. He tells me that his constant companion is the sound of sand, gently sliding against boots and hooves.
I am only 23. My son speaks to me, a man of 56. I glean insight into who I will be, as a father. He tells me of my open nature, my love of stories, and those words of mine.
“Do not despair, there is still tomorrow.”
I do not share this man’s, my, sentiment at this age.
My son tells me I have fought dogs, lean and rabid creatures which pounce behind the cover of sandy winds. He tells me of the only time he saw my face twisted into something ugly. I caved their heads in, skulls reduced to pulp beneath my bloody fists. He tells me of how I cried that night, head pointed to a black, and smoky sky. He tells me I howled out in pain, for I had never killed until that moment.
I cannot imagine such a thing. Here, in this moment, my heart pounds. I see myself, a warrior, a soldier, a fighter. Yet, I know that this is not the truth. I am scared. How desperate is my future, that I will bludgeon another living thing to crimson paste?
My son tells me I lose my arm. Fangs, and canines drenched in stagnant shit and water, poison my flesh. Within weeks, it turns shades of green, and purple. My wife, a woman I have not met yet, grinds my limb free with the blunt edge of a car’s metal rim.
I die. Not in battle, or of old age. I die running from something, and my body fails. My son tells me he could only hear my cough, as every vessel in my body bursts. I bleed to death on a dune behind our home. My son runs into the desert with his mother, our house alight and the shadow of bandits playing on the sands.
Then I am awake. I lie in a soft bed, and listen to the sound of my home in the night.
When next I fall asleep, I do not meet my son.
It is a woman. She is haggard and vicious. She moves in the way I imagine the dogs which will take my arm move. Her shoulders hunch forward and swing low. Her arms are so long, and they seem to drift along the ground. Her legs twist in awkward angles, and her chest presses low to the ground as her neck clicks, and shifts to look at me. She smiles. There are too many teeth in that smile.
I ask her what I asked my son, but she only chuckles.
“I hate you,” she says before she leaps and catches my neck in her maw.
I die in my dream, my granddaughter howling in glee as she eats me, a mouthful at a time.
The next I dream, it is my great-granddaughter who I meet. Her eyes are haunted, but she does not blame me for her misfortune. We speak of her mother, and we commiserate the pain she caused us. Before she leaves, my great-granddaughter tells me:
“I do not know where you are going, but there is a dark cloud ahead of me. I do not how far, but it smells of smoke.”
For every following night, my descendants tell me the same thing. For every night I fall into sleep, I awake with the smell of a great fire in my nose. Every morning, I hear someone whisper in a language so utterly changed from what I speak, and yet instantly recognizable.
The dreams blur, and so too do the descendants. Some have great grievances with me, others weep upon seeing my face, still others do not recognize me and we sit there in blank silence.
I do not understand why it is I who must endure this gauntlet of heredity. I am not the first of my line. Does my father experience this? My mother? My sister? Do my children, strung out across centuries, sleep with the knowledge of their own children’s atrocities? Do they also dream of their children’s miracles?
I dream. I hear His name, chanted on a foul wind. When I open my eyes, I am moved to weep. He is so perfect. From the curve of his brow, to the lilting line of his hands, I cannot find a flaw in him. When he speaks, it is the clearest sound I have ever heard.
He says: “Come, Great Father. Listen to my achievements.”
They are horrible. As he speaks, I see the people who follow him under the banner of a bloody palm. There is death, there is suffering, there is pain, there is destruction. Yet, what horrifies me so deeply are his eyes.
As he recounts the worlds he has razed, the tortures and cruelties committed, I see nothing in his eyes. There is no bloodlust, no ache for conquest, no sick joy in pain. Nor is there a lie. He does not believe this is for the best, that he builds a better place.
He is bored, and I tell him as much.
“Yes,” he says. “There is nothing to elate in anymore. What is left but the excess, when all of memory is mine.”
“What do you mean?”
He laughs. “You gaze into the future through me, but I have lived your life, and every life of every ancestor. There is nothing new. I am a cup overfull, and now I shall never know what it was like to sip.”
