Selected published poetry
medusae
Published in Plumwood Mountain Journal ‘Queering Ecopoet(h)ics’, edited by Dr Willo Drummond and Stuart Barnes
For the immortal jellyfish
Bell-shaped, bearing a mouth at the tip. Umbrella
cascading fairy lights. Invertebrate hitchhiker,
free-swimming radical propelled on the currents…
he can hear all the animals
Published in Westerly 67.2
All these people, keeping me alive.
An essential indecisiveness. Caught.
An essential indecisiveness, caught
between knowing and not. How to live?
Between knowing and not. How to live
not wanting to die? Feeling every blade.
Not wanting to die feeling every blade
of grass. Beautiful until you remember.
Grass is beautiful until you remember
they are called blades for a reason.
They are called blades for a reason -
one million tiny swords, a sea of cuts.
Green sea of cuts, one million swords.
All these people, keeping me alive.
medusa tries mdma for the first time
Published in Debris Magazine Vol. 2 - Hospitality
grey-eyes
Published in Cordite 106: OPEN and Australian Poetry Anthology 10
in the club, which is cheaper than therapy. If you move the body
first, the mind might follow. Think of yourself as a door. Instigate
a laugh from the bouncer, crush up a hug. Know that the door bitch
is an oracle. Find Knowledge and Belief giggling in a bathroom stall,
the queue snaking into an abyss filled with strobes. The club is buff
and academic, full of contradictions. Club theory dictates that
clubbing can only ever be experienced directly, not thought abstractly.
Chaos organises itself into the form of a mortal woman. Concrete
takes on a softer quality – air pressured underground. Subterranean light
tunnels another plane. Lasers project astral questions. The social
experiment here is how to be kind to strangers. She enters the back
alley glowing like a neon sign – dazzling the dry ice with green light.
The women with the sad eyes are usually the sexiest.
New moons rolling around in their heads. Big dumb
pools you can dive into. The moon doesn’t speak
much, so you can project your longings onto her. Try
picking her out of the sky like a cherry, go on. Wrap
your tongue around the stalk of her one huge glaring
eye and see if you can tie the knot. Tongue dexterity
is a skill they teach in school. The tide of you pulls
like a dry rope, straining against cargo. Despair is
the look of the season. Heart rolling around inside
you like a stubborn pebble. Peppercorn of need.
They say these girls possessed a single eye.
Dropped to the bottom of the ocean, as if into
a glass. Half empty and filling rapidly with salt.
A thousand feet below the ocean, looking up
at things that don’t exist yet. You can’t get inside
someone else’s eyes and see through them. You
can work at rage all your life, and still have
nothing to show for it. What a terrific waste
of time, trying to make violent things beautiful.