four hundred years ago, a baby went to sleep

He had gone in person (Month of Poetry #31)

2012-01-31T20:20:00.002+11:00

He woke into an unadorned morning,
nettled with unease, still unsure whether
the news had sunk deep into her.
He had gone to tell her in person,
was scolded for making the trip when
he could just have rung her up on ‘the blower’.
Will run on for thirty seconds at the mouth
about weather and the kids, then all
awkward lips and scattered breaths, say
the words about his brother, her youngest son.
Another graceful intention, another retarded action.
Adventure: side of beef roast wafted through
the floral suffocation of the room and caught her up
in the subject of lunch. “They overcook the beans.”
“Did you hear me, mum? About Robert?”
“I heard you. When you spoke, I turned around.”
Amid the acoustical preface, to Hotel California
he compared her retirement home. Assisted care:
you’ll be checked in any time your kids like.
She had been a looker in her day, legs like fish-hooks
to men’s eyes. She’d had a delightful way of being
able to stand, still in space but somehow out of time.
She was a prize, he thought. And so we beat,
- on boats against the current - each other to her love,
racing skiffs across the waves for her attention.
She had dulled swiftly in memory like wet silver,
still he had no joy to see her staunched in that drudge
of decrepit chats and daytime television. But she
had nestled, confirmed comfort, in her mismatched way:
“If life gives you lemons, you’ve got to crack a few eggs.”
He had gone in person, when the news had come.
And had told her, he reasoned. He should not find worry
with the peace of a paid debt. Of finished business
she knew nothing: each day fresh with unremembered
phrases the nurses would repeat in patience.
This is the hidden backdrop of our age destination:
parenting the parent, mourning the reversal of care.

___________________________________________________________

Today's final poem for Month of Poetry 2012 is based on suggestions from eight people:

@marklawrence: "This is the hidden backdrop of our age" (Wade David, The Wayfinders)
@jayjaycee: "the news had sunk deep into her" (short story by Tiggy Johnson, Crossing, published in Escape, ed. Bronwyn Mehan)
@anthonyeaton: "and so we beat on, boats against the current" (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)
@_camer0n: "Another retarded action adventure side of beef" (Kurt Cobain Journals)
@realnixwilliams: "The peace of a paid debt, of finished business" (B.R. Collins, Thyme's End)
@ernmalleyscat: "a delightful way of being able to stand still in space" (Frank Jordan, Create More Butterflies)
@timsterne: "I turned around amid the acoustical preface to 'Hotel California'" (Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch, Ten Walks/Two Talks)
@matchtrick: "The blower will run for thirty seconds" (Owner's Manual, LA Spas (Quest Series))

Who are not an excuse any more (Month of Poetry #30)

2012-01-30T17:53:00.003+11:00

It is in many ways quite difficult to be everything
perhaps you should be. A fisherman, a poet, a chef
a priest, a politician of the sort you’ve watch Howard spin.
Block, prevaricate, sidestep your way into achieving
little more than shelter from the fallout.
Each of you freefall into the most important
decisions: children, jobs, which way the bed faces,
all these points of difference you gotta have.
Friendship and courage and whatever you’re going
to cook for tea – these choices mount up like newspapers.
I watched you all, but settled on a soul to crack open.
I had chosen him because in this house of his there was writing.
On every wall he played this paperchase, for each game
a fresh square is used. For drawing the Wog and the Dago
and other taunts from his childhood into the open,
he used a green pen. His mother had said they were jealous.
I watching him in winter as he snapped his icy fingers
around the words that blamed his life on each and
every other. I bricked in the quiet about his ears;
I did need six years to contruct and build the cone
of silent transference. When he had placed his
every dumb reasoning elsewhere, he felt that he was
alive again, forgiven for not struggling
against the undertow. Certainty is favourable;
unfortunately, massive overconfidence is not.
A survival trait learned from family who are not an excuse
any more. He wore his assurance as a false receipt,
for an advertisement in his pocket that sang his own
praises. The devil is not impressed by how fast
you can swim along with the current.

__________________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from ten people:

@jayjaycee1: "perhaps you should be a fisherman" (Natalie Babbitt, Jack Plank Tells Tales)
@slimejam: “He snapped his icy fingers” (Daisy Meadows, ‘Nicole the Beach Fairy - Rainbow Magic #78)
@jellyjellyfish: "You gotta have friendship and courage and whatever!" (Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life)
@ernmalleyscat: "In this house of his there was writing on every wall" (John Galsworthy, The Forsyte saga)
@matchtrick: "For each game a fresh square is used for drawing the Wog" (Joyce Thorpe, B.A., Successful Parties & Social Evenings)
@eglantinescake: "We've watched Howard spin, block, prevaricate, sidestep..." (David Marr, Quarterly Essay: His Master's Voice)
@mike_sh: "Unfortunately, massive overconfidence is not a survival trait" (Garth Nix, A Confusion of Princes)
@crazybrave: "a false receipt for an advertisement in his pocket" (Delia Falconer, Sydney)
@timsterne: "I did need six years to construct and to build the Cone" (Thomas Bernhard, Correction)
@marklawrence: "he felt that he was alive again, forgiven" (Peter Temple, The Broken Shore)

Twitnic 2012 (Month of Poetry #29)

2012-01-29T21:23:00.000+11:00

Keeping seven kids in place at a park
proceeded not from the circumstances of
geography, but from sheer will of one man
plus balloons. The call came electric:
come to a picnic. Because we are no longer
willing to remain imaginary and avatared,
we brought cheese and children.
I arrived first with a boy pre-grubbed into
the shade of an aardwolf, the earth-wolf.
Of South Africa he knows nothing.
For fuck’s sake, of South Melbourne
he knows nothing. We shut and opened
the creak of rotunda gates and I thought
of people I would soon embrace.
This is how space begins: with words only
bright on a screen, with @ and # and
tentative DMs towards IRL. And then ---
They flew in with blankets and arms
and arrayed themselves into points:
this star, is very easy to assemble.
God doesn’t love you, but friends might;
I know which pair of arms I’d choose.
I have settled on this that life was:
weakness, strength. Was the exception
the maelstrom of people I have found?
I asked my boy this question, he answered
me with a handful of almonds. One thing more:
I have missed you today, missed your
quick straight-teeth smile that proclaims:
there was my librarian, stern and infallible.
And silent, your eyes for me across the grass
threading past plates of chicken and bread.

_______________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from eight people:

@timsterne: "proceeded not from the circumstances of geography but from sheer will" (Joan Didion, Sentimental Journeys)
@kirsty_l: "God doesn't love you" (Katharine Susannah Prichard, The Pioneers)
@matchtrick: "We are no longer willing to remain imaginary" (Alberto Manguel, Into the Looking Glass Wood)
@marklawrence: "Life was weakness, strength was the exception." (Peter Temple, The Broken Shore)
@jayjaycee1: "This star is very easy to assemble" (Frederique Gueret, Magical Window Stars)
@_esther: "This is how space begins, with words only" (Georges Perec, Species of Spaces)
@_camer0n: "there was my librarian, stern and infallible and silent" (Charles Bukowski, Ham On Rye)
@ernmalleyscat: "aardwolf, the earth-wolf of South Africa" (Arthur L Hayward, The Concise English Dictionary)

Decisions (Month of Poetry #28)

2012-01-28T20:03:00.003+11:00

Fucking hell, I’m bones and then I eat a
sandwich and a woman appears from nowhere.
On Broadway, policeman vanishes with the call
of donuts. On Lygon Street, choice disappears
under a looped track of pasta. It’s a bit like starting
solids at 6 months: once I commence meals
I have to keep going. Three decisions a day was
the crucifix I had begun having nightmares about.
The reality of adult life: need to feed my child,
run butter across my dry muscles or I will
stagger dumb feet, crack knees on the foothpath
before I relieve him to daycare. Twenty kilograms
doesn’t lift any weights from this meaty decision.
Each frown is a case of balancing damage
and I will slap these words down blunt:
Dinner, then slam my head in the cupboard?
Skip it, then sob and shake for what counts as routine?
He slips and hits his knee; cries. I offer my arms
to him/you, and you ask for cheese. You behold
me in a horrible example. Of free thought I offer
a place in between these insignificant horrors:
my warm lap, a slice of comfort, a promise.

____________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from three people:

@spikelynch: "Woman Appears From Nowhere On Broadway, Policeman Vanishes" (Joanna Russ, The Female Man)
@timsterne: "I had begun having nightmares about the reality of adult life" (David Foster Wallace, Oblivion)
@attentive: "You behold in me a horrible example of free thought" (James Joyce, Ulysses)

Light behaves like waves (Month of Poetry #27)

2012-01-27T20:17:00.002+11:00

She was expected to wash up a mermaid
with knives in her feet. They said I’ll bet
you anything she’s a damsel in distress of
the bottom of her foot at the bottom of the sea.

They neglected to notice she had read the
fine print, that ocean of tiny words that stream
in a champagne bead to the surface. They
forgot that light behaves like waves, too.

She had thanked them all in vast fish: you ought
to return thanks. In a neat speech wrapped about
in fins and slime she flopped her appreciation
out in stench. The whole world had a new smell.

Small and unadorned, a chamber maid slit
one open. Gasping still, the flapper heaved
out hot guts and gleaming metal in the middle there.
Opens up a field of infinite opportunities: one gold ring.

A footman, arrested about his death journey
on to the conquest of another snivelling hypocrite
found a string of seaweed hanging from a oak.
He stood a second, missed the crushing wheels.

One man saw her like a flying fish, escaped across
the sky. Stars flickered like salt crystals. He
said: It can’t be the moon, it’s going too fast
and wasn’t that a tail? Under one gaze, she won.

This isn’t the story? Not Disney or Andersen? I saw
that slick red-head Ariel, I know how it feels.
To have to begin speculating ominously about
a woman fish: it is to find her, warm about the rocks.

__________________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from eight people:

@JayJayCee1: "they forgot that light behaves like waves, too" (Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon)
@jellyjellyfish: "I'll bet you anything she's a damsel in distress" (Rodman Philbrick, Freak The Mighty)
@marklawrence: "in the middle there opens up a field of infinite opportunities" (Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium)
@spikelynch: "It can't be the moon. It's going too fast" (Alasdair Gray, Lanark)
@matchtrick: "You ought to return thanks in a neat speech" (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass)
@ernmalleyscat: "the whole world had a strange new smell" (A S Byatt, Possession)
@attentive: "On to the conquest of another snivelling hypocrite" (Stendhal, Le Rouge Et Le Noir)
@timsterne: "I know how it feels to have to begin speculating ominously" (Joseph Heller, Something Happened)

I'm not sure why this combination of phrases prompted a Little Mermaid poem. Maybe each sequence of poems I write demands a Little Mermaid poem somewhere.

Every poem is children (Month of Poetry #26)

2012-01-26T20:58:00.004+11:00

Every poem is children. I clapped words
together and every time: children.
These lines, they imitated
their basic shape and form, sprouted a
mimicked phrase, small-tooth grin,
never-ending mucus and poo.
Poetry is an abdomen, smooth with an
adolescent promise of everything
your belly will one day make.
A nice sheath for a sword, fine lines for
breaking. Nothing happens by chance,
to girls come pretty rhymes and words
all treacle shiny. Those glosses on
the human comedy of terrors, each one
a pentameter pretender, teasing out
pregnant stanzas: they got themselves up.
Killingly, those poems are untimely ripped
brought forth squalling. They scream
against the glare, straining umbilical against
the tethers of their tiny language.

________________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from six people:

@_camer0n: "never-ending mucus and poo" (Robin Barker, The Mighty Toddler)
@pinknantucket: "They imitated their basic shape and form" (Ed. Robin Myers & Michael Harris, A Millenium of the Book [slightly edited])
@ernmalleyscat: "Your belly will one day make a nice sheath for a sword" )Honoré de Balzac, The Droll Stories_
@timsterne: "Those glosses on the human comedy" (Jan Didion, Sentimental Journeys)
@spikelynch: "Nothing happens by chance to girls" (Italo Calvino, Baron in the Trees)
@kirsty_l: "They got themselves up Killingly" (Edward Gorey, The Glorious Nosebleed)

Today's poem is neither Australian nor unAustralian. This reflects my general stance of approving of public holidays, but not approving of daycare centres being shut on public holidays.

Two (Month of Poetry #25)

2012-01-25T12:42:00.007+11:00

(for L. and C.)

An extra pair of feet dash sparks across the carpet
and two bodies fling a whirl of hair and arms
onto the bed. Never I have seen the springs
(for all the winters this mattress has endured)
pressed down with such pretty squeals.
Snags and plain sangers are the
holiest of menus: Mary’s kitchen is suddenly
full of angels with Vegemite faces. Two:
one who doesn’t notice if it’s white,
one who would otherwise avail herself of any
opportunity. To burst into tears (either
of them or us) is acceptable and overtired.
As I write this, sitting in the kitchen sink are
the cast off dinner pleadings. I know
tofu can taste superb. “Yes, it really can
be eaten. No, it’s not kitchen sponge.”
Their adult-mirrored curl of lip calls me false.

At bed-time, they take arrangements without
a twitch of eyebrow or serrated silence.
This change of bedding expectation, it
must be a cultural thing. Says Mum:
“Kids adjust to anything. It’s adults
that have a crisis over cereal branding.”
Two: damp with play, slack with sleep.
we made them, one each, from our bodies.
They think us heroes, able to cut off Medusa’s
head without being turned into stone or
find our tenderness baked cold into mudbrick.
We smooth back hair, pull their softness
to us again and again to feel that we live near.
A tribe of bloodless white people we have been.
These two; small and primary, soon shock us awake
in the morning quarter-dark. Infuriating and loveborn,
their shouts defibrillate the day.

_____________________________________________________________

Today's post is based on suggestions from eight people:

@timsterne: "We live near a tribe of bloodless white people" (Lydia Davis, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant)
@marklawrence: "to cut off Medusa's head without being turned to stone" (Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium)
@ChanletB: "I have seen the springs, for all the winters" (Kay Jamison, An Unquiet Mind)
@realnixwilliams: "Tofu can taste superb - yes, it really can" (Rose Elliot, Fast, Fresh and Fabulous: Rose Elliot's New Vegetarian Cookbook)
@notcharming: "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink" (Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle)
@matchtrick: '"It must be a cultural thing,'" says Mum.' (Shaun Tan, Eric)
@attentive: "who would otherwise avail herself of any opportunity to burst into tears" (WG Sebald, The Rings of Saturn)
@ernamalleyscat: "Mary's kitchen is suddenly full of angels" (Andrew Marlton, The Story of the Christmas Story)

Storm dogs (Month of Poetry #24)

2012-01-24T22:19:00.000+11:00

At the turn of spring, the rain
pulls away from earth and out
of sight. Left behind, the space is
big where clouds once stuffed full the sky.
The silver ladder’s gone, lifted
back up into someone else’s season.
Bobble-headed birds sprout stubble
and this craze for flowers was also manifested.
In other facets of daily life, I noticed
a swathe of Lost posters peppering the
streets with missing pets. Unseasonable
storms had sprung them loose, backyards
emptied of dogs, garden chairs were
undepressed by cats. The thunder takes
them out of their heads, it is a truth universally.
Acknowledged the plight, I took the snips of
phone numbers in a show of aid,
just to let the people know there is
someone out there. Who reads the papers
for disappeared animals any more?
I looked for one particular hound,
and there he was. A funny old dog,
he liked strawberries thrown high
for the mouth-catch. On just the right
trajectory, you double him up
like a pocketknife mid-air and he spreads
his canine blades snap! across the
berry into slush. They would find him
in a week, bearing a jagged stick
in his maw like a trophy. I would
throw this new-foundling his summer fruit
and wonder if when the storm struck,
he had jack-knifed skywards and only
after seven days managed to drag
that piece of lightning down.

_________________________________________

Today's poems is based on suggestions from seven people:

@timsterne: "just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers" (Don DeLillo, Libra)
@JayJayCee1: “The silver ladder's gone!” (Isabel Wyatt, The Seven Year Old Wonder Book)
@realnixwilliams: “This craze for flowers was also manifested in other facets of daily life” (Andrea Wulf, The Brother Gardeners)
@sulphura: "He was a funny old dog. He liked strawberries." (Margaret Wise Brown, Mr Dog)
@safzoro: "It is a truth universally acknowledged" (Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice)
@ernmalleyscat: "you double him up like a pocketknife" (Damon Runyon, On Broadway)
@LaceySnr: “Space is big” (Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)

When I was a kid I read the 'lost' notices in the local paper, and then kept my eyes peeled for the pets. I still do it out of habit when I see posters up on power-poles.

Opposite ends of the job (Month of Poetry #23)

2012-01-23T17:23:00.001+11:00

When that nest turns up empty
as a tureen after pouring the soup,
into the toilet go all thoughts of
fledgling-proofed freedom.
When it comes to being thicker
than water, we’re more of the blood.
Love and rhetoric school us
in opposite ends of the job:
devotion and addiction;
subjective and objectionable;
Mention the word ‘quality’
to some project managers
and you’ll hear an audible groan.
Mention the word ‘babyhood’
to some teenagers’ parents and
you’ll see the timeline has grown.
Children shoot up faster than
any deadline, while mothers and
fathers they simply trail behind,
grumbling that it goes too fast
leaning on the door-frame between
leaving home and a first smile.

__________________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from four people:

@realnixwilliams: "Mention the word 'quality' to some project managers and you'll hear an audible groan" (Barker & Cole, Brilliant Project Management)
@timsterne: "After pouring the soup into the toilet" (Lynne Tillmann, American Genius)
@ernmalleyscat: "they simply trail behind, grumbling that it goes too fast" (Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works Volume 1)
@matchtrick: "We're more of the blood, love and rhetoric school" (Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

This may well be the first time I've had to fit project management into a poem. The odds are it's probably the last, too.

Virginia bred presidents (Month of Poetry #22)

2012-01-22T19:28:00.000+11:00

I expected maybe the Mormons.
Or the man trying to sell Foxtel
(to who my grandmother had once replied
“Oh no, we’re quite happy with Telstra, thanks”)
But it was him, shuffling and frayed
around the periphery, as if every edge
of him from hat to boot had split ends.
He asked if I would like to hear his theory.
Mindful of my looming tax return and
mountain of matched-up socks
I invited him in: “I’m extremely interested.”
In squalor steps he bird-footed down the hall
nestled himself on my couch and fluffed up
what he had forseen. It was a vision of
the Old Dominion. As the southern outpost
of a Middle Atlantic economy, he detailed,
we were in a prime position to capitalise
on the untapped assets of presidential births.
Eight politicians later, his hair frilled out
ecstatic and diamond beads of sweat etched
his face with trails of fanatic grime.
Virginia bred presidents, was the gist of
his words gone since. “I never talk to children:
I believe. In their artistic instinct lies a power
that, if harnessed, could make America’s
greatest leader since your great-grandpappy
was a twinkle.” A flash of brown-rimmed gum.
He smelled of mass-produced roast dinners
and overused mattress. A roll of papers
scruffled from his pocket, slashed with
arrows and flecked about with scrawl.
“I took it to the government on a number
of evenings. I tried every night to be as
unfunny as I could, and all I found was
their laughter.” He coiled his wire fingers
around my wrist, and stood. “I will trust you
with this. Keep it until I come to you again.”
A flash of saggy tweed and my front door
clicked shut, soft as an apology. When
I looked down I found the scroll of revolution
pressed between my palms.

_________________________________________________________

This poem is based on suggestions from four people:

@ernmalleyscat: "I'm extremely interested in squalor." (J.D. Salinger, For Esmé – With Love and Squalor)
@facelikethunder: "it was a vision of the Old Dominion as the southern outpost of a Middle Atlantic economy" (Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency)
@timsterne: "Since I never talk to children, I believe in their artistic instinct” (Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet)
@matchtrick: “I tried each night to be as unfunny as I could” (Stewart Lee, The "If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One" EP)

The American state of Virginia is nicknamed “Old Dominion”, but also “Mother of Presidents”, as eight U.S. presidents were born there. That seemed as good a starting place as any for a poem.

Not made of anything so desperate (Month of Poetry #21)

2012-01-21T21:30:00.004+11:00

When she was only seconds slicked forth
she stared at the midwives like their eyes
were the meanest eyes she had ever seen.
I narrowed mine too, when they told me to wake
her to feed. “I’m sorry to break your dreams,”
I whispered, and she blinked once, her
mouth open clean as Frieda Hughes.
Delirious with milk, my chest arched weightless
bobbed me across the ceiling, expressed
streams of mother manuals I should write.
The big-boob handbook is sopped with
fever, pierced with vacuum suction.

I brought her home, all furred pale arms
on the hottest day. The front door wavered,
and in the foreground, a black cat.
Sky pale green and shimmering raw with tiredness.
I made babies and journeys like artists are born,
and not made of anything so desperate as
a pull and a jumpstart for my own new existence.
I don’t give a damn for life. Is really an idiotic
business such as this worth plumping humans for?
I made her because there was a gap in her shape
a space cut out for like starfish hands, opening
and closing, silhouetted against February fires.

_______________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from six people:

@timsterne: "I don't give a damn, for life is really an idiotic business." (Blaise Cendrars, Moravagine)
@scooter_lass: 'journeys, like artists, are born and not made' (Laurence Durrell , Bitter Lemons)
@ernmalleyscat: "and in the foreground a black cat. Sky pale green." (Vincent van Gogh, The Letters. (last letter to Theo))
@marklawrence: "I'm sorry to break your dreams." (Dee Nolan, A Food Lover's Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela)
@pinknantucket: Their eyes were the meanest eyes she had ever seen. (Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh)
@lalscotton: 'I should write the big-boob handbook.' (How to leave twitter by grace dent)

Dinner was Campbells (Month of Poetry #20)

2012-01-20T21:38:00.002+11:00

I met you young, and then again at thirty.
It was me that in later life you married.
The mole on my cheek stayed non-cancerous
and the mole in that other place fascinated
years after we found those uncanny rings
on our shaking fingers. We chucked in sense
like a steaming massage towel, we threw
every waking hour against the dreaming drawbridge.

We took it upon ourselves to hurl our
caution money at gangster winds.
I would write, you would teach.
I announced the last of my grant in ominous tones:
“Germany has declared war on Russia.”
Swimming in the afternoon was cancelled when
the pool fees outstripped dinner and a
rare bottle of painstripper cabernet.

I knocked off writing, you finished teaching
and slipped a coin in the public phone
each evening at 5, affected snotty French tones
and enquired whether Madame would care
for cream of chicken or the beef and vegetable?
Dinner was Campbells. We exhausted the
Warhol jokes but stayed warm over the stove
even once the novelty of poverty wore off.

We ran our cards up in hot plastic slots.
For a few months there was less money,
then there was no money at all.
Was exactly what we had contained in a
voice from the end of the street?
Tapped along a wire we had no want
of reversing, running thin like soup
through the cables between our ears?

_______________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from three people (which is lucky, as I forgot to ask for suggestions last night but they came forth anyway!)

@timsterne: "Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon" (Franz Kafka, Diaries)
@ernmalleyscat: "No money at all was exactly what we had" (George McRobie, Small is Possible)
@scooter_lass: "in later life you married the mole" (Martin Amis, The House of Meetings)

I remember reading somewhere about a writer couple (I think) who for a while could only afford a can of soup each night to share for dinner. Each evening he would ring her from the public phone at the end of the street, to see which flavour of soup she felt like that evening. The phone call probably cost half again what the can of soup did, but that gesture of his phone call has stayed with me, though I've long forgotten who the people actually were.

The sofa can't be blamed for this (Month of Poetry #19)

2012-01-19T20:00:00.003+11:00

A simple and inexpensive way
to tune a poet’s strings?
Tell her that a verse a day’s
the easiest of things.

We poets had no full-time staff,
we had no secret agents,
worthy of note, worthy of chaff,
we star in our own pageants.

And so I too had fallen prey
to the mind warp oh so pretty,
rather than just write, I say:
I’ll call up half the city!

I’ll offer poems, freshly cut
from words placed in my hands.
The dragon does not beg, slut,
but places her demands.

Have you got as much guts
as you’ve got gall and phrases?
I will not give you ifs or buts,
just put them in their places.

I’m going to fail, I’m going to suck
I happily agree.
On ‘Hotel Buggiato’ I’m stuck
(you get this verse for free)

I’ll fudge a few bad ditties,
I’ll badly rhyme my lies,
there’s no need to get shitty,
it’s not the Nobel Prize.

So if my mother is a fish,
it’s bad metaphor: I know it.
The sofa can’t be blamed for this,
the fault lies in the poet.

_______________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from seven people:

@matchtrick: 'The dragon does not beg, slut' (George Martin, Game Of Thrones)
@scooter_lass: 'have you got as much guts as you've got gall?' (Hammett, Red Harvest)
@timsterne: ‘my mother is a fish’ (William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying)
@ernmalleyscat: ‘I too had fallen prey to the mind warp’ (Randall Lane, The Zeroes)
@lalscotton: ‘we had no secret agents worthy of note’ (Dennis Wheatley, The Deception Planners)
@dogpossum: 'simple and inexpensive way to tune' (Kalaukele pamphlet)
@ChanletB: ‘Hotel Buggiato’ (Lili Wilkinson, A Pocket Full of Eyes)

Er, my sincere apologies.

I'm very very tired and there's a three year old who's been screaming "I WANT TO SING A SONG! I WANT A STORY! I WANT A DRINK OF WATER! I WANT TO WAKE UP! I WANT TO WAKE UP!" from his cot for the past hour.

I think it did something to my brain.

You still wrote me letters (Month of Poetry #18)

2012-01-18T19:45:00.000+11:00

I said it softly. You asked me, did I say I loved you?
When a child asks you something, answer him.
For goodness sake: when a man asks you something,
answer him as if you'd care to hear it back.
I'd like to try and pose here, but my facade would
fall as flat as abandoned beer. I cared enough to
propose my hand across a pint glass, you took
my fingers and we marveled the reflections of the two.

Old women gazed, disapprovingly bubbled-wrapped
in a festival of ladies and letters. Written out of history,
we lived in a preoccupation as complete as that of a
dream-walk by the river and a missed last train.
We were off, racing hard against the last thirty years,
riding til the writing from our pens was slick with lather.

