Miro Bilbrough is one of the poets featured in Te Purere/The Exodus: The Anthology of Expatriate New Zealand Poets, edited by Vaughan Rapatahana and John Gallas, Cold Hub Press, 2025, which will have it’s Sydney launch on Saturday, 6 Dec from 3pm – 5pm at the Stanley Street Gallery, 1/52-54 Stanley St, Darlinghurst NSW 2010. This is a Poetry Sydney event. Tickets are $15 and are available from https://events.humanitix. com/sydney-launch-te-purere-the-exodus
Imaginary Cinema
Lonely as a ghost scouring time, I visit our western hunting grounds where ramshackle railway mansions pose as rooming houses peopled by green grocers’ apostrophes and rubber plants.
Your 19th century visage buckles and swims under mind-glass. Two asterisks, your eyes, footnote night and day, blasting mine clean of thought. Who’s that strange pearly creature? you ask, damp hair parted like a Rabbinical scholar studying the textual sea floor. The light is Indian summer. Where you stop and I begin it’s no longer possible to navigate. It hurts to look at knees, forearms, the unexceptional, the utilitarian, you. The cuckoo rings in the city’s fever dream.
I shot it all, did I say? Archiving, a friend calls it. Another, the turning book. Busy with your own recordings, you mixed me eleven mix tapes. I still play them but not as much.
**
Forest Lawn
In Narellan food court a woman with unquiet face ships restlessly between official documents and a Collins English Dictionary while I subdivide a samosa into floury chunks of turmeric potato. On Elyard I join the A9, driving into the green glow of a sign that reads Forest Lawn.
And I’m back with Forrest: post-mod Christopher Robin, ash-blonded, brown-T-barred, pegged-panted, batik-chested, born under the sign of double academics, student of the gamelan, 1984.
Calico tacked at the window, lambent morning light, pale croissants with jewel-jam cooling on bread & butter plates. Forrest at breakfast, a disapproving dauphin in an elegantly washed-up Kelburn court. Nonchalant, formal, soft on the eye as a Pointillist painting: perhaps that’s why I stay.
But first, before I have sex with Forrest, I ring my boyfriend from the old black dial-up wall phone in the empty share hall. The receiver, heavy to hold. It’s the middle of the night. I need to tell him I’m not coming home tonight. I need to tell him don’t worry. I will be home in the morning. That’s what I actually say.
When I get there, running down the down-curve of the devil’s elbow in our verdant shadow-sculled town, he will already be moving out.
Forest Lawn Crematorium and Cemetery. The sign updates itself as I hurtle Sydney-wards in my metal memory box. When my mother encounters Forrest, a languid occasional maid mowing the Axminster in shoes of childhood in the home of Tinakori art-world matriarch, she says but he’s so clipped. A lawn. Not a forest at all.
Miro Bilbrough’s counterculture memoir In the Time of the Manaroans was shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction 2021 and hailed as ‘the best book of non-fiction published in New Zealand in 2020’. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Heat, Written Off, Cordite, Contemporary Feminist Australian Poetry 2016, Australian Poetry Anthology, The Disappearing, Otoliths, Te Pūrere/The Exodus, A Game of Two Halves, Reading Room and Sydney Review of Books; and in her debut chapbook Small-time Spectre. Films she has written and directed include Floodhouse, Being Venice, Bartleby and Urn. She has a Doctorate of Creative Arts from Western Sydney University, and she lives in Sydney where she works as a lecturer and script editor. https://www.mirobilbrough.com/
Rochford Street Review 