Poemsby Julie Maclean (UK/ Australia)

Published in Issue 32.

Laura's Place

A blitz buggy

rusts in the front yard

            one eye open

This iron-wrinkled home

built by hand-fed hungry 

            diggers     

Heft of gum

            in the meat room

criss-crossed

            in chop of heifer and lamb

Animal skin was laid

            across thick beam

Old eucalypt bleached

            yellow with scrubbing 

Then the rains came

            Bullock dray treachery

 Women who stayed

behind with wet hands, blood

            on white cotton

           while men sniffing gold

                        stayed away

Loggerhead

Slicing through a safe passage 

out of Hook Island

our white sloop with the sharp sprit

races for home 

when a spaceship is sighted

from the helm bobbing 

on the anxious surface

She’s missed James Cook

by a hundred years, head tucked in 

to avoid collateral damage

We power on with the jib yawning

while a hundred metres back

the anvil head comes out of its shell 

with eyes of an old soul, 

raising an ancient eyebrow

Hedgehog

In top gear
behind the windscreen
road-kill is a snapshot,
collage in low relief

but an encounter with
the freshly killed
keeps death close

A snail already
in the moist and warm,
flies on the scout

Inside out, the blood is too red,
Gizzards serpentine and so long.
All I recognise is a redundant claw
a spine horse brush

Unseen, the radar tongue
burrows into cobbled stone
for the last forced kiss

Will

If Copenhagen has a heart
it's with the dead
in Kierkegaard's graveyard.

Plots of love are epitaphs
from heaven.  Stone trees with oak
leaves mirroring the canopy.

Mia the wife, a simple rock,
lichen on her south face.
That's what I want.