When 'to' and 'from' addressed the same, you still wrote me letters.
Those sealed-up thoughts, they were big, and the writing was tiny:
small letters, scritched with all the haste and mess of hope.
Time had sneaked up on us and we found it was months ago
not weeks, that we had said this bright new idea out loud.
Danger cats threatened teeth and snarls against us:
we stood and fixed our feet firm as the young mice
squeaked with alarm; pleaded scattering.

Some people seem to think it's exciting to deface things.
That we write among them is our talent, our saving brace.
Your lines drop a rope ladder, rawk up my skin in magic:
a spell is the right words. Delivered in the right way they stop
short the hunters. Let the tigers come with their claws:
you have caught me up out of reach. We are flung up high
these seats gonna be a nosebleed, but hey, we've got
plenty of years pumping blood ahead of our veins.

____________________________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from eleven people (I obviously fail at my own intention cutting things off at eight phrases):

@msmisrule: "a spell is the right words delivered in the right way" (Diana Wynne Jones, The Magicians of Caprona)
@slimejam: “Time had sneaked up on us” (Magnus Mills, The Restraint Of Beasts)
@home_sewn: "when a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness sake" (Lee Harper, To Kill a Mockingbird)
@mike_sh: "We lived in a preoccupation as complete as that of a dream" (Marie & Pierre Curie, Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, A Tale Of Love And Fallout)
@scooter_lass: "Seats gonna be a nosebleed, but hey" (George Pelecanos, The Turnaround)
@matchtrick: 'Let the tigers come with their claws!' (Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince)
@pinknantucket: "The young mice squeaked with alarm" (Jill Barklem, Brambly Hedge Summer Story)
@_camer0n: "I'd like to try and pose here" (Pierre Bourdieu, On Television)
@timsterne: "It's exciting to deface things that we live among" (David Shields, Reality Hunger)
@gretapunch: "the reflections of the two old women gazed, disapprovingly" (Neil Gaiman, Stardust)
@ernmalleyscat: "They were big and the writing was tiny" (Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha)

Three years ago (Month of Poetry #17)

2012-01-17T19:07:00.000+11:00

Three years ago he is heralded by
a tidal wave, breaking like something
in Hollywood they shoot. The white girl
first feeds him with all her insides and
he eats her up, smiling at her smiling.
Two years ago and she makes a prayer:
never may he have an accident.
Shaped like an umbrella with his arms
outstretched he learns all at once
to step the chasm between chairs.
Naps are mastered and performed:
routines are like a comfort blanket
for kids and parents alike. They mark
the beast of sleep, prop up the days.
One year ago she glances across at
the red light and almost doesn’t stop.
He says in his little voice: ‘You okay?’
She shakes her head and hands shake.
Later, she says ‘My God, I was a long
way down.’ Her tears run over his face
when she remembers almost leaving.
No years ago and we are all of us flesh
and blood and more entropy than
the second law of thermodynamics has.
A rather different status for time exists
when dealing with a three year old:
he finds extra moments in little corners.
Where someone else’s bid for immortality
goes unnoticed, he can pick up time
and tuck it away like a pocketful
of gumnuts. Every hour spent watching
a line of ants won back with a skipped
nap. Every minute spent experimenting
with your favourite seasonal fruits and a
plastic hammer leaves a new lifetime
of stains on the carpet. Every second
ticks back to three years ago when we
first taught each other to swim to the surface.

___________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from eight people:

@_boobook_: “Routines are like a comfort blanket for kids” (Nicole Avery , Planning With Kids)
@matchtrick: 'They shoot the white girl first' (Toni Morrison, Paradise)
@_camer0n: "experimenting with your favourite seasonal fruits" (The CSIRO total wellbeing diet)
@spikelynch: "May he have an accident shaped like an umbrella" (Primo Levi, The Periodic Table)
@hannibal_: "The second law of thermodynamics has a rather different status" (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time)
@ernmalleyscat: "little corners where someone's bid for immortality goes unnoticed" (Edmund White, The Flâneur)
@timsterne: "My God, I was a long way down" (Knut Hamsun, Hunger)
@gretapunch: "She glances across the red light" (Joe Dunthorne, Submarine)

Today is my wee boy Luka's third birthday. Happy three years, blondie :)

Rang out sirens (Month of Poetry #16)

2012-01-16T18:13:00.000+11:00

She had waited for a great-grandchild
long as we could remember. Instead,
substitute pets ring-barked the furniture
spread their reminders on the couch.
They were blessed with dubious monikers
and natural ends. She wrote to tell us:
“At the stroke of six, Ikey Snigglefritz
laid down. His goose was cooked.”
Ikey was a rottweiler. The pets ate well;
the goose may have not been figurative.
Two cats, three chickens, a Doberman,
miscellaneous flurries of guinea pigs and mice
(some free range). Added into the mix is Herman,
a cannabalistic plumber who roamed
the water pipes, dispatching fellow spiders
in an arachnid audition for Get Carter.

She refused all use of the telephone,
though kept it in the cupboard for emergencies.
The cord trailed to the wall like an unlit fuse.
To her mind, this was being flexible and sensible.
Instead of being rigid and brittle in her thoughts
she wrapped them up in logic until they
couldn’t breathe. So we weren’t sure how
to tell her, how to usurp all her pets with
this bright new thing of birth. Debates ranged
over the stop-start-stop of telegrams,
the photographic curlicues of calling cards
the dashing nature of Morse Code.
You suggested we tie a note to Herman
for when she next took a bath.
When her first great-grandchild burst into
the world, full of cottage cheese and
yodelling fury, I lifted the phone and
we simply called. Her joy rang out sirens
like the most brilliant emergency.

_______________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from four people:

@matchtrick: 'in the end we simply called her Joy' (David Almond, Skellig)
@marklawrence: "was being flexible and sensible instead of being rigid and brittle" (CS Forrester, Hornblower and the Hotspur)
@ernmalleyscat: "At the stroke of six Ikey Snigglefritz laid down his goose." (O. Henry, The Social Triangle)
@timsterne: "Added into the mix is Herman, a cannibalistic plumber." (Destroy All Movies!!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film)

That line from Skellig is possibly my favourite last line of a book, ever. Although I haven't actually read 'Destroy All Movies!!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film', so perhaps I shouldn't dismiss Herman the cannibalistic plumber out of hand.

A Nice Town (Month of Poetry #15)

2012-01-15T18:10:00.004+11:00

I was born here, in the front room. My mother

trilled ‘El Paso’ as she laboured, though as a rule

you do not whistle cowpuncher tunes on Sundays.

Would you like the little lady to get you a cup of tea?

We’re one of the old families, been here since

the church was built from trees they had pulled down.

The beams to make the cross were split by my

great-grandfather, singing away to glory with his

Gladly the Cross I’d Bear for Jesus. I always wondered

what Jesus had to do with a cross-eyed bear.

He went downhill after that, as did my father later.

Me, recently I’ve had another episode of coughing,

blood running a bit too thin these days and my heart

can’t get a grip. Often the menfolk seem to go that way.

Don’t expect you’ll have the ‘local trouble’, though.

You look healthy as a proverbial.

I wonder how that tea is getting on. No, don’t get up.

You’re really going to like it. Here it’s a nice town.

(with nice people you couldn’t have)

Made a better choice, had you really? Well.

Expect you could find someplace fancier,

(but we’ve all heard about your ‘spot of trouble’)

Ah, I expect you’ll be staying on a while yet.

(staying on here with us

til you find yourself withering

out each day by the fence

until the junk mail catalogues come)

Now. Where’s that tea?

_________________________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from four people:

@ernamalleyscat: "You do not whistle cowpuncher tunes" (Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet)
@timsterne: "I've had another episode of coughing blood" (Anton Chekhov, A Life in Letters)
@realnixwilliams: "You're really going to like it here! It's a nice town with nice people! You couldn't have made a better choice!" (Stepford Wives)
@matchtrick: “They had pulled down the beams to make the cross” (Jorge Luis Borges, The Gospel According to Mark)

Having had to look up what a 'cowpuncher tune' is, I've now had Marty Robbins singing El Paso on the brain for the past several hours. It's not unpleasant.

Gef (Month of Poetry #14)

2012-01-14T20:18:00.003+11:00

He was completely dissatisfied with
conventional spellings. Unable to settle
upon Jeff or Geoff, he mixed the names his
mother offered him. On the day I met him,
Gef explained that he was quite unlike a normal.
Mongoose eyes and weasel nose, his rodent voice
pattered about with Dr Seuss, The Bible:
‘Your mountain is waiting. Eloi Eloi,
lama sabachthani. So get on your way.
There’s no nutter like a fellow nutter. Hello!’
Gef was stark raving, so we got along fine.
Both of us, we’ve never liked crossing roads.
We took the back way to everywhere, climbing
out from under the winter hedge with bits
of dry, brown grass and seed pods. Stuck to his
clothes were the trappings of lunacy,
I quickly pulled them on with pride. There’s a word
for it: hypomania, and we dashed from the woods
to the night to the day to the sea. Sand crusted
our bodies with the texture of bathers. On a
crowded beach is a diagram of human madness,
and he scraped it out wet with one shaking finger.
‘All of these people, they cannot see their pattern.
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious,
fact-ridden surface of life. But if I draw a line here - ’
his bright eyes flashed hot, ‘we can see it how
it turns itself up the right way.’ I scoured his sandscape
eager jumpy glances. ‘It looks like a turtle.’
He nodded. ‘I knew you’d understand.’
One morning Gef was not waiting by the front gate.
I asked the nurse, but her interrogation of surnames
rattled my head like a seed pod and blew out
my thoughts like dry strips of grass.
Cross-legged under a tree, I took a stick
etched out a self-righting turtle in the dirt.

_____________________________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from six people:

@jellyjellyfish: “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact” (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Boscombe Valley Mystery)
@matchtrick: “Gef explained that he was quite unlike a normal mongoose” (Richard Wiseman, Paranormality)
@gingerandhoney: "climbing out from under the winter hedge with bits of dry, brown grass and seed pods stuck to his clothes"
@ernmalleyscat: "The texture of bathers on a crowded beach is a diagram." (Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form)
@facelikethunder: "Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani" (Mark 15:34)
@timsterne: "We've never liked crossing roads." (Lars Iyer, Spurious)

Aramaic and an abnormal mongoose named Gef! What could be easier to work into a poem. Ahem.

Every fading February (Month of Poetry #13)

2012-01-13T23:03:00.002+11:00

Summer left us and the trees dropped their skirts
to make a new carpet with their glowing.
Smoldering crimson or scarlet skins stirred
around your ankles, your feet peripherally
in the thick of things. You have glasses on
your nose and autumn in your heart,
skittering out your blood like leaves.
I hoped the memory of summer would
keep us warm, but you were razor-angry,
spitting tacks at people I’d never met:
‘He was a cockroach.’ With no muscles
anywhere, I bluffed light your fury, chanted
‘Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris,
sed in nomine diaboli’ and then regretted it so.
The tiger came into the kitchen with your reply:
‘I baptize you in the name of your own father.’
That March, we managed to say everything
that a problem would need. Very tall dogs
of war let slip over our back fence and sidled
into the house like arguments, nosed into
small corners of hurt that we had long papered
over or set to freeze around June.
Every fading February undid us a little further, that
new season a courier who gave you the message
in colours: red for frustration, purple for anger.
Brown for boredom, dulled flat under tired feet.
Like every year I wondered if we might not
crunch taut through another autumn.

__________________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from eight people:

@ernmalleyscat: "Problem - would need very tall dogs" (Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie, The Goodies' Book of (Criminal) Records)
@timsterne: "He was a cockroach with no muscles anywhere." (Me, my Grade 6 yearbook)
@matchtrick: 'So the tiger came into the kitchen' (Judith Kerr, The Tiger Who Came to Tea)
@facelikethunder: “Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!” (Herman Melville, Moby Dick) ("I baptize you not in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil")
@spikelynch: "you have glasses on your nose and autumn in your heart" (Isaac Babel, How Things Were Done In Odessa)
@marklawrence: "With their glowing, smoldering crimson or scarlet skins" (Stephanie Alexander, 'Cherries', The Cook's Companion)
@_boobook_: 'Who gave you the message?' (Robert Graves, I Claudius)
@scooter_lass: 'Peripherally in the thick of things' (Peter Timms, In search of Hobart)

Even though I wrote it at 6am, it's a late posting, due to fun with friends and keeping my child up way beyond his bedtime. A good excuse for delayed poetry if ever I heard one.

Milking leeway (Month of Poetry #12)

2012-01-12T21:28:00.001+11:00

Of course, the shot of white
drifted crossways to the bucket.
We were milking leeway:
that would eradicate itself into
the half-moon of a cow's foot.
Fresh from the beast, the bodywarmth
of it turned your stomach. It made
you think of curdled flesh, of the
pull and squeeze needed to unblock
the openings. Add to your troubles
a fine case of heartburn: you chewed
antacid and turned a faint green
at my suggestion of milk: like something
Schopenhauer might have had.
After a bad night where your head
lowed heavy with cattle and your
throat caught the branding iron
you took an enameled cupful, early
and warm as your own skin.
'Don't tell them I'm squeamish about
fucking milk, will you? Tell them
I am a knight.' Errant as you are,
I loved your mock-heroic stance,
metal cup aloft as Excalibur.
The cows chorused, dairy stink
filled my nose with everything alive
and I kissed your mouth surprised:
warm as blood or cream.

______________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from four people:

@attentive: "tell them I am a knight-errant as they are" (Thomas Malory, Le Morte D'arthur)
@ernmalleyscat: "unblock the openings, Add to your troubles" (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching)
@timsterne: "like something Schopenhauer might have had after a bad night" (PG Wodehouse, Hot Water)
@matchtrick: 'we were milking leeway that would eradicate itself' (China Miéville, The City and the City)

A concatenation of circumstances (mainly but not exclusively centering around my 3 year old) means I haven't had time to start today's poem until forty minutes ago. I don't write at night: I'm a morning person and when I looked at today's suggestions at 8:40pm with bleary eyes, I pretty much just sat here in blank despair for a further 10 minutes. Then I figured 'if you can't beat 'em, take 'em literally'. Hence: milking. I like the smell of dairies. Shit and milk and warm bodies. Smells like life.

Rumpled (Month of Poetry #11)

2012-01-11T21:35:00.001+11:00

All that glitters is not spun straw.
A foolish father he was. A withered
little lizard of a man, he boasted to a king
who took his words for daughters.
The doubtful king knew he could not lose:
‘They feed me lies; so I will eat them.’

In a box he shut her with a wheel and
(disregarding her hayfever) demanded
three nights of gossamer thread.
For a necklace, a ring and an unknown child
a little rattle stilt made the fodder shine.
The baby brought her wealth to dust and grief.

She guessed at Mat and Mark, Sam and Cam,
Tim and Tom and Chris, and finally at Alice.
His impish name danced away on fires
and all the promise of her sweet soft boy
seemed lost into his gnarled demands.
It was only luck that found his name.

Stamp! And stuff feet! And embroider toes
into the floor like the truth is stitched pretty.
The endings vary. He split the earth with a bang
like a headsman’s axe. He fell from a good height
and flew out the window on a ladle.
He took his own foot and ripped up the middle.

One mouth says he found in the centre of the garden
there was a well, one woman’s dark wet metaphor
and in his fury he plugged her up.
But all that mattered was the story potential.
In everything, word of mouth edits like the knife.
In debris, shield will cut excess swords down blunt.

In everything, names are shields and words can rip apart.
If you find your babes among the straw
perhaps that could be gold and truth enough for spinning.
Do not promise your first-born like a necklace or a ring
do not treat them like a rare gift of jewellery:
you will not always find his name to save them.

______________________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from nine people (yeah I know I said maximum of eight, but it's too hard just to leave out one):

@pinknantucket: "In the centre of the garden there was a well" (The Vanishing People, Katharine Briggs)
@_camer0n: "So I will eat them in a box." Dr.Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham
@markhwilliams: "All that mattered was the story potential in everything' - Supergods by Grant Morrison.
@marklawrence: "treat them like a rare gift." - Anh Do, The Happiest Refugee
@ernmalleyscat: "He was a withered little lizard of a man" Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
@attentive: 'with a bang like a headsman's axe' The Heroes, Joe Abercrombie
@dogpossum: 'stuff feet and embroider toes' - pg 51, 'Amigurumi' - LAN-Anh Bui & Josephine Wan.
@timsterne "fell from a good height, and flew" Jack Robinson, Days and Nights in W12
@matchtrick: 'The knife in debris shield will cut excess' —User Manual, Talon Petrol Line Trimmer (Model No. AT33550/AT33552)

Obviously, today's poem is about Rumpelstiltskin (which translates as 'little rattle stilt'). And it's true, the endings do vary - in the one I read as a kid he stamps his foot through the floor and gets stuck. In others, he stamps through the floor then grabs hold of his other foot and tears himself in half up the middle (gruesome), or flies out the window on a ladle, and somewhere I read a version where the queen stands above him and in his rage he flies at her and 'plugs her up'. Fairy tales, they're always about sex, aren't they?

The Rising Sun (Month of Poetry #10)

2012-01-10T18:35:00.004+11:00

He had brought it back from Japan, starched with tourism,
hung it from a post at back of the hen house
to scare away foxes. Harsh weather seasoned the fabric,
now the Rising Sun standard hung limp against the flagpole.
Like the toga of a Roman senator, we would sometimes find
a hysterical chicken rolled up in the red striped swathe.
‘Your mother thought the Japanese would stink of fish.’
He rarely spoke of travels. Confusion blushed my face.
‘Always kept a bit of her country racism. When the
Italians moved in up town, I bet she imagined their fingers
would smell of garlic and their hair of tomatoes.’

They were never meant to fly, but his chickens hassled
themselves up into the orchard trees, singles to companies.
At ripening, fruit caught their beady eyes

they peppered the fuzzy globes with sharp beaks.
‘Is it the shape of the peaches?’ I was all parts book-learned
and naïve. His caterpillar eyebrows drew together like lovers.
I blathered: ‘Chickens have, by nature, cannibalistic tendencies.
Maybe the peaches look like, little…heads…’
The eyebrows arched. ‘Reckon the chooks just like peaches.’

Weary whiskey and evening loosened his throat.
Leather-voiced confessions: he thought each summer
was his last, he prepared for a season from the back of the head
to the affront of his death. Perhaps each daybreak was final,
the sun would never rise again hot and fierce against his eyelids.
‘I feel relief every time I see another.’ Round, burning through the sky.
‘Each one, I imgaine, ups the odds of surviving another day.’
He pointed to the hen house, the tattered fabric.
‘Reckon that flag draws up the dawn to match it, red-hot for red-hot.’

Superstition was fleeting strange; he hardly ever spoke of magic
and when he did it was like a history lesson in obscure imagery.
‘I can’t shake that red circle from my chest, it is strange.
How this goes on: the struggle to get started. Terrible.’
‘It always happens.’ My voice was soft, afraid for him:
‘The sun comes up, the chickens need their breakfast.’
He placed his glass neatly back in its wet table circle.
‘It’s such a weight, such a big red weight on my heart.
Your mother understood, she kept an eye on the dawn.’
Last light pinked at the top of the hill; the flag on the
hen-house stirred in the wind. I turned to see his face
at that salute: his brief unshuttered dread.

_________________________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from eight people:

@eglantinescake: “Chickens have, by nature, cannibalistic tendencies” (no author, Keeping Chickens)
@BespokeShespoke: “It is strange how this goes on. The struggle to get started. Terrible. It always happens.” (John Steinbeck, journals)
@ernmalleyscat: “Singles to companies at ripening fruit” (Graham Pizzey, Field Guide to the Birds of Australia – Wompoo Fruit Dove)
@liamvhogan: “I feel relief every time I see another round burning through the sky. Each one, I imagine, ups the odds of surviving” (Evan Wright, Generation Kill)
@lalscotton: “He hardly ever spoke of magic, and when he did it was like a history lesson” (Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell)
@timsterne: “a season from the back of the head” (Steve Aylett, Lint)
@ChanletB: “the Rising Sun standard hung limp against the flagpole like the toga of a Roman senator” (Murakami, Norwegian Wood)
@marklawrence: “she imagined their fingers would smell of garlic” (Catherine Bateson, The Vigilant Heart)

Today's poem was really hard - I struggled for a lot longer than usual to fit the lines in, and as I wrote along, it became quite a strange poem. When I finished, I scanned back over my stanzas and thought: "Yep. That's weird." But chickens are pretty damn weird, aren't they? All that brooding.

Children in an ancient world (Month of Poetry #9)

2012-01-09T18:03:00.003+11:00

Sea full of lovely chaos and crusted zinc
a cacophony of children spray shouts
in a wet garble of sound: they are a TV
turned up too loud; an audience of cockatoos.
No voice cuts out of tune, they are harmonised.

Three boys gesture a game of thrones and swords
'Aye, my lord,' bows one, with all the regal
purpose of an ocean. A shell in one hand,
he kneels in the shallows, is knighted with
a strip of kelp. And dunked for good measure.

A mother's voice rings out like a flung quoit
sweeps an armful of triangle sandwiches
bright buttered pinwheels of Vegemite,
ham and pickle, egg and lettuce. The game halts
the knights slough their armour: there will be no conclusion.

They take. They eat. A jumble of towels drapes
along shivering shoulders. I distract downwards,
stirring the sand with my finger, dragging my eyes
to notice a welt, bulging against the grain.
I smooth it clean: a white disc of shell.

We used to call them 'back doors'. Sea snails
hold them tight against their soft jelly feet,
protection against sharp beaks and rough swells.
Younger-limbed, we'd duck our heads down
underwater, let it seal over us in silence.

Occasional stingrays wafted past. Like fainting spells
we sank down dimly, peeled open our eyes:
children in an ancient world. The weight of water felt quiet
and dying. Unnerved, we popped like champagne corks
roaring in relief back up to light and speeding time.

_______________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from six people:

@timsterne: "my finger dragging my eyes" (Penni Russon, Only Ever Always)
@KarenCollum: "stingrays wafted past like fainting spells" (Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child)
@ernmalleyscat: "a TV turned up too loud" (MJ Hyland, How the Light Gets In)
@astarlia: "aye, my lord" (George R.R. Martin, Dance of Dragons)
@greenspace01: "They take. They eat." (John Ajvide Lindqvist, Little Star)
@matchtrick: "There will be no conclusion." (Peter Hoeg, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow)

Being underwater in the ocean is always strange, like going suddenly deaf or stepping out of the world. And then you come up for air and it's all kids shouting and lunches and mothers, like no time has passed while you were under.

I'd seen airplanes up in the air (Month of Poetry #8)

2012-01-08T18:08:00.005+11:00

Kept an eye on the eaves through a crack in the venetians
we knew the undersides should be golden before we
stripped up the shades to face the afternoon light.
We peered into that blinding slit of summer, white
as royal icing, white as the middle of the pink tablets
that mostly kept me from going crazy.
Crisped-up Christmas trees blew up the street
first abandoned singly, then wedded into pairs:
dry needles matted together like veins and syringes.

Across the street, we called it the 'lamp house':
bare bulbs swung on frayed cords but behind
one spat and grubby window bloomed a fringed
and tasselled shade, supported by a brassy naked woman.
When January fury warmed to dusk and the lamp house
(crack house) shouts of 'Fucking mother FUCKER!'
slowed to intermittent we knew (in the same way
you know microwave popcorn is ready) we could
let the dregs of daylight in our balcony door.

Last year in a charred and broken February,
fire broke out, skipped parole and pleasured
up our street like a tongue. It tickled our eaves
a different golden hue and slopped across the road
to slaver five houses flat. In the soggy morning after,
a bunch of regulars worried the footpath grey:
to their relief, the lamp house survived.
We didn't mind the daily swearing or sirens,
they never gave us any trouble (or any crack).

Summer pills made my head heavy with sanity.
It is easy to be crazy, full of glory and forget
and brilliant white wings of time. I wore out
three pairs of winter shoes in places I had never
put down rubber or my face in sleep before.
But no one trusts you if you never get tired,
and a back corner of your brain mistrusts yourself.
So milligram by milligram I weighed my thoughts in place
until I grew too jealous of the undrugged morning light.

You said to me at night: 'You're a funny one.'
I never wanted to be a comedian.
You'd think I'd never been outside after dawn in
all my life. I'd seen airplanes up in the air, new year
babies with slim legs lotus-pale against the glare.
In dread of another chemical day, I said to you:
'I will go to sleep.' In the sun, those prescription days
were overfocused and full of sharp edges.
I saw too much of everything. It hurt, I had to close my eyes.

__________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from six people:

@_boobook_: "I will go to sleep in the sun" (Roald Dahl, Death of an Old Man)
@timsterne: "Fucking motherFUCKER!" (Tony O'Neill, Sick City)
@ernmalleyscat: "The undersides should be golden" (Jamie Oliver, 30 Minute Meals)
@eglantinescake: "To their relief, the lamp house survived" (H.O.U.S.E.: Habitable Objects Unique Spatial Extraordinary)
@gretapunch: "All my life I'd seen airplanes up in the air" (Justin Bieber, First Step 2 Forever)
@matchtrick: "I never wanted to be a comedian" (Stewart Lee, How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian)

What's a lamp house? I have no idea. So I made one up.

An extra identity (Month of Poetry #7)

2012-01-07T18:03:00.002+11:00

In the last weeks she would struggle with the vertical,
a catalogue of twinges I could neither appreciate
nor salve. She railed against pregnancy dogma:
'This slab of rules, it's to make me think I'm a prisoner,
frantic with corporeality: one bite of soft cheese
and one unpasteurised spoonful away from child abuse.'
The suggestion of heat-treated sugar saw me dissolved.
'I will get you honey,' I concluded against her eyebrows.

When she held him first, I burst with sweetness.
A calm baby and almond-eyed; a stately, plump buck.
'Mulligan' came from the stairhead of her ancestral home,
carved into wood like a suggestion. We placed it
in his middle, an extra identity in case of unseen futures.
This is a city of beggars and thieves and faces gone dark for
dark business: perhaps he would have need of an alias.

