Bronze Jesus

This piece seemed kind of fitting to plonk up here as Christmas is only just gone and my thoughts recently have been rich with childhood memories of summers on Rottnest Island; of moments where life was big and the possibilities infinite, a time where in a small skin I felt big, a time when my Dad ruled the world and could tell me anything, where my parents were perfect, stories had happy endings and flawed boys were flawless ...

Bronze Jesus

You stand like Jesus. You glow like I imagine he might.

My skin is polka dotted. Though I’m hoping you won’t notice. My small limbs are painted with red mecurochrome antiseptic and I’m starting to scab, I’m wishing I wasn’t, wishing I was better at riding bikes. Standing before your deep bronze skin you don’t notice mine even though I’m glowing too.

You’re chatting to Dad about cray pots and boating weather and I wish I were big enough to come too, strong enough to yank up those pots. But I feel sorry for the crays and I’m too small to be allowed to stand that close to the edge of the boat anyway.

I’m still in the shade of the verandah and I want to tell you things but instead I stand behind Dad looking at your calf muscles. My terry-towelling jump-suit has left the red splotches very visible. My bony shoulders protrude, decorated with ribbon-tied straps. My lanky body (which is not as brown as yours), my flat chest and my oversized feet, that are bare on the concrete, make me want to hide even more.

But I still want to climb over the balcony rail. I want to stand beside you in the sun and tell you how many fish I caught the other day. Though I put them back—and I’d seem stupid saying that because you pull cray nets and that kind of thing.

If I were wearing my Karen Carpenter Jeans you might think I were more grown up. You wouldn’t see my bony knees. My skivvy would cover the blotches on my shoulders, but it’s too hot for winter clothes.

I push aside my home cut fringe—too heavy for my face and try to think of other things: the Bubble O Bill I’ll buy later from the shops with the five cent coins I saved. I’m thinking hard so I don’t keep staring at you and right now you matter a lot. But what I don’t know now is that one day you’ll grow to be leathery, that you’ll marry your pregnant girlfriend. That there’ll be a Sunday where you’ve had too many. A Sunday where you mess up the barbie, get third degree burns and then drink away the pain. Right now I’m looking at your bronze skin. Your hair that makes you look kind of like Jesus. I’m hoping you’ll notice me. But you’re still making plans that I’m not involved in.


(Published in Dot Dot Dash 2010)

This is How

The good folk at Black Rider Press published this little piece. Editor, Jeremy Balius is one wondeful literary man.

You can view the text at Black Rider Press' The Diamond and the Thief

YourMic Home

Trolley love (an ode to the Coles upgrade)

I press my dollar coin into the mouth of the new thing with streamlined metal vertebrae, shunning the larger framed carcasses, bulky rachides, beside     The smooth action of her wheels, fluid      The shiny linoleum floor, a bed of air     The sound of crying children, faded    The fluorescent lights, moody      And Joan’s voice calling Paula to checkout number one, a seductive melody

Diedre and Scooter (and fending off guilt)

This week has been tinged with red wine. Red wine and tea, in the in between moments. And my minds feel much like a sponge that’s mopped up too much of the wrong things. And along with excess there have been those slices of life: a dominatrix, two wounded birds, thoughts on mourning, reflections on shopping trolleys. There were stories there, are stories there, but somehow pre-Christmas excess and pre-birthday celebrations saturated all of the words and they turned to mush.

So I’ve sat this week with the guilt of not processing these things. Cursed my brain for firing off sparks without any flame. Life seemed too big to put into words. So instead, to keep my promise-to-self to post regularly, here is a more fictional slice of life. Something to fend off guilt until the dominatrixes, birds and trolleys with wheels that work, until mourning and parallels to knitting all speak a little more clearly.

Until then meet:
Diedre and Scooter (a snippet) ...

Diedre lay on the floor of the laundromat.

Scooter sat close to the dryer watching it turn round rhymically. His face looked goofy.  Dumb. And he watched fascinated by the rotation of his old underpants and worn cotton Tee’s. His head playing out a circular kind of nod as his eyes followed each rotation.

Diedre stared up at the ceiling, at the lifting paint. She couldn’t move in this heat and the floor felt cool. 

Scooter stood, began jumping up, reaching above his head to grab at the peeling paint. Diedre watched his jeans fall lower each time his feet hit the ground.

She always thought he had a dinky arse.  Nonexistent.  Dinky—it was the perfect word. She though of the old bung bicycle in the shed with busted springs that pressed up against the cracked lining of the seat.  That was Scooter’s arse.  Naked he looked a bit like a sick horse, all iliac crest and paper-thin lilly-white skin coating the bone. And Diedre though of her own fleshy bits, rounded, offering more than Scooter ever could.

(image: Anthony Giocolea)

Sarah

Sarah’s hair has grown. The part that was shaved above her left ear is now two inches long. The rest of her hair is shoulder length. Blonde. She lays back. I work on sculpting her eyebrows.

