2024 Calanthe Collective Prize for Unpublished Poetry

Lot’s Wife

You shot the dogs this morning - two sharp howls
neither animal nor man.
In the after-silence your boots scuffed the dirt.

Already crows have come - drawn by blood
they will leave only gleaming bones
salt bright on rust-red earth.

The pipe bangs, you flinch
as the tap coughs up a meagre glass.
I twist it shut, look away to the acres of time and sky.

Your cheeks carved hard and deep
the delta of a forgotten river, dry and red
as the bed of our dust choked creek.

I remember when I raised salt to the surface of your skin
thirsty in my fertility, drawing forth our future.
The day burns.

You squinted at me in those days
said I burned too bright.
Eyes tight shut you clung to me.

Our wedding was in Spring, the cathedral strewn
with jacaranda in lieu of a bouquet.
You named it Grafton snow.

Your fingers coil and uncoil, remembering
or anticipating two quick shots.
I cannot let you bear this final sin alone.

My faith shrouds me, I wonder
did Lot's wife look back to remember
or to absolve him of her unbearable weight?

The women of the sea

She is a widow;
she mourns in her still silence, reaching to the sand
for something to hold on to.
The moon takes her grief and makes it shimmer,
veils her turmoil with night,
but if she whispers to you, decides to confide in you with her doleful murmurs?
You will taste the salt of her tears on your own cheeks.

She is a mother;
a donor of love and life, holding every lost child
in her tired cradling arms.
Noon creases her exterior so that she is wise,
paints her into a golden welcome,
but if you lose yourself in her embrace, let her envelope you?
You will be swallowed by her blurry exhaustion.

She is a daughter; 
fleeting around in herself, searching for something
to make her unrest settle.
The day's sunlight refracts off of her youthful image, feigns transparency,
but if you indulge too carelessly, let her consume you as she'd like?
You will become wasted in her insecurity and restlessness.

But tonight,
She is a witch,
she throws herself against the rocks, howling at the sky
with a turbulent vicious fury.
The lightning highlights her dangerous edges,
the rain fuels her,
and if you wait for the storm to die, allow her to curse the shores for a while?
If you leave her to rage on without furrowing your brows at her unruliness?

She'll flood her thanks into your hands,
because no one's ever allowed her to feel it all before.

gaze

the lens blurs and for once you can see me. imperfect light illuminating frayed edges. fingerprints smudging glass in an attempt to focus. I am the periphery. that which is almost visible. squished into the margins that frame the subject. I linger, liminal. do not fit neatly, have never known how to smile. unable to contort myself into the right lighting. focal point. right kind of human. you catch a glimpse in the corner of your eye. you cannot hold me there, no matter how you zoom in. I am transient. a flash of indistinguishable colour. I hope to one day discover that not every gaze is violent.

The Speed of Life

You said to me
I don’t want to leave you.
Mouth twisted down
and your bald head warmed
by a small knitted cap
hiding your missing hair.

Enfeebled in your chair
unable to walk unless held
it must have burnt your throat
like bile to say out loud
those childlike thoughts
I don’t want to leave you.

I wanted to say
light travels from our warming sun
eight minutes before reaching eyes on Earth.
If it exploded now
we would continue to bathe unaware
for the time it takes a bowerbird
to dance its extravagance.

Light is fast
but so vast is space
that even light takes time
to reach us
and they teach us our sun is close.

Think of those stars a light year away
or ten.  What then?
The star we think we see from here
is ten years ago
and so if someone standing there
was to point a telescope at us,
they would now be watching you laugh and dance
cook up a storm in your kitchen fort
see us come and go with hugs and promises
watch you bend to pour
kisses on your grandchildren’s heads.

