Reading the stars while the place goes to seed

08 March 2007

Three Portraits Missing you is an elephant it's dark grey and wrinkled it fills my bedroom blocks the door, the windows the light from the hall and the moon outside it stills my bedroom I can't move it won't budge I can't breathe some nights I wake with its behind in my face the stench is unbearable all I can do is lie trembling with fear that it will flatten me Grace Yee Cubby your thoughts crawl in to a packing case nailed up a tree sap bleeding into you the smell of pine needles spread across splinters your shirt snagged on a nail pulling threads from afternoons from secret places you watch yourself in a mirror flashing signals on a horizon shrunken to a clothesline rain blowing in weeks evaporating nothing happens in between the years broken up still in a box clinging to the sea's edge the password hidden within you never coming down Paula Green Don't Don't let me sit mired in magazines, reading the stars while the place goes to seed. Don't let me spend days strolling the malls, devote myself to an over-cosseted dog, neglect my friends. Stop me if I start to say, like she does, that the young have no manners, the journalists no grammar, that I'm turning into my mother. Emma Rooksby

ARTS AND CULTURE

Reading the stars while the place goes to seed

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