izzy

Sophie’s Mum says lingerie is ‘made for speed,’ like you’re not meant to wear it for too long because it’s designed to be sexy not comfortable. I’m not really sure why it can’t be sexy and comfortable.
I get to your apartment and my butt’s burning. It’s a 40 degree day and I’ve been walking a lot, my undies riding up under my dress and chafing the delicate skin between my butt cheeks. It’s cool in your apartment and I take my shoes off to feel my feet flatten against the polished hardwood floors. The smell of coffee and sex and tobacco. I haven’t been home for days. I’ve started leaving a stash of underwear here, even though I like having an excuse to borrow your Calvin Klein boxer briefs so I can feel them gripping my thighs when I’m sitting in lectures. I only leave my sexy underwear here. Even though you must know I don’t wear it all the time, that it couldn’t be comfortable, I want to maintain the façade a little longer and I know you prefer it.
Today’s pair are Kaiser, so I think that makes them sort of the middle step between ‘sexy undies’ and ‘fancy lingerie’ because they look great, but they’re not French lace or anything. The top of them is opaque black nylon or something and then the boyleg part that curls around my front and over my butt is lace. I chose ones like this so they’d hide my pubes, because I don’t want to get rid of them. You say they’re sexy anyway.
I’m thinking about how Australia simultaneously dwarfs and suffocates me, like all its spaces are too far away, too vast for me to reach but all the people live in a goldfish bowl or a stacks-on pile and I can never be really invisible while you eat me out. I feel like I’m gonna go through the roof, or at least writhe around enough to mess up your perfect sheets. You see the welts between my butt cheeks from the lingerie and I am embarrassed and hiding my head under the pillows, writhing and squirming and trying to be as small and invisible as possible, but you fuck me anyway.

*

sarah

You make the street lights slow dance
and the clouds coalesce into picture book daydreams
you take a hammer to my heart and teach it new rhythms
drumming out my blood ready to rise in my cheeks and my ears
you are a slap in the face of my expectations
and I am rosy and reeling

*

izzy

There are two llamas strapped to the back of a ute, grinning at me in this mire of traffic and tarmac mirage. I don’t know if they’re to scale but their fat plastic heads seem huge, looming above the dashboard of my power blue Nissan Micra. The traffic stagnates, and I fester. My thoughts pool around my feet like porridge. The insistent honk of a horn startles me, and I put my foot down. In the moment before contact, as the car lurches forward, I realise my fly is open and my hand is down my pants. I’ve drifted so far far in the sea of cars, dribbling my brain over the dashboard, masturbating. My bumper crunches into the back of the ute’s trailer and the last thing I see are the fat grinning plastic llama faces smashing through the windshield into me.

*

sarah

The kids are out in force tonight, dressed in bed sheets and bad wigs and fairy wings, yelling ‘Trick or treat!’ at houses with no tricks up their sleeves at all. They shove fat hands into bowls and buckets and cooking pots and stuff lollies into their bags, fretting at their companions in front, getting the good bits. I look over the heads of candy-eyed eight year olds to the street beyond and there’s a boy there by himself. He’s shaken off the regal train of clucking parents and mouth-breathing cousins and is skulking by the fence. He’s wearing a laundry bag, brown paper, the sort you see in movies. It’s got a few holes torn in it for arms, a big gash for his neck, and he’s wearing it with the sort of fuck off expression I reserve for weekdays before coffee. The crowd of neighbourhood infants clatter down our steps to the houses beyond, and laundry bag kid slinks up, eyes down, breathing hard. He doesn’t say ‘Trick or treat.’ Doesn’t meet our gazes, just shoves his hot pink hand into our saucepan of Wizz Fizz and Snickers bars, draws out more than he can hold, shoves most of it awkwardly under the bag into a pocket. He drops a few things on the way but doesn’t stop to pick them up, just pulls his head into his shoulders and turns hard to go. Before he does, his eyes dart up and he stares at me, just for a second. It’s a look so fierce and harsh and frightened that I can’t help but smile at all this fury and terror in a body so small. He sees, and his face goes ugly, but he doesn’t run. Just turns on his heel and balls up his fists and kicks his way out our gate like a fat lipped old drunk on a thunder night. It’s not until he gets to the edge of the street that I see him start to sob.

*

izzy

an imagined conversation with two Kawaii girls:
Yeah, we’re the only ones who really do it here
Yeah, you know, like, the only two who are actually properly committed to it and stuff.
It’s kind of hard in Geelong/
It’s expensive-
We have to order most of our stuff off the internet.
Yeah, there used to be a sort of specialty store, like, an importer, but it closed down.
Yeah.
Sometimes we go to Melbourne
Yeah, some Sundays we go to Melbourne. There’s more stuff there.
There’s more different stuff there.
These hair pieces cost $10 in Melbourne
They would have been, like, way more than that here.
Yeah, ‘cause they’re actually from Japan.
Mm, we’re pretty committed to it. I just really love Japan, Japanese culture
Yeah, me too.
Love it.
I don’t ever want to change
I’m pretty happy how I am now, yeah.
I think I probably spend about $100 a week on maintaining this look
Yeah, I spend like $150 a week
It’s worth it
Yeah. Totally worth it.