Instead I took your small hand
and pressed it to my chest
You’re in here, Mum
I could barely say,
and so you see you cannot leave,

but stay entangled in every cell,
in memory in words in voice in
smells in moments which dance

Hello Mother 

Do you see me? I see you 

are at it again, shaving off the best parts of your soul to stuff inside me, scraps hastily sewn together raw and bleeding like you have no right to ever create me, pacing the room like any moment now they’ll storm in and take me, you’re 

Watching me with wild eyes like you wish you could throw my marble face until it shatters and you find yourself in the cracks, scrabbling on the floor on blood-slick knees, until you pick up the shards and hold them to the light and the reflection you see is one you almost forgot -
Your own eyes, bright with years yet unlived, staring back, but
No -
Trick of the light -
When I was born, they all told you I have your eyes, so 

Hello mother, is that all you’ve ever been?
Sometimes I forget someone gave you your name. But I think you were my mother when you were born, you were my mother before you were a child, and you are my mother before you are yourself - Just as your mother was yours, and I am my unborn idea of a daughter’s - 

Except, of course, all those times you cry out for her hand to smooth down your sweat-matted hair and whisper sweet nothings in it while you weep. Do you miss it, being a child again? So, 

Hello mother, what were you before me?
A beautiful baby with full cheeks and gummy sweet smiles? A little girl dancing with fairies and sung to sleep every night? A woman so scared and brave and lonely, holding her head like she knows who to be? 

A daughter, were you ever a daughter like me? 

But
Mother, I don’t think there is ever a ‘before’
Mother, we are both missing from each other, but I keep you in my chest and you hold me in your hands and I am not sure which one hurts more, because 

Mother, you gave me your eyes
Mother, we are one and the same
Mother, I carry you with me the same way you carried me home that very first night, swaddled in blankets and hospital antiseptic and inexplicably, always, in love
Mother, do you remember what you told me that day, when I was young enough I still fit in your lap and being your daughter was the only thing I needed to be?
Do you remember my mouth, sticky with juice, sparkling eyes, ‘when I grow up, I want to be just like you’?

Mama, I remember
Mama, I still remember
the way you barely paused from where you were tracing lopsided love hearts on the back of my hand, where your thumb swiped thoughtlessly at the corner of my lip, when you answered me so lightning quick - 

‘No,
you’re going to be better.’

Dining 

The table is a glorious piece, all old wood
and glinty dinnerware. From the window
in the kitchen, you can see glaring
platters of hard shell: clams and oysters and
the deep, planetary blues of abalones, broody shades
spilling from their bones like water.
Music shines hotly in the air, sweltry,
and notes glide almost tangibly in that moth-bitten
light of heat—which is really just haze
or mist, as my sister sings. And when she does,
there it hangs, thickly: a cloud of my father’s Spicy Cologne.
No really, the bottle is curtained, in curved text:
Men’s Spicy Cologne, and all at once I think of heat
and every scene it holds: gold by the campfire, sparkly
in the sink. And the pots, the dinner candles, which flicker noisily
at the foot of the table. It’s Thanksgiving and my father’s
cooking the turkey—a chest of stuffed wind and
thyme. We’re all slurping pasta and sucking
molten beads of butter from the baked potatoes.
Time floats, overwhelmingly
above us, and the next scene unfolds:
the walls are dark this time, splayed with thick
angles of reddish light—warmth mooning about
hotly, incessantly, as the table smolders.
Some space away, the butter knives are gleaming
in the cupboards, and the air smells of dense spice
and I can hear my father, his footsteps, his
spice-tinged breath and shuffling suitcase. Fading.
Now, the table hums coldly, chairs grating blue
lanes across the floorboards. We still linger
in the heat of night, when the rain falls and the lights
blister and my mother boils water in the kettle.
Still, we breakfast on sliced toast, turn the table,
have lunch at the pristine bar near my father’s new apartment.
The whole place reeks of Men’s Spicy Cologne—
even the glass, the turkey, the withering
sticks of butter. And my father, his speech slowed
to the bottled clink of beer on teeth or
a shut door or the crackling of dinner plates,
their mournful faces crystallized under the tablecloth.