izzy

fuck children
fuck peace
fuck the ten commandments
fuck neighbours
fuck resting in peace
fuck the afterlife
fuck chocolate
fuck the United Nations
fuck feeding the ducks on a cold winter’s day
fuck holding hands
fuck ice cream sticky in summer
fuck making out
fuck getting your rocks off
fuck sticking it to the man
fuck the hours spent playing on the swings in the park when you were 9
fuck everything
you stubbed your toe

*

sarah

I am reading birthing stories again. It comes in waves, this maternal intrigue, this fascination with pushing out a force of existence into the cold bright morning. I am collecting descriptions in the filing cabinet drawer in my head marked ‘babies.’ ‘It’s like pooing a watermelon’ is in there, told by a wide-eyed pregnant German teacher at high school, who can’t have been much older than I am now as she stood in the tiny classroom, mixing the dative case with girly gossip about periods as her stomach swelled. ‘There comes a point in labour when the words run out, when women stop being able to articulate their pain’, on the radio, on a hot night down Punt Road, heading home. ‘The kicking feels like someone dunking a teabag in my stomach’, just the other evening, in the swell of bodies at the North Melbourne Town Hall foyer, as bad pop blares inside. Photos of fathers crying over their partner’s shoulders as tiny hands beam up like flares dripping phosphorous ash. Another drawer, labeled The Things They Don’t Tell You About It, filled with exclamation marks – ‘You bleed for six weeks straight afterwards!’ ‘Almost everyone requires stiches!’ ‘You will shit yourself and you won’t even care!’ In the middle I am wheeling, fascinated and longing, pressing a hand to my belly and imagining a life balled inside. Then out to the margins, kicking and screaming, terrified terrified, too selfish, too young, too frightened to put all my leftover life into a new thing. Never sleeping again, bleeding money and fear and love into four limbs and a world too raw and unkind. Afraid of little lungs bawling on planes. Of SIDS. Of rolling over half-asleep and crushing it to death. Of doing it just because that’s what we do, we make a new thing to fix our broken selves, and watch it fall to pieces as life takes a pick to its heart. Oh baby-o, unborn, oh new favourite thing, oh life all in bits in the side of my belly. Oh thing that is not. Your mother is fluttering.

*

izzy

know why I chose the white radio?
true story.
what’s going on, a little scrabble action?
did he?
that’s great, good for you!
whatever, whatever, the point is you’re together playing, god bless
oh, no, just here to pick up my father.

*

sarah

Postcards from Indonesia:

The pool is quiet in the morning heat. An Australian man in his 50s (why is everyone here Australian?) heaves himself into a shallow seat in the water and rolls slowly to bake his stomach. The hair on his shoulders looks like wings. A woman steps up, child in hand, takes a photo on her iPad and he looks up. ‘Oh, I’m not taking a photo of you!’ she says. ‘Ah, it’s alright’, he says jovially. ‘I’m a beached whale here.’ He splashes water onto his gut. ‘Just gotta keep tipping water on me.’ The bartender at the swim-up bar nestles between bottles of bourbon and rum and scribbles furiously in a notepad. He is probably tallying yesterday’s sales, or ordering more mixer, but I hope he is writing a poem for a lover. Swim up verse. Poolside poetry. A beer and a quatrain for 50,000 rupiah. More waddling baked Australian seniors stroll past, clutching folded notes, in a country where we are all millionaires.

*

izzy

I’m on the phone to Centrelink, and I need to poo. I’m not sure what the politics of the situation are. They called me. I made an appointment time online, and they called me. I laughed to myself sitting by the landline phone. Centrelink my lover, Centrelink my beau. I’m on hold, trying to calculate whether or not I could feasibly poo in time before the woman gets back on the line. She seems lovely. That feels like an anomalous experience, to speak to someone so engaging and lovely when all they do all day is talk to people looking for help. Maybe that is rewarding. I hope she finds it rewarding. She seems so lovely. I know if I drop the call and ring back, I’ll have to wait in a queue for ages. I might even have to wait forever to get another appointment. Surely people go to the toilet when they are on the phone to Centrelink all the time. That mustn’t be pleasant to deal with. I don’t want to be one of those people. I consider whether I could leave the bathroom door open to minimise the acoustic differences. Whether I have enough control to avoid embarrassing noises. Whether she’d ever know if I waited til I was off the phone to flush. “Are you there?” “Yes, hello! Still here.”

*

sarah

Postcards from Indonesia:

We step out of Denpasar airport, out of the long hot queue full of people wearing faces of quiet desperation, out of the stern faced man at Immigration who asks if my mother is my grandmother and then apologises profusely, laughing, out of the bag graveyard and into the air. The day smells of clove cigarettes, incense and gasoline, and I breathe in deep. It feels familiar, and I remember the first time I was here. Ten, maybe? Bold and all-knowing in peaked caps and books, bossing my brother about and feeling unsettled by the smell of shit in the air. I scrawl an equation: comfort equals unfamiliarity plus time.

*

izzy

She feels good about the fact she can fight. It’s like the number one best thing she knows how to do and it makes her untouchable. She can run, too – really fast, but she thinks when the time comes, she’d prefer to fight. The streets at night are an invitation as well as a threat. Whatever she’s wearing is a threat and an invitation. Fists like thorny rosebuds waiting to bloom.

*

sarah

I am practicing smiling like a shark
deadening my eyes, growing my pupils
black and fat and matte
I am circling smaller and smaller
around a coin on the floor
getting the turns tucked in tight
I am holding my breath in the bath
my neck muscles twitch
ready to let the gills split the skin

*

izzy

there’s a cutout of a mountain where my face used to be
it was certainly the best option, in my opinion

maybe it wouldn’t objectively be the best option ever, like
the best option for face replacement surgery anyone’s ever had
but it works for me

I feel like an alpine dream.