*

sarah

light like lemon cheesecake in the air
fat and pale and creamy
dripping down the walls
lining the inside of his gums
seeping into his words with the tenacity of biscuit crumbs
his tongue flops onto the floor and oozes away
spit slides down his chin and pools in his beard hair
she rolls into his lap and grins and he just stares

*

izzy

Even Mum can’t remember when they brought the trailer or how they got it in. It’s way up the back paddock on blocks and the gums are so dense you can’t even see the road from there. Dad reckons the gums must have popped up after – that they cut a road through the bush and now it’s grown over. I don’t reckon gums grow that fast. They’re like our own Stone Henge, the Kaley family’s Easter Island. A whole train carriage languishing in the dirt, rusting. The doors have been ripped off, but the sheep won’t even go in there when it’s raining. One of them did once, but it got stuck between the seats and died. I wired the skull over the doorway. I moved out there for a bit, after I read ‘Into the Wild’. Alexander Supertramp’s desire for solitude and authentic experience really resonated with me I guess. The wind whipping through the doors used to get so feverish it sounded like someone screaming. The roof leaks, and my mattress got mouldy real fast so I moved back up to the house after about a month. Somewhere in there my copy of ‘Into the Wild’ is peeling and bloated with water.

*

sarah

Recording on my phone of the man in line behind me at Lentil as Anything, Abbotsford Convent.

‘Distinction awaits, believe me! And see the electric storm that happened Sunday night, after St Vincents lied about the blood test results – this incredible electric storm. I started to recover, I felt it – bang – the lightning starts. What is the cross made of? Love and suffering! Not love and violent lies, and violent collusion. And all the bullshit under the sun. Truth, not lies. The cross – you’re just sanctifying your own violence. Nothing more! Look, he knows it! They’ll say ‘No, no, no’ and then ‘Yeah’ cos they know it’s crap. The whole thing is a filthy, toxic lie. And they will go to hell for it, the whole lot of them. Extinction! A filthy, toxic lie. He doesn’t know what to do. He knows it’s the truth. It’ s a filthy, toxic lie. He’s with America. I bought his low country’s crap, it’s not low country at all, it’s America. What’s a murder between friends? Or a hundred murders?’

*

izzy

“24hr Pet Emergency” blares neon into the truck-sliding night, urgently red. The waiting room lights make everyone’s faces look pallid. Incurably ill. Blue keeps sliding to the floor, his limbs all soft and slack. His eyes are rolling back and mouth foaming at the edges – the kind of sticky white spit that almost looks like chewing gum. Rat poison. He starts falling floorwards again, so I grab a handful of rusty curls and pull him to me.
‘We’ll see you now.’
A sharp-nosed vet with warm brown eyes, she turns on her heel efficiently.
They pump his stomach and I fret in the waiting room, quietly tearing off strips of magazines and eating them. When the ambulance arrives, I don’t know what to tell them. He’s as good as dead when they haul him up into the back, hoodie soaked with spit and sick. They won’t let me call his Mum from the back of the ambulance, screaming through traffic to the hospital.

*

sarah

Mercy is not in their nature
the clean white socks that clasp their knees and lick their upper thighs are bought new weekly
their parents never did find a way to bleach all the blood out
they shadow the rims of their eyes so the sun can’t get in
and smoke their own haze effects hourly
mulching the cigarette butts with the tips of their school shoes
they have perfected the art of looking unobtrusive
arms snug over breasts, eyes down at the floor
ball gags and hot pokers for anyone who squeals
they say that they kill a man every full moon
and kick the shit out of all the rest
they call it ‘tenderising’ and smile their lipgloss grins

*

izzy

she runs at night like there has never been an axe murderer or a serial rapist on the loose
she runs like her muscles are knots, ropes and pulleys
she runs like she’s following a huge straining sail and it’s just salt and sweat and wind and her

*

sarah

She clenched her fingers til the bones rose to the surface of her skin like chicken in a soup pot, cruel and white and vicious. Her back felt spined as she arched, bucked against the perverse hospital cornered starched white bed. She bellowed hot red sounds and felt the body between her thighs come snaking into the world, crowned with a coronet of cold. The nurses began wiping the child clean of the thick gunk that coated him, but she shook her head, had him laid filthy on her slick breasts. She hissed love at him through a newly forked tongue and blinked too many eyelids, lazy with contentment, in the flickering fluorescent haze.

