Jackson

(Art Gallery of WA Admin Building) This was built of cut country by exiled boys dreaming. The high windows present their mouths, stone-jawed. On each upper lip, a scroll is a waxed moustache. The wrought-iron fence has abstract paws, marking the land with the Lion’s toes. Its stemtops are sketches of buttercups, pistils fisting from Read more

I cannot be what you have lost and you may not be what I never had but still I long just to hold your hand just to walk beside you on the less-walked path because walking beside you I am in my place because dancing beside you I can truly dance despite and because of Read more

When you dance it’s as if you gather the music into yourself, into the softness of your diaphragm and belly, and smear it through your body, along the long cords of you— tendons, neurons, axons, veins spine, lungs, bowels, hips— and extrude it down the pipes of your lean limbs. When you dance you keep Read more

I use my mother’s lessons and both my hands to make apple pie with a tiny pastry apple      among little pastry leaves with carefully slit vents with whipped cream He fills himself up with pizza and curry and kebabs and isn’t hungry Everyone else takes a piece In the morning I eat the cold and Read more

This is the pillow you slept on. It smells like your 3am skin. On my tongue it would be translucent smoke      and opaque wine and the clear water of your going When I look at it I see a space      surrounded by an incongruous frill It makes the sound of silence and of your voice Read more

I pull out my patched I There’s a new cut in it, bleeding gently, persistently I try to suture it, but the stitches hurt more than the blade—that blade made a clean, sparkling pain, a sudden fizz, a breath-catch— I try to anaesthetise, but numbness is unthinkable, terrifying, now, after that blade so I give Read more