The second afternoon caught her wet-faced by surprise.
Uneased, I forced assurance that no single, individual moment
is in and of itself unendurable. Her anger snapped electric and shone
out like the dog star stood beneath the Judgement Seats.
And raged: 'Tell me that when you've been in fucking transition,
when your nipples have been ripped through a cheese grater.'
The tiny tyrant screeched instead against unstoppable historia:
he condemned the pyramids on principle,
damned the Incan temples and ripped forth his fury
at the unsought blinding chill of his and every birth.
The baby would not stop, would not stop screaming.

On the third sunrise he had been quiet for seven hours;
those monsters had gone back to their lairs.
In his unconscious slack-limbed state I peeled,
cleaned and re-wrapped him into a baby burrito.
His chest fluttered like the small brown sparrow
flies down again to snap up screen-stuck midges.
'He is still alive,' I remember whispering.
She kept her back and shoulders to us
and murmured back: 'Am I?'

_________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from eleven (eek) people:

@_camer0n: "I will get you honey" (Stanley and Jan Berenstain, The Big Honey Hunt)
@scooter_lass: "this is a city of beggars and thieves" (Terry Pratchett, Stuff)
@_boobook_: "The small brown sparrow flies down again" (Anna Branford, Violet Mackerel's Natural Habitat)
@robcorr: "Dark for dark business" (JRR Tolkein, The Hobbit)
@facelikethunder: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead" (James Joyce, Ulysses)
@twitofalili: "The dog star stood beneath the Judgement Seats and raged" (Diana Wynne Jones, Dogsbody)
@anti_kate: "That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable" (David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest)
@Hannibal_: "it's to make me think I'm a prisoner, frantic with corporeality" (Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing #6)
@attentive: "those monsters had gone back to their lairs in his unconscious" (Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard)
@ernmalleyscat: "He is still alive, I remember whispering" (Patti Smith, Just Kids)
@timsterne: "he condemned the pyramids on principle" (Peter Conrad, Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life)

Disclaimer: I got up at 5:30am so I could write this in the hour before my 3 year old usually wakes up, except today he decided to wake up then too. So instead it was written over the next three hours, in between Rice Bubbles, poo, and him yelling "I'VE GOT A GIANT VACUUM CLEANER" over and over and over. So I might not have had the same levels of concentration as usual (or, you know, any level).

Eleven suggestions! Jaysus. Might have to cut things off at the first 8 from now on if I intend to live out the month.

Ship Shapes (Month of Poetry #6)

2012-01-06T19:22:00.000+11:00

I could tell he was in my wardrobe, from the shuffling noises.
Unsure of which end to open first – open it left or open it right?
As if Jonathan Creek would filter the scene and each panel I slid
back would prove him still invisible. And then there was the
glass eye of the mirrored doors, predicting my presence
and promising nothing of his. I chose the left.
‘I’m sailing a big ship, Ma! It’s full of aminals!’
Soft arms gripped the plastic chair helm,
fierce waves of my dresses crashed across the bow.
The animals were not pathetic two-by-two, but soldiers,
(‘might there be Ferrets among the crew?’ I asked
the gesture of reply was non-committal.)
The ship’s belly prodded at carpeted shores and
they took the city for their spoils, gloried in
the treasure of my dusty shoes. Soon the mighty ship
dropped anchor among the storage tubs
because it was time to go to the supermarket.

Each day spits salt into the evening’s furrowed dreams,
smashes a wave across our brains, holds us foetal and
floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion.
Thinking produces; suffering twists it into strange shapes.
That night I swept out across the bed, sweated visions
of dessicated animal skins fluttering like skirts,
high seas where lightening sent down its white spider legs
and bent coat-hanger wires to pierce my arms. A clothed
and dead Reepicheep tilted his wind-stripped skull
at my suitcases and when I would not understand
he took a mirror and sliced away my fingers.
When my eyes broke open to a song of toast and cuddles,
his wardrobe still gaped open-mouthed.
‘I dreamed about your ship’, I said.
He shook his dandelion head in half-asleep.
‘My ship’s gone to the other place,’ he murmured.
I slid the mirror shut to vanish clothes and shoes
and caught my fingernail between the door and wall.

________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from seven people:

@kirsty_l: “Thinking produces suffering” (Stendhal, The Red and the Black)
@erinmilne: “open it left or open it right” (Nick Sharratt, What’s in the Witch’s Kitchen)
@pinknantucket: “And then there was the glass eye” (Roald Dahl, The Twits)
@cathcrowley: “lightening sent down its white spider legs” (Karen Russell, Swamplandia)
@timsterne: “floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion” (Siri Hustvedt, The Summer without Men)
@robcorr: “they took the city for their spoils” (Hammett, Red Harvest)
@dogpossum: “might there be Ferrets among the crew?” (Tamora Pierce, Mastiff)

Luka's make-believe has a funny effect on my mind sometimes. And if you've never dreamed of a skeletal Reepicheep, be thankful.

A very ordinary form of madness (Month of Poetry #5)

2012-01-05T17:17:00.000+11:00

Panic is in the details. I've lost all sense in
the thought of Rice Bubbles, toilet training
and squinting at the Panadol bottle at 2am.
Never mind that I am shaping a person,
about that fact my conceit, pomposity and
indignation grow in old age.
Like nostril hairs and earlobes, these small things
threaten storm clouds over the overtired.

When you ask the matter of it, I recalibrate my
words five times until certainly they beat me
speechless and you frustrated to sleep. I want to say:
'I am terrified by sandwiches and getting to daycare
on time and remembering to brush his teeth.'
What I mean is: 'I am frightened of being his mother.'
What I say is: 'μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος'
then I can't remember how to use my lungs.

This dissonance, the break between your concern
and my nonsense or silence of reply. While it
might be a very ordinary form of madness now,
if you pull it you had better not be bluffing.
I've taken too many swallows to find my throat;
the room has flattened into dumb sleep.
I will wake up into a parent again and wonder
why the question found me mute with tears.

I don't think that's the asking. I think
it's the breath I've lost trying to answer.

__________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from six people:

@eglantinescake: "It might be a very ordinary form of madness" (Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncannay Life)
@facelikethunder: "μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος" (which translates as "Rage -- Goddess, sing, the rage of Peleus' son Achilles" - Homer, The Iliad)
@lalscotton: "Pomposity and indignation grow in old age, like nostril hairs and earlobes" (Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles)
@attentive: "Certainly they beat me" (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)
@timsterne: "Now, if you pull it you had better not be bluffing" (Mark Brandon Read, Chopper 4)
@matchtrick: "I don't think that's the asking" (Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go)

Luka comes home to me today after over a week staying with his grandparents. It's possible I'm a little bit apprehensive at plunging back into parenthood again.

Flying Home (Month of Poetry #4)

2012-01-04T18:42:00.000+11:00

Going home promised little more than the smell of chops and beans.
We draped like wet socks across the front of our bikes
she blew smoke across my handlebars from her bored mouth.
‘Mum’s flying home to visit this weekend.’
My mouth shaped an aeroplane and nylon stockings,
she breathed in a ripple of sparks and puffed out grey.
‘You be glad to see her?’ Lifted shoulders to her ears
and flopped them down. ‘Course.’
The shrug told much more than the word.

I spun pedals with hot bare feet and juggled words
silently around my lips and teeth.
Jas’ mother had cracked like ice fresh out of the tray
and run off up to the sky. The way Jas told it,
she had smiled her way into a job as the
Head of Concourse Relations at Bremen International Airport,
flying back a whirlwhind, bright hair and heels, hands spilling
out exotic delights: Herbes de Provence and parmesan cheese.
I didn’t know where Bremen or Provence were.

I knew Dad said Jas’ mum served large men small drinks
then snapped on the latex and cleaned their
mile-high shit streaks off dunnies on the plane.
That she was a slapper in company-issue nylons who took
the odd high-altitude appointment scribbled on an airline napkin.
‘Ssh, little pitchers,’ my mother would say.
At nights I struggled to piece the picture.
The note and that appointment seemed to hang together
in pointillism; I stood too close to make out the figures.

Jas’ family; blurred tiny circles pressed up against each other.
Somewhere in all those dots was where love, how love colour feels,
how it is where the Venn diagram of longing
and hate and allowances overlaps into a family, but only just.
Jas picked her nails into wet threads of blood.
‘Mum’s different now.’ I couldn’t find anywhere to look.
‘How?’ I flicked the bell on my bike, she rang hers.
‘Just different.’ Yearly in a haze of perfume and shine and
international accents was how the girl saw her.

Dad driving past in the ute straightened both our backs.
Early. ‘No TV for you tonight.’ The familiar joke unwound
the clamp on our hands and faces. ‘TV is just troubled people.’
‘Being booed these days, you’d think it was a bloody art form.’
‘Bunch of bloody monkeys yelling at sick people.’
For Dad, every show was a Jerry Springer audience.
‘Your TV still kicked in?’ Craning, Jas shaped a silent O
let a mouthful of smoke escape. Bleached faces upward
we scanned the endless sky for planes and came back empty.

____________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from eight people:

@_boobook_ “The note and that appointment seemed to hang together” (Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca)
@timsterne: “TV is just troubled people being booed these days” (Jon Ronson, The Pyschopath Test)
@matchtrick: “where love how love colour feels how it is where” (John Ajvide Lindqvist, Little Star)
@slimejam: “She smiled her way into a job as the Head of Concourse Relations at Bremen International Airport” (Dan Rhodes, Little Hands Clapping)
@ernmalleyscat: “She blew smoke across my handlebars” (Tim Winton, Aquifer)
@KatApel: “The girl saw her dad driving past in the ute” (Kathryn Apel, This is the Mud!)
@Kirsty_I: “Herbes de Provence and parmesan cheese” (Delia Smith, Delia’s Frugal Food)
@marklawrence: “The shrug told much more than the word” (Hornblower and the Hotspur)

Holy crap, it was hard to fit all of today's phrases into a poem! @matchtrick's and @slimejam's suggestions are a case in point. Now I'm going to give my brain a little lie down.

The landscape is in the woman (Month of Poetry #3)

2012-01-03T18:12:00.000+11:00

Nobody starves in a garret any more. Not even poets.
The comfort of cliché removed, I sulked
against my real state of graceless poverty
and mourned all the beautiful perturbations of the spirit.
Moping around like a real teen, I kicked a gurning bedpost
scattered tumbleweeds of lint and spiders of hair
fluffed up unromantic clouds of dust.

Through my half-lidded hangover it seemed she flew
in past the flakes paint and rotting wood,
hovered like night air and curled kittenish
on my stale sheets. She'd told me that some day
all the women will have wings. Hers were folded,
prayerlike, trailing in the crumbling floorboards.
I reached for my sketchbook and took her in.

A long breast, a cream valley of waist and
my pencil caught the mountains in her.
The landscape is in the woman, her arms were trees
forking fingers in my pillows: whorled, finely divided.
Lateral sterile branches barked her shins against
the bed-end and I sped to catch her pebbled toes.
'Ten seconds, please God,' I whispered to the unlistening.

The air creaked, broke my gaze, she flew apart
and my bed sagged with the weight of no women.
Each mouldy skirting corner stretched a little further
into my peripheral; the landscape shrunk to foul objects.
Brown curling paperbacks; wet-dog washing;
the hardened pizza crusts; the rat taking a piss.
In my coffee mug: memories of pencil shavings and beer.

_______________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from seven people:

@ernmalleyscat: "whorled, finely divided lateral sterile branches" (Penny Watsford, Plants of the Forest Floor)
@timsterne: "Moping around like a real teen" (Grace Krilanovich, The Orange Eats Creeps)
@attentive: "all the beautiful perturbations of the spirit" (Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise)
@sushipyjamas: "All the women will have wings" (Nights at the Circus)
@SeanMElliott: "The rat taking a piss in my coffee mug" (Warren Ellis, Crooked Little Vein)
@pinknantucket: "'Ten seconds, please God,' I whispered" (Wilbur Smith, Eye of the Tiger)
@scooter_lass: "the landscape is in the woman" (De Kooning exhibition)

Always a joy to have to work a rat taking a piss into a poem. Thanks Sean.

The Third Death (Month of Poetry #2)

2012-01-02T19:17:00.000+11:00

Let's sort out the facts, once and for all, of his
final unravelling, for it must be invoked by name.
He had been waiting for death, and had become
accustomed to its weight. People can get used to anything.
Except dying was his habit, he wore the noose in comfort
like a bridle; a cravat; a young child's arms.

This week he was to be named and crowned Rasputin.
The six men rode out in the democrat-wagon,
an old wagon sat by the shore for just such
pitchfork purpose. Each man longed for a torch to
flame righteous words along the horizon.
No matter that it would not warm her body.

The town rustled its skirts and pressed thrills against
the notion of his lacerated skin. They whispered:
'He was a wicked man, a bully,' and everyone was glad.
To see him die would wash the pretty poison from their
mouths, protect their stock and educate their children.
His wrung-out neck would set a hundred heads to nodding.

He waited inside for ropes and creaking wagon-men.
'Better be hanged at home than die like dogs.'
In Ireland he would have taken himself to them
and opened his veins to show them the dust.
Here instead he waited, winding them under toward him
with all the keel-haul of his deed.

Stilled in his chair at their rowdy entrance,
he kept his movements careful and they fumbled
as they dragged him. And became gentle.
The man who threw his rope across the branch
apologised the jerking of the noose against his skin.
'It is no matter,' he replied. They drew him up silent.

He had died twice before. Once at her mouth in movement,
once at her eyes in stillness. He had been waiting for this
third death, and had become accustomed to its weight.
Swinging heavily and dimmed, he saw her image
As if through mottled windows, fleeting in and out of the glass.
Her fair plaits hung forward like ropes, then tightened.

___________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from eight people:

@robcorr: "The six men rode out in the democrat-wagon" (HP Lovecraft, The Color out of Space)
@_camer0n: "An old wagon sat by the shore" (Tyrone T. Thomas, 120 Walks in Victoria)
@gretapunch: "He was a wicked man, a bully. Everyone was glad to see him die" (South Pacific. Is that even a book, Gil? Whatever.)
@jellyjellyfish: "Better be hanged at home than die like dogs in Ireland" (1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare)
@_boobook_: "Her fair plaits hung forward like heavy ropes" (Christine Harris, Audrey of the Outback)
@ernmalleyscat: "fleeting in and out of the glass" (Kathleen Stewart, Under the Giant Clam Shell)
@attentive: "it must be invoked by name" (Michael Shea, A Quest for Simbilis)
@timsterne: "People can get used to anything, except dying" (Richard Beard, Lazarus is Dead)

It never ceases to amaze me how a bunch of random suggestions can suggest a theme. Today there was lots of death/hanging/ropes, and...err...wagons. So I made a story around them.

Also, it's 40 degrees today and I can't face venturing out to find free wifi, so I've typed this on my phone. I hate to think what blogger will do to the formatting once I post it. *shakes fist dramatically in advance*

Month of Poetry 2012

2012-01-01T19:38:00.000+11:00

This month I'm going to join in Month of Poetry 2012 that Kat Apel is coordinating. The idea is to write a poem a day for the month of January, which I'll post each day here (could be interesting as I don't have internet on at home yet).

So that I don't cheat and write ahead (I tend to cheat), I'm going to set myself a procedure a bit reminiscent of my #poemsbyrequest jaunt earlier last year. Each day I'm going to ask Twitter to provide me with a random phrase (5-6 words-ish) from a book, that I'll use to write a poem around. What could possibly go wrong?

Today's suggestions are:

@kirsty_l: "It was twenty minutes to ten" (From Jonathan Franzen's Freedom)

@ernmalleyscat: "Pretty mouth and green eyes" (From J.D. Salinger's Pretty Mouth & Green Eyes)

@dogpossum: "She wanted to make it rain" (From Penni Russon's Drift)

@timsterne: "It's a rotten thing to have a soapy neck" (From George Orwell's Coming Up For Air)

So! Here is poem #1. Happy New Year.

Apples

All week dragging clock hands behind me

minute hand in one, hours in the other.

When she let herself in it was twenty minutes to ten,

half past a wash and not quite conditioned to her hands

on the taps, sharpening the waterfall into pins

she wanted to make it rain.

Fingers smooth as a shell or a new fruit

she sloughed away the week's decay

it's a rotten thing to have.

A soapy neck slid under my mouth

I buried my face in her wet hair like treasure

shampoo breaths of clean Granny Smiths

pretty mouth and green eyes,

how you like them apples?

A very country Christmas

2011-12-23T08:55:00.005+11:00

Guest post by Tim Sterne.

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house could be heard Aunty Lilian having a whinge about "those slutty pop singers" on Carols By Candlelight.

"They've ruined that hymn," she says. "Why not just sing it?"

She gives a brief demonstration of just singing it in her trilling soprano. The rest of us make noncommittal grunting noises and return our attention to the tiny TV set, upon which an alleged slutty pop singer is thrusting her pelvis to the disco beat of "Silent Night".

Aunty Lilian makes the same complaint every Christmas Eve. Prior to the introduction of television, she had descriptions of Melbourne-based carols events telegraphed to her in real time so she could complain about the melismatic depredations of the slutty (read: female) singers of the day. But that's Aunty Lilian's way: repeating the same conversational pablum year after year, like a primitive automaton with Mallee dust in its cogs.

Aunty Lilian isn't the only one with a bung replay setting. The whole town seems locked in an eternal cycle, reenacting the same rituals every year: closing the modest main drag so Santa can throw lollies from the back of a fire engine; curiously depressing Christmas Day church services; endless seasonal socialising with people you see every day anyway, because in a town this small you see practically everybody every day. As a city-bred child visiting for Christmas I enjoyed the sense of community, the stability of small town routine. As a teenager I find the place stultifying and cloistered. I dream of traffic lights, graffiti, and alleyway muggings. I dream of drinkable tap water, proper footpaths, and--

"What's Santa bringing you this year?" Carols has gone to an ad break and Aunty Lilian is looking at me with her kindly, wrinkled face.

"I... huh? Oh, I don't know." Santa? I'm seventeen with a nicotine addiction and a girlfriend who drinks cask wine for breakfast. I haven't believed in Santa for at least a year.

"I remember..." says Aunty Lilian, falling asleep then waking with a start. "I remember you and your brother playing in the front room with the train set Santa brought you. You were naked as babes!"

"That was a long time ago," I say. "Things change."

"They do." Her head droops again. "They certainly do."

By the time Carols ends Aunty Lilian is snoring in her chair and the rest of us are discussing the logistics of Ray Martin's hair, which looks the same as it did last year and the year before that. Some things never change.

*

Ouyen, pop. 1000, sits almost exactly one hundred kilometres south of Mildura and approximately six hundred kilometres north of anywhere I wish to be. Later at uni I will be delighted to learn that in 1931 the residents of Ouyen barricaded the main street and took up arms as rumours circulated that communists had overrun Sydney and were preparing to march to Melbourne via the middle of fucking nowhere. History is silent on what the Ouyen Falangists did when the expected revolutionary army failed to arrive. Probably they retired to the Victoria Hotel to discuss how bloody hot it was, because it is always hot in Ouyen, even in winter when people warm their houses by simply summoning memories of the months of baking summer heat.

We arrive the day before Christmas Eve. Aunty Lilian pecks my cheek and quiet, watchful Uncle Bill crushes my hand with his powerful carpenter's muscles. The clear, hot air buzzes with the sound of cicadas and enormous air conditioning units. A ute passes, the driver raising a hand in greeting.

"Jimmy McIlvaney," Uncle Bill says. "Used to have a farm out near Walpeup until a wheat silo collapsed on his missus. Then his baby was eaten by a possum. Oh, and in September he lost three toes to native wasps while signing his farm over to the bank."

"Go on," Dad says with affected disbelief.

"Then his dog got bitten by a snake," Uncle Bill says. "And his horse got gout."

"Go on," Dad says. I wonder if he is glad he left all those years ago. Dad is hardly an urban sophisticate, but I can't imagine him here, in a world so small and cruel.

Later I go for a walk, chain-smoking Peter Jacksons and dodging untethered dogs. The footpaths are compressed clay infused with gypsum which sparkles in the sunlight. I walk past the weighbridge and trackside silos and stand for a moment under a peppercorn tree. I stood here ten years ago with my grandfather, not long before he died. He taught me how to spit peppercorns with speed and accuracy - a country kid trick - but now when I try all I get is a foul taste of peppercorn and dribble down my chin.

I walk on to the Victoria Hotel and, without giving it much thought, push the weathered door and step inside. It is cool and quiet, only a handful of drinkers at the bar. I am suddenly conscious of my long hair and torn jeans but I step up to the bar and order a beer in my manliest voice. The barman doesn't ask for ID or so much as raise an eyebrow at my appearance. He pours my beers and starts talking to an elderly man at the bar. Like most conversations in Ouyen, this one concerns a farming accident.

"... was out putting up new fencing," the old man says, "and sure enough the bloody wire snapped and went whoosh across his front, quick as you like, and Barry looks down and his nipple is lying on the ground! Severed the bloody thing perfectly. Barry was about to bend down to pick up when some bloody ants grabbed the bloody thing and carried it back to their bloody nest!"

"Go on," the barman says.

"Reckon those bloody ants ate well that night!" The old man gives a hoarse laugh.

"Go on," the barman says.

I sip my beer, feeling conspicuous even as the other patrons make a point of not noticing me. I consider staying for a second drink, but I don't want to push my luck. I walk back to the shade of the peppercorn tree. Overhead a broad streak of cirrus cloud drifts south, which seems eminently sensible to me.

*

"Happy Christmas!"

Uncle Bill crushes my hand with all the compliments of the season. The kitchen is alive with clatter and women's voices. Traditional gender roles are upheld: the men walk around with glasses of sherry and talk about crop failures and amputations; the women do everything else. I set the table, then it's present opening time. Santa brings me a video game. He must have received my letter.

It's thirty-five degrees and climbing outside, so of course we are having hot roast meat - ham, pork and turkey - plus roast potatoes and assorted veg. Bonbons are opened, paper hats donned, shitty jokes told.

"Made in China," somebody says, examining the fine print on their bonbon joke.

"Isn't everything these days?" somebody else adds. My brother Rob and I exchange looks. We know what's coming.

"Well, they're better than the Aborigines. At least the Asians will work.

"... and he was as black as the ace of spades! Almost purple. Gave me quite a start. He had the loveliest smile though."

"I don't mind them driving a taxi or something like that, but I wouldn't see an Indian doctor."

"Vick's chest rub doesn't smell the way it used to. Probably made in China now."

"It's political correctness gone mad..."

The torrent of casual bigotry is staunched only by the arrival of dessert. Heaving platters of pavlova, cake and pudding, bowls of trifle and jelly studded with cherries.

"Diet starts tomorrow," Aunty Lilian says. Rob and I roll our eyes. It's another of her classic lines. The room falls silent as we tuck in. "We must be hungry," Aunty Lilian says, right on cue. Rob makes satirical "Mmm!" noises and I laugh. The routine is so rigid that even our sibling in-jokes roll out at the same time every year.

After lunch the adults nap while Rob and I walk to the school to play basketball. We will do it all again at dinner time, with the addition of further relatives and family friends. The same dishes as last year, the same conversations, the same stories. A performance, really, rather than a celebration. A hollow tradition.

The ball clips the backboard and falls swish through the hoop. I light a cigarette and vow that this is my last Christmas in Ouyen.

*

In the twilight I sit at the outdoor table, drinking a VB and plucking the acoustic guitar I insisted on bringing. I'm not playing anything in particular, just adding random bright chords to the still night air.

I feel bad for feeling bad. Not long ago I was happy with holiday routine and banal conversations and seasonally inappropriate food. I was loved and I loved in return. I was fed and given presents and asked predictable questions about school and Santa. Simple.

Now I am all drive: sex, booze, friends, music, experience - even if gained through brash stupidity, of which there is plenty in my future. I want the new. The old, the routine, that which in my arrogance I perceive to be the unthinking, rubs against me like sandpaper against raw skin.

I strum a few random chords.

"That's nice."

Aunty Lilian opens the sliding door and steps out. She still has her apron on and a tea towel flung over her shoulder.

"Thanks."

"Do you still play piano?" It was Aunty Lilian's dream that Rob and I would become professional pianists, a la Richard Clayderman.

"A little." I don't know how to explain the disparity between who she wishes I would be and who I actually am.

"When are you going to come up for a visit?"

"I'm here now."

"I mean on your own. Or with Rob. Like when you were little."

"We're not little anymore."

"No, I suppose not." Aunty Lilian looks at me, appraising. I wonder she is really like, behind the cliches and social niceties she wields in place of conversation. I wonder what she thinks about.

"Well," she says, "the offer is there." She dries her hands on the tea towel and goes inside.

I strum a few chords and look at the stars. One thing about this place, the sky is bigger, brighter than I've ever seen at home.

Cheat post: “It’s Tim, right?”

2011-12-16T11:42:00.000+11:00

Writing Day today has unfortunately been hit with a tidal wave known as "Dear ARP, you are going to Warrnambool for a week, and Luka for two weeks, over Christmas and you have to pack and organise everything, remember? Love and kisses, ARP."

So instead I'm putting up a kind of cheat post - a random excerpt from a WIP. This is the other thing I've been attempting to write on my Writing Day.

Excuse swears. I like swearing. And it is hip hop, after all.

____________________________________

Mr Swan is habitually late, and a couple of boys in the class are amusing themselves by turning the overhead fan on full and hurling wooden rulers up into the blades so they shatter wood-chip missiles on the rest of the class. A fragment bounces off Callie’s wrist.

“For fuck’s sake,” she says.

Marie-Claire rolls back from her slump across the desk. “How immature. We’d never do that, would we?”

“Nah,” yawns Callie. “They took our fucking rulers.”

Hot silence descends again. Muffled shouts drift in from the oval. Callie studies the dirt under her fingernails. She wonders: How does it get there overnight? Do I dig shallow graves in the back yard? A sudden snort from Marie-Claire makes her jump.

“What’re you laughing at?”

Marie-Claire’s cheeks shine with the sudden promise of a story. “I came home last night to find my sister going through the white pages and ruling out names.”

“Right. Fair enough. But I have one question,” says Callie, brushing a splinter of wood out of her hair.

Marie-Claire sits back in her chair. “What?”

“Why is your sister a different colour to you?”

Marie-Claire snorts with laughter again. “Low-Cal, I told you, my biological father is Usher, hers is Eminem. It’s very, very simple. Do I need to demonstrate the turkey baster method all over again?”

