American Creek

To chew on grass in the sunshine. To lick at the yolks of eggs, or bright & fern-dappled sunlight out in the yard. The trees crack like whips & faraway the southerly, the change comes. It’s worst at night, beneath…

Betty Malvern with a bee. Here’s my sisterly path, the secret way. Through the woods, into the sunlight for a sec. Token uniform a spot of brown by the creek. Small whorls of dirt in the clear water, like washing…

They don’t believe in fairies but I do. You don’t believe in fairies, do you? I have seen them, and you’re wrong. I’ll bide my time, until they all come back to visit. They like to hide inside jacaranda trees.…

The creek’s steam mingles with our gossip, picking apart other peoples’ reputations, as we do. The morning stream calls. I ran out of the house, missing the fern by millimetres. In a way this flood is funny. It washes so…

I can feel the nettle, stuck in my leg, this remnant of Nebo’s glory, shoved deep inside my thigh, and poisoned too. I can just imagine the swelling there, and the pain. Totally worth it. An opportunity I’d never had…

The school yard’s dense with bodies BUT I CAN’T HEAR A THING. No need to shout, a corona’s hanging around her head. The silence of summer. Here we go, across the iron bridge and onto the sports oval. Grass whistle.…

You know it’s just that every day this wave of International Roast it just hits me, in the common room, and I want to run. I see a pile of papers that may never get marked, handwritten notes, attendance rolls,…

By American Creek there’s a fig tree with someone’s name written on its trunk. I hesitate to say mine. Okay, yes. In some fit of adolescent vanity I carved the initials RM there one day, after school. Never have gone…