To the Occupant

by Emma Neale

  for the twelve-pack of fresh bread rolls

  we’d had to walk past him to buy—

  with our conscience burning holes

  in the sleek, fat satin of our well-fed hearts—

  and then some big old drunk Sally

  came swinging past with her plastic sacks

  and as she sang up a rough happiness

  she’d scratched together somehow

  she knocked his collection cup over

  so all the loose change spilled out

  with the faint jangle of lock-up keys

  and a two-dollar coin shot away

  like a panicked animal,

  light ablaze on its skin

  and another man chased it

  into the traffic

  where a courier van blared its horn

  and the pursuer’s toe tripped it as it spun

  so it seemed to lunge sideways to dodge him

  as it plunged through the grille

  of a storm drain;

  quenched like the flame

  of a tiny Excalibur;

  small miracle of compassion

  withdrawn.

  The Appointment

  In the hospital’s eye department, there are two identical art works framed on the wall. ‘Why?’ asks my seven-year-old.

  ‘Perhaps it’s like a game of spot the difference,’ I answer. ‘Or an eye department joke about double vision?’

  ‘A super-bad one,’ he says, giving me The Look.

  We wait ages. Our books get tiring, so we start a game of hangman.

  On the third round, my son finishes the gallows just as a young handcuffed detainee is ushered in by two cops. My son’s hand freezes over the paper as the trio disappears behind a partition.

  ‘J?’ I guess, pretending all is normal, so my son won’t be afraid. He draws a blank head.

  The men reappear. ‘FUCK that,’ says the jailbird.

  ‘Language,’ warns the short cop as they escort the prisoner to the men’s, where they have to wait in line.

  ‘Ps and Qs,’ I whisper. ‘Mind your Ps and Qs.’ My son looks puzzled.

  ‘I?’ is my next guess.

  He pencils in another small circle.

  ‘An eye for an I?’ I ask. He throws The Look again. Then, in his clear, piping, piercing way, he asks, ‘Are the police here ’cause justice is blind?’

  I glance at the tattoos that flick like blue blades up the pale skinhead prisoner’s neck.

  The room plays deaf.

  My son’s name is called like a lifted sentence.

  Removal

  The bloodmark has been there for months:

  like a bootprint tramped in by sadness,

  or, as on a mariner’s map, a small brown outcrop of loss.

  Yet it cleans away so rapidly—

  just a stiff brush, cold water, soap froth

  and it evaporates like fog scrubbed off by noonday sun;

  a pencilled problem quickly erased

  when the debt worked out too great.

  Those unkind words, though,

  grind in their own red stain;

  envy and cruelty spill bitter oils

  that ruin the delicate barbs and barbules

  of memory’s once buoyant plumage.

  Slander

  Just say that for today, there are no have-tos.

  Responsibility sets down its tools,

  heels off its shoes, soaks its ankles

  in the long, cool grass;

  treads to the bed of dahlias, their pinwheel carnival,

  lifts the invisible shutter from its inner ear;

  lets the garden dot-dash the air’s translucent sheet

  in chords that morph with the breeze:

  an earthy but elfin aria

  on the edge of recorded language

  like the songs of an isolate tribe

  with no concept of covetousness, envy, or pride—

  stop. Wreck the dream there.

  If we knew such sweet, supernal music

  how would we ever fully return

  to our own clan’s self-righteous jury?

  Grief would be mind’s lifelong quarantine.

  Turn

  It is so hard to be a good human in all the ways.

  Time to go out to talk to the sunflowers, still visible through the white morning’s mist. Close in, against the dark soil, each bloom gleams like the fired gold of a baritone sax inside the velvet lining of its case. Jackie says she loves the French for sunflowers; a phrase which travels two ways, like the word itself. Tournesol; flowers that turn towards the sun; flowers that turn the sun into flowers. Tournesol, they stand as a turnstile between seasons; between looking too far inward, and turning out to the city shivering in its thin, bright fabrics.

  It is so hard to be a good human in all the ways.

  Listen to what the sunflowers have to say. There is wisdom in their quiet faces.

  My aunt says her grandson names her sunflowers: Tom, Tomasina, Little Tommy, Little D. So perhaps he agrees. He waters and waters their dark hearts, as if water were love and there could be no drowning in that. My own quiet sunpeople turn and seem to gaze this way. One is a black and watchful eye fringed with golden lashes. These others bow their brown cheeks, humble and furred as bees, deep in the meditation of plants. See the fingerprint whorl in the tawny deeps of this one; the curled petals of another, as if it retracts from some sting, a spurned child nursing itself. This other, a mother, hip-swaying, with diaphanous skirts whirling, as, with the hours, the sun leans lower through the mist. Here, a green, spiky little sister, still no bigger than a locket. There, a grandmother who might exclaim, ‘Little rays of sunshine!’ as she flings a meal’s unused cutlery back into the drawer, the blades and tines spinning light to the ceiling as they fall. Yet another, a solemn grandfather, eyes cast down to his broad hands rough as emery boards as they worry at each other, their green veins delicately fuzzed with white prickles. And this one, cartwheeling on its leggy stem, like a seven-year-old allowed to rough it up again, now his arm is three weeks out of a cast, joy whirling his ragamuffin hair in a shaggy corona.