“Are you back teaching?” I ask.

“Twice, yes twice. Six weeks.”

“Mmhmm. You’re still doing shifts at the milk bar?”

“When you last saw me it was like, 'hi I’ll just be a moment and whaaa and then …’ It’s a bit confusing to explain. You know. Life is like ... Nine to five. Yes the milk bar it’s … And you know.”

While she doesn’t have the words to tell me, I know. The tumour she once mentioned casually, spoke of in the past tense, is back. Sarah is a client. Someone who comes to see me once a month. One of many who come in the name of vanity yet unintentionally divulge much more, small slices of life, things that have happened in the day or week. Moments.

When Sarah lay down on her first visit and I hovered above her head, her hair fell back and parted to reveal the old thick scar. “The hair doesn’t grow back there properly,” she explained. I nodded and she told me of the tumour, that now with things being better, with more stability, she and her husband were going to buy an apartment. She was teaching and making extra cash with a job at the local milk bar, extra money for the apartment.

In recent visits her hair has been shorn back in places, patchy. There are scars. She makes attempts to explain things and ...

Silence creeps in. There are gaps between sentences where she’s not sure of where she meant to go, where I want to finish them but I’m not sure of how. And I wonder if she knows. I wonder if she’s aware. And I close the door behind her as she leaves her appointment. Tell her I’ll see her next time. And I wonder if I will.

(Image: Tierney Gearon)

Something to do with lettuce

He hands me the lettuce over the low fence that separates our yards. His is weed free, full of herbs, fruit trees, fertiliser and rocket. Mine holds a small up ground pool, erected each summer to appease my need to be close to water. My yard is a mass of concrete, quaint second hand yard furniture and succulent plants that hold their own against my well-meaning hands, fingers I wish to be green but, at best, are a pallid shade of lime.

He moves to sever another lettuce from the ground and I tell him, "it's ok. I probably won't be cooking tonight, I'll eat out". That I'll let him know when I need another. He fills a jar of fresh oregano and hands me over a potted plant. I smile.

After explanations of how to care for the plant that cowers in my arms (It senses my inability and I sense the inevitability, though I wish that were not the case). I lay out my bounty on the kitchen bench.

John, who bears an Italian name too long to pronounce, who insists on being called John, passes me these lettuces frequently. And with optimism I go to wash them, but hesitate. I take many small animals, slugs and things, back out to my own garden to destroy my own plants because I can't bear to flush them down the sink with the remnants of soil.

Sometimes I pick off the outer leaves hopeful that the creatures lurk only on the edge of the vegetable. Leaves and bugs are laid out on my own soil. ‘Composting.’ I say, though I know nothing of what this means.

Those lettuces that don’t have company, free of six legged creatures, are stored.

And the lettuces gather in my refrigerator and wilt. They beckon to be prepared into a salad, some form of healthy meal, and I open and close the refrigerator door and the light within illuminates my green guilt until they resemble lifeless forms. As I throw one out another replaces it. 'He has a bounty of them in the yard, it makes him happy for me to take them,’ I justify because I cannot bear to tell my neighbor, the old man who lives in the same house he grew up in as a child, a man who still sleeps in the same room he did as a boy, that, while I love his stories, I really don't care much for lettuce.

A guest post on 'Literary Minded'

I'm cheating a bit today, but in doing so I'm bringing your attention to a wonderful space full of all things literary.

Miss Angela Meyer kindly invited me to guest blog in her neck of the woods, a little suburb called 'Literary Minded'. This made for an excuse to pick up an old favorite, have a re-read and dribble all over it again. Alice Sebold's writing is so sparse yet so rich and this is primarily what I had a good waffle about in my guest post.

Here is a snippet with a link to read on some more over in Ange's space if you wish ...

"Guest post: Allison Browning on Alice Sebold’s Lucky

It was in an impassioned conversation with Miss Angela Meyer on the floor of a particular writers’ festival venue, relishing the taste of ginger beer, that I expressed my love for the sparsity of Chloe Hooper’s writing in The Tall Man. Angela and I continued to chat about those writers who have an understated way of inciting emotion and I remembered being affected by the withheld tone in Alice Sebold’s Lucky, in much the same way that I had been when reading The Tall Man.

With Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones soon to be released as a feature film it seemed a fine excuse to shine my desk lamp on the lesser known Lucky and the prose that just … got me.

I first fell in love with Lucky years back when stranded between European airports. The dignity in the writing left me red-faced and puffy-eyed, I must have looked like some forlorn woman—the kind who’s left a lover behind in some other city.  Sebold’s dignified yet blatant and honest style of writing had me looking most undignified.

There is a difference between emotive and emotional writing. Sebold wins with the former. She delivers some brutal and confronting memories relaying the story of her own teenage rape and the aftermath, without a shred of self-indulgence. She has an ability to ... "

To read more click here