Today the morning rang me at 6.15
to tell me what I had done wrong
the day before
and what mistakes I must not make today.

Something is taking over the bush
and the woods and the forests …

this ghost song of my own —Lisa Sewell Cancer now a song sung low: melody’s long exhale the melismatic languor of high summer’s relentless shimmer. The brightest mornings, yes, still remember the coldest burn of your mid- winter hopes. Diagnosis reaches us through air-conditioning —followed quick by dye injection, by lidocaine, by the carefully controlled somnolence of anaesthesia. (Song sung low, this lullaby a cocktail of morphine and the lesser pain meds, the slather of lotions and the photographic record of your breast’s diminishing blueness.) One week later, when the nurse gives her authoritative nod it cuts through heat, through […]

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

The dead (a simple fact) come close to me at night. They manage houses they never lived in, polish spoons, lay tables, summon a lazy sun-filled river to lie there for hours, barely flowing through my head. They are my flesh. I trust their presence as I trust the bougainvillea outside my window at midnight is still red. Round and round the moon moves like plants do in their sleep. The living, breathing as if their breath was kidnapped from the sky and the dead, breathing it into them. I can hear a tree splitting from a storm that took […]

I envy my neighbour’s bigger ration,
but he won’t play in this way.
He stays indoors. I invite him
to watch. His no is final.
He is loyal to his house
and paints his stairs.