  It is so hard to be a good human in all the ways.

  The sunflowers cluster. They say gather the lustre of yourself and each other. They say burnish and finish and gleam, one to the other. The air around us now is ticking loud with late cicadas and crickets. All my sunpeople and I are the toothed cogs in a shimmering clock, letting time turn us, turn us, together.

  Swarm

  We heard our first bee swarm

  in a stand of native trees

  before we saw it; from the road thought

  the thorned hum to be

  the churn of a boat’s engines idling.

  Deep in the woods there were

  single golden bullets whirling,

  a twister of sun-dipped gravel,

  and a massive, detached propeller

  whose dark vibrating atoms

  became a ghost’s slung-off pelt;

  then the melt of bees on the new hive

  was living electric snow.

  Your uncle said we had to fear attacks

  only if the bees could sense our terror

  so we clasped our dread tight against our skins

  like diamonds, passports, cash

  and as if they bought our forged innocence

  the bees’ swarm let us cross its border

  to your uncle’s hut where breath

  rushed the honeycombs of our lungs.

  Pivot

  A skink swims its cursive over the gravel chips, vanishes

  two dragonflies arabesque mid-air, are gone

  cicadas disentangle from jasmine,

  ricochet like chips of smashed green glass

  The clouds in their mobile glyphs concur:

  don’t stay as you are

  don’t stay as you are

  iii

  Selected Letters

  Underneath the Fridge Magnet

 
Dear Fartypants and Coffeebreath

  Dear Doodlebrain, Bumnuts,

  Dogsbollocks and Spottyface

  You never really loved me

  So that’s why I’m gone-burgers.

  Please don’t worry about it

  not that you probably will

  the kid in the middle

  should come middle

  or sometimes even first

  but in my point of view

  it’s only mostly last.

  I’ve got my backpack and my drink bottle

  and a couple of books for if it gets boring

  not that it probably will because runaways

  have to think on their toes for their living

  and there might be wild van-pirates

  so I’ll have to keep a constant look-out.

  I’ve taken the one-eyed binoculars

  that broke on the beach trip

  and a warm layer like you always say.

  Don’t be angry but I’ve taken some of the cake

  and I’ll eat it too ha, ha.

  Don’t try to find me when I’m grown up.

  You won’t be able to because my alias

  will be amazing. I’m making a list of cool ones.

  If Julie or Tom go into my room, don’t think I won’t know.

  Even if I die, my soul will know and you better believe

  I’ve been practising karate in the park

  so watch out because if they mess with my stuff

  I could still come back—that is, if ever my ghost

  gets done with running away.

  Goodbye and thanks for the days

  when it was good to have forgotten

  I was once upon a time your only son.

  Affidavit

  He said, epistolary novels

  sound like they should be about cowgirls.

  Or at least, set where cowgirls shop—

  like in a perfumery, or a dispensary.

  An epistolary would stock a range

  of compact fold-away travel guns

  in multiple colours, with red-tipped slim-fit ammo

  and the serving staff would be older, wiser cow-women,

  whores with hearts of tooled leather, copper-jacketed lead.

  You know, he’d always wondered,

  once you could buy guns

  that fit inside a handbag

  why did women still let men

  get away with so much violence?

  She cocked

  an eyebrow.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  She licked her lips

  as if some words

  are swigs of strong grog.

  She whispered—

  Pistol-whipped.

  She whispered—

  Calibre.

  She whispered—

  Silencer.

  Shit, he said.

  So triggered.

  Put your hands

  right back

  where I can

  see them,

  she said

  .

  Letter from Hamelin

  The rats have moved into the attic; they slide inside the walls tricky as humidity. They have ignored the peanut-butter-laced traps, the cat, the poison bait and even the supersonic frequency device that’s meant to Pied Piper them away. (A silent-to-humans security alarm, an opposite-to-dog-whistle, it’s set at a pitch to call them off, like Mahler blasted out over shop doorways to repel loitering teens. Only these rats have settled in.)

  The sound of them nags and sickens like a guilty conscience over everything we’ve left undone. They tap an audio memo that the whole globe’s a boat fast-sinking because the rodents have had to come inside, to shelter from the non-summer. Sleet, hail, snow and rain fall all year round, every storm weather-bombs the records. The word unseasonal already seems obsolete. These are the chills of a planet running high fevers.

  The sounds of munch, crack and thud in the ceiling are the earth’s timbers breaking, the ice cap melting, the bones of all the endangered, bright and fearful symmetries collapsing to the ground.