Callie raises her palms. “No, it’s cool, once was enough. I do have one more question, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Why do you still have a hard copy of phone book?”

“See,” says Marie-Claire, “This is why we’re friends. That was also my question, given I already know about the turkey baster. She reckons to save filling out an address book on the her phone, she’ll just go through our complimentary White Pages and cross out everyone we don’t know.”

Callie swings back in her chair until the back of her head presses against the wall. “You guys are the New Quirky Sitcom, you know that? You’ve even got the non-standard parental arrangment to add that extra degree of quirk. ”

“You love my non-standard parental arrangement,” says Marie-Claire. “You can’t wait to slot me into a rhyme that involves ‘mums’ but excludes ‘bums’. But I’m not finished,” she leans closer, “My dear, miraculously un-coloured sister also spent our entire dinner last night singing the Brady Bunch theme song over and over, and making retching noises each time she reached the line about ‘bringing up three very lovely girls’.”

Callie nods. “She has a great future in hip hop, this girl. I can hear the vom-sample chorus as we speak.” She sighs. “Stop making me laugh, it’s too hot to laugh. It’s too hot to think. What are we actually supposed to be doing?” She scans her notes. “Memory questions?”

“Yep. Leaving mine til tonight.”

“Hmm.” This is the main lesson of high school, thinks Callie: how to tolerate boredom. And not just your ordinary gaze-out-the-window bored, more the sort of dangerous boredom where if-something-interesting-doesn’t-happen-very-soon-I’m-going-to-propel-myself-through-the-nearest-window. This kind of boredom is especially dangerous when it affects Marie-Claire.

“It’s Tim, right?”

Callie’s chair thunks to the ground so fast she has to press her palms into the table to avoid injury. She stares forcefully at Marie-Claire but the girl is on a mission and the mission doesn’t involve meeting Callie’s gaze.

Tim pauses in the middle of a pen drum-solo. He raises his chin to look at Marie-Claire, and Callie sees that his eyes are different colours. One blue, one brown.

Marie-Claire notices this at the exact same moment. “Hey, you’re like David Bowie!”

Tim rolls his unmatching eyes. “So everyone over twenty tells me. Did you get kept back in primary school?”

Callie lets out an uncontrollable shout of a laugh and then grimaces. Marie-Claire whirls around and raises her eyebrows. “Sorry,” says Callie, “That was a bit loud.” She leans around a mock-angry Marie-Claire and says to Tim “MC gets that a lot.”

“MC?” says Tim. He’s trying not to laugh, Callie can see it in the way his lips want to turn up but he’s pressing them down.

“Marie-Claire. My mums liked a book. This is Callie.” Callie points at her own head by way of confirmation.

“Hey,” says Tim. “Yeah. It’s Tim.” He glances around the classroom. The same group of boys have run out of rulers and moved on to staplegun shootouts. Every now and then one of them yelps joyfully and cuffs the other over the head. “So, I seem to have signed up for the stationery-destruction class instead of psych?”

“Every class has a bit of both, really. Swan will turn up eventually, he’s probably just having a quick smoke in the Ladies. You’re from Geelong, right? Isn’t coming here moving in the wrong direction with respect to Melbourne?”

Marie-Claire seemed to absorb people’s background information from the atmosphere.

“I have plenty of respect for Melbourne. Mum’s here for work. I’m just the collateral.”

Marie-Claire nods sympathetically. “So,” she says, and Callie grips the table. Here it comes, she thinks. “What’s your MC name?”

Tim blinks. “What’s my – aren’t you MC?” Callie resists an almost overwhelming urge to facepalm for the second time in as many hours.

Marie-Claire just laughs, flashing her small white teeth. “Yeeees,” she says, as if she’s talking to a two-year-old, “My name is MC, short for Marie-Claire, but I want to to know your hip hop alias. You write rhymes, right?” Tim blinks a few more times, and opens his mouth. “It’s alright,” says Marie-Claire. “You’re among friends.” She grins, “Callie and me, we’re no cynical mimics - ” she pauses and tilts her head towards Callie, who follows her lead out of habit;

“no gimmicks, lyrical miracles scrawled down - ”

Marie-Claire takes the line back “fuck it’s lucky you’re sittin you look like you’re going to fall down.”

Tim bursts into wheezy laughter. “Where the fuck did you two come from?”

Callie lets out her loud, single-note ‘HA!’, and then pulls a face.

“You really need to turn down the amp on that one, Low-Cal,” says MC.

“You can talk, Sonic Giggle,” retorts Callie. Callie’s mother has been known to remark that Marie-Claire’s giggle can cause minor tidal waves in the outlying islands of the Phillipines.

Tim shakes his head. “Low-Cal?”

“My MC name,” offers Callie. “Or Calorific, I’ll have to decide before my first album.”

“Nice,” says Tim.

“Callie’s my protégé,” says Marie-Claire, and puts an arm around her friend’s shoulders. “I discovered her in year 9. She has an unfortunate preference for Aus hip-hop, but we’re working on that. Back to the important question – what’s your MC name?”

Tim leans back in his chair and bites his lip. “I kinda haven’t got one,” he says.

Marie-Claire widens her eyes in mock horror. “You haven’t got one? How am I supposed to win any battles with you if I don’t have something to rhyme up against? I’m MC MC or Short Mac, by the way. Nothing like a skin-related coffee reference.” She frowns and looks Tim up and down. He fidgets a bit under her gaze. “What’s your middle name?”

“Um. Clarence.” Tim looks even more embarrassed.

Callie laughs, “Clarence! 8 Mile for the win! I know something about you/you went to Cranbrook - that’s a private school!”

“It’s unfortunate, really,” says Tim. “Mum hasn’t seen 8 Mile. But at least I didn’t go to a private school before I came here.”

“Clarence is no use,” interrupts Marie-Claire. “What’s your surname?”

“Sirius,” says Tim. “So I’m both 8 Mile and Harry Potter related. And A Christmas Carol, if you take the Timothy part into account.”

“Well, Tiny Tim already has multiple users, so that’s out,” says Callie.

Marie-Claire turns to glare at her, “Callie! Do not make light of this situation! This is - ” she spins back to Tim and slams her palm down on his desk. He jumps and just manages to catch himself before his chair tips over backwards.

“That’s your MC name,” says Marie-Claire.

“What is?” he says shakily.

Callie and Marie-Claire speak in unison. “Serious T.”

Tim grins. “Much respect, lady rappers.”

Write soon

2011-12-09T09:08:00.004+11:00

I'm really not in the mood for blogging today. It took the usual three million hours to get Luka off to daycare, and that's without me attending to the bench full of dishes, the two bags of rubbish on the balcony that need taking to the basement, the bed sheets that need changing, the bath that Luka hasn't had for two weeks, the floor that needs sweeping, and the nappies that need buying.

So here I am, finally, set up at 1000 Pound Bend (free wifi, power-points, good tunes, fuck-off strong coffee, no air con), and all I want to do is write letters.

I got my first penpal when I was 13. 'Got' sounds silly. What is the word for how one acquires penpals? 'Met'? 'Read'? Anyway. She's from Finland (though she now lives in Austria), and 18 years later we're still writing.

I've currently got about 20 penpals (I think - sometimes I lose count), though the count peaked in around 1995 when I had 43. There wasn't much to do in Warrnambool as a teenager. I wrote a lot of letters.

Before you ask, my penpals and I correspond on paper, with pens that we hold in our hands, then we put the paper in an envelope and put a stamp on it and put it in a post-box. No, really. Most of them are on Facebook too, but we mainly use it to tell each other when we've posted a letter.

Having a stationery fetish contributes greatly to my enthusiasm for letter-writing (and judging by some of the letters I receive, the same goes for a lot of my fellow penpals). I have a filing cabinet full of letters and a chest of drawers full of writing paper, stickers, cards and envelopes.

There's also a certain joy to be taken in phrases that don't quite bridge the translation gap (I'm pretty sure I have been responsible for numerous ones myself when I try to write in French).

Introductory letters are always a strange beast. Some penpals introduce themselves: “Dear Australian friend, I am your corresponding,” while others prefer to jump straight to the facts: “Dear Friend, I’m 155cm tall and I’m normal." Some first letters are affectionate: “Hi from a big kiss”, some are more formal: “Due to some unavoidable circumstance I could not reply to your letter which you posted December 12.”

There are often important facts about Australia to be cleared up: “Are koalas very dangerous? Do they kill people?” Once, I sent my penpal from Japan some Vegemite, and her next letter came back, “I’m sorry. Vegemite is rot. Because it is summer in Japan, winter in Australia. It is rot.” When I assured her that Vegemite was supposed to be black and somewhat pungent, she wasn’t convinced: “Is that Vegemite really not rot? But it was very bitter, and very smell.”

They tell me about their family, their brothers, sisters and pets:
“Do you have any pets? I have a sister called Anja.”
“My mother is a housewife, my father is a business.”

And of course they tell me about themselves:
“I like sunburnt on the beach.”
“I dream become top model. I laugh."

My penpal from Bangladesh took the prize for best double entendre sentence with: “My mother is interested to intercourse with your papa and mama.” My mama and papa were flattered but said they weren't really into that sort of thing.

These women and I have exchanged our handwritten lives, in some cases for more than half our existence. We've gone through high school, uni, jobs, boyfriends, husbands, break-ups, breakdowns, and children together. We've dropped off the radar for a few months or years and then picked up our correspondence again. We've discovered, as adults, that we've gone through the same things in our pasts and never knew (the amount of eating disorders I've discovered we have in common since I 'came out' has been truly surprising).

Writing to these women is probably the most important form of writing in my life. Letter-writing for me is a treat, and discovering a new be-stickered envelope in my mail-box at the end of my work-day can wipe out all the frustrations of dragging an incessantly babbling toddler home from daycare when all I want is a glass of wine and some peace.

So why am I blogging and writing fiction today, when I want to be letter-writing? I think it's because I privilege writing according to how hard I find it. Letter-writing is easy and pleasurable (not to mention pretty), so it mustn't be of as much value as poetry, which is harder but short enough that I don't have a massive crisis of confidence before I've finished a draft. But poetry mustn't have as much value as fiction-writing, which I find harder and more nerve-wracking. And novel writing? Well, let's just say I've spent most of my life trying very hard not to write a novel.

This hierarchy of value is a crock. It's pure writing-snobbery on my part.

How is it a less valuable form of writing to share these women's lives, my life? How is it a less valuable form of writing to create something that is for one person only, something that is always right the first time, something that will never see the rounds of multiple editors, re-drafts and self-doubts?

It's not.

In my handbag at the moment is a letter from a woman in Sri Lanka that ends so sweetly: “Have nice days and dreams, write soon.”

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to write a letter.

Sandwich hands

2011-12-03T11:32:00.001+11:00

“You honest?”

“Sorry?”

“You honest. Can I trust you?”

“Um, yeah, of course.”

“Some of these girls, money goes missing – pfft – from the cash register, you know?”

“Oh. I wouldn’t do that.”

“Ok. You start now, ok?”

“Right now?”

“Yis.”

This, apparently, is to be the extent of my job interview for the position of Sandwich Hand at the Uni Bite Café. I’m 20 years old, and my only previous job has been five years working in a book store. This new job, which is about all I can squeeze in around my uni contact hours, will prove to be a somewhat different beast. For one thing, there will be vastly greater amounts of scalloped potatoes involved. The levels of scalloped potatoes I encountered while bookselling were suprisingly low. So low, in fact, that I eventually concluded that thinly sliced tubers gently absorbing large amounts of milk and butter were not actually relevant to selling books at all. I know, go figure.

My new employer, Joanne, having decided that I am probably not going to pilfer vast amounts of cash from the till, hands me a black apron and tells me to tie my hair back. She comes up to just under my boobs and keeps up a contant stream of muttering in half-Lebanese, half-English.

“You start training today, maybe three hours, this on your own time, then you do lunchtimes 12-3pm and we see how you go. What days you can do it?”

“Uh – I can’t do Thursdays.”

“Ok. I trust you, I give you these Monday Tuesday Wednesday Fridays.”

“Um, thanks.”

“You make coffee?”

“Sorry?”

Joanne looks up at me with an expression I will quickly become familiar with. If the expression could speak, it would say “How can you be at university, enormous white girl, and yet be such a complete idiot?” I don’t really have an answer for this, but luckily all Joanne actually says is: “Can you make coffee.”

I stare at the large metal machine. It’s got lots of knobs on. I get briefly distracted by my need to make a knob joke, and then realise that a) I haven’t answered Joanne yet, and b) there appears to be small ribbons of smoke extruding from her ears.

“I haven’t done it before, no.”

Joanne sighs, grabs a metal jug of milk and thrusts it at me. I’m going to be bad at this. On my first shot at frothing a jug of milk, I don’t dip the steam nozzle thing in far enough and I send a spectacular spray of milk all over myself and the bench.

“Aieeee!” yells Joanne.

On the second go, I can’t get the milk to foam before it starts to boil out of the jug.

On the third go, we switch to sandwich making. I sucessfully only drop one large salad sandwich on the floor. Joanne’s stream-of-Lebanese-consciousness has started to reach quite audible levels by this point.

After my three hours of training (on my own time, as she reminds me regularly), we’re both pretty much nervous wrecks. “Ok, enough for today,” Joanne says. “You clean the bella marine and then you can go.”

I look wildly around the café. “Clean – clean the what?”

I get The Look. She points silently at the bain marie. “Oh, right, the bain marie,” I say.

Joanne shakes her head witheringly. “Yes, the bella marine. Newspaper under the sink.”

My hands gradually learn the automatic movements required of the café assistant. True to my job title, I develop sandwich hands: my left hand is a pair of tongs, my right hand a sweaty latex glove with horrible powdery stuff on the inside. I have about twenty tiny burn marks on my arms and knuckles from the bain-marie and the damned frothing jug. But I have skills.

I can halve and wrap a towering salad roll in greaseproof paper, and twirl the corners of the bag shut without spraying shredded lettuce at customers. I can separate and layer hundreds of cheese slices into star-shaped dairy-plastic constellations and wrap them gently in cling-wrap so as not to break off any of the corners (an important lesson from Joanne’s reaction to any food wastage: don’t break the cheese.) I can grate large amounts of onions for sausage rolls as long as I breathe through my mouth and don’t mind smelling of onions for a week. I know at what point the spaghetti cabonara in the bain-marie needs re-hydrating. (This, for the unitiated, means that when the pasta starts to dry out under the heat lamps, it gets the leftover milk from the coffee machine jug poured over it. That pasta sits there all day, absorbing luke-warm frothy milk. Don’t buy it.) I can shuffle the bain marie trays around like Tetris with the added prospect of third degree burns. I can re-layer the biscuits in the jars so that the older ones are closest to the top. I can roll hundreds of plastic forks in paper napkins and stick them shut with my wet fingers. I can even avoid getting whipped with a tea towel when I don’t get out of Joanne’s way fast enough.

But I still can’t froth a jug of milk to save my life.

“Yalla, yalla,” says Joanne. I’m struggling to plate a sausage roll that keeps threatening to disintegrate. Yalla means ‘hurry up’. This is followed by a longer phrase that I’ve gathered means ‘Move your arse’. Joanne’s not in a great mood, because it’s her birthday and her two sons have forgotten. She’s dealing with this by picking up things and slamming them down in other places. The bain-marie trays cop most of it.

SLAM! The lasagna tray.

“[muttering in Lebanese] BLUDDY MEN [mutter mutter] NO RESPECK”

SLAM! The scalloped potatoes.

“HEPPY BERSDAY TO ME, HEPPY BERSDAY TO ME [mutter mutter]”

SLAM! This time it’s a soup tureen.

“Why I have these sons [mutter mutter] I don’t know which one of them has more cuckoo-brains; both of them.”

SLAM! etc.

Frank, her husband, who looks like a cross between Nero Wolfe and Fat Tony, and whose main function is to fry the chicken schnitzels and sit on the back step smoking, calls out “Shut up woman!” and goes back to his cigarette.

Joanne narrows her eyes at me and shakes her head. “You learn this one, girl. You got to treat the boys mean, keep them wanting or BANG they give you all kind of trouble. And no RESPECK!”

She shouts the last word out into the kitchen and I hear Frank mutter “All the time, shut up, bluddy hell.”

I’ve washed the last scraps of scalloped cement potatoes out of the tray, and then scraped off the creamy slime that’s coated the hairs on my arms. There are long washing up gloves provided but none of us bother with them as the time taken getting them on and off usually earns me and the other sandwich hands a “Yalla!” or two. It’s pay day, so I shuffle up to Frank’s chair on my way out of the kitchen.

“How many hours you work this week, twelve?”

“Fourteen,” I say. “I did extra on Monday and yesterday.”

“Joanne!” yells Frank. “Anna do extra on Monday and yesterday?”

“What? Ah, yis, yis on those days extra hour.”

Frank grunts reluctantly and leans sideways in his chair to pull out his wallet. He rifles through a thick wad of notes and pulls out my pay. “See you next week then.”

I fold the notes over and stuff them in my bag. I’m paid the princely sum of $8 an hour, but I can make a sandwich for myself whenever I like (as long as I don’t use any of the expensive ingredients like meat). Frank has informed me that if ‘The Tax Man’ ever comes in, I’m to say I’m paid only in food. I’m not sure how sounds more legal than cash-in-hand, but as ‘The Tax Man’ doesn’t appear to have The Uni Bite high on his list of venues to personally investigate, I haven’t thought too much about it.

“Um,” I say. Frank looks up. “I’ve been offered a job in a library, so this week will be my last week.”

This is true. Last week after my lunch shift, I ran across to Union House, dressed in black (plus a light dusting of sandwich crumbs) and smelling a lot like scalloped potatoes, for an interview as a library student casual at the Rowden White Library. There were lots of questions, but strangely none of them were about whether I intended to steal from the till. Also no mention of frothing milk or breaking the corners off cheese slices. I got the job.

“Joanne!” yells Frank. “Anna going to another place, put the ad back up.”

Joanne appears in the doorway. “You leaving us? You no like us any more?” She wipes away a pretend tear but grins at me, and I can see it really is her version of a good-natured farewell. Sandwich hands don’t tend to stick around very long.

“I’m going to work in a library,” I say.

Joanne and Frank stare at each other in disbelief. “With the books?” says Joanne.

“Pretty much,” I say.

“Why would you want to work in a library?” says Frank.

I look over at the sink, where a pile of onions are waiting to be grated, and a couple more lasagna trays are soaking. I smell like elderly cream sauce and I’m a sweaty mess after only three hours of running between the bain marie and the sink.

I consider explaining the attractiveness of a job where I won’t be covered in food and sweat, and will most likely be paid a legal wage.

I shrug. “I like books.”

Friday is writing day.

2011-11-25T11:36:00.000+11:00

To misquote Thomas Mann*, "A parent is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

Friday is my designated writing day. It's my one day off work a week. Luka doesn't know that. There are lots of things he conveniently doesn't know, like how sometimes he goes to daycare in what are technically pyjamas, and that batteries can be replaced. The day that fucking Elmo guitar with no volume control wore out was one of the best days of my motherhood.

Anyway, on Friday mornings I resist the urge to potter about the house in my pyjamas while my son creates a small yet surprisingly adhesive trail of Rice Bubbles along the lounge room tiles.

Up! Shower! Pants! Relatively clean bra! Top! Shoes!

(that's me)

Nappy! Clothes that may or may not have been intended to be worn as pyjamas! Hair gel so you can see out from under that mop! When did I last clean your teeth! Oh well we'll do them tonight! Shoes! Rice Bubbles!

(that's Luka)

"I want you to do it."
"You want me to do what? You want me to feed you your Rice Bubbles?"
*blonde head nods*
"But you can do that yourself! I need to comb my hair out."
He gently rests his forehead on the edge of the table and pushes the Rice Bubbles away.
*sigh* "All right."

I shovel spoonfuls of breakfast confetti into my son with one hand while running a brush through my hair with the other. Occasionally my multi-tasking limbs get confused and I run a spoonful of warm milk through Luka's curls. He thinks this is hilarious.

Right. We're ready to head to daycare. Then writing day will commence.

"Mum, I've got a big poo."

I stop at the front door, keys and four thousand bags in hand. "Really?"

He stand on his toes and shuffles towards me in poo-stance. I smell him before he gets to me. Birthday cake has a lot to answer for. Bags down, into the bedroom.

"Righto, lie down. No, lie down here, I can't reach you there. You can play with Thomas when you get home from daycare. Lie down here. Luka. Now. We have to go catch the bus, come on, lie down. No, dummies are for sleeping, you know that. Luka. Lie. Down. Now."

10 minutes later the poo has been dealt with. Back to the front door.

"Luka, where have you put my keys?"
"I made a hide-and-seek! You count!"
"We haven't got time, can you find them for me?"
"You count!"
*pause* "I'll count and you see how fast you can find them, okay?"
"Okay!" (Another thing that Luka conveniently doesn't know are the technical points of hide-and-seek.)
"One, two, three, four, five - leave that jacket there we've got another one in your bag - six, seven - you're looking for the keys, remember? Eight..."

Another 10 minutes later and we are successfully on the other side of the door.

"I'm a bit sad," says Luka in a small voice. I squat down.
"Why are you a bit sad?" I ask.
"In my face," he answers. I put a hand to his face. It's pretty warm. I put my hand up under his t-shirt. His back is pretty warm too. I hesitate.
"Do you want some medicine before daycare?" I ask. Maybe Panadol will head things off at the pass.
"Yeeeeeah."

Back inside.

"What do you weigh, Luka?" I study the dosing guide on the bottle of Panadol.
"Okay," he says.

One weigh-in, 9ml and another 10 minutes later, we have made it to the bottom of the stairs and Luka is clipped into the stroller.

"Right!" I am triumphant, we've made it out of the apartment and it's still only 9:30am.

"I want to hold my bag," says Luka.

I reach for his bag. I've left it in the apartment. I glance up and down the hall. There's no one around. "You just stay here, okay, I'll run up and get it?"

"No, I wanna go with you."
"I'll just be a minute, I'll just run upstairs and-"
"Noooooo I wannna go with yoooooou!" He starts to wail. I do some involuntary fist-clenching, followed by some voluntary quiet swearing.

"Fucking," says Luka. I glance around to see if anyone is proffering my Parent Of The Year award, but there are no gleaming statuettes in evidence.

With my teeth carefully pressed together, I unclip him from the stroller, unwind the complex pretzel of my handbag strap from the handles and hold his hand while he takes the stairs one step at an interminably slow time.

"Do you want to put your bag on your back?" I ask, once we're inside again.
"I've got a big poo."
"Really?"
"Yep."
"Can I have a look down your pants?"
"Okay."

Fifteen minutes and another nappy later, I am re-pretzeling my handbag strap around the stroller.

The next bit runs so smoothly that I am quite unnerved. We stagger up to the bus stop three minutes before the bus arrives, and I manage to wrestle my wagon-load of child, stroller and bags onto the bus while only gouging out a relatively small chunk of my calf.

The traffic is light. The bus stops right outside the daycare centre. This is going well.

"This is where we hang up your bag, this is Luka's hook."
"That's MY bag."
"Yep."

"Hi Luka! Our friend Luka is here, everyone!" Winnie waves to Luka and he waves back in that whole-body toddler fashion that threatens to take out any object within arm's length. Toddler arms are a bit like Labrador tails. Enthusiastic and fatal to heirloom china.

"That's a great top, Luka!" says Winnie.
"These are my monster pyjamas!" replies Luka.

Ah. Scratch one thing off the list of 'things Luka conveniently does not know'.

Forty minutes later I'm back at my apartment, cup of tea in hand, laptop on. I glance at the pile of breakfast dishes, but I don't let them distract me. I choose to believe that they will be taken care of at some point during the day by my invisible, domestic-hero boyfriend. He really is a dear, and always knows just the right time of evening to suggest I stop hanging up the washing, put my feet up and order pizza. (I have to order a large pizza, obviously, because there's two of us. Invisible boyfriends can really put away the slices.)

"Right," I say. I say 'right' a lot.

I open the story I have been working on to reacquaint myself with where I was up to, and wonder why my characters roll their eyes and nod so much. I think they need to say 'right' more often.

I've written four halting paragraphs when my mobile rings. I swear, press ALT-F-S (which can theoretically stand for File-Save or Fuck's-Sake) and pick up my phone. It's the daycare centre.

"Hello?"
"Hello, is this Anna? This is Winnie, from the daycare. Ah, was Luka unwell this morning?"
"Um, he seemed pretty okay, a bit warm maybe."
"Yeah, he's seeming a bit unwell today, I think his temperature is about 39, and he just want to lie down on the floor and rest all the time?"

I look at my laptop screen. There's a nice little standoff between Guilt and Annoyance in my head. Guilt pokes Annoyance in the eyes and pulls her hair. Guilt fights dirty.

"I probably should come and get him, shouldn't I?"
"Yeah, I think it would be good. Thankyou Anna, see you soon!"

I gently shut my laptop and pick up my keys. The weather has heated up. When I finally get back to the daycare centre, I'm a sweaty mass of frustration and chafed thighs. I stride through to the toddler room, and each step echoes like a diminishing word count. Annoyance has obviously picked herself up off the ropes and bitten Guilt on the nose.

"Hey, Luka."
He turns his soft face up to mine. He's so pale he's almost translucent, and the rims of his little eyes are red.
"I'm a little bit sick," he says.
I pick him up and he leans against me, resting his head on my shoulder. He's very warm, and I can feel his little arms quivering.
"Can we go home and have a little sleep?" he asks in a small voice.

Guilt pulls an AK-47 from her pants and efficiently obliterates Annoyance.

"Course we can, buddy. I'm sorry you're a little bit sick. Do you want some Tiny Teddies when we get home?"
"Okay."

I cuddle his hot little body a bit closer.

There's a Friday every week.

*In case you're wondering, the original is: "A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

Mixed selections

2011-11-18T11:13:00.010+11:00

"What does 'mixed selection' mean?"

"You don't want to know."

"No, really, what does it mean."

"It means - well, let's just say it's a good idea to keep a note of which meal was served on which day of the week."

"Why?"

"You don't want to know."

***

It's about my fourth week living at a Melbourne University residential college that shall remain nameless except to say it's not Trinity, Hilda's, JCH, Ridley, Whitley, Queens, Newman, St Mary's or Ormond.

