We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 117
WINTER 2009
POETRY
Drawing in the Birth Room
WINNER: 2008 GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE
Drawing with my daughter
at our kitchen table
I am reminded of the night of her birth
– my swollen belly strapped to a monitor
in the hospital ward
and two mechanical pencils
moving parallel, but not touching,
across a ream of blue paper,
transposing her heartbeat
and my contractions
into a drawn landscape
of poplar trees and gullies,
fox tracks and field
and the sharp angled legs of crickets
springing out of grass
at dusk to
bind day to night.
Somehow she was pulling herself
into the landscape
by drawing the place she would enter,
tracing the dark shapes
of what she could only imagine,
of what she had heard creaking
beyond the womb
– the trunks of night trees
swept sideways by wind
or a shed door ajar
swinging back and forth
on its hinges,
shuttering light in slants
across her eyelids.
Three years later
and here she is,
drawing the rain beside me,
her head bowed down in concentration,
frantically moving her crayon
from sky to ground,
cloud to field,
over and over again,
so that soon nothing will be seen
behind this mass of falling, trailing water,
– not her own portrait
a minute earlier she had drawn
on the page,
only this vast watery landscape
she had known before anything had begun,
before she had pushed her head into the air
gulping light and form
beyond the angle of rib cage and pelvis
to be born.
ANGELA MALONE lives with her husband and two children in the Central West of NSW. Her novel, Lucia’s Measure, was short-listed for the 2001 CK Stead Award for fiction. In 2009 she was a finalist in the ABR Poetry Prize.
Surprise Sweet Peas
A man with a bunch of home-grown sweet peas
steps onto the gravel outside
a shop selling floral sheets, fluffy doonas,
drip-dry tablecloths.
Under his chin, pale lavender and pink and pure
white butterfly wingtips
rustle
out of the solidified mist
of an old grocery bag, while his feet
crunch rubble, speckled
grey and cream like petrified feathers of pigeons.
Where can he be going with the Thursday sun
hard as a saucepan lid on his soft
boiled head with his old
arthritic fingers so tender
under the plastic which trembles
a hood round hidden
bone-stiff stalks?
Halfway between the hospital
and a lake where air
is gasping into sails
he is stepping delicately, delivering a gentle gift
to this light
which is turning him slowly
into a stain upon itself.
Where can he be going – to his wife, to his child,
to his friend half a gasp ahead of him
on the outgoing
tide? He keeps
crunching, heading away from the sick
wards
and outside the shop selling floral shrouds
down the footpaths tendrilling
toward the cool
relief of water
people
as he passes them pause, as if he is putting up
invisible netting and they
are catching on it
the thin bouquets of their faces
straining after
his solitary, sweet peace.
JEAN KENT lives at Lake Macquarie, NSW. She has published three books of poetry. The manuscript of her fourth collection, Travelling with the Wrong Phrase Books, was highly commended for the 2008 Alec Bolton Prize. Her first book, Verandahs, was republished in 2009 by Picaro Press in its Art Box Series.
Island, PO Box 210, Sandy Bay, Tasmania 7006 Australia
Ph: (03) 6226 2325 Fax: (03) 6226 2172
E-mail: island.magazine@utas.edu.au