Naked

Barbara Fairhead

I want to live my life in that fierce flame that lights the eagle’s stare.

Open my heart to the wild-cat’s scream.

Fall to the dark earth like a star.

Offer all that I am to the cutting flint of crucifixion.

I want to run naked as desire over dark hills

and drown in starry nights of wonder.

I want to breathe this splendid rage

—into my blood—

—into my bones—

into the haunting seas of memory.

I want to swim the slow thinking of fish

—and feel the world stream through me—

its huge unstoppable tides.

I want to walk beneath the raging branches of the storm

—hear the rattle of bones lost to the wind—

I want to cleave the sky like a hawk’s wing

and blow away

like dust—

or ash—

or forgetting.

I want to live at the cutting edge of myself

—with the presence of grinning death perched upon my shoulder—

—whispering—

—always whispering—

I want to learn his dark song.

I want to sing it to the wind.

I want to walk on water.

Featured on 25 November 2021

Her Face

Leonie Williams

It’s a quiet afternoon

in the streets of Helenvale.

Over the road

a woman limps along painfully,

with clothes torn

as if she’s been attacked.

Children play loudly

in the street

as if joy is deep,

but the woman

struggles along,

and her eyes

limp in her face.

Featured on 18 November 2021 as one of the Helenvale poets

Ribs of Satin, Mouth of Dusk

Sarah Uheida

I. Father, Persephone’s pomegranates fell out of my mouth

as I came to you asking for the equivalent of ease

and you said the music that played then paralyses now

II. I, too, have turned feral, turned teeth on teeth,

you, too, have sipped Dionysus’s wine straight out of dusk’s collarbone

III. At the entrance of what was once my birthplace, you sat threadbare

and mourned the quietness of quitted beds

you said to resent only the acts of kindness

that sound like D.H. Lawrence’s Self-Pity.

IV. Needled my way through the days

bones bearing a famine yet to come,

O how Father’s hand glistened when I spoke of sin

V. The sheer injustice of pen on paper

The nouveaux literariness of English on my tongue

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.”

VI. Father’s mosaiced litanies, the way he raised me, like hands to the sky,

Undo all my attempts at non-repentance

VII. An oasis of oh no, of Father is no longer father, just another man who could not love my fading out

VIII. For after all,

What is a daughter but a splinter, a hereditary haemorrhage?

IX. God as coaxer of crude confessions; God as the distance between me and the first time I excused myself,

drank & drank in the absences of Jannah

X. There was that one time, though, when you taught me how to spell Mediterranean and I asked whether

inheriting your religion meant I could no longer languish the myths of the Greek

XI. You said I still could.

XII. Father,

How could you not have noticed the teething

XIII. And there was that other time, when I placed an offering at your feet, whisper-yelled:

let me be

your debutante

and I’ll let you hold my body like a grudge.

XIV. Be still, you said, the prayer that played then paralyses now.

Featured on 11 November 2021