Ada Cambridge Poetry Award

This poem was highly commended in the recent Ada Cambridge Poetry Award as part of the Williamstown Literary Festival. It's in the anthology, along with the shortlisted and awarded biographical short stories, which you can buy at Hobsons Bay Libraries for $10 each.

Lay you down

For the funeral they calmed your yellow skin with make up

neat hair navy blazer silver buttons shining

I touched your hand   thick and heavy like a slab of fish

couldn’t think of any words to say   was that the day I picked you up?

seems I’ve carried you a long time now

curved shoulders   those vertebrae protruding at the top of my spine

Freud says I look for you in other men

dragging you around like this head bowed   it’s hard to see anything

night time is for resting but this bedroom is cluttered  

too many shoes   lonely earrings   tax receipts swirling in pockets of dust

you slip into my dreams   a puppet staring wide-eyed from a single bed  

unable to move without my help   effort to lift you drenches me in night sweat

once I see you happy   sitting at an outdoor café

wearing the red mohair jumper she knitted   smoking a cigarette

I want to leave you in this place   but don’t know how we got here

silent movie on a far away screen  grey dawn stirs  the image flickers   disappears

Where we live

This poem was short-listed in the Williamstown Literary Festival Seagull Poetry Prize:

A woman

hidden under bulging flesh and sallow skin

sprawls in the Westpac ATM alcove

barks out her mantra: 'Got any money?'

When I lived in India I had a policy

of giving money to three people each day

This is Footscray

Her horizontal pragmatism does not invite conversation

and I don't think she is interested

in attending any community storytelling workshops

In the shared back paddock behind our house

there is a tree planting invitation

everyone welcome

I wonder

The morning of the tree planting

jackhammers blast me from sleep at 6am

busting up bluestone to widen the streets

Not sure why this makes me sad

it's not as if I laid it

It just seems like a violent

kind of beautification