All of us first-years have started to lose our country-stunned expressions and drift vaguely into groups. We're all just out of high school, so from the footy-heads to the musical theatre nuts to the science nerds to the constantly drunk medical students, the social groups are roughly the same as in high school. I've determined that all the male students are named Andrew or David, and all the female students are named Jenny or Kate. This saves a lot of time. I personally have decided to answer to Kate, as I am not blonde enough to be a Jenny ('microwave Jenny' or otherwise).

We've gotten past the stage where all we can think of to ask each other are the two first-year-student-from-the-country questions: "Where are you from?" and "What course are you doing?" (Warrnambool; Arts/Science), and have moved on to discovering that we both taped the same obscure 1970s Jacques Rivette film off the telly, and have well-loved copies of 'The Castle of Cats' in our bedrooms.

We've also moved on to the most important and long-running intellectual discussion of our residential years: college food.

College food has a reputation. It starts off okay, I'm told, to lull the first-years (and their nervous parents) into a false sense of security. Then there is an almost imperceptible slide into a kind of tolerable yet soul-destroying mediocrity you can only otherwise experience by listening to Coldplay on the headphones that came with your iPod in a Hoyts cinema foyer while eating supermarket potato salad.

The first thing to note about college food is the smell. It doesn't matter what's for dinner, it still makes the dining hall smell sweet and meaty, a bit like the smell of a McDonalds hamburger bun. It's the kind of smell where for a minute you can't tell whether it's something nice or something rotting.

"What's for tea?"

"Armenian lamb, apparently."

"BMP?"

"BMP."

There are many varieties of stew served at college. They go by such names as Armenian Lamb, Mongolian Beef, Indian Lamb, Mediterranean Beef, Moroccan Lamb and they all look and taste exactly the same: they are basically brown meat in a pot. The BMPs that are supposed to be curry-flavoured are often served with enormous amounts of pale, not-quite-deep-fried-enough pappadums which have been dumped into large metal bowls without being drained properly, so by the time we get them they have cooled, and developed little pockets of solidified fat in their undulations.

It doesn't pay to be vegetarian at college, either. The vegetarians are faced with a seemingly endless procession of 'slice': lentil slice, zucchini slice, and several others that go by different names but are essentially lentil slice and/or zucchini slice. I find this baffling: it is so easy to make tasty vegetarian food, even in slice format. The vegetarians at college go through a lot of tomato sauce.

Friday is the holy grail of college mealtimes. We all come back to college for dinner on Fridays, following some kind of deep, primal instinct that leads us to the dining hall like cartoon mice drifting nose-first after an illustrated ribbon of cheese-scent.

Friday at college is fish 'n' chips and ice-cream night.

*cue heraldic trumpets*

True, the fried-solid planks of fish-like substance are affectionately referred to as 'surfboards', but there's CHIPS and there's ICE-CREAM and there's shitloads of toppings and nuts (which you may also put on your chips if you wish, it's your call. We've all dipped McDonalds fries into a chocolate fudge sundae, so no one's judging). Those of us who return multiple times to the industrial-sized bottles of topping develop a kind of fiddler-crab-esque, overly muscular right arm from pumping the sauce.

I'm a bit funny about food at the best of times, so - Fridays aside - college food fills me with a combination of revulsion and amazement. I attend dinner like I'm performing some kind of experiment:

How many different sorts of soup can possibly just taste like thickened cornflour broth with salt? (Twelve.)

How thin can meat be sliced so as to feed as many students as possible? (0.3mm.)

How many servings of chocolate ripple cake can one footy-head balance up in a single bowl? (Five, but it isn't pretty.)

What is that? (It's carrots. Really. It's actually carrots.)

I try to work out why this sort of food unnerves me so much. I find the volume of it, the sheer enormity of a curry for 160 people, quite repulsive. There's so little detail in that amount of food, it reminds me of feeding the pigs on my friend’s farm. I know it sounds melodramatic, but there's something dis-empowering about being served up 3 mass-produced meals a day. I'm not an individual to this food; I'm an 18-year-old Jenny-or-Kate from the country who needs x amount of nutrients in order to get to three 8am Biochemistry lectures a week. In a way, this is true. So why does it make me feel like I should start learning synchronised gymnastics routines and move to North Korea?

***

“What does ‘mixed selection’ mean?”

“You don’t want to know.”

I’m standing in front of the daily black-board menu next to Sean.

"No, really, what does it mean."

"It means - well, let's just say it's a good idea to keep a note of which meal was served on which day of the week."

"Why?"

"You don't want to know."

I find out what ‘mixed selection’ means that evening. At my college, ‘mixed selection’ refers to the entire week’s leftovers, re-heated and served up in the bain-marie. You choose your poison. The trick is to try to remember if the dried-out Beef Wellington (another form of BMP – brown meat in pastry) was first served closer to Saturday or Thursday.

Sean, Laura and I survey the gently steaming array of food on offer.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“I think that’s Tuesday’s rissoles mixed with Thursday’s risotto,” says Sean.

“Why are there chips in with the croissants?” I ask.

“Oh,” says Laura. “I think I’ve worked it out. They’re serving things alphabetically.”

“That doesn’t explain why the lasagne is next to the zucchini slice,” I say.

Sean and Laura reply in unison: “That’s lentil slice.”

We make our choices. My choice is to move out of college with Laura at the end of the year, into a terrace house in Carlton that has a rosemary bush which threatens to take over the backyard every couple of months, and neighbours who regularly seem set things on fire:

“Who lit the fucken bin?”

“Don’t call the fire brigade Belinda, the car’s on fire but I’m puttin water on it!”

“Look Belinda, I’m a fireman, I’m a fireman!”

On the first night in our little house, I fry an up an onion with garlic, a tin of kidney beans and a tin of tomatoes. In case you can’t tell, I really don’t know how to cook yet. Laura is kind enough not to comment. I ladle the weird concoction into two crazed white bowls that my parents have had since the 70s, and we sit down in the tiny kitchen.

The onion is undercooked and crunchy, the whole thing is crying out for salt, and I didn’t rinse the kidney beans well enough.

It’s one meal, made for two people, to be eaten on one night.

I eat my whole bowlful. It’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted.

We have rendered the impossible into life

2011-11-14T11:14:00.002+11:00

We have rendered the impossible into life.
Upended our lives on three words
and found the best things underneath.
We thought ourselves empty flower pots
face-down over earwigs and the skeletons of flowers.
We lifted our terra-cotta helmets
and when the sun hit the dirt
it was full of tiny seeds
curling up toward daylight.

You may as well start now.

2011-11-01T17:02:00.005+11:00

“Do I have to write down a birth plan?” I ask. I’m seven months pregnant.

“Well,” says my obstetrician, “You can write down that you plan to give birth, if you like. That one’s a definite. But you can make up the rest as you go along. Unless there’s anything specific you want, of course. I had a woman once who was adamant that she needed this giant red oil painting in the delivery room to focus on and channel energy through.”

“Did it work?” I ask.

He frowns a little and gazes up at the ceiling. “I think by the time she entered transition, her energy was more focused on another channel.”

After scouring the pregnancy forums, I pick my OB because the words that come up the most are ‘laid-back’ and ‘non-alarmist’. Also the fact that he doesn’t do internal examinations ‘unless medically indicated’. I’m not a fan of internals. A few months later when I am in labour, I will kick a midwife halfway across the room as she quite roughly performs one on me. She will raise her voice: ‘Come on, be a good girl, it’s not as bad as the contractions is it.’ I will growl ‘YES IT FUCKING IS’ but be in too much pain to point out that given I am currently giving birth, I am obviously no longer a ‘girl’ and probably haven’t been a ‘girl’ for quite a while, thank-you very fucking much you patronising medical professional. Five hours later when I am attempting to push out a baby, I will accidentally shit on this midwife and not mind at all.

I’m getting off track here. Back to just-pregnant.

I phone up to make my first appointment somewhat apprehensively, as my OB’s receptionist has A Reputation For Being A Little Bit Difficult. “Um, I’ve got a referral to see [redacted name of OB]?”

“How far along are you?” comes the terse reply.

“Three and a half weeks,” I say.

“So you haven’t missed your period yet.” She sounds really annoyed.

“Um, no,” I say. I’m standing outside my GP’s office in the wind, and I’m a bit frazzled at all of this. I hate making phone calls at the best of times.

“Then how do you know you’re pregnant?” she accuses.

“I have a positive pregnancy test,” I say. I nearly add ‘it’s a bit of a tip-off,’ but I’m too intimidated to rise to my usual level of smart-arsery.

She sighs. “Hold on I’ve got another call.” I wait for the usual waft of on-hold music and am slightly perplexed to find I’ve been hung up on. I ring back.

“I was just talking to you and we got cut off - ”

“You’re the three-and-a-half weeks?” she says.

“Uh. Yeah.”

“24^th May at 2pm?”

“Uh. Ok.”

“See you then.” She hangs up, and I burst into illogical tears. But hey, I’m pregnant, I now have special dispensation to burst into illogical tears whenever the fuck I want. Also I get to swear as much as I like because once I have a two-year-old with a talent for repetition, I’m going to have to try to behave myself. I may or may not prove to be very successful at this, and my two-year-old may or may not prove to be very good at clearly announcing ‘fucking computer!’ at inopportune moments.

But back to the early days, when my future swearing blonde moppet is little more than a tiny prawn made of snot floating around somewhere a lot lower down than I imagine my uterus to be. Should have concentrated harder when the Life Ed van came round to my primary school.

I like my OB even before I meet him. This is mainly because he has a Playmobil operating theatre and hospital room set up on his office book shelf. I’m easily wooed by the presence of these little German pieces of plastic. When he does enter the room and begin to speak, I’m soothed by his soft voice. He’s kind of like a really nice dad. He’s probably in his mid-fifties, has inoffensive grey hair and wears chinos.

“I have heaps of Playmobil,” I say. “I asked for it for every birthday and Christmas present from age 4 up until I was way too old to still be asking for it.”

It’s probably not the usual first thing he hears from a new patient, but I’m not going to be a usual patient. I am going to be weirdly low-maintenance for a first pregnancy. I’ll have hardly any questions or worries (that’s what the internet is for), I’ll never call him after hours, or even during hours, I’ll never page him and I won’t have a single medical problem even when I go 10 days overdue.

“Do I really have to follow all those food rules?” I ask. “There’s like a million of them. And I really like soft cheese.”

He leans forward and steeples his fingers. “Look, you can be as cautious as you like about these things, really. I would say: don’t eat undercooked meat if you’re in France, don’t eat anything that’s off, other than that just eat whatever you’re comfortable with.”

I must look pleased. “Oh,” he says, “And you’re going to need to drink to get through your second pregnancy, so you may as well start now. A small glass of wine each day isn’t going to do any harm at all.”

It’s official: I am in love with my OB.

I’d like to say the next 9 months fly by, but they don’t. Increasingly, they waddle. I outgrow every bra size ever invented. I stare in confusion at ‘hospital bag’ suggestion lists that insist I pack thank-you cards so I can write my thank-yous while I’m still in hospital. Why don’t I just write a novel and find a cure for cancer while I’m learning to breastfeed?

I manage never to have heartburn or need to wee more often than usual (even when I’m 9 months gone I don’t ever have to get up at night to take a piss. I try not to mention this to pregnant friends or friends with new babies, because their eyes take on a certain murderous gleam that I vaguely think I’ve seen once before and I think it was during ‘The Hand that Rocks the Cradle’).

Pregnancy is weird. Everyone is suddenly interested in me, and a bit grabby (which oddly enough, I find I quite like). I do consider having a set of business-sized cards made up that say “January. Boy. My first.” in order to save answering the same three fucking questions from every single person on the planet.

I also note one weird pregnancy thing that no one ever told me about: when you’re really, really pregnant and your baby moves around while you’re having a poo, it feels like your poo is alive. True.

And suddenly I’m 10 days overdue, lying on the couch moaning about how I’m going to be pregnant forever. Then something…squirts. I don’t usually spontaneously piss myself, I think. I leap off the couch and in ridiculously stereotypical Hollywood style, my waters break spectacularly all over the floor. It goes everywhere. I get the giggles. “Labour doesn’t start like this in real life!” I exclaim, “I’m an episode of Friends!”

I’ll spare you the labour. It’s actually quite boring, for the most part. It hurts, it takes fucking forever, I get really tired, I kick a midwife, I have an epidural. Epidurals are awesome. Everyone should have one, maybe once a week.

Then suddenly it’s time to have a go at actually giving birth, and I can’t manage to push properly (apart from the aforementioned shitting upon the patronising midwife). My OB, who has arrived with his hair tousled from sleep, says kindly: “I think I might need to give you a hand. You have one more go, I’ll get the salad servers ready.” I assume he means forceps because I don’t recall ordering a salad.

I’ve meandered all over this blog post, not knowing quite how to end it. I can only think of one way how it ends, and when I mention it to @matchtrick, he replies: “Then that’s how it ends. You get very few chances to tell a story that ends that way.” He’s right.

I admire my stripy Juno-style socks as my numb legs hang in the air, propped up by stirrup thingies. I can’t feel a thing, but my OB appears to be tossing the salad. (This is not intended to be a euphemism, but I suspect it already is.)

A few moments later a curled up creature is slopped onto my chest, apparently covered in tinned tomatoes and cottage cheese. It’s not a bag of kittens after all.

One of his fists clutches around the strap of my nightie. He’s all shiny and gross and a lot bigger than I expected and completely amazing.

I burst into logical tears.

It ends with baby.

Visiting Chats

2011-10-28T16:54:00.004+11:00

It’s been a quite a long time since I last visited her. Too bloody long, actually.

When I blink and think of her, she is frozen in place at high shutter speed, a tiny firecracker of a woman who would stride in to Camp Hill Primary School, clasping my little hand, and demand to read to my class (to the bemusement of my Prep teacher, who very wisely allowed this elderly dynamo to entrance our class for half an hour).

Now, as I struggle with the spring on the low gate, it feels like someone else's life. Other children’s sun-faded drawings are stuck to the sunroom glass. The pencil scratch marking my height has long ago rubbed off the front yard lamp post.

My mother is by my side, pleaded along for the visit, just in case. In case of what? If I'm honest, I've asked to her to come with me in case the woman I am visiting has finally grown old.

I push the black plastic button on the wall and a startling string of clangs bursts from inside the house. I’d forgotten the assault of that doorbell.

“Darling girl!” A familiar silhouette, dwarfed by the doorway. Heather Chatfield, or Chats, as I quickly dubbed her as a 6 year old.

She was my mother’s English lecturer, and my childhood provider of endless Tim-Tams and endless aggressive enthusiasm. She is now seventy-eight. Her faded blonde hair is arranged in vague curls around her head, and her open mouth reveals worn down bottom teeth.

“It’s our girl! And mother!” trills her deep theatrical tone. She has the voice of everyone's Aunty Beryl who smokes ten packs a day and sounds like a bloke, crossed with Bob Downe.

“Now give me a hug.” she orders, and I bend almost double to embrace her tiny figure. She holds me at arms length and purses her lips. “Let me look at you, aren’t you a beautiful girl - isn’t she beautiful, mother? Come in, now - will you have a cup of tea?” She bustles into the house and we follow. The darkness inside feels familiar; a stillness of decades in every ornament and stagnant piece of furniture.

The grandfather clock still blocks half the passage, and my Year 7 pottery sculptures (including an incredibly un-lifelike replica of an icecream sundae) still adorn the television. Chats steams through the lounge into the piano room and perches on an embroidered chair. I wonder if the piano’s Middle C still plays two notes at once. For those of you playing at home, neither of the notes are actually Middle C.

“Every time I get one of your letters,” she begins, “I go down to the Bendigo library and search for those books you tell me about. Those librarians must be saying to each other - ” she tilts her head in the air and flares her nostrils “ - ‘Who is this old trrrrollop who knows all about these new books and keeps pestering us about them?” She breaks into the throaty laugh that always threatens to turn into a cough. Sometimes it does, and I remember her emphysema. “It’s all those cigarettes I smoked, dear girl, I’ve had to give them up now.” When I was in Prep I used to hide her fags and she would chase me all over the house with a fly swat, me giggling hysterically. There were a couple of packets that she never found. I think I even flushed some of them down the bog.

Chats presses her hands into her lap. “I don’t regret a single smoke, if they told me I was going to die tomorrow I’d buy a huge pile of them -” she throws her arms wide, “ - and smoke myself to death!”

“I don’t understand all these people clinging desperrrrately to life,” she continues, “Half the ladies down at the Red Cross are grumbling about getting old and how their medicines are prolonging this and that - I think every day after seventy is a bonus, darling, and I won’t be claiming I didn’t get enough time.”

As we finish our cups of tea she presents me with a flat, green book. “This is the latest one darling, I thought you might like a copy before you go.” Chats writes English text books for primary and secondary schools, and now, as she approaches her eightieth year, she has finished another. “Because you’re off to university this year, aren’t you? Oh, you are a clever girl.” Her lips draw back in a sneer. “Not like those girls who think they’re intellectual giants because they can say -” she bursts into a whirlwind of quotation; arms sweeping, r’s rolling, ' - ‘O wearrrry night, O long and tedious night, abate thy hours! Shine comforts from the east! That I may back to Athens by daylight, from these that my poor company detest: and sleep, that sometimes shuts up sorrow’s eye, steal me awhile from mine own company.' " She pauses, and her expression sharpens. "And not like those people who are lazy with their language, either.”

Chats detests ‘lazy language’. God help me if I ever ended a sentence with 'with' (unless I really couldn't think of any other word to end it with). Once, aged seven, I was vigorously told off for starting two consecutive sentences with the word “Then”.

Then it’s time to leave. Then it’s hard to leave, too. But there are relatives who hold polite conversations about school to be visited, relatives who, unlike Chats, will probably not announce things like: “I’ve given up wearing a bra now, darling. I don’t see the point any more.”

We stand at the gate, and her gently trembling hands wrap around my wrists. Her blue eyes shine a bit too brightly from her pink face. “You’re a dear, clever girl, and you must visit again soon. Not very many people like me, darling, so the ones who do I drag close to me. Kicking and scrrrreaming!”

She huffs a laugh and leans closer towards me. “Don’t you let anyone stop you from doing what you want to do.” She wiggles my arms up and down. As I smile and turn to leave she pulls my face down to hers and cups her hands against my cheeks. I swallow, it feels like her eyes are pressing against my own. She square her small shoulders.

“People might try, you know. They might try to stop you doing whatever it is you want to do. Remember darling girl, if one door closes - beat it down.”

The Trojan Bra

2011-10-21T10:07:00.000+11:00

It will not surprise you to learn that my grandfather ran a pub, and my great-grandfather ran a pub.

There's something about this publican history that passes with the amniotic fluid in our family. While I am decidedly of Librarian Stadium Status, I often think my library will be the most perfect place on earth on that day where I can pull you a mean pint as I loan you a copy of At Swim Two Birds. Or, if you're that way inclined, mix you up a Mint Julep to go with your Great Gatsby. I can pour you a delicate liqueur to go with your Poirot (sirop de cassis, ou creme de menthe?). If you're borrowing anything by Bukowski, however, I might duck after I heave the four jugs of of vinegar-masquerading-as-red-wine over the counter.

Anyway.

I'm in a very small country town, sitting in the front bar of the pub my grandfather used to run. It's a local bar, for local people, and I'm wearing way too much black (actually, only my socks are black; it's still too much). But I have special dispensation to sit here at ease, as the blood of this pub runs in my veins.

There's a lot of yellow pine paneling and the ceiling feels lower than it actually is. It's 1pm, and the regulars lean against the bar like old tree trunks, curved over their beer mats and occasional exchange of words. There's a comforting smell of stale ale and stubbed-out hot chips. A wishing-well's worth of foreign currency is blu-tacked to the wall next to the register, and beside that is a small picture of a kitten hanging onto a tree branch, captioned: "Lord, help me to hang in there!"

I recall that one of the previous barmen here refused to serve anything except beer, regardless of what you asked for.

"What can I get you?"

"White wine, please."

You get lager.

"What'll it be?"

"Scotch and coke."

You get lager.

"Another round, boys?"

"Yep. 6 tequila shots mate."

You get lager.

"And for the lady?"

"Where are the toilets, please?"

You get lager.

"What's your poison?"

"A single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man's hat."

You get thrown out.

There are limits.

Zero tolerance for Simpsons references round these here parts.

The weekly Tinna Shit raffle will come around later. These are so-named because the prize may as well be a tin of shit, that's not the point. You don't weigh up whether you really want a meat-tray or free entry to the footy-tipping, you just buy the bloody ticket. If you're stupid enough to actually ask what the prize is, the reply will come swiftly from the Greek chorus: "Tinna shit."

I'm perched on the cracked leather of a bar stool, attempting not to knock back my beer in one giant mouthful. These days, I only seem to venture into country towns for funerals, and the pub becomes vital because apparently it is a universal law that only chardonnay may be served at wakes. For me, chardonnay has a tang of corpses.

In between 'sensible' sips, for I glance upwards. I'm not sure why. Probably because ever since I got here I've had the distinct impression that the distance between my head and the ceiling is ever-so-gradually diminishing.

Directly above me, fiercely secured with yellow stick-pins, is the biggest bra I have ever seen.

It's tacked to the pine boards in four places. It's very, very beige. The cups hang low: plumped, pendulous, emptily sensuous. There's a kind of drag against the elastic that isn't the result of polyester and gravity alone. The straps have torn a little against the rusted spikes that trap them against the ceiling.

There's something in that bra. I really, really hope it's not a pair of boobs.

The barwoman places an elbow conversationally next to my own. "Punch girl?" she asks. It's not really a question. We Punch girls look alike.

"Yep," I reply. "Mick's grand-daughter." I glace upward at the bra again. The barwoman smiles and her eyes crease into fans at the edges. Her lipstick is immaculate.

"Lady left it behind upstairs in the rooms. It's a double G-cup. The fellas been throwing coins up in it."

I look up at the bra again, and can just make out half-moon edges of coins pressing against the cups. It must be pretty filled out.

The barwoman nods and her verandah of hair bobs stiffly. "Brings them in, of a weekend," she says. "Their bloody aim gets worse as the night goes on of course. Number of times I've had dollar coins bounce off my nut."

I look back at the ceiling, and the men at the bar tilt their heads to match my upward gaze. Does the elastic tear a little further against the stick-pins, or is that the sensible sips of beer talking?

The barwoman speaks again. Her voice is firm and confident. She is in charge here, proud and comfortable.

"When it comes down, all that money's going to the Children's Hospital."

Every pair of eyes is fixed upon the Trojan Bra. Necks crane and chins tilt.

The leather men at the bar lean sideways and fumble in their pockets for change.

I'm turning the world into birds

2011-10-14T09:53:00.001+11:00

The last 1.5 hours of my library shift last approximately 5.4 hours (5.9 if Daylight Savings has ended).

10am-7pm is hardly an epic work day, but that dingy hour-and-a-half after everyone else goes home appears to turn my brain into some kind of weary meat soup, and my only intellectual ability is to create more misunderstandings than that time I went to the supermarket and only bought a packet of AA batteries and a carrot.

Typical exchange #1:

Borrower: "Can I borrow these please?"
Me: "Sure." I scan their student card, hand it back and then attempt to check out the dvds. The student card hasn't scanned.
Me, enunciating badly: "Sorry, can I have your card again?"
Borrower, looking down at their cardigan: "Sorry?"

Typical exchange #2:

Borrower: "Sorry, these are a few days overdue. Is there a fine?"
Me: "No, that's fine."
Borrower, frowning: "What's the fine?"
Me: "No, it's fine, no fine."
Borrower: "Can I pay it here?"

etc. I'm tired.

At 6:55pm I wander around the library using my best Mum-voice to break through to the iPod-deaf students in the Science Fiction collection, and the stellar examples of young love that lie entertwined and lust-deaf in the bean bag room.

"THE LIBRARY IS CLOSING IN FIVE MINUTES!"

The iPod kids nod vaguely at me and re-prop their George R. R. Martins back against the door. The young lovers spring apart like I'm their dad and I've just walked in on a particularly practical homework session.

I turn off the music (I've recently discovered that playing the Labyrinth soundtrack just before closing is a good way to get rid of everyone, for some reason), click the bolts across the doors and turn off the lights. There's a muffled shriek and some mad rustling from the other room as someone who has fallen asleep both on and under a bean bag realises they're about to be locked in. They shuffle to the exit and I let them out.

The fluorescent tubes flicker out and I stand alone for a few minutes. Have you ever hung out in a closed library? It's really nice. Warm and dark and booky. Given that I start work again at 8:30am tomorrow, sometimes I consider just making myself a nest of bean bags and sleeping over. Pretend I'm Lynda Day sleeping at the Junior Gazette headquarters. But even without the frizzy perm, it might scare the cleaners to find a bleary-eyed, flannel-pyjamaed librarian where there should really only be empty bean bags and the occasional mouse.

So I wander through the deserted Union House, with its permanent aroma of sushi and feet, across campus to my bus stop. I put on my headphones, partly to listen to music but mostly as a kind of hipster head-band to keep my hair out of my face.

In the peripherest of my peripheral vision, I see two sparrows flitting confidently along the ground towards me. I like a small brown bird as much as the next librarian, but I don’t often, well, hang out with them. I turn my head as slowly as I can so as not to scare them and discover that my new feathered friends are in fact scrunched-up-brown-paper-friends, probably originating from Baker’s Delight, that have blown along the steps towards me.

I’m vaguely disappointed at this dissolution of my prospectively Hitchcockian moment. But only briefly because at that point my bus turns up. One minute early! I wonder why everyone else looks so bloody grumpy about this, but after a few travelers ask the driver “Are you the 6:42?” I realise that this bus is not in fact 1 minute early but 29 minutes late.

The bus skittles towards Clifton Hill and past the tennis courts. I’ve let shuffle choose the tunes and it’s chosen Dolly Parton. While ‘9 to 5’ isn’t entirely accurate for my day, I’m the first to admit that ‘10 to 7’ doesn’t have quite the same je ne sais ménage à trois. (I may have done 1^st year uni statistics, but I only did French to year 10.) And at least it's not 'His Eye is on the Sparrow'.

