la nina

this summer will be an advertisement for some kind of coffee liqueur. sultry women barely wearing their singlets, beads of sweat, the fondling of melting ice cubes. and then the warm rain. the laughing and the dancing.

his father's son

the four-year-old hammers a nail into a piece of wood. his grandfather comes over.

what are you doing, mate?

fucked things for fucked people, replies the four-year-old. keeps hammering.

after eltham

my leftovers

"The leftover sausages in the fridge are mine," she says out the driver's side window, and repeats herself as he comes around from behind the car. He nods, now hungry, and waits in his office-crushed suit for the traffic to pass.

She says it without malice, but studies him with narrowed eyes under that shiny black bob as he crosses the top end of Brunswick Street. Might as well add: "so keep your hands off, fat boy".

It's a Volvo he just got out of, with the numberplate WTF. She's off somewhere and he's going home to eat around the leftover sausages.

alexander technique

How your body holds itself is its own aching history.
- Andy Jackson, The Dead, in Going Down Swinging Issue 30.

plutonia on cromwell

i am nude and about to get dressed. she is dressed and about to be nude, but it's her strong voice i recognise first. it echoes round the change room and wrinkles the decades: she clarifies the steps for taking a japanese bath; calls to order the rattiest girls in her classroom (me among them); summons her kids and their friends (me included) to the backyard for tea.

i catch glimpses of her as i dress and dry my hair. she looks the same. my hair is long again as though the intervening years never happened – neither the dreads nor the shorn advertisement to lesbians. in the ladyhawke moment before she gets into the bath and i go upstairs, we hug and say hello. get told off for talking too loud. 

all the way through my massage i think about her son … how we ran riot in playgrounds at dusk. how cool i thought he was as Fagin in year eight. how he kept me sane in doncaster, knocked on my window til i answered. stood beside me when i most wanted to vanish. how we fell apart. about platonic male friends and how close I still hold them. how far away.

i come downstairs and there he is, waiting for his mum, sitting cross-legged with his own son (older now than when his father and i first met). i kneel awkwardly until his son offers me a headrest. i could do with a headrest - my head is too full of information and fuzzy from this cold - but I don’t know what to do with it. they both look beautiful and kind.

i take flight.

coming back from the island

figuring out old-new friendships over seven kinds of cheese, wine and seafood, sandstone and sea views.

we walk to pyramid rock, over pigface and fox bait. down the cliff to rock pools where we find lady-garden anemones and starfish mid-feast. dead baby seals on the rocks and gulls beak down in the sand. dad jokes wash up at high-tide alongside half a surfboard and a computer: somebody crashed surfing the internets. 

i haven't been a passenger since May. not in a driving way, at least. maybe on weekends away. 

driving home alone tonight, slightly wired by sleeping platonic, late lunch lasagne, RRR and iced tea, i come home you, tradie vehicle, in my spot. my voice cracking while i leave a message on the landline signwritten on your truck. hi mate. you've parked in my spot. stop it. it's fkn annoying.