izzy

Siri says:
This is the city Baybend
This is where they found you, shining in the rubble

*

sarah

Shatter-day night and the race cars are hustling
and the pharaohs are fixing to fight
Vegas, you’re a tawdry love on a hot night
(and they’re all hot nights, aren’t they, darling?)
Mumbling gansters with twelve-dollar trilbies
are combing their pockets for shirtfronted change
and cocking their eyebrows to the flamingo legs
that are strutting in high, wasted arcs down the streets
Out in the distance, thunder is brewing
readying to rain down redemption to run down the bitumen
into the sewers with yesterday’s meat
and the scurrying rats with their atrophied feet
it’s a big bawdy babe of a city in summer
stewed in dreams lost at dinner and love gone by morning
of wedding dress tatter and old neon hiss
of tits-out seduction and wine tannin kiss
it’s the holiest of holies in the motel room toilets
and the sick deathless drone of the big cooling fans
it’s the spew on the carpet and the hair in the door
and the ‘what-happened’ stories to keep from your wives

*

izzy

Siri says:
Under the milk of the sky, the water is churning

*

sarah

I put my dick in a box and took it to the op shop.
I’m waiting for some nice couple to take it home.
I hope they don’t have a dog.
Or a baby. Or kids at all, really.
Like, ideally, I’m after a nice middle-aged, middle-class couple.
Sexuality irrelevant. Just as long as they keep up with the dusting.
I just want to know that it’s gone to a better place.
With people who won’t treat it the way I did.

*

izzy

Siri says:
Under the silk is a hot a thread if you look hard enough you can say it

*

sarah

Potential lines for a three second cameo in a Hollywood film:

Hunker down, heroes, it’s gonna be a real long war.
There are two types of soldier. Those who do, and those who die.
Goddamnit, Jackson. God-fucking-damnit.
You crazy, mister! Ain’t never been a man rode them rapids and lived!
No, not just sharks. Piranha sharks. And they haven’t been fed in years.
Why, this old thing? Juss some old hunk-a-metal come falling out the sky ten years back.
Don’t go baby. Not with this baby in me, baby.
Chalk and cheese? Hell no! At least you can eat chalk and cheese!
I got a bad feeling about this bad feeling about this.
If they won’t listen to reason, maybe they’ll listen to raisins.
Strap me in, boss. I got forty years of bad luck and nothing left to lose.

*

izzy

Siri says:
If I wanted to tell you the truth I would have said something clearer streams don’t lie

*

sarah

tuneless sorrowful shattered light pours
runs through my fingertips like the first rain of spring
the corners of the world are cracking
and the morning is rubbing out sleep from its eyes
sweeping it into gutters and the mouths of children
who yawn wide around it and chew on its cud
with milky white teeth and toothpaste smeared grins
the day dawns sweetly as the car exhausts howl
and the mothers clutch babies as they swoon

*

izzy

Siri says:
The whole city had tended to trace the leaves fell and people swamped

*

sarah

You’re like a good cheese, he says, and winces even before she screws up her face in disdain. No, I mean, he says, heat rushing to his face, no, I mean, like, you’re getting better. With age. No, I mean, not, age – you’re not old, you’re more – You look beautiful. I meant like a good wine. They both get better, though. Cheese. And wine. I mean, is what I’m saying. Not that you weren’t. Better. Stop looking at me like that (and she is. Looking at him like that). I – can’t a man tell a woman that he’s noticed that yes, though she is increasing in years, after twenty-eight years of marriage, can’t a man – and you often comment on my nose hair! And my balding – can’t a man, is what I’m saying, notice that his wife is, yes, is ageing, and that yes, she is putting on a little bit around the middle, can’t be helped, it’s just the slowing of the youthful metabolism, can’t be helped, can’t a man, you know, who has indeed noticed that the powder settles a little deeper into the cheeks of his beloved, can’t a man, is what I am trying to ask you, say that his wife, though a little more dragged through the world, a little more shaken and rumpled by the passing of time, can’t a man, I would like to know, tell his wife that she becomes, in some way, ever more beautiful, perhaps, to him? (She left some time ago).