  They are at it night and day, this nibble and gnaw, an anxiety of rats, a fret of rats, a hazard, a startle reflex, a fright and flight and flight of rats. So hyperactive it is as if they’re knocking back coffee beans on top of pseudoephedrine.

  Freakish thought about vermin who do their animal work 24/7: not exactly the eating and breeding, though that is repellent enough, but the possibility of psychotic episodes induced by sleep deprivation. Not mine, though I do lie awake feeling more and more 1984, but theirs. What would a rat with disordered thoughts do? Might it think it was an elephant, a wrecking ball, dress up in the kids’ Batman gear, Darth Vader mask, would it try to fly? Or would it find a keyboard and try to type a tonally wrenched, discontinuous but mainly frightened letter to the world about the end times, while the end times keep on creeping on, as the rats slip in, the rats slip in, the rats slip in to the attic?

  Letter from tomorrow’s tomorrow and tomorrow

  Dear time-mother and time-father

  you gave us roars of wind spin, ice needles falling, blister sky. We think the small survivimals must store your voices, they cry out and they cry in, they cry out and they cry in; your names, do they keen them? For the survivimals sound even when first they are born as if your cinder-bones were red inside them and so early their spirits long for the leaping.

  The light calls in dry splinters, burning. Stones on stones set scraping and rocking, rocks rocking, rocks rocking. The raw wind wishing, the boughs whipping and breaking, the sea rushes up rushes down, air forcing and pouring through night-dark waters splitting, how do we find our way to beforetimes?

  When the bough downquakes hey hey when the baby wakes humma humma when the sky at last slants quiet and the day soft-croons in place, sudden times our skin-pulse wants—tihei mauri ora!.to pick up sticks, flick flax, knock bricks broken, beat hollow pipes rust-coated. Wants us to jump the flash jack, gas, gas, gas, la-la-la lay, lady-ay, sweetmusic-sweetmusic—bidda, budda, boom, bidda, budda boom

  dit-dit-dit—dash—dash—dash—dit-dit-dit

  Dear Friend

  Dear friend I never see

  but still think back to daily

  often at the sun’s draining tide

  or now, say, when the poppies

  on their long green wires

  hum like an iPod’s earbuds

  and those small, dizzy gillespies the bees

  pipe as if burning with the bluest blues

  and my hands are in the tangled grasses

  yanking hard at the roots of the undesired

  until something inside falls so quiet

  it is as if the mind climbs down to peer

  deep into a still green pool of time

  and wonder can gently wend its way to

  —is it enough, that you’re still there,

  deeply held, all the sliding colours of you,

  and the gestures like something

  the packets of light choreographed

  even deep inside the flowers’ furred purses,

  the seeds’ foetal-curled sleep?

  And when, not your words precisely,

  but their slow, warm register burrs again

  as if a breeze stirs an aerial,

  or a man hums low in the past’s far-off rooms,

  as the inlet of memory flexes and fills,

  flexes and fills, is that enough to go by?

  Or shall I try again to write, to ask,

  does this silence have anything to do with

  sorry, I didn’t, I never truly wanted,

  that wasn’t what those straw-gold

  poppy-sway blue-barred days

  ever betrayed at all?

  Dear Adversity

  I’m writing to ask

  if the separate sorrows

  we will give both sons

  could be just enough

  so when the large griefs come—

  as we know they must come—


  they can each take in the blow

  not like a fist, but like a traveller

  they see sodden in winter showers;

  lay down the warm beds

  of their hours;

  withstand the toss and turn;

  sweat and sleep off

  despair’s bone-deep wrack

  so just a few pock-marks, pale lines

  remain on the psyche’s face,

  as traces of when loss came

  to run its course;

  memory’s red cells

  already immunised

  by today’s small, live doses

  of childhood tears.

  Unlove

  My friend who says her mind has frozen

  My friend who says her mind has frozen—

  My friend whose mind has frozen

  sends me small gifts she says to keep her sane—

  a cornflower blue watch;

  a box carved of light with a green latch;

  a grey egg she says will one day hatch

  a small, exquisite monster, its teeth sharp as love.

  ‘It will mark you for me,’ she writes,

  ‘Tiny cat nips, bee bites, gin stings—

  its mouth filled with time’s nettled patch

  you would not pluck safe for me.’

  Couldn’t, I have to say to her, each time.

  Couldn’t. Body closed as a sugar snap pea.

  Mind the silk-sheathed pulse in that body.

  This love that thrives only in sun-winds pocketed

  by cacti, rocks, hooves, scales:

  in the feral thirsts of the near-alien,

  not rippled mirrors of rains, lakes, streams.

  Blindsided

  C

  up

  id ne

  eds contact le

  nses and to reorganise both his belief system

  and his physiological response to attachment relationships

  by seeking some appropriate intensive therapeutic intervention

  amirite?

  Long Distance

  Dear Dearest,

  We dared it,

  didn’t we,

  this nearness?

  In its own way