after Molly Bloom
I walk about town with a book in my hand but I’m not literary at all. The book is a how-to-do-it, build-your-own laundry, because most flats don’t have one anymore. I don’t have time for towers or friends. The budget has just been announced and I’m going to stuff some cash in my wallet, a little bit per year, spread out among the bills. I could order an Uber but public transport is free until May so I’ll hop on a tram and continue to see where I might fall. I’m like winter drifting down on the city, maybe from one of the elms. MAYouf gugen-Hae whifter shoap shaf. That’s what my grandson types on the computer. At two, he’s the sort who’ll one day wander the city with a novel in his hand, lilliput clouds breaking up around the sky’s edges, bats cantilevering across the evening which falls and falls into the dark. I can’t see further ahead than this glimmer of light that peeks through the artificial pears in a neighbour’s garden, in patches – but steady, like electricity captured by smoke, or glass: Edison, a person I’ll teach my grandson about one day when he’s bored by cartoons, or crying, afraid of night’s invented sleeplessness.
Jennifer Harrison has written eight books of poetry, most recently Anywhy (Black Pepper 2018). She is Chair of the World Psychiatry Association’s Section for Art and Psychiatry and received the 2012 Christopher Brennan Award for sustained contribution to Australian poetry. Recent work has appeared in Australian Book Review 2022, Best of Australian Poems 2022, Australian Poetry Journal 2023, Rabbit 2022, The Hyacinth Review 2023 (France), Unusual Work 2023 and The Fourth River 2023 (USA).
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