Jackson

Lipstick your mouth, then open it. Speak clearly. Finish your words and leave spaces between them. Be big-eyed and soft-lipped in pantyhose, a powder-blue twinset, newsreader hair, a beret, and a knitted scarf. Wear a silver cross at your pushed-up cleavage to promise him godly motherhood, safe behind tall gates in beautiful BMW McMansionville. Pronounce Read more

They tried to regrow the forest. Met on alternate Saturdays with baby trees in tubes, buckets, plastic tree-guards. The rows of holes, sheltered seedlings, rations of water their day-off task. Some seedlings died. Some grew, became ungovernable trees. But it wasn’t a forest. Even after seven years, twelve, fifty, the wipe remained, the clean, the Read more

My mother said not to put it in the dryer. All that heat! all that wind! Hang it under the verandah. Don’t go out to the laundromat with its strangers, bad coffee, trashy magazines. Stay home, stoke the kitchen fire. My mother said not to put my identity in the dryer but I did and Read more

fakn it with all these / in my pink leopardspot stretch velvet fake fur black collar / fakn it with all these synaesthetes “audioslave” Listen Listen / before it into complexly schemed intertwined vines fruited with echoes, wearing black w/flashes of               flashes of gleaming pin/k + sil ver ice + the is ness of Read more

wait sicksigh wait for the doctor with the broken old toys broken and lined faces sicksigh lined. Song pats my shoulder First published in Creatrix Read more

The shell at my ear whispers of screaming things. Miniature lifeforms drowning in waste and seals in oilslicks and whales speared songless and shells bleached silent on laminex tables First published in WA Poets Inc Fresh Poetry Read more