He cries there, this monster of my flesh.
I awake, and wonder. Will this come to pass?
Originally published in Woroni Vol. 72 Issue 22 ‘To Be Confirmed’
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Zero gravity
when your hands interlock with mine.
I am floating in this unspoken tension
high octane as we leave the stratosphere.
I forget to remind myself, we don’t exist beyond the parametres of this moment
We will never again kiss
for it’d be the last thing we’d do
before we’d choke to death on dark matter and stardust.
But I can’t tear myself away, I’m transfixed by those lips
energised by your touch and swept up in this pretence.
We circle the moon and maroon ourselves on Mars
and as I try to patch the holes in our spacesuits
you loosen your grip and let me go.
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Sunrise teases through cheap blinds
as the gently shaded share bursts
into life again. Ready for madness
to crash and simmer through.
Between two sun-fat couches and
a worn-out coffee table, they
play out their lives and memories.
Restored by muted secrets and wine.
Something’s so special about the daily
path of those lost and incredible hearts.
The soldier sings sweet old etcetera
while she waits for her war to come.
Across is that reluctant Australian
trying to build herself a life that makes sense.
A man assures us he can fly as
he explains the world’s problems away.
And the Ghost Song Woman sits restlessly
tripped up in a myth of eternal return.
But that daring mouse schemes away
as he busies himself with empty words
then watches parliament as a sport.
This is their place, theirs, and worlds.
Here we see them, every pain
dancing alongside every joy.
Once the day sets past that island,
locked in an impatient empty tower.
The hearts beat together, sipping and
smoking away at time in perpetuity.
Tomorrow with that intoxicated return.
Sunbliss and TV chatter gently fills the room,
whilst days drift across the time capsule kitchen
where we measure out our lives in coffee spoons.
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$5.90 pork wontons, a jar of XO sauce and a pouch of roasted sunflower seeds.
I gently laid them on the counter.
She barked at me in English,
not a second of hesitation,
like the arms that pushed me into this vat of cold, white
paint,
leftover from The Block houses.
The Chinese girl behind the counter writhed
at the sight of my tattered Air Force 1s
as if they were screaming.
The security TV was screaming
on behalf of each aisle,
flinching as I scrambled past.
A Pokémon in a Bratz world.
Or a Bratz in a Pokémon world?
A corruption of culture, identity, and everything her mum had ever told her that girls like us should look like.
Maybe I’m dramatic.
I feel like how the sun must feel in skyscraper smog.
Maybe that’s dramatic.
The sun is not suffocating.
It’s shining somewhere?
Maybe I’m an alien,
the Asian girl at the Asian grocer
who looks like she should’ve gone to Coles.
Originally published in Woroni Vol. 72 Issue 4 ‘Alien’
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You are awoken by the sound of cheering. At first, the sound slips in drizzling patches through your curtains. Individual voices, raised in fervent joy, lost to the thick and coarse cloth. Morning light, swallowed, eaten, and regurgitated, a pale yellow when compared to the bloody sunrise you know is rising against the gothic backdrop of ringing cathedrals.
Sweet God. The bells have begun to toll. Sonorous bellows of brass giants locked in marble cages high, high in the clouds. The cheering is mortal, but the bells are horrifically divine. You squeeze your eyes tighter; you pull your pillows closer to drown out the light, the sound, the sights that they bring to your mind.
You can imagine them. Far, far below, in the poor, rancid, sweating levels of the city, march lepers ten-thousand strong. Bandaged in bindings swollen by filth, some are true lepers, others the refuse of a society too haughty to care for the ill. You wonder if poor Michella is down there. Does she stamp her feet on the decaying tiles, pushing mud from underneath their worn edges? Has she raised one of those ridiculous effigies, burdened by beads of glass? God. Has she bound and set her arm correctly or been swept up by the hysteria of it all, dutifully suffering beneath that cruel effigy as it grinds her body beneath its weight?
You cannot bear the speculation, and rise. You cannot bear the half-formed light, or the muted sounds, and diligently pull back the curtains to thrust your head into the morning air.