*

sarah

They flick the switch on the dimmers and they kick into life, that low whine-hum of the lights warming up, of the electricity settling in the grid. I bend double, cycle my spine down to the floor, clicking my knees into place, unhinging my shoulders and letting the fluid snake down my arms. I am heavier here, older, achier. I stoke the fires in my belly and tuck a little lighter fluid behind my teeth, ready to bite down and let it loose. The ceiling plays static, bouncing from speaker to speaker with ping pong precision. I close my eyes like red velvet curtains and peer through the cracks at the stage. Footsteps shuffle outside, the herding stupid scrapes of too many people in too small a space. I breathe in deep, breathe in power and fear and spiny black words and I won’t breathe out til the applause hits the wall behind me and bounces back off, and I am full of its echo and myself again.

*

izzy

sometimes, I wish we were manatees
you make me feel like doing naked star jumps
I get why people say ‘love is like a drug’
I never sleep or
I sleep all the time because I am tired out
from all this feeling

right now it feels like I am filled with a million helium balloons
and I want to make a high-pitched happy sonar noise, like
eeeeeeee eeeeeeee eeeeeeee eeeeeeee eeeeeeee

*

sarah

you are carved in the lamplight
stone and ivory and shimmering bronze
and I am fearful of approaching you

I trace in my skull the curve of your breast
your hip-bone sentinels, the cove in between
you are holy and pagan and sacred and sin

you stir in the quivering, hot blended air
and a trickle of sweat draws a line down your chest
cleaves you in two, like a butterflied lamb

you beckon me over and I stumble in my haste
to kneel at your temple
and press a finger inside

*

izzy

somebody go
tell the world it’s on fire

*

sarah

I ogle you
there’s no other way of putting it
I ogle you through a pair of perfect champagne goggles
and drape myself against the balustrade lustily,
fustily, reeking of damp in my wool blend cardigan
you run a hand through your Ken Doll raked hair
and wipe it carefully on the leg of your pants
and there’s a chance, I would wager
that we’d get past the pleasantries
and fall into bed with a fumble of hands
but I’m jumbling words in an alcohol haze
and I’m dazed by the sparkle of cigarette lighters
raised in the air like a toast to the night
so I just keep on ogling you

*

izzy

say something like, “run a mile”
say, “watch yourself”
say, “look where you’re going”

say something like, “this could never happen to me”

*

sarah

The mist paws at the glass, draws away, comes back kissing. I breathe onto the window and draw a smiley face for it to love. My breath grows heavy, the water collects and the smiley face eyes start crying. The mouth grows strings of beaded rain. The car heater rattles whenever we turn corners. Freeway exit ramps grate. Roundabouts are intolerable. We sit in the sort of sharded silence caused by too many teeth being grated, too many jaws held tensely, too much breath let out too fast. The indicator ticks dully. A truck shoots a wave of dirt and water past us and the lights of the highway turn to fat round flecks. The dark is coming quick now, and we are hurrying, scurrying across the big, flat Australian nothing.

*

izzy

how warm all the shop windows look
glowing and spilling all over the pavement
the mannequins reclining
perfect smooth skin
pineapple and apple bikini prints
turning their plastic limbs with a wink
while we wither and chill outside

*

sarah

Two women in their 50s on the Frankston line into Flinders Street, Monday, 9:22 am:

A: The only thing that I do low fat is my yoghurt. Oh, and I do diet jelly on Tuesdays.
B: Oh, that’s nice. That’s a nice refreshing treat.
(Pause)
B: You still doing Pilates?
A: On Tuesdays.
B: Oh, good on you. My teacher talks a lot. But she’s got this really calm voice. Really calm.
(Pause)
B: You see, no-one at work’s noticed. No-one’s said anything. Meanwhile, I’ve gone down in my clothes, you know! My sister’s noticed. And you. But nobody at work.
(Pause).
B: So, is your niece still with her husband?

*

izzy

Quentin Tarantino wakes feverishly, looking for something to hold onto. He is skewed across the basement couch, sandwiched by a blow-up Nicki Minaj doll and a Vulcan BF50 nerf gun. His suit is crumpled. He wipes saliva from the corner of his mouth and pushes his hair off his forehead. Sunlight creeps through a chink in the curtain and he squints at it with swollen eyes. The birds are at it again. He staggers to the balcony, rips open the door and yells some abuse over the fence. Alan Ball mustn’t be home, because he doesn’t come out to defend his squawking brethren. Tarantino slams the balcony door, and the glass shatters. The noise of the exotic birds eating, fucking, chattering saunters in. The doorway stands open like a gaping jaw and the noise can’t be filtered out. Out, damn spot. Tarantino sits bowed over an enormous panelled wooden desk with his forehead on the cool desktop, and cries. His sobs mingle with the sonic refuse of the feathered jerks next door. He will not write today. He will not write tomorrow. The sound of the birds has become his only reality.

*

sarah

We winter inside our doona cocoon. Spiders of ice snaking across the fitted sheet. It’s coming out at the corners. It’s always coming out at the corners. The mattress won’t be shackled by a faded brown fitted sheet marked with cum stains and period leaks. I sigh in your arms.
Dear I, I say.
Dear I?
It’s like dear me, except I used the wrong pronoun.
You laugh for a full minutes, fall silent and then start hooting again. You make me write it down. I do not think that I am funny, and so making you laugh fills up my insides. I wonder how big comedians must feel when they feel the weight of ten thousand laughs hit their stomach at once. They must feel like titans.

*