*

izzy

Siri says:
I woke up in the air attend to Warta everyone elseseemed to be able to breeze but not me

*

sarah

I feel like I’m chewing a mountain
spitting out splinters the size of saplings
grinding my teeth on red-rocky boulders
there’s possums chattering in my throat
pissing down into my thundering gullet
galahs have gathered in the caves of my sinuses
whistling and squawking whenever I breathe out
there’s moss sliding over my eyelids now
the world is bottle green and simmering
and I am granite-heavy and grave-dirt sorrowful
ready to belch back up the whole world

*

izzy

Go tell the mountain that it’s burning

First warn the soil, then tell the rocks
Ask the peak if it can hear you

*

sarah

When the soldiers find their messiah they fall to their knees and sob. It’s not how they expected, prophesying between the back slappery and lewd jokery of the steamer ship. There is no great feast, no slew of doe-eyed virgins, no choir of angels. Not even a round of applause. There’s just a sort of feeling of great peace, a certain hang to the air, a quiet settling of the dust motes. They realise, all at once, that it’s the feeling of folding one’s head into the arms of a sun-warmed mother at the end of a long day, and they all feel it, even those who never had one, even those who never even dreamed of one. All the lost boys and late entrants and end-of-the-line orphan scrappers fold into that sort of bosomy love there at the end of everything, and they cry. Just cry for themselves and each other and the whole stinking world.

*

izzy

she liked to clean his ears,
took a strange, almost sadistic pleasure in it.

he hated it, but he let her do it.
years later, when they were no longer together
they still allowed themselves this ritual
when they were handing over the kids.

*

sarah

The wheat silos ring when you rap them with your knuckles. Kick them real hard and you can hear the grain shifting inside, rustling across itself in the deep wide dark. Every few years a kid gets cocky and climbs the ladder to the door up top, jimmies the padlock and peers in. Once, Vincent McMahon went missing late in autumn when the silos were at their fullest and they never did find him. Kids from school said he’d boasted about making the climb up the rickety stairs but nobody ever listened too hard. The police thought he might have skipped town, thumbed down a passing truck and made his way to the city, but his mother never believed it. Six months later, Susie Jeffreys broke a tooth eating Weet Bix, and when she dug around in her mouth to find the culprit, she found a crisp white molar, but this one wasn’t hers. Kids all over the country started finding teeth in their cereal, and there was talk of getting them together to form a set of dental records, but it never did happen.

*

izzy

down by the rocks,
phosphorescence glowing at night
twirling and cajoling the shore
drawing it into the depths
all sparkling green eyes
and hushed whispers

down by the rocks,
they used to dive for abalone
rangers turned a blind eye
the sea, she didn’t mind it
got pulled up because the law
got sent down because the letter

down by the rocks,
you triumphant in leather sandals,
linen dress grey bun flyaway,
tearaway you, crisp and brown
and salt sea spray with a fishing reel
dare the rocks to move beneath you.

*

sarah

The big kids turn green marble eyes in their red-lined sockets and stare
Marcy sticks her thumbs into her belt loops and grinds her heel into the dirt
holds up all six years and eight inches of herself, siphons her sinuses
into a giant booger, spits it at their feet, glares through cowlike eyelashes and sneers
they can’t decide whether to laugh or swear so they do both, heads bobbling
sides shaking with mirth, doffing respectful invisible hats as they pass

*

izzy

look at the way the water laps at your feet
like a dog
like it could make you love it
like it knows you own it
like it wants you to pull it closer

*

sarah

I hope you do not find me churlish, she whispers, wrapping a strand of hair around her finger and winding til it snaps. I hope my words do not frighten you, she purrs with her thumbs folding together like an origami bird. I hope you do not wish to leave, and she flutters her eyes and purses her lips and melts into the pillows.

*