The city of Dema is a layered hell to native or transitory residents. You feel a twinge of sympathy for those who have only arrived recently, unprepared to face this. It is only a twinge for you were not prepared either.
In your middle-home, hewn into the granite chest of Urdan’s Cathedral, you gaze above and below at the crossing paths of the city. Between the cloistered towers of various Gods, the sunrise tosses its light in thin, vertical slashes to paint the stone. Fat clouds of milky white hang above you, as you twist your neck to look up. The clouds crowd the highest levels, where the bells are rung above the world. More paths, thin and tiny in perspective, cross the air between cathedrals. Each carries thousands, marching and calling that wordless chant.
Below you, another sticks their head out. A man, with a balding head, a hooked nose, and eyes set beneath bushy eyebrows. You call to him, asking:
What in the God’s name is it about?
His answer is lost in a swelling roar that shakes your windows, and tousles your hair. Stray hairs find their way into your eyes, your nose, your mouth, and you spit. The man below narrowly dodges your travelling kiss, which falls and falls and falls without you ever seeing its landing. You yell your question again, shouting:
What in the God’s name is fucking worth this?
He does not answer with words, but holds one hand in a circle, fingers forming an ‘O.’ With his other, he thrusts a fist through before bowing his head in religious rapture. You shake your head, but he nods and repeats the gesture before retracting from the window.
It cannot be. It cannot be.
A million-million souls march in celebration, and your world shakes to their cries of exultation.
AN IMMACULATE CONCEPTION! AN IMMACULATE CONCEPTION!
The knock is polite but insistent. Only thinly polite. It is the knock of a man who has places to go, and you are the impediment. By the time you’ve made yourself look presentable, thrust yourself in clothes ‘worthy’ of their presence, and answered the door, the man is not impressed.
He breezes by you, no question of who owns this place. It is his, and always has been. He monologues for long minutes, and you are taken. There are no questions of your plans or place, the responsibilities you have.
You ascend. You are pressed through thronging crowds, who are drawn to your handler’s robes. As you hurry through doorways only for clergy, you hear the beat of believer’s fists against stone and wood. You hear the retort of those things they have made above. Weapons that belch smoke and fire.
You are led before a door. Behind it comes the muffled cries of a woman in great pain. Before the door, a young woman looks at you in sympathy. Her eyes are bleak, and she mouths something to you, lost as her handler roughly pushes her along.
You are in the room, surrounded by men of immaculate character. Priests of every rank, with jewels along their fingers, and rich cream cloth draping their person. They ask you a single thing, ignoring the writhing woman strapped to the metal table.
Can you see it?
Can you see her? Of course, it is impossible to ignore. She is swollen to bursting. She is melting in sweat, there is blood on her lips, hands skinned and raw. She has been here for hours, twisting in pain. She has nothing left. No strength to scream, no will to writhe. Still, she is being broken, pulled vertebrae by vertebrae, vein by vein, beat by beat.
Can you see it? Can you see the God?
You can see the God. It hangs above her. An unknowable mass of things. There are eyes like a doe in there, great wings with feathers of salmon skin, the bent back of a hungry dog, and features stranger still. Fingers with too many knuckles, bent and shaped in twisting spirals. A hollow chest filled with a baby’s first cries.
Can you see it? Can you see the God?
They crowd around you, eyes darting between you and an empty space. You do not know which is worse. The hungry leering in their faces, or the sight of the God twisting its hands in her belly.
They ask again, and you say the truth.
They are not appreciative.
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The rain falls softly in the muffled dirt,
You flex your quiet flesh,
Lingering within rain, almost inert,
Your body bending mesh.
I watch you climb up the green onion stalk,
A ghostly shade, hungry,
Searching, scorning what tastes like ash and chalk,
A god in your country
Atop your tower you watch and survey
The bright leaves that glisten,
Hoping to flower with your fresh bouquet,
You wait and you listen.
The world, it remains hazy, cool, and still,
You will not be challenged,
So long you have waited in dirt until
The earth, it grew pallid.
But today, here, something juicy to eat
You ripple with delight
You’ve been brought something delicious and sweet
Your joy, it fills the night
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