I gaze into the middle distance as we pull up at Clifton Hill station. My gaze scans lazily along the bottom of the tennis court fence.

At the base of it I see a pair of seagulls. They are waltzing.

Their white bodies shuffle back and forth in perfect three-quarter time, like little pale boats cresting the same wave.

I blink, and lean forward in my seat. The feathered flamencos gradually resolve, and I realise the mesh that covers the fence all except the bottom 30cm is obscuring the very human, tennis-playing legs that are connected to the seagulls that are, in fact, a pair white sneakers. As the player dances back and forth, my eyes still catch a bird-like echo in his feet.

So at this point I'm seriously considering either taking up twitching or getting my contact lens prescription checked.

As the bus flings itself up along towards Alphington, I let shuffle take over again and am pleasantly rewarded by a corny rendition of 'Two Hearts Swing in Three-Quarter Time' by Michael Feinstein.

The bus lurches to a halt outside a shop whose signage simply proclaims "TOOLS!" and I try not to take it personally.

I lean my head against the bus window. An enormous raven whizzes right past my head and I instinctively jerk away from the glass in shock.

"Fuck me dead!" I exclaim under my breath. At least, I think it's under my breath but the looks from my fellow passengers suggest it is more 'under my breath while I have headphones on' than 'under my breath when I can hear the volume of my own voice'.

I peer out the window down the road, trying to catch the flight-path of this over-sized cousin of the writing desk.

I can't see any birds, but there is a cyclist waiting up at the red light ahead. His head is at about the height of my bus window, and he's wearing a large, black, aerodynamic helmet. It doesn't look much like a writing desk, but I think I've located my giant Quoth.*

I'm turning the world into birds. What am I going to ornithologically Rorschach next? Does Rorschach** even work as a verb?

My bus purrs on towards Ivanhoe, and the evening light clicks over to that syrupy golden haze that singles out each tree and tells every leaf it's a miracle. As the bus reaches the top of a hill, a large tree rears into view. It's been pruned vigorously to allow the power lines to run through the middle.

Large leafy limbs curve up on either side, straddling the electric tightropes. The evening gilt fades in an instant and the tree arcs in flightless silhouette. I briefly hold my breath at this clipped delusion. The bus drives on.

My iPod shuffles and the first notes of The Leisure Society's 'Love's Enormous Wings' curl around my ears.

__________________________________________________________

* Apologies to Terry Pratchett.

** Autocorrect suggested 'cornstarch' in place of Rorschach. I expect the next gelatinous mass I see will look like a pigeon.

Not a rooster

2011-10-07T09:51:00.002+11:00

It’s 5am. I get up early, but the small Tim Brooke-Taylor impersonater in my life gets up earlier. This morning, his blond locks hang over me in a similar fashion to my hangover. It’s draped gently over my brow, not a very bad hangover, more like having your gumline carefully stroked with a chisel made out of Wil Anderson.

“I want some Rice Bubbles,” says mini-T.

“I just need to have a cup of tea, and then I’ll get you some Rice Bubbles, okay?” I say. It’s safe to say at this point, I’m lying. I just need to have a cup of tea, 2 Codral Cold and Flu tablets (Original Formula), Vegemite toast, maybe four pieces, 1.5 litres of soda water, a text from my mother asking if I’ve sent my grandmother a birthday card, a funny ache in my leg that may or may not turn out to be middle-to-upper-calf cancer, a Lego brick embedded in the arch of my foot, another cup of tea, a scribbled note to myself from last night that reads “if you stand on the table you can touch the ceiling!!!”, and a small child patting my face with his tiny soft hand.

I turn my head towards him and he grins. Little shark teeth. Then his expression changes, he looks amused but somehow admonishing.

“You’re not a rooster,” he says.

My eyes dart about briefly, but the lounge room appears to be in its usual state: ie. mainly held together by fossilised Rice Bubbles and granola-type clumps of hair and cous-cous.

“Sorry?” I say.

He turns his small face up to mine. It’s still lightly flushed with sleep, and I brush his blond curls out of his eyes. He reaches out a hand and cups my cheek. It’s such an adult gesture, I almost blush.

He smiles and shakes his head. “You’re not a rooster.”

Kids say the darndest etc and out of the mouths of etc and never look a gift horse in the etc unless you fancy an equine-spit facial. But having a two-year-old cradle your face in his hands and gently inform you, apropos of nothing, that you do not belong to gallus domesticus, is unnerving.

I assume it’s from book he’s read, or a daycare song, or something. We don’t take it any further. I go get the Rice Bubbles, and douse my hangover.

A few weeks later, we get home from daycare one evening and embark on the dinner/bath/tantrum/fine/whatever/I don’t give a shit/no bath then/straight into pjs routine. We curl up on the couch and he picks out every single book on the shelf that features a digger. The heavy-machinery epic tale is prepared. He opens the first book, and as I draw breath, he turns his little face up to mine and rolls his eyes. He looks amused.

“You’re not a rooster,” he says. He turns back to the book. “It’s the yellow digger!”

At this point, I need more information.

“Hey, buddy,” I say, then pause. How to ask a 2 year old to explain this? “I’m not a rooster?” I ask.

“Nah,” he says. “You’re not a rooster.”
I struggle to form my queries. “Why am I not a rooster?” I ask. He looks confused. I try again. “I’m not a rooster?” He confirms this, and pats my hand consolingly. “What am I?” I ask.

“It’s the yellow digger!” he says, and points at the book.

I try again. “I’m not a rooster – is that from a book too?”

“Yeah,” he says. The problem is, he says ‘yeah’ to pretty much everything. “Are you just saying yeah because you don’t understand the question?” I say.

“Yeah!” he says.

“Is it from a song?” I ask.

“Yeah!” he says.

“How does the song go?” I say.

“Goes,” he says.

Once he goes to bed, I Google the phrase ‘you’re not a rooster’, hoping it’s a song from some show featuring a genital-free chap in an orange lycra jumpsuit whose name I would know if I ever turned on the tv. The top twenty Google results instruct me in rooster management. Which would be very helpful, but I’ve already been informed that I am not, in fact, a rooster.

A few days later, I bring up the subject myself. “Hey Luka,” I say.

“Hey Ma,” he answers.

“I’m not a rooster, am I,” I say.

“Nah,” he flashes his little sharky teeth. “You’re not a rooster.”

“Are you a rooster?” I ask.

“Nah. I’m a boy,” he says proudly.

“What am I?” I try.

“You a mother,” he says.

“Yeah, I am,” I say. I reach out and take his little hand. He closes his hand over mine. He’s two years old, and even now his grasp can barely encompass two of my fingers.

“You’re Ma,” he adds.

“That’s right,” I say. “I’m your Ma.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m gonna get my digger truck.”

“Okay,” I say.

He jumps off the couch and trots to the toy box. He turns back to me, grins, and the shine in his eyes just floors me. “You’re not a rooster,” he says lovingly.

“No, honey,” I say. “I’m not a rooster.”

Late that night, when everyone else is in bed, I think about what he’s told me. I’m a mother. I made a boy that I learned to love. I’m almost certainly not a rooster. But at only two years old, how does he know what I am, and what I’m not? And why does he tell me about it with such joy in his voice?

My Day on a Plate

2011-09-30T14:03:00.005+11:00

Every weekend in The Age Sunday Life magazine, I read the ‘My Day on a Plate’ section. I read it first, and I make self-conscious scoffing noises every week. Apparently, every human being on the planet follows this daily routine:

We start the day with lemon juice in hot water. (I look forward to future columns about our dentist bills)
We adore untoasted muesli with natural yoghurt and ($8 a punnet) blueberries. Go you antioxidants go
Occasionally (we should capitalise that, really) OCCASIONALLY we indulge in a skim-milk latte mid-morning.
Somehow we have lunch prepared for us by a professional chef because it’s always lightly seared tuna steak with quinoa, raw grated beetroot and and light dusting of fear. Dressing on the side.
Whereas most people I know have four dim sims from downstairs and three chocolate coated teddy bear biscuits and fifteen tomato salsa rice crackers and some of that slice from Emma’s going-away-afternoon-tea last week and a bottle of Diet Coke.
Sorry about that. Ignore point 5. We’re back on track for afternoon tea, where we have a cup of sencha tea and a handful of raw almonds. No more than ten almonds. Usually five or six. No more than ten. Definitely not the whole bag. Because raw almonds aren’t very nice so why would we eat the whole bag anyway? Unless we were a bit bored.
Right. So, at 7pm, when we were supposed to finish work at 6, we catch a train and get home by 8 and instantly prepare a perky combination of grilled chicken, more fucking quinoa, and some kind of colourful combo of vegetables (steamed) and a delightful squeeze of lemon if we’re feeling crazy. After all, it’ll be in our morning teeth-eroding drink so we may as well kick on.
In no way after this virtuous day will we crack open the block of Fruit ‘n’ Nut our in-laws left behind and nip down to the bottle-o for another bottle-o.

***

So I wrote the above based on what I think normal people might be like. I don’t eat like ‘My day on a plate’, but I don’t eat like the above version either. I eat like a person who has an eating disorder. And I wanted to write a version of it based on me, at my worst, though I suspect it’s at the blacker end of black.

But what the fuck. My day on a plate has just as much right to be out in the world as green tea and quinoa.

First, a disclaimer: I do eat at relatively sustaining levels at the moment. However, this was my average day back in January.

4am: I wake up early because I’m pretty hungry; I haven’t eaten for 24 hours. I set my tea to brew and take off all my clothes (including my watch, rings and glasses), go to the toilet and then weigh myself naked. I note the number, but also note that I haven’t taken a dump yet today, so I am probably 200-300 grams heavier that I would be otherwise. Having an eating disorder means you know the weight of everything, including your average shit.

6am: I inhale a litre of tea while reading. My child wakes up and demands Rice Bubbles followed by Vegemite toast. Afterwards I stare at his buttery crusts and milky cereal. I place a single piece of bread in the toaster, look at it for a bit, and then abandon it to have a shower.

7am-12pm: 1.5 litres of water. I do a lot of shelving and counter work. I try to be as active as I can in the morning, because I’m less likely to pass out at that time of day, and it stimulates my metabolism.

12pm: I’ve been at work since 8:30am and when I stand up things are starting to swirl a bit. I chuck back four Tic-Tacs to attempt to kick up my blood sugar levels while I get the pickled cucumbers out of the work fridge. Pickled cucumbers contain 15kj per 30 gram serve. A piece of bread (also 30 grams) by comparison contains 305kj. If there was an anorexic supermarket it would have entire aisles devoted to pickled cucumbers, mustard and salt. Somewhere between the laxative aisle and the toothbrush aisle.

12:30pm: I’ve finished my allotted amount of pickled cucumbers. I usually have to sit down as much as I can for the rest of the day.

1pm-5pm: 1.5 litres of water. Everything gets a bit blurry. I won’t remember if you come to see me at the library or if I see that cat that looks like the cat I sort of adopted when we lived in Carlton that you hated because he woke you up at night howling outside your window and annoyed you and I didn’t know. Oh right, sorry, you’re not my old housemate, you just want to borrow a book.

5:30pm: End of the day. I’m tired and dizzy and I have to double-check before I cross roads. I take the train home, plough up the hills toward home. At some point I lurch sideways into a fence and it’s just another bruise.

7:30pm: My child is asleep. I don’t want dinner. I never want dinner. I have four glasses of wine (because alcohol doesn’t count as calories) and I type words onto a screen until my fingers hit all the wrong places and all the songs I listen to are too meaningful.

11pm: I fall asleep on the couch, wake around 2am and drag myself to bed.

***

I’ve struggled about how to end this. Flippant, caustic, matter of fact?

Matter of fact wins.

4am: I wake up. My limbs feel like they’re filled with sand. My heart is beating like a hammer inside my chest. I have to sit up slowly, stand up even slower. I hold onto the door frame. And the whole day, the same as every single day, begins again. I feel like I’ve been alive forever.

You have to be able to handle a lot of pressure.

2011-09-22T15:38:00.003+11:00

There’s a large, plush Winnie-the-Pooh in the tree outside my bedroom window. I close the venetian blinds and open them again. It’s still there, propped in the fork of the tree. It’s got the NQR proportions of a skill-tester prize but enlarged x 30 (which, interestingly, increases the weirdyness by a factor of 1000).

And it’s looking at me. I pretend I haven’t seen all the Chucky movies.

While I’m still standing there debating whether to A) see if its eyes follow me around the room or B) put my pants on because I’m standing half naked in full view of the communal backyard, the decision is made for me by C)elia, my elderly neighbour. She shuffles into view in her bright yellow dressing gown and I snap the venetians shut again to rectify the pants situation. When I slowly draw the blinds open again, Celia has removed the toy from the tree and is scolding it in no uncertain terms. There’s finger-pointing, and eventually a bottom-smack. (Just to be clear, Celia smacks the toy, not the other way around.)

I’ve only lived in this flat for a month but it’s already become clear that Celia is a bit of an Interesting Person. She follows my cat around the yard and brings him back up to the house if she feels he’s getting too close to the road. (He’s been an outside cat for 6 years so he’s pretty much sorted out not to go near cars by now but whatevs.) She told me I should take him outside on a lead, and I informed her that if I had the time to be walking my cat he would be a dog. Once she turned up at our front door with him in her arms:

“He’s just done a poo on my bed, but it’s okay,” she said. That wasn’t entirely what I was expecting.

I took my cat from her. Her story seemed pretty unlikely as Tolly doesn’t even have a litter-tray inside my flat, he lets you know in no uncertain terms if he needs to go outside to take a dump (to the point of running across your head, claws out, if you’re asleep at the time). You’d actually have to shut him in and ignore him for a long time. But my initial question was: “Uh, why was he on your bed?”

“Oh, he likes to come in sometimes,” she said, “and play with my cat.”

This also seemed unlikely. A territorial male ‘plays’ with another male cat, on his home turf? But I apologised uneasily for the possibly non-existant poo, and suggested that she not let him into her house any more, ‘in case of more accidents’. Mainly I suggested this because I was starting to wonder if he might come back shaved or tie-dyed after his next visit.

The next morning I go down to check the mail and am startled to find NQR-the-Pooh nestled into the front hedge. I glace around, but there’s no sign of Celia. I wonder briefly if the toy escapes on his own each night and that’s why she was scolding him. I eye Houdini-the-Pooh for a minute. He looks back at me, as if to say ‘I’m a stuffed toy, for Christ’s sake, stop ascribing human powers to me like movement and speech.’ I tell him he’s probably right, but he doesn’t reply.

Celia ups the ante for a few weeks after that. She starts to make little window displays on her lounge sill, pulling up the venetians so everyone can see. They usually involve some combination of stuffed toys, her cat, and pictures cut from the Herald Sun. One time there’s a packet of Tim Tams and a carrot involved. Cousteau-the-Pooh continues to roam the garden, and I begin to think he might be related to that garden gnome in Amelie. Sometimes a large white teddy is sat out in the sun in a doll’s pram, which is gently tied to the wrought-iron balustrade with a blue ribbon. And Celia herself, shuffles about the gardens in her yellow dressing gown.

One morning I hear a funny metallic banging noise. I’m on my way to work so I’ve already waddled back into the house three times (umbrella, pre-natal vitamins, brain). As I approach the mail boxes, I see Celia, dressing-gowned as usual, gently lifting the iron flap of each of the 24 mail boxes one at a time and letting them fall back down with a clang. I try to scuttle past but I’m well into my non-scuttling trimester and she spots me.

“You have to be able to handle a lot of pressure,” she says. I excel at this sort of small talk. Throw me a curveball like “How are you?” and I’m stumped, but mailbox xylophone plus ‘you have to be able to handle a lot of pressure’ and I’m on fire.

“Um, yeah,” I say.

That’s the last time I see Celia.

Our communal backyard sports no less than eight Hills Hoists. It’s like someone was only allowed to pick one iconic Australian symbol for the development, but they could have as many of that one thing as they wanted. When the wind blows and they all creak around at night, it’s equal parts unsettling and soothing, like someone chanting ‘Bhagavad Gita’ over and over but in a Roots Manuva voice and every now and then replacing it with the word ‘Ryvita’. So you’re quite relaxed but you keep letting out nervous giggles.

A few days after I witness Celia Suggs performing Lady of Spain on her mailbox-phone, I open the venetians (this time with pants on because I am a fast learner. Also I’m really quite pregnant and if I can’t see my legs, no one else should have to). I gaze out the window.

There is a toaster tied to one of the Hills Hoists by its cord.

It swings in the light wind, secured by a simple under-over knot at the plug end.

I stand quite still and watch the gently revolving heater of bread. I wonder if you wash toasters on the normal or delicate cycle, and if you chuck in a scoop of breadcrumbs in place of detergent. By the time I get home from work that day the toaster is gone. A week goes by before I realise that unlike the toaster, Winnie-the-Pooh hasn’t popped up for a while. And Celia’s venetians are shut, which is also strange. Usually the cat gets a sunning and there’s at least some form of vegetable-and-tabloid-based window display. I start to worry that maybe she’s keeled over indoors and is being gradually devoured by her cat. I figure that cat would have some issues by now and might not be averse to some ex-Celia if it was attractively plated up on a yellow dressing gown.

I start to sidle up to her lounge room window, realise I’m wider in profile these days, and change my gait to frontle. One of the venetian blind blades has a broken piece, and I carefully put my face to it, half-expecting to find Celia’s bloodshot eyeball peering back at me. Or Winnie-the-Pooh. Or a cat’s bloody maw.

The flat is empty. All the furniture is gone, and the carpets are striped like freshly-steam-cleaned tigers. I remember a removalist van was around a little while ago, though I never saw anyone going in and out of Celia’s front door.

I step back from the window. I wonder about the toaster, and what she meant by it. I wonder if the toaster needed to be able to handle a lot of pressure too.

A week later, a young Filipino couple move in. The woman’s belly is almost as big with baby as mine, and in January we will come out of our flats holding the same orange government folder we got at the hospital.

We will smile, she will ask “How are you?” and I won’t know what to say.

Curled and cat and calm

2011-09-16T21:26:00.002+11:00

“I want MAAAAAAA!”

It must be 6am already. My tiny blonde alarm clock has gone off in the next room and I’ve got approximately 56 seconds to have a quick piss and then get to him before he reaches critical mass.

I execute a well-trained bladder manouvre and open his bedroom door. He’s been in that room since he was 7 months old but we still call it ‘the study’.

“Hey buddy.”

“Hey Ma. I want to wake up.”

“Okay. Should I turn on the light so we can get you out of your sleeping bag?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you ready for the bright?”

“Okay.”

I switch on the light and he is standing at the end of his cot, head bowed in a gold rush of curls against the not-very-bright bulb.

“Shall we get you ready for Rainbow, and wake up your Da?”

“Okay.”

Ten minutes later I have sloughed my child into an orange-and-red-and-pink outfit worthy of a ‘dressing in the dark’ scouting badge, and his father is standing at the door, dressed but possibly not awake.

“Bye!” my two year old yells. “See you soon! Good luck!”

The front door closes and I have just enough time for a mashup of two of the following:

Shower

Makeup

Pack my lunch

Clean my teeth

I go with options B and D because A I am vain, and B I talk to people all day and no one wants a waft of that pizza from twelve hours ago.

I slam the front door, then check that I have my keys. This is not the ideal order of proceedings, but I do have my keys, today. I trot down the hill and up the hill to the train, avoiding the fresh brown dog poo, the rehydrated grey dog poo and the poo that looks suspiciously familiar but definitely isn’t mine because I had an early night on Saturday.

I make the train with heart-pounding seconds to spare. I flop down on a seat and remove ten thousand layers of clothing. I pull out my headphones and clap them over my ears, fighting the usual battle with my hair. The early morning sunlight changes colour as music floods through my ears and I have a small moment of glory as bass guitar and a blistering female vocal assaults my joy.

Music transforms public transport. The carriage of suits sways in time to the beats in my ears, at least twenty people bob their heads as Bingethinkers blare “Can I get an answer/can I get a yes – YES”

The train plunges though Westgarth and then slows, waiting for another train to pass. In the pause, I curve my head to look out the window. Directly opposite my window is a high brown fence, tagged and faded. I recognise a few of the common Melbourne tags.

Suddenly, a pair of disembodied hands appear above the fenceline, holding a perfectly white cat. The cat is curled into a sitting position, his bottom resting comfortably in one of the hands while the other supports his chest.

The cat gazes along our train carriages, his furry triangle head swerving slowly. I am reminded of The Exorcist and relieved when his neck only stretches along 180 degrees.

I twitch my head around my own carriage, desperately looking for a pair of eyes that have seen this periscope feline trainspotter. Everyone is looking at their iPhones or books or asleep although there’s that guy who’s fondling himself but I’m happy not to meet his gaze.

My train jerks into life, and I look back to the fence. The cat is still there, curled and calm in those mysterious hands. He tilts his head and gives one front paw a cursory lick.

As the train moves off, the hands gradually lower and the cat disappears. I jerk my head around the carriage, searching for a pair of eyes that have seen, suddenly desperate – someone must have seen?

All eyes are down or closed.

The train sways off towards Clifton Hill.

“I’m looking for a book. It’s got half a woman’s face on it.”

2011-09-09T14:36:00.002+11:00

Something stirs in my gut, and it’s not the dry Weetbix with butter and vegemite, the block of Golden Rough and the bottle of red that I had for dinner last night. (Although incidentally, that particular meal will produce an almost identical sensation five hours from now.)

This is something quite different. It’s an affliction that hits me in bookshops, particularly the big, who-gives-a-fuck-what-you’re-looking-for kind of book-supermarket that would rather you BYO dowsing stick than pay their staff enough to make them to actually want to help you.

Sorry, did I say that out loud?

Anyway, this particular affliction is commonly known as EBSNU. Before you say ‘Gesundheit!’, I should advise that EBSNU stands for Ex-Book-Seller Ninja Urge.

Ladies and gentlemen, I was not always the mild-mannered librarian you see before you. My name is Anna Ryan-Punch and I used to be a bookseller. I pulled all the moves. I told you your order would arrive in 7-10 days (which means I have no idea when your book will arrive but I really hope it’s not me who serves you when you come back to ask about it). I suggested a novel for your birthday present to your 9-year-old son who ‘hates reading’, when what I really wanted to suggest was that you get him something he’d actually like. I knew that you meant Rushdie’s Satanic Verses when you asked if we had the Satanic Bible, though I was always tempted to ring up a copy of the latter. I found you books for your daughter at university who you didn’t understand any more, books for your 80-year-old aunt who hates swearing and sex, books for your baffling 16-year-old son who knocks off two novels a day, and most importantly, I found you the books that you couldn’t remember the title or author of, but you definitely know there is a part where someone has sex with a bear.

I’m standing in Borders at the Jam Factory (this blog post brought to you by the wonder of memory combined with first person present tense). I’ve got The Subtle Knife in one hand and Guns, Germs & Steel in the other. The books, I mean. I may be an EBSN but I don’t actually carry throwing stars.

“I’m looking for a book. It’s got half a woman’s face on it.”

My EBSN aerial extends from my head and locks into place with an audible click. (This is a lie. I am not, in fact a cyborg. But I did imagine an aerial extending from my head, and I may or may not have made a little clicking noise with my tongue as I imagined it locking into place).

The book she’s looking for is Tully. It’s obviously Tully. The shop assistant (I can see at once he is not a true book-seller) hums a bit and asks the standard non-ESBN questions.

“Can you remember anything about the author or the title?”

The woman shakes her head impatiently. “You’d know it,” she says. “It’s got half a woman’s face on it.” I run out of willpower at this point; I relapse. I place my weapon-related books gently down on the bench and sidestep out of sight behind a wall of Frank McCourt. Then I scurry, head-down, to the fiction section and locate the Paullina Simons wing. Five seconds later I’m back at the info desk. The woman is still there, and by the look on the shop assistant’s face I can tell she’s now said “It’s got half a woman’s face on it” upwards of twenty times.

“Sorry,” I interrupt, “Are you looking for Tully?”

The woman turns towards me and for a minute I don’t know if she’s going to hug me or stick me with a nearby copy of The Subtle Knife. I hold the Simons out in front of me and she almost snatches it from my hands. “That’s IT!” She points angrily at the shop assistant. “He didn’t know what it was, and he works here.” I smile beatifically and melt into the night. By which I mean I pick up my two books and ask the shop assistant if they have an EFTPOS minimum.

EBSNU is a relatively common phenomenon. It’s about two-thirds as common as ex-booksellers, but half as common as remaining a bookseller for more than five years. I did first year stats at uni, just go with me on this.

And like any addiction, there’s the rush, the high, and then you need more. But hanging around in bookshops eavesdropping on customer service is as acceptable as drinking light beer at a B&S Ball. Or, should you prefer your references more high-brow, it’s as acceptable as ordering a Becks at Beer Deluxe.

It’s best to stay calm and let the EBSNU moments come to you. My personal crowning moment comes 10 years later, when the EBSN in me has been soothed by years of Dewey shelving and non-retail-related book dealings. I probably couldn’t recommend a book I hate if my life depended on it.

Let me preface my moment of glory by providing a piece of information: my mother collects books by relatively obscure and mostly out of print author Beverley Nichols, who wrote everything from children’s books to books about flower-arranging.

Fascinating, isn’t it? "Your parents collect pipes? That's really interesting!"*

Anyway, I am lurking in Readings Carlton, that haven for booksters and desperate parents whose toddlers love the train-set table. (Why are you all looking at me?) The Readings staff are most definitely book-sellers, and I suspect there may even be a few BSNs among them. I am hovering in the poetry section because I know I won’t have to move my bag out of anyone’s way.

“It’s by a man with a woman’s name, and it’s about people who live in a tree.”

I freeze. Did anyone hear a small ‘click’? I know what the book is, and I know it’s out of print. And this, dear reader, is where EBSNU goes meta.

“A man writing under a female pseudonym?” asks the book-seller.

“No,” says the woman. “He’s just got a name that sounds like a woman’s name. Like Evelyn, but not Evelyn. I think it’s a kid’s book.”

“Is it a new title?” asks the book-seller.

“I don’t know,” says the woman.

By this point I have fished out my iPhone, typed in the Abebooks web address with trembling fingers, found a second hand bookshop in Bendigo that has a copy of The Tree That Sat Down in stock and written the details down on a post-it note. (I always carry post-it notes. Librarian status: alpha.)

