Amanda Joy

How slow an approach when viewed from a distance. How more likely the encounter if the ground is clear A voice saying always “go ahead” calls it freedom Above the 27th parallel is the heat I know as home, in my bones always untouched by city’s cool centrifuge that refracts a kind of light which bursts and vanishes on the spot Heading North, I escape the fray Green hem of the outskirts, roadside façade of forest, hiding a casement of burnt earth, silent as myself Outside, a poet ghosts a window Writing back into life his night parrots. I drive lines from water to water, guzzle roadhouse coffee Warming up, there is a conflict of appetite, a suburban tree, black with cockatoos shucking almonds A dolphin trapped in a rock pool Cane toads storming the Kimberley in wet, find it planted with sugar An olive python curled under a van belly beaded with feral kittens After three days of seated travel I lunge from the car, sprint the length of jetty, deaf to the man screaming warning. Only in midair do I look down to the sea, the time it takes to panic Two yellow-and-black krait, vivid bandwidth of danger, turning on the turquoise surface, and all I can do, is fall

Madness “hath builded her house in the high places of the city.” — Guy Debord Men are hanging themselves unaccompanied by sound in the dark hours before the bottle shop opens Rope snaking a branch of pepper tree at the lodging house Empty tenement. Dark windows bruised by sky lighting rookeries of collapse and fire crumbling out until the whole street is vacant and mud caked In ragged brown of summer verticordia I peed near a midden of fleshy arils heaped at an anthill entrance watched them drag seed deep instilling acacia in dirt Withering of certainty spits hisses The swamps filling with drillholes guarded by adders Air churned with a fierce screaming warra! Warra. Dumbbell of yield and sequence Through years of discipline I learned containment or vice versa as natural as speechlike Upward spiral of spell A nested equivalence this woundedness Pinned fury petering in honeyeater as a falcon plucks its way to the warm core, feathers wafting down to soft eremophila Sentences in the Bible begin with And God As if starting was difficult and well populated An excess of tangle and downcast in need of name The roof rats went quietly once the python escaped to ceiling rafters of my father’s house its coagulation of coils echoing shapes of a nearby bogong moth