What kind of forgetting?
About who built the roads
the railways, and the township
about who is buried beneath them
People forget I am of this place.
My skin the colour of truth, my blood changes each season
I chart history with my tongue and carry wounds
so deep I don’t always remember how I got them.
I carry this place in my rib-bone, cut out,
and carved into an ivory spear
I carry this place in my breast tissue
in the milk that nourishes my daughter –
she drinks the stories of first sunrise
When she dreams, timeless echoes greet her
When she wakes
we speak words that glisten against sunlight
write a lexicon in the ash
only land, sea and sky can interpret
Archive memories in our bone marrow
when we die
mountains
will speak of us
We are this place
What kind of forgetting unremembers the story
about how the ocean was formed?
I tell my daughter to memorise language
they tried to erase from our lips
same way they tried to scrub melanin from our bloodline
But forgettin’ ain’t easy and
reparations don’t count
if they keep stealing babies.
Together, we catalogue
names of women disappeared
names they prayed we’d forget
Utter obituaries under a Milky Way sky
tell a life story – not just of people
but of place – ancient and godly
of women, who are mourned by oceans
The colour of amnesia is white
It is a fragile thing, easily shattered
like porcelain dolls at a garage sale on a saturday
Amnesia is a gaping hole of nothing – or maybe nihilism
Another word for amnesia is oblivion
All I know is I’ve been watching people fill a fault line
with money and cars.
yesterday, a woman jammed jewellery into a sinkhole
so she didn’t have to think about
bodies buried
in her backyard
or the neo nazis
she works with
drinks tea with
My body is a map
My lover, cartographer of rivers my heart holds
Him, beholden to waters I won’t let him forget
My mouth carries names of creeks paved over by progress
I utter them to him in ecstasy
before we fade off into sleep, sated
I pour the language of water into my
adorations of him
so he is overflowing
with
remembering.
…
Merinda Dutton is a Gumbaynggirr and Barkindji woman, a lawyer, poet, and co-founder of Blackfulla Bookclub. This work was awarded the 2025 Oodgeroo Noonuccal Poetry Prize and is published in partnership with the Queensland Writers Centre.