I glide up to the info desk, leaving my bag safely in the poetry section.

“I couldn’t help overhearing,” I say, because I am secretly Jessica Fletcher. “But I think the book you’re looking for is The Tree That Sat Down by Beverley Nichols.” Here I pause and wait for the ‘That’s IT!’

“THAT’S it!” exclaims the woman. Different emphasis, but pretty standard.

The book-seller looks it up. “I’m afraid it’s out of print,” she says. The woman looks crestfallen.

“It is,” I say, “but if you phone or email this secondhand store - ” here I proffer my post-it, “they have it in stock, and the others in the series too.”

The woman takes the post-it note from me with the degree of reverence reserved for dealing with people you suspect are a bit mental. “Thankyou,” she says uneasily.

I turn, and without another word glide out of the shop on a wave of adrenalin. Then I turn around, go back and retrieve my bag from the poetry section and slink out another way.

This is the life of the EBSN. We are not high mages or good fairies, do not worship us for our mystical skills. We are simple junkies looking for a fix. We are everywhere, dear reader.

And we’re listening.

________________________

*obligatory obscure reference. See here at about the 2 min mark.

How not to make coconut chocolate tarts

2011-09-02T14:35:00.004+11:00

If you wish to make coconut chocolate tarts from scratch, you must first invent the universe.*

More specifically, you must invent the part of the universe that evolved into the part of the human psyche labeled “patience with recipes”.

I am usually a very patient cook. I can layer and oil hundreds of filo pastry single sheets with tai-chi smoothness. I can roll out pastry, loop it over the rolling pin and unfurl it into a pie dish like a happy labrador’s tongue. I have even been known (because I don’t own a set of beaters) to whip meringues by hand. I always read the whole recipe first, to check if it says ‘meanwhile’ anywhere. ‘Meanwhile’ is recipe-book-speak for ‘you should have done this bit earlier and now your dough needs an hour to prove but the filling is already congealing and you really should read the whole recipe first, you douche’.

I am making coconut chocolate tarts from a recipe by [redacted famous chef who often appears in weekend newspaper magazines]. The recipe book is called something in the vein of ‘Fast and Fresh’, or ‘Quick and Comforting’, or ‘You Really Should Read The Whole Recipe First, You Douche’.

‘Place the egg whites, sugar and coconut in a bowl and mix to combine them. With wetted hands or a spoon, press the coconut mixture into eight deep muffin tins, covering the base and sides to make a shell.’

I am all over this. I press the mixture firmly into my muffin tray, and pop it in the oven. And because I have read the whole recipe first, I know that later on it tells me to ‘make the filling while the bases are cooling’. I’ve got your number, [redacted famous chef].

‘Place the cream in a saucepan over medium heat and heat until almost boiling. Remove the cream from heat. Add the chopped chocolate and stir through until the chocolate has melted and the filling is smooth.’

It doesn’t explicitly state in the recipe that I need to eat massive spoonfuls of this mixture while it’s warming, but I’m well-trained in reading between the lines in these sorts of recipes. Sorry if I’m mumbling, I’ve got a mouthful.

After the prescribed 8-10 minutes, I have a look at my tart shells, while making several brilliant jokes in my head about ‘tart shells’. They are supposed to be ‘golden brown’. They are, in fact, ‘golden brown’ on the edges but still ‘very white’ on the base. I am calm. Perhaps it’s like making biscuits where they seem squidgy and undercooked straight out of the oven, but harden up as they cool. I make several more brilliant jokes in my head about ‘tart shells hardening up’, and look back at the recipe.

‘Cool the shells for 1 minute then gently remove them from the tin.’

I rest those coconutty little whipper-snappers and then gently slide a knife down the side of one shell to detach it. The ‘golden brown’ sides slide up neatly, leaving a perfect ‘very white’ circle of tart shell still glued to the base of the tin. I have more of a ‘tart ring’ on my hands now. Resisting the urge to make yet more brilliant jokes in my head, I calmly pop the muffin tray back in the oven to give them a bit longer. The filling is starting to develop a skin (which my interpretation of the recipe requires me to eat), so I warm it on low.

Ten minutes, a modicum of swearing, and a few more ‘tart ring’ events later, the bases of the shells have finally turned the prescribed shade of brown. I personally have turned an unanticipated shade of pink, as the edges of tart shells are now of a colour somewhere between ‘chocolate brown’ and ‘charred remnants of sanity’.

The filling is starting to develop its second skin of the day, so I get the tray out of the oven and gently slide a knife down the side of one of the eight remaining shells.

When I say ‘gently slide a knife’, what I actually mean is ‘attempt to wedge a knife between tin and shell and discover the more well-cooked parts have welded them to the tray like dried Farex to a baby bowl’.

It won’t dislodge. I shove the knife a bit harder and an entire shell shatters. I make a carefully crafted comment about [redacted famous chef] and her mother’s possible dealings with members of the animal kingdom. I turn the tray upside down and twist it, hoping to crack them out like ice-cubes. Nothing.

And this, dear reader, is where I fail to invent the universe.

More specifically, it is where I fail to invent the part of the universe that evolved into the part of human psyche labeled “patience with recipes”.

I slam the muffin tray down onto the bench and stab at the remaining shells with the knife; eruptions of failed burnt sugar chips spray across the kitchen. I throw the recipe book at the sink and shatter an unsuspecting cereal bowl. It’s the bathroom scene in Punch-Drunk Love all over again, but with less toilets and more coconut.

I heave in a great, ugly breath, take a quick look to make sure the cat isn’t around, and finally hurl the knife at the floor as hard as I can. By some miracle it sticks in the floorboards point down with a humorous BOINNNNNNG, and quivers gently.

I snort. ‘Cool,’ I say aloud. ‘I should join the circus.’

‘Pour the chocolate filling into the coconut tart shells and place in the freezer for 10 minutes or until the chocolate filling is set. Serve with coffee or berries as a dessert.’

Or, if you will,

‘Pour yourself a glass of wine and eat the remaining chocolate filling and shards of coconut tart shells with a spoon while standing up at the stovetop. Spend 15 minutes trying to pull the knife out of the floor. Add "buy new muffin tray" to shopping list. Return to lounge room and continue reading Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.’

Now, would anyone like the recipe?

This is what my tarts did not look like.

The unfortunate muffin tray.

________________________________________________________

* Apologies to Carl Sagan

Confession: I did several creative writing subjects in my university years.

2011-08-26T11:42:00.006+11:00

I know, I know. But I was young. I had Intellectually Romantic Notions.

I thought that each tutorial I'd have my stories and poems ferociously torn apart by my fellow scribblers and my faults laid bare in revelatory fashion (possibly with evocative jump-cuts between me and the other students). Or perhaps rather than cowing to their superior knowledge, I would go on to argue a devastating Gregory-Peck-style case for why I’d written what I’d written. Then next week I'd help do the same for their writing. We would appreciate our conflicting views and fierce arguments, and come away ready to confront our writing in new and risky ways.

Like I said, I was young.

Also I'd watched too many films involving writing workshop sequences.

So as we all sat quietly around the table each week, tentatively murmuring "That was good, I like your images," and "I was interested in how you changed tense halfway through", I started to wonder what I was actually going to learn. I wasn't going to learn to critique others, and I wasn't going to get critiqued in the way I’d hoped for if we were all going to be so goddamn nice all the time.

But actual assessment would be different, I thought. My tutors were writers I admired, so obviously I would get the sandblasting I wanted. I’d get opinions about which bits of my writing were the written equivalent of Roquefort, which bits were Tasmanian Heritage camembert, and which were Kraft 'parmesan-style' vomit flakes that come in a shaker you don't even need to keep in the fridge.

I would think hard about their opinions, possibly while ordering a cheese platter, and then decide for myself what I thought.

My assignments generally came back looking like this [circa 2004]:

This form of assessment didn’t really fit with my anticipated cheese/writing analogy.

The ‘big tick scenario’ could have meant three things.

1. It could have meant that I was an absolute freakin prodigy at 19, and should have just quit uni and waited a couple of weeks for my first publishing contract to land in my lap. Obviously this one was correct. Ahem.

2. It could have meant there was just so much wrong with what I'd written that the tutor saw no point even starting a detailed critique because she was only paid a flat fee for marking, not per assignment and certainly not per hour.

3. It could have meant she was being sensitive about possible (but non-existent) neuroses about having my writing criticised. I’ve never been overly attached to creative pieces I’ve written, once they’re finished. I’ll rework pretty much anything, especially if it gets me a paid publication. As Jim Rockford once said: “There’s two things I won’t do for money. I won’t marry for it and I won’t kill for it. Other than that I’m open to just about anything.”

Anyway. What I wanted was for my habits to be trampled and bloodied and my awkward writing structures to be cracked in half over my head like Anne Shirley in charge of a slate. I wanted to be pushed and confronted and hurt.

But at the end of each semester I got: A Big Tick.

I gave up on university creative writing classes after a few subjects.

My writing habits varied enormously over the next ten years. In undergrad I wrote masses of poetry and letters and essays and mated flies and inoculated agar plates and finished my BA and BSc degrees. I didn’t eat much and I didn’t sleep much and was probably a bit nuts a lot of the time.

Then I quit English/Philosophy Honours after a month, graduated with what I had and studied for a library degree full time (night classes) while also working nearly full-time during the day. Assignments (and – kill me now – group assignments) were done very early in the morning and all weekend. This is not recommended. My husband will attest to my sleep-walking and talking at this time. I graduated.

Then I stopped reading, and only worked and watched films. Think I was a wee bit burnt out.

Then I worked and read and the only writing I did was book reviews and I'd accepted I probably wasn’t going to write creatively ever again. This lasted a very long time. Every now and then I’d force a poem out from between the cracks, because that was what I was supposed to be doing. But mostly I edited up my old stuff and that was the stuff (some of it 10 years old) I was submitting to journals. It felt horrible and I felt useless and if anyone tried to talk to me about creative writing I got defensive and pretended it didn’t matter to me. Did it fuck.

Then I got wonderfully, deliberately pregnant, had a baby, and what happened in that following year was…hmm? What? Can you hang out the washing? I’ve just been pooed on.

Then as my kid got older I read more, reviewed and judged writing awards more. I was busy. I didn’t write much poetry, and I didn’t write any fiction and I kept pretending it didn’t matter.

Then everything went to complete and utter shit for over a year and I went a bit nuts and didn’t eat or sleep but I wrote more than 200 poems and over 80,000 words worth of stories in 6 months. Don’t try this at home. Seriously. It means you’re mental.

Now I'm just trying to keep writing because I think if I stop I might never start again.

Conclusion: I tend to be all, or bugger all. How I do one thing is how I do everything.

But I did in the end learn something from writing classes at uni. I learned that I want there to be different streams of classes, to cater for different needs. It would have made me feel a bit less mental, then and now. In my pretty dream uni (where the coffee is free and Union House doesn’t smell like dead fish and feet), there would be one creative writing stream for people who want encouragement, gentle constructive pointers, and to have the good things they do firmly acknowledged.

And there would be a second stream for those who want the extreme version – the all or bugger all. To be let loose to argue and criticise without fear of slamming their feet into the kidneys of someone’s dream-child. To get into the messy details and debate single words in single sentences, and be able to say, essentially: This bit is awesome, this bit is parmesan-style vomit-shaker.

And it would be clear-cut – you’d volunteer for your stream, not be assigned. Tick a box, choose your crits.

I don’t actually think either stream is ‘better’, by the way. I hate the idea that being able to ‘take’ criticism is an indication of strength or superiority. Some writers don’t read reviews because they write better without them. Some writers do read reviews because they write better with them. If some form of counsel helps your improve or makes you want to improve your writing, then it works. If whatever it is doesn’t help: screw it. Ignore it. Avoid it.

But in terms of creative writing classes, the cautious and nice approach doesn’t work for everyone, just like cheese doesn’t always make an appropriate analogy for writing. (I initially was going to link my cheese imagery to how marking at Melbourne Uni was done on the bell curve, but then I looked at the words ‘cheese’ and ‘bell curve’ in the same sentence and decided against it.)

I’m not completely inhuman; I do like praise. I like a big fat tick on my assignment as much as the next scribbler. But I like it explained, or not at all.

Is it a Roquefort tick?

Or a Tasmanian Heritage camembert tick?

Or a tick that means “just put that vomitous parmesan-style shaker back in the cupboard”?

The highest form of blogging

2011-08-18T21:30:00.005+11:00

In this blog post, I will not do at least two things*.

1. I will not have my novel-in-progress assessed by a feline editor.
2. I will not fall backwards off anything.

It's true, consultation is the wryest form of cattery, and propellation the spryest form of battery. But by not doing at least both of these two things, it will become obvious that I am not copying anyone's comedy stylings.

Why yes, I did give up caffeine two months ago. What of it? It wasn't agreeing with me. And that awkward moment in the staff toilets was pure coincidence. This music is Bulgarian, by the way, not Georgian. What next? Am I still allowed to make sandwiches and drink arbitrarily feminised varieties of tea? Why am I defending myself to you anyway? You're a cat, and touching my stuff with your bum doesn't constitute editing.

I stop writing blog posts to my cat in order to have a shower. I’ve just taken my pyjamas off when there’s a knock at the door. It’s not the tv repair man because he came yesterday, eventually. So it’s going to be Paul, having forgotten his keys. I reach for a modesty-towel from the cupboard, and remember they’re all in the tumble drier because we only own three towels and usually that’s four towels too few for my washing regime.

The venetian blinds are still shut in the lounge. I trot naked to the front door, execute an elegant triple-step to avoid a particularly vicious-looking block of Duplo and impale my instep on a small plastic goat that I swear wasn’t there a second ago. I notify the plastic goat that it is, in fact, an arsehole, and wrench open the front door to give Paul his keys.

It’s the postman. He looks bored.

I slam the door shut again and shout “JUST A MINUTE!”

The only appropriately voluminous garment within reach is an embroidered kimono that I’m selling for my aunt on eBay. I shove my arms into the sleeves and wrap it around my body.

I open the front door again. The postman still looks bored.

“Sorry,” I say, “I was thinking about my husband. I mean, I thought you were my husband.”

"Sign at the top, please."

I pause, pen above paper. I have forgotten how to do my signature. I scrawl something with a few too many double-consonants in it across the form, and take my package. The postman fades out onto the footpath.

The package is puffy and soft, and I wonder what I ordered online the last time I was pre-menstrual and watching Dead Poets Society at 2am. I plonk down on the floor in my beautifully stitched kimono and strip off the wrapping.

It’s a set of towels.

My cat pauses mid arse-lick in the cello position and stares calmly at me.

"Stop it. This is fine," I say. "You can't copy an indirect presentation of a contradiction between an action or expression and the context in which it occurs. Irony is a widely used device.”

My cat finishes his editorial ablutions and jumps down from the desk. He sniffs the pile of new towels on the floor and then makes a pointed attempt to sit down on my bare foot. Despite his demonstrated high standards of anal hygiene, I'm not keen to risk having my bare toes critiqued.

So I stand up, take a step back onto a well-placed Matchbox car, perform a devastating somersault over the coffee table, and resolve to seriously reconsider the introduction to this post.

*My very funny friend Mat Larkin has a very funny blog. Parts of this post may or may not be directly related or stolen from his writing in the past, present and future.

Registration: EHN 539

2011-08-16T21:44:00.002+11:00

One bleary afternoon I’m in an under-ventilated tutorial room, sitting in a moulded plastic chair that threatens to pierce my kidneys at any given moment. I nod confidently while the students in my tutorial wax literary about notions of the onanistic sublime in William Blake. I’ve got no idea what they’re talking about, but I suspect it’s mostly about wanking. I blame it all on Peter Otto and tune out for the rest of the hour.

You’re waiting outside for me, traditionally clad in philosopher-brown corduroy pants and a light grey shirt that suggests you don’t separate whites from colours.

“You know how the car got nicked?” I nod. “Well, the police found it. It had a few parking tickets on it, but we don’t have to pay them as it was reported stolen.”

“Oh, that’s good,” I say. “Where was it? Was it damaged?”

“No…” you say. I raise my eyebrows. “Well, it’s a funny thing,” you continue, “The police were quite surprised, because while the thieves had obviously taken it for a joyride, they’d locked the doors when they abandoned it.”

“They’d…locked…” I frown.

“Apparently they found it at Optus Oval,” you say.

“Optus Oval,” I say.

“Yeah. Where a week ago I went for a kick of the footy, and then I had a beer or two, and then because I’d had a beer or two I walked home.”

“And…did you walk to Optus Oval, or did you –”

“I drove.”

“Right. So you reported the car stolen the next day, when actually - ”

You smile, and your eyes crinkle at the corners. “Yeah. I forgot.”

I attempt to frown again, but somehow I’ve collapsed against the John Medley brickwork, gasping with laughter.

You slide down to a squat beside me. “At least we don’t have to pay the parking tickets.”

It’s a car with personality. Which is a nice way of saying it’s a piece of shit but we can’t afford to get a spare key cut for the lock, let alone buy a new car. Let me introduce our car by way of some salient features:

If we rev it too high, the radio changes stations.
The windscreen wipers don’t work. We have a sponge rubber-banded to a ruler; lean out the driver’s seat window and ta-dah! Human windscreen wiper. If the rain gets too heavy, we just have to pull over and wait.
There’s a hole in the radiator somewhere, so if we’re not careful the temperature indicator will point into the red, then to the H, the past the H, and then we have to abandon it for the night and walk home from the Lort Smith with the cat.
Don’t put anything precious on the floor in the back seat. There’s a leak in the roof, and in winter we have to bail out the puddles each morning.
The driver’s seatbelt-clip doesn’t undo. There’s a pocket-knife in the glove-box and if we stab it around in the catch for a while, eventually it comes free. We always wear seatbelts though. You know; safety first.
Something smells in the boot. We haven’t been able to find out what it is. This is probably just as well.
Most importantly: the engine doesn’t shut down if we just turn off the ignition. We have to stall the car to make it stop. This is very, very important.

It’s one of those excellent, pre-child Sunday mornings. Sleep-in til 11am, slightly hungover but not like someone has stripped off your skin and shoved it back on inside out while you were asleep. More the kind of hangover that just feels like you’ve clipped your toenails a little too vigorously and then worn new shoes, or that you’ve tried a new kind of sauce at Lord of the Fries when you knew your favourite was the cheese and gravy.

The best thing about North Carlton on a November morning is the light. The light in North Carlton dictates everything from rental prices to the attractiveness of your fellow café-goers. It turns three-day growth into designer stubble and last night’s makeup into dusky Vogue eyes. Even the dog turds, rehydrated from white to grey by gentle spring rain, take on a beatific glow.

On Sunday at 11am in North Carlton, everyone is eating massive plates of fluffy scrambled eggs, crackly bacon, salted lemony avocado, smoked salmon slices that curl up like kittens, luminous fried mushrooms, steaming nutmeggy spinach, thick slabs of crunchy toast glowing with butter and oh sorry I didn’t mean to stare, how long have I been standing here? Sorry.

We move on past the Paragon, and fish in our student-sized pockets to see if it will be one coffee each or one between us. We’d rummaged between the couch cushions to see if your housemate had been slumped on a favourable angle again, and come up trumps: $7.05 in change. That’s even enough for coffees at the Rathdowne St Food Store.

I poke the racks of crumbling books out the front of Alice’s Bookshop while you wander inside and end up having the usual lengthy exchange with Anthony. You tell each other (again) the story of that time I paid for my Jules Verne book with $40 of Monopoly money, and I smile to myself.

The coffee licks the remaining corners off our hangovers. Archie looms up at one point, beard first, arm over his head. “I’m tryna get fifteen dollars for petrol - ” We give him our remaining 35 cents and he pockets it without changing his expression. We’re the only ones who give him anything.

When we turn the corner into Richardson St, I frown at our car. Registration EHN 539. Honda Civic, red, no visible rust.

“Why are the windows black?” I ask. Our steps quicken. You pull open the unlocked door and the smell of burnt red carpet rolls out like…a red carpet.

“Is it on fire?” It’s not on fire. But there’s a large, damp, melted patch of carpet that stretches from just under the gearbox down to the pedals. I look at you.

“Did Ben borrow your car last night?” You nod. Ben is your fellow philosopher and housemate. Any communications between the two of you that don’t involve theoretical absolutes can be a bit unreliable. “Does he know that you have to stall it to make the engine turn off?”

“I did say,” you answer. I gaze around the car’s interior. There’s a piece of paper on the dashboard that wasn’t there before. I lean over and pick it up, unfold it. A short, handwritten message reads:

“We have put out your car. Any queries contact Carlton Fire Brigade.” I hand the note to you. You nod.

“Well, at least Ben paid for our coffees.”

“Actually, I think it’s poo.”

2011-08-13T14:44:00.005+11:00

I stare at my freshly bitten thumbnail.

“I did say you’d have to stop biting your nails before we had this baby,” my husband says.

I stare at my freshly bitten thumbnail. I would quote Fox Mulder right now, but beneath my cool exterior is one very distracting thought: It’s definitely poo.

But that’s Earth Motherly, surely. Ingesting my 6-week-old baby’s poo on the morning of my first mothers’ group is bound to make me some friends. Of course, they may be the kind of friends who eat placenta sandwiches and cry over episodes of Captain Planet, but I’ve been at home in 40+ degree heat, sans air conditioning with a new baby for the last month and a half, so frankly, have we met? I just want to buy some chips. What do you mean you don’t sell chips, what kind of dry-cleaners is this?

I leave the dry-cleaners and drag my body up the hill toward the Maternal Health and Something Nice About Children Centre. Everything is glaring hot and my stomach muscles feel like they’ve been twirled like chewing gum around someone’s finger (possibly Kylie Mole, but that’d be showing my age) and then splodged back into place. Seven of us stagger in with our seven little Bonds Wonder-Suits. I slam my pram confidently into the door frame, waking up my baby. I smile jovially at the other mums as his screams achieve a volume precisely calculated to wake their own sleeping infants, and realise that no amount of fingernail-poo ingestion is going to instantly rectify this particular event.

I have reached my first developmental milestone as a mum: I have pissed off more than five other mums at once. It’s listed in your horrible blue baby book, somewhere after “your baby isn’t putting on enough weight, you are a terrible mother” but before “your baby cannot use a cup or spoon, you are a terrible mother”. You’ll know it when you get to it.

But I’m staying for this meeting. I know why I’m here. I want to hear that someone else’s baby is worse than mine. I want to hear about more colicky babies, babies that sleep less in the day and less in the night, babies that scream for more hours, babies that chuck up more feeds, babies that refuse more and bite more and crap more.

Than mine.

We admire each other’s bundles of bunny-rug. Isn’t everybody’s baby lovely. But mainly we stare at our own babies. All they do is frown and yawn and crap themselves, but they’re like little lava lamps. We can’t look away.

I volunteer an ice-breaker. “I accidentally ate baby poo from under my fingernail this morning,” I say. My kid chooses this moment to make a dramatic violin noise from my lap. I gaze serenely down at him and demand: “Hungry? Sleepy? Tired? Pooey? Distressed about interest rates?” I get some tired smiles.

Another mother speaks up. “Yesterday, this one projectile pooed across the room into the slats of the electric fan.”

Another: “She only sleeps sitting up in her swing chair, but only if it’s in the kitchen. So I slept on a blanket on the kitchen tiles last night.”

A third: “He’ll only feed from the left side, so I lie upside down on the couch to feed him from the right side. Every hour.”

Then they all chime in:

“I fell asleep feeding her and woke up with bite marks all over my boobs.”

“My partner found me sleepwalking in the kitchen. I’d assembled the breast pump and had expressed 120ml.”

“I can’t remember how many bottles he has during the night. I can’t remember if I heat them up or not.”

“She vomited into my brother-in-law’s mouth when he held her up, and it was the best moment of my week.” Pause. “Possibly year.”

We stare at briefly at each other, away from our infants, and it’s almost like we’ve know each other all our lives. Then I feel suddenly warm and the other mothers gasp. I lift up my baby gently and more white milk vomit sprays through my hair, my clothes, onto the Maternal Health and Something Nice About Children Centre’s chair and all across the Maternal Health and Something Nice About Children Centre’s carpet. It’s pure milk, pure volume, and pure yoghurty stench. I’d rather eat all the poo under everyone’s fingernails.

Baby wipes appear from everywhere like magician’s doves. Unspeakable things are mopped up with fairly inadequate Aloe Infused! and Purely Sensitive! squares. The Maternal Health and Something Nice About Children nurse rushes to open the windows, diffusing the Something Not Nice About Children smell. We are all supposedly going out for coffee after this meeting, so I phone my husband at home and urgently ask him to bring me down a new top. Mine was white. It is now extra-white, but also extra-wet and extra-transparent.

“I’m covered in milk spew,” I whisper.

“That’s pretty normal, right?” he whispers back.

“Yes, but so is taking a shit and I don’t generally do that in the middle of a café either. Why are you whispering?”

Pause.

“I’ll be five minutes.”

He arrives, my knight in shining stretch cotton, gallant husband and saviour. Suddenly faced with six more new-mum pairs of eyes than usual, and six rhythmic hands patting six little romper-suited backs, he looks slightly panicked. He thrusts the plastic bag towards me and edges back toward the door, smiling and nodding.

The other mums murmur their approval:

“My husband would never know what to bring down for me to wear.”

“You’ve got a good one there, very quick wasn’t he?”

Oh yes, I agree, dabbing more vomit from my hair and collarbones. I peer into the plastic bag. I look away. My skirt is passable, doesn’t need changing. My hair could be just be sporting a new, somewhat chunky gel product. I peer into the bag again and smile brightly at the other mums.

I retreat to the bathroom, sniff the vomit-crusted horror I’m wearing once more, just to check, then stuff it into the plastic bag.

I hold out the clean top at arm’s length. My well-meaning husband has brought me down one of my summer pyjama tops.

I pull it on, and stride back to the milky circle of chairs.

Isn’t everybody’s baby lovely.

Coffee?

Luka (6 weeks) and I just before our first mothers' group.

Note the lack of vomit on me at this point.

