By: Anicca Maleedy-Main
Dusk
A mind like trouser dust
and bones that catch the light
through gaps in vision,
flow of days.
Chinks in ruffled shell,
That’s fracked by foxes,
flung at brick.
Skin blown soft
through branches
of conifer and oak.
She eats with her hand on an old friend’s ghost.
No smell exists
between her legs, no Mariners,
no mussels, kelp
drifts free like beggars
sleep in byways
safely, to exist.
This all made sense
when last those patterns,
jigsawed into thought.
She sleeps with her hand on the head of a horse.
Her mattress weight has grown to
twice its weight in thirteen years,
sunk with shellfish
sweaty beats.
Crusts of time trapped in the ticking,
ticking slow now forming burls.
She leaves with her hand on the world between words.
Driving through Rockbank in March
Curling smoke lopes
hybrid up in tongues,
road languid in the heat.
Beneath the wire,
the viscera seek space
and fleck with meat
the dust so deep it swallows hope
before the sheep.
Sky bends its back to land,
spine curled to stand
upon the line of dirt and plans
float gently from the fence
like rotting twine,
or garbage bags or time.
Horse
Muscles coil, divide me into fear and joy
I strain the spaces made by fate
his fur, my hope, his mane
expand towards horizons, over crests,
the muddy depths of dams filled in the night.
Potential worth far more
than what’s now underneath.
We could be more
tomorrow,
later than and then,
in half an hour or when
I’m far outside this skin.
These lines of definition bind me in:
The curl of nostril breathing out
The stifle’s curve
The arc of tail through air,
that hair that sews me in.
Anicca Maleedy-Main is an Australian writer and artist, whose work often contains themes of childhood, ageing, gender, connections with animals and place. She has as MFA in Creative Writing and has had work published in Islet, Catapult Magazine, The Sleepers Almanac, Marathon Review, and Not Very Quiet Journal, among others. She lives in deep suburbia north of Melbourne with her husband, kids and dog.