Bin Day, or Rainy Weather

Rhiannon Hall
On Tuesday mornings, revving engines send jolts through me as I try to remember if I put the bins out. The obnoxious twittering of a New Holland Honeyeater in the grevillia outside my bedroom window pierces my early morning haziness. Tuesday mornings are the only day I wake before my alarm. They are like crazy windy days at school. Sounds are amplified. Can