Two Twittericks

2011-08-11T20:35:00.005+11:00

Admitted: I covet a mention,

A joke, loud applause or dissension,

Be it LOLZ at some wit,

Or critique of my shit,

I essentially need the @tention.

It's not that I'm twisted or bitter,

But I'm thinking of sticking to Twitter.

For aiming one's arse

At the bog of one's past

Reveals that Facebook is a shitter.

Technical arguments

2011-08-10T20:28:00.003+11:00

When I was still quite young, I only had access to adjectives. My writing was full of them, crammed with great, big, meandering, directionless, wavering, tedious, strangely repetitive great, big, meandering, directionless strings of adjectives. Every object was mercilessly tied to at least two of these creatures, and after a while they began to complain. Landscapes bore the brunt of this unshakeable, immature habit. I awoke one morning to find a sweeping, pastoral, meadow-sweet collection of rolling hills perched determinedly at the foot of my bed.

“I’ve had enough,” it said in gramineous tones. “No one will even take photos of me any more, let along wander my lush valleys. By the time I’ve finished introducing myself, what with all these adjectives you’ve tacked on, everyone’s either fallen asleep or wandered off to some diverging path in a yellow wood. It’s ridiculous, so I’m moving to Malaysia. You’ve never been there, so you can’t describe it and I’ll be free of you.”

Animals didn’t seem too keen on how they were written either. Dragonflies and hummingbirds fronted up with increasing regularity.

“We’re supposed to be graceful and flit from place to place with unerring precision, but how are we supposed to manage that with these huge chains of adjectives clipped to our tails?”

A sprightly, lace-winged, swooping, metallic-scaled dragonfly pushed himself forward. He was almost in tears. “I was just trying to swoop through the air yesterday when my description got tangled up with a fragrant, blossoming, antique, faded-apricot rose bush. Nearly tore myself a new pair of wings!” He muffled a sob and drew himself up with quiet, stern, masterful dignity. “If you want us to function as plot devices, you’re going to have to be a damn sight more careful about how you treat us.”

I admit, I was worried about this persistent use of adjectives and its effect on my writing. But as I grew older, similes came into my life, unnoticed at first like a rash on the backs of your knees, but building in intensity like a hammer thrower winding towards release. I’d never been so excited; my writing would flow from my pen like a carton of milk upset on a table.

But still, my subjects were unhappy. Resentment in those I wrote about seethed like custard left on high in the microwave.

“Do you know what it’s like?” the river hissed like a leaking tyre valve. “To be told what you’re like all the time? I’m like a winding snake, like a path through despair, like an everchanging, endless passage of time and I’m fed up with it! Haven’t you ever had relatives bail you up at Christmas and inform you’re nose is like Uncle Keith’s, your ankles are like cousin Sarah’s, your left eyebrow is like third cousin twice removed Lord Roger’s, and your teeth are just like Billy who married that girl from New Zealand’s?” I nodded slowly, deciding the specific relatives were not to be taken literally. “I want to be something, not just be like something. I am an original! Not just like an original! I expect something to be done about it.”

I sighed. What can you possibly say to something that is never the same the next time you step into it?

Still, I did not despair. History had told me that time was like an ever-changing river (despite its objections to the role) and would bring something new, some solution to launch my writing beyond these distractions.

Metaphors. Metaphors came to me and suddenly words were a paint palette, I could paint a world on the canvas of my foolscap and transform it at will.

The rolling hills were a blanket dropped in a heap on the bed. The dragonflies and hummingbirds were reflections on the surface of a river, fleeting and brilliant. And the river, the river was a tiger, snarling over rocks and weeds, opening wide its jaws to swallow all in a rush of foam.

Nothing complained. Well, almost nothing. A few things tried:

“I’m not a fire really...”

“My hair isn’t black wires...”

But I shrugged my shoulders and informed them firmly, “Oh, that wasn’t a metaphor for you, you don’t think I think you’re really comparable that, do you? I think you’re misreading me, hmm?”

Shuts them up every time. Once everything is something else, there’s no end to what you can do.

Reading 'Wasted': Yes. Fucking yes.

2011-07-13T17:19:00.000+11:00

Reading Wasted is like being belted over the head.

Marya Hornbacher's 1998 memoir of her anorexia and bulimia (written when she was just 23) has been much criticised for its triggering nature and unresolved, bleak ending. Which is fair enough, on one hand. It does have huge triggering potential. There are startling amounts of research and theory pulsing through Hornbacher's writing, along with descriptions of her personal experiences that are magnetic, raw and deranged. It's a seductive and mesmerising combination of factors - the academic and the mad, and she was obviously still unwell when she wrote it. Reading Wasted draws you in so close to Marya that it does make you feel pretty nuts, so if you're already a bit nuts, proceed with care.

But I'm not intending to enter the debate about whether Wasted 'should' ever have been published. It was published, it still is being published. People can choose what they read, choose to stop reading. People in recovery know what triggers they need to avoid. And not every book has to have a happy ending.

Moving on.

Wasted veers between vicious honesty, articulate introspection and self-indulgent ranting. The belted-over-the-head factor for me in this book comes from many things Hornbacher says that I haven't had the words to express, or that I haven't even thought of. Things you don't read in the Standard Government-Issue Pamphlets On Eating Disorders, and things that struck with with their truth (their truth for me, personally).

Sometimes it doesn't occur to me that the DSM-IV-TR might not be a comprehensive account of these conditions (although the very inclusion of EDNOS should be a tip-off that eating disorders are that easily defined, yeah?). The value of this book for me is pointing at a paragraph and just thinking "Yes. Fucking yes."

I've folded so many corners down in this book it's starting to fan out at the bottom. Rather than ramble on, I'm going to share a few corners. I don't think they're particularly triggery passages, but that's only going on my subjective appraisal.

"The bragging was the worst. I hear this in schools all over the country, in cafes and resaturants, in bars, on the internet, for Pete's sake, on buses, on sidewalks: Women yammering about how little they eat. Oh, I've starving, I haven't eaten all day, I think I'll have a great big piece of lettuce, I'm not hungry, I don't like to eat in the morning (in the afternoon, in the evening, on Tuesdays, when my nails aren't painted when my shin hurts, when it's raining, when it's sunny, on national holidays, after or before 2am). I heard it in the hospital, that terrible ironic whine from the chapped lips of women starving to death. But I'm not hun-greeeee. To hear women tell it, we're never hungry. We live on little Ms. Pac-Man power pellets. Food makes us queasy, food makes us itchy, food is too messy, all I really like to eat is celery. To hear women tell it, we're ethereal beings who eat with the greatest distaste scraping scraps of food between out teeth with our upper lips curled.

For your edification, it's bullshit.

Starving is the feminine thing to do these days, the way swooning was in Victorian times...My generation and the last one feign disinterest in food. We are 'too busy' to eat, 'too stressed' to eat. Not eating, in some way, signifies that you have a life so full, that your busy-ness is so important, that food would be an imposition on your precious time. We claim a loss of appetite, a most-sacred aphysicality, superwomen who have conquered the feminine realm of the material and finally gained access to the masculine realm of the mind."

Yes.

"This is the very boring part of eating disorders, the aftermath. When you eat and you hate that you eat. And yet of course you must eat. You don't really entertain the notion of going back. You, with some startling new level of clarity, realize that going back would be far worse than simply being as you are. This is obvious to anyone without an eating disorder. This is not always obvious to you. But at this stage, when it is effectively Over, is haunting in its own way...This is the pitiful stage where you do not qualify as an eating-disordered person. And you feel bad about this. You feel as if you really ought to count, you ought to still merit worry, still have the power to summon a flurry of nurses, their disdain ill hidden, your skeletal smirk.

But you are in the present tense. Your husband sips his coffee, saying, But dear, I don't really care if you've gained weight. And you, triumphant, logical as the Red Queen, shriek, You see? I have gained weight! I knew it! And he sighs. You ask again, Do I look fat? No. Plump? No. Round? Well you're a woman. What do you mean? I mean - I mean -

I picture husbands all over the world, hovering in doorways, caught in a terrible tangle of language, feet and hands bound by these slippery words glossy and meaningless as the pages of a magazine."

Yes.

"I should've known better, I should've called myself on all the lies I was telling myself - I'm eating enough, I'm doing all right, I'm healthy. I was happy. I had learned, or thought that I'd learned, that I was a valuable person. I understood that I needed to eat to live, and I wanted to live. I said to myself: It takes time, it's not that easy, you can't expect yourself to be perfect this soon. There are altogether too many 'empowering' things that professionals tell you that can be twisted around and turned against yourself. I had heard a few too many times that if I threw up, it was just a 'slip', if I stopped eating for a little while it didn't really mean I was relapsing. How long is a little while? It stretches out, one week, two weeks, three, and you're back where you started. Professionals give anorectics and bulimics way too much credit for having their brains in order: You have to be patient with yourself, they said, you have to be nurturing to yourself, be nice to yourself. And so, as I went through another day without food...I said to myself: I have to be patient, I'm being nurturing to myself by not expecting too much of myself, I will not push myself too hard today, so I guess we'll just have some coffee for lunch...
We all do this. I've never met an eating-disordered person who could not come up with an astonishing battalion of solid-sounding, intellectualized reasons why they can't eat."

Yes.

"Did my family set it off again? Did my father's neediness and my fear of it spark relapse? My mother's distance? An article I read? A woman I saw? Not likely. What happened is that, faced with a number of things in my life that I didn't like, I turned to my eating disorder because I had never, ever figured out how to fucking deal."

Yes.

"I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. Everything is done at all costs. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense, pretty much. People with eating disorders tend to be very diametrical thinkers - everything is the end of the world, everything rides on this one thing, and everyone tells you you're very dramatic, very intense, and they see it as an affectation, but it's actually just how you think. And it isn't that you ignore the potential repercussions of your actions. You don't think there are any."

Yes.

It was also very pleasing to hear my opinion on the therapist-worshipping 1980s YA novel The Best Little Girl in the World echoed: "It is in fact a rather romanticized account, written by a doctor intent upon demonstrating not the experience of having an eating disorder but rather his own genius in curing them."

Yes. Fucking yes.

"youre carrying it inside you" - Riddley Walker

2011-06-24T21:39:00.003+11:00

"The worl is ful of things waiting to happen. Thats the meat and boan of it right there. You myt think you can jus go here and there doing nothing. Happening nothing. You cant tho you bleeding cant. You put your self on any road and some thing wil show its self to you. Wanting to happen. Waiting to happen. You myt say, 'I dont want to know.' But 1ce its showt its self to you you wil know wont you. You cant not know no mor. There it is and working in you. You myt try to put a farness be twean you and it only you cant becaws youre carrying it inside you. The waiting to happen aint out there where it ben no mor its inside you."

I've just this minute finished reading Riddley Walker and it's astonishing (also, how did anyone read it before LOLspeak was invented?). It's perfect to read after reading Margo Lanagan, for some reason - she's like a mythological primer for Hoban's creation.

You don't read this book in the usual way (as you can probably tell from the quote above). You apprehend it, you hear it. It takes a degree of relaxation of your mind. It demands to be read for hours at a time, not pages. It's not a book you can read with your eye half on Twitter or your child or your lunch.

And it's completely worth the effort, the reservation of your hours, and the displacement of how you usually read.

Melbourne By Dusk

2011-06-23T11:44:00.004+11:00

Melbourne By Dusk is an excellent project that was started by David Witteveen and Angelica East as part of the Emerging Writer's Festival this year.

"Melbourne by Dusk mixes photography and flash fiction to explore the overlap between our city and our imagination.

(Flash fiction is just a fancy term for really, really short stories.)

It is part of the 2011 Emerging Writer’s Festival.

WHAT IS IT?
Our core idea was to take a photo of something real in Melbourne, and then write an urban fantasy story that riffs off the picture.

Here’s what you can submit:

A PHOTO for David to write a story about.

A STORY. These can be inspired by the “seed” photos we put up. Or they can be your own stories that Angelica can then take photos for.

Stories should be 20-200 words, and urban fantasy/weird/surreal. (Include the Seed Number, if any, so we can match them up.)

YOUR OWN PHOTO/STORY combination. (Again, 20-200 word stories, urban fantasy, etc.)

SOMETHING ELSE that meets the theme - music, poetry, video, quotes, artwork…"

This was my effort - a flash poem (if that's a thing) about a photo of Flinders Street Station.

Go forth and submit your own!

The importance of tea (or; why I love McCall Smith's online novels)

2011-06-09T13:13:00.004+11:00

“He had filled his days doing ordinary, unexceptional things and thought nothing of them. But they were far from nothing: even the act of making his morning cup of tea as he looked, bleary-eyed over the rooftops of Pimlico amounted to a small miracle: that there should, in this cold void of space, be a small blue planet on which he, a rather complex collection of cells, should be delighting in the dried black leaves of a plant that grew half a world away; that surely was astonishing and worthy of celebration and awe.”

- from A Conspiracy of Friends: A Corduroy Mansions Novel by Alexander McCall Smith

"You speak the truth...You think it is easy?" Some thoughts on 'A Monster Calls' by Patrick Ness

2011-06-08T06:47:00.012+11:00

"The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do. But it isn’t the monster Conor's been expecting. He's been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he's had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming... The monster in his back garden, though, this monster is something different. Something ancient, something wild. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor. It wants the truth."

Like many people will, I read Patrick Ness' new book A Monster Calls in an afternoon and cried solidly for a few hours afterwards. It was sometimes so emotionally difficult to read, at several points I didn't know if I could finish it.

Initially, I couldn't quite find the words to say why this book hit me so hard, and all I could do was applaud its clarity of expression, honesty of emotion, delicacy of metaphor and the beautifully placed illustrations that gave me goosebumps especially the surprise of each full-page spread.

Aren't they stunning?

I think my reaction to this book is partly to do with an important idea to me: of children (and anyone, really) being allowed to be angry, and for that anger to be valid and true. An okay thing to feel. It's why I've always loved Where The Wild Things Are as well.

In A Monster Calls, Conor deals with his anger by trying to be invisible and capable. He hides his anger from everyone (including himself) until it bursts out of him as a (literally) destructive force. When he lets his monster out and lets himself be visible, then he has to face it and find ways to deal with it, and to deal with the truth of his anger.

There are truths we hide, from each other and from ourselves, because they feel like they hurt everyone too much. They're not fair.

"Many things that are true feel like a cheat. Kingdoms get the princes they deserve, farmers' daughters die for no reason, and sometimes witches merit saving."

Truths make you angry as hell, they make you beat up the bathroom. As Conor's mum says, everyone should be allowed to be "as angry as you need to be...And if you need to break things, then by God, you break them good and hard." But once you've broken things, you own the destruction. And you have to acknowledge what you've let out, and believe it.

"Belief is half of all healing."

Belief hurts, truth hurts, healing hurts. Which is all very unfair, but as the monster simply puts it: "humans are complicated beasts." Our minds are much happier believing "comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both."

Truth sucks. It just happens, unfortunately, to be necessary.

These thoughts are confused in my head, but I thought I'd write them down anyway, before I lose them or doubt them any further. You know, the "maybe I've got this all completely wrong and I'm the only one who thinks this and anyway this is far too dramatic to be posting" feeling you get when you write blog entries sometimes? That.

One thing I'm sure of is that I want to thank Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd for the gift of their story, and Jim Kay for his amazing illustrations.

"Stories are important, the monster said. They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth."

Baa Baa Black Sheep

2011-06-05T08:13:00.002+11:00

Luka is nearly 2 and a half now. When did that happen? I must have been asleep. Oh wait, no I wasn't most of the time.

His book-reading methods are *somewhat* different from the first time I posted a photo, and the last time I posted a video, so I thought it was time for an update:

Discovering which songs Luka knows from daycare has been really cute. Yesterday's discovery was Baa Baa Black Sheep, via a new book of nursery rhymes.

I can't wait til he's old enough to make up stories, so I can steal all his ideas.

Reading Matters 2011

2011-06-02T15:33:00.002+11:00

There've been lots of wrap posts about the Reading Matters conference (a biennial YA literature conference run by the Centre for Youth Literature at the State Library of Victoria) written over the last few days, and I felt like I should do one too.

Mine's a bit different, though. Throughout the conference, lots of people were tweeting about the conference under the hastag #RM11. So I've collected a bunch of those tweets, and chopped them about to make a poem.

Tweets used are from @msmisrule, @twitofalili, @SLVLearn, @annaryanpunch (yeah that's me), @bookboy, @Zoe_Walton, @mike_sh, @timpegler.

__________________________________________

#RM11

I love the smell of librarians in the morning.

rival gangs of verbose bookish miscreants roaming

Police should be alert for the inner city landscape

not so much black tie as black cardi.

How to tell if you are a writer:

Do you have a set of bizarre interests?

Are you bisexual? Can I have some of your blood?

Are you interested in planking?

Superheroes wrote their own comic books,

seeing what we take for granted

anew like childhood views of power stations

beautiful by night, straightforward and utterly baffling.

Everything relates to Buffy, this is clear.

Girls write themselves, damsels need

discussion that involves the phrase "sausage-fest"

not princess fairy kitten and the glitter horse stickers.

Every family has their own terminology

how they respond is what’s important.

I've heard the term 'cultural melting-pot' a lot

it’s natural to want to see outside that.

Readers will never come last in the race,

never quite know the extraordinary journey.

We owe everything to a roomful of books:

strong, flawed and not having to be rescued.

Mascara Literary Review

2011-06-02T06:23:00.002+11:00

I'm very pleased to have a couple of poems and a review published in the new issue of Mascara Literary Review. It's my first try at reviewing a poetry collection, so I spent far too much time on it. Hopefully my careful reading and re-reading has done it and the poet justice!

I rather like having things published in online journals (especially online journals who pay you in cold hard cash. Well, glowing electronic cash, actually, but you get the point).

Joining me in issue 8 are poets Anthony Lawrence, Michele Leggott, Andy Kissane, Marlene Marburg, Ashley Capes, Ali Jane Smith, Nicholas YB Wong, Mal McKimmie, Margaret Bradstock, rob walker, Jennifer Compton, Judith Beveridge, Sue Lockwood, Anis Shivani, Brook Emery, Philip Hammial, Aidan Coleman, Sam Byfield, Tricia Dearborn, Peter Lach-Newinsky, Desh Balasubramaniam, Michael Sharkey, Alan Pejković, Jo Langdon and Sridala Swami.

Submissions to Mascara's special poetry issue are now open until September - prose poets, sharpen your pens!

Re-reading Xaipe by e.e. cummings

2011-05-25T11:11:00.003+11:00

I originally posted this over at Goodreads, but thought I'd post my waffling on here too, to make up for the sudden dearth of blogging!

e.e. cummings has been my favourite poet since high school. I carry a 'selected poems' around in my handbag (for emergencies), but it's always interesting to revisit a whole book, rather than just what someone else thought was a 'best of'. You get standout poems that don't make it into other collections, alongside lesser ones. Xaipe (pronounced "Khai-er-ree" to rhyme with 'fiery') means 'rejoice' in Greek, and the collection is often movingly joyous.

Cummings sometimes gets accused of being sentimental, deliberately impossible to read, and even casually racist. I can see how he could be read thus.

But I think his playfulness rescues him from sentimentality (I adore his poems about children):

if a cheerfulest Elephantangelchild should sit

(holding a red candle over his head
by a finger of trunk,and singing out of a red

book)on a proud round cloud in a white high night

where his heartlike ears have flown adorable him
self tail and all(and his tail's red christmas bow)
--and if,when we meet again,little he(having flown
even higher)is sunning his penguinsoul in the glow

of a joy which wasn't and isn't and won't be words

while possibly not(at a guess)quite half way down
to the earth are leapandswooping tinily birds
whose magical gaiety makes your beautiful name--

i feel that(false and true are merely to know)
Love only has ever been,is,and will ever be,So

His impossibility - shredded/recombined words and absurd punctuation litters his poems - suits the way I read poetry. I just read it headlong, straight through the first time, not pausing over words, punctuation or to try think or match up the parentheses. And interestingly when I go back for a second look, the image I've got the first time around usually still stands up. Try it yourself:

the little horse is newlY

Born)he knows nothing,and feels
everything;all around whom is

perfectly a strange
ness(Of sun
light and of fragrance and of

Singing)is ev
erywhere(a welcom
ing dream:is amazing)
a worlD.and in

this world lies:smoothbeautifuL
ly folded;a(brea
thing a gro

Wing)silence,who;
is:somE

oNe.

Cummings himself responded to the racist controversy (mainly around his line "a kike is the most dangerous") in typically cryptic fashion:

'Cummings' "Good American point," as he told Allen Tate, was "that the kike isn't(helas) a Jew..." (but is an invention of Gentile society).' (quote from the inner flyleaf of Xaipe).

I loved revisiting Xaipe. It's flawed and joyous and sometimes extremely funny:

o to be in finland
now that russia's here)

swing low
sweet ca

rr
yon

(pass the freedoms pappy or
uncle shylock not interested

Additionally, when I re-read it, a copy of poem by Gwendolyn Brooks that I had been trying to remember for ages (When You Have Forgotten Sunday: The Love Story) fell out - I'd been using it as a bookmark! Brilliant.

Poems by request

2011-05-18T18:44:00.001+11:00

Well, that was an unexpected delight. Whee!

In early February, I wrote a poem on a whim, for Penni Russon and Kirsty Murray (because I idolize them a bit), and instead of squireling it away for a dusty publication, I posted it on my blog. I got some nice responses, and I tweeted something along the lines of "I should do this every day. What should I write about tomorrow, Twitter?" @facelikethunder replied that I should write something in dactylic hexameter, so the next morning I did, and posted it on my blog. More nice responses. That evening, I asked Twitter what I should write about the next day - and people responded with suggestions.

And so it went on - to 100 poems. It's not quite 100 days, all up, because there were a few days where I wrote two poems (crazy kid). It's tripled the traffic to my blog (which usually lies pretty fallow as I am slack). The most popular poem, hits-wise? This one.

For a very non-prolific person (I usually amass a grand total of about five poems a year), writing 100 poems in a couple of months has been liberating and heartening. Turns out if you just sit down and write stuff, then you've written stuff. Who knew?

Writing a poem every day (no weekends off!) for 100 pieces means I've written in practically every possible physical and emotional state I can think of. I've written poetry while I was happy, angry, tired, manic, ashamed, proud, crying, laughing, drunk, hungover, sick, stressed, hungry, spaced-out, distracted, sweaty, freezing, you name it. A couple of times I was prevented from posting my poem on the actual day - technology, parties, emotional disasters can get in the way of these things, but I'm proud that I never actually missed a day. I always wrote the poem, and it got to the blog at least within a day of being due.

I wrote poetry when I thought I couldn't face it, I wrote poetry when I thought I couldn't face anything. Sometimes the last thing I wanted to do was write a fucking poem. Sometimes it gave me a reason to live through the night, or get up in the morning. Sometimes it was so much fun.

Writing a poem every day - and in a way I couldn't cheat ahead with, as suggestions for the next day's poem were always taken the night before - has forced me to loosen up the way I write. Writing a poem in the morning, editing it and posting it that evening is a far cry from the strangulated way I usually write a poem over months. I've written poems entirely composed of quotations, I've written poems entirely composed of in-jokes. I've tried forms I never would have tried on my own - anti-poetry, sestinas (OMG sestinas are hard), visual poetry, concrete poetry, villanelles, terza rimas, etc. It's reminded me that I love formal restrictions, and how they can sometimes create better work than writing unfettered by rhyme schemes and meter.

It's overflowed into my non-blog writing, too. I've calculated that in the last three months I've written 20,000 non-blog words in the form of other poetry, short stories and essays. That's pretty much unheard of for me. I hope to keep the momentum going, because when I stop writing, I tend to get paralysed. Thomas Mann said "A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." Sounds about right.

I love making things for people. Poems by request let me make something every night, and hand it over like a present. I'm ending the daily poem posting at 100 (because I'm a little weary, and it seemed a nice round number to stop at), but it's not really an end as such. I still intend to post poems, and take special requests. Just not every day!

What now? More of the same, really. Submissions, writing, reviewing deadlines, mothering, partnering, reading - and you know I have a day job, right? For the time being, anyway. I'd quite like to resurrect my reading your favourites thing too, though it takes a lot longer to get to blogging about that each time. I hate leaving things unfinished!

Overall, I want to say thankyou. The response from all of you has been quite overwhelming. Night after night, you kept coming up with suggestions for the next day's verses - I've had suggestions from lifelong friends, old friends I've just met, complete strangers, family, authors I admire, toddlers and children. Thankyou to everyone who's commented, tweeted, and spoken to me about how they've enjoyed this spontaneous project, and special thanks to everyone who's made a suggestion. Namely *drum roll* these 91 peeps (I hope I didn't miss anyone!):

AG
Aimee
Allysha
@_boobook_
@_camer0n
@1000yearsago
@1000yearsago
@alphabetsoupmag
@anitranot
@anthonyeaton
@anti_kate
@awurster
Charlotte
Claudia
@cochineal
Daniel
@dogpossum
@eglantinescake
Erin
@ernmalleyscat
@facelikethunder
Fred
G____
Gabe
@greenspace01
@GretasTARDIS
H.
Hamish
@hleighthree
@iFigaro2u
Janet Punch
@jellyjellyfish
@johnnypurple
@juliansanelli
Justine
Keira
@kenrob2037
@kirsty_I
@kirstymurray
@kissability
@kumuda
@lucyrogue
Luka
@margolanagan
@marklawrence
@matchtrick
@mindlessmunkey
@MJPhotographer
@mlledelicieuse
@msmaddiep
@msmisrule
Mum
@notcharming
Ollie
P.
@pcblues
Peter Punch
@pinknantucket
@PipHaz
@Quadelle
@realnixwilliams
Riley
@robcorr
@ryanpaine
@sarahhazelton
@SeanMElliott
@simmonehowell
@skippy_2
@slimejam
@snazzydee
@sorrel_smith
@sorrel_smith’s 3yo (and her 1.5yo sister)
@spikelynch
@spikelynch's three girls
@sulphura
@sushipyjamas
@sushipyjamas
@suz_la
@suznannah
Tammy
TG
The Boy
@TheEndeavour
@tiggyjohnson
@timsterne
Toby
@twitofalili
@tysonarmstrong
Una
@VayaPashos
@xutraa

Thanks guys. What a trip. I'm so grateful.

xxx ARP