*

izzy

I kiss the dirt like it is your forehead
I tell the waves to fuck off like they are your whisper
teasing that we’ll knock ‘em dead one day
make all those boys sorry they were born
grow up to be real heartbreakers

I eat bread like it’s your bones
like I could fill myself up with it
learn to run again, like a real girl
like more than a brittle effigy

I can’t see shit without my glasses these days
unless it’s up real close and personal
breathing moist against my cheek, you
are so far away you’re like a fog

I don’t trust my own memory.
I always sit in the same place on buses.

saccharine crack between teeth –
were you thrust into this?
sometimes I think we all were –
50 cents of gumdrop glory
sinking in the pit.

I hate halloween, creeping around your birthday
like a dog done wrong
reminder that the dead don’t rise
reminder that this is another year missed

I toast you like you’re still here
toast you like you’ll live forever

you could have lived forever.

*

sarah

Midnight interview.

What is the colour of love?
A purpley kind of a colour.
What is the sound of love?
Wind rustling through shredded crepe paper dangling from wire coathangers.
What is the most beautiful thing?
You are.
What else is the most beautiful thing?
Baked potatoes.
Do it properly.
A baby.
When was the last time you felt really happy?
Pass.
How many people have you ever loved?
Twenty? I don’t know. Maybe not twenty. I don’t know.
When did you feel the most grown up?
When I was twenty-eight.
Why?
I was a lecturer. People listened to me. I had a staff parking permit.
If you had a megaphone, and you could say something to the whole world, what would it be?
Help.
Help what?
Just help exclamation mark.
Have you ever seen snow?
Yes.
Have you ever made a snow angel?
Yes.
Have you ever kissed anyone under mistletoe?
No.
What are three words that describe how you would like to be as a person?
Better. Better. Better.
What’s the earliest song you remember hearing?
‘My grandfather’s clock.’ Or ‘Where’s your momma gone?’
When did you first realise that you were a boy, and that was different from girls?
Probably in the bath. With my sister. She didn’t have a penis.
What’s the best book you’ve ever read?
I really liked ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.’ But the sequel was shit.
What song do you want played at your funeral?
‘Joy to the World.’ The Jeremiah was a bullfrog one.
What’s your favourite photo of yourself?
I like one of me and my sister what I was about two.
Why?
Cos I’m smiling a lot and I look very happy.
What do you want to dream about tonight?
Something interesting.
Like what?
Oh, I don’t know. Ice skating on the school quadrangle or something.
Pick a word. Any word.
Coagulate.
Say goodnight in any language other than English.
Guten nacht.

*

izzy

hollow the bones and pinch the meat
roll back the skin and place your hands in the heat
this is what they meant when they said ‘sticky fingers’
this is the drop that wasn’t already in there
if a circle was made of straight lines, what would it look like?
hold your head underwater for as long as you can
but don’t forget to breathe.

*

sarah

When I die, I want singing at my funeral. Big, brash, joyous singing. I want harmonies everywhere, even if they don’t quite fit. I want hands lifted to the sky and bad dancing. I want speeches about all the times I fell over. I want photos of my worst drunk faces. I want everyone to stuff themselves on the food that made my guts hurt. I want people to make out at the reception, confused and scared and lonely but full of each others’ heartbeats. I want answers. I want a phone call to heaven to ask why I’m not there. I want the fragments that were me to reassemble enough to figure out what the fuck is going on. I want people to stage a revolution because I’m gone. I want to live. I want to die. I want to stop wanting so much and so little. I want to mean more. I want to fear less. I want to be braver. I want to be either richer or poorer or maybe both. I want to curl in a ball. I want to get through the night. I want hope. I want happiness. I want purpose. I want soul. I want singing at my funeral.

*

izzy

somewhere in this city, he is dropping hands into rubbish bins,
keeping the wedding rings stacked on a chain
making liars of us all

*

sarah

Of all the things I imagined being at this age, lukewarm was not one of them. Middling. Almost-but-not-quite content. That terrible nagging nearly-okay-ness that is somehow more unbearable than the fiercest of hardships. These years are the temperature of the backyard spa our parents installed, into which we would invariably leap before it was hot. The ache of tepid water, worse than the burn of our teenaged feet when we ran from the night-iced grass to plunge into frothing hot bubbles, forty degrees, gasping at the pain. No, this bored ennui is worse. We all have microwaves humming in our chests. We’ve long thrown the matches away, and we let the turntables revolve empty, waiting for a fat frozen chicken to coax back into teeming salmonellic life.

*

izzy

sketches for my sweetheart the drunk
8. Of all the old men in sparkling sports cars, you’d be the dog hanging its tongue out the passenger side.

*

sarah

Now listen cos this is important
we step into the light here, now, today
no more meetings in dark corridors
halfway between the pissweak halogen bulbs
pressing into the mouldy wallpaper with our shoulder blades and knees
no more whispers into telephone lines
no more crack-coded eyebrows and wrists
no more telling your mother you have another business trip
to a state where nobody knows you
today is the day it happens
take my hand and lead me into the daylight
and we will stride down the street with our heads at full mast
and pride blazing behind our eyes
today is the day the red lips of our secrets come falling open
and all the love and strange and sadness come tumbling out
today we are not hidden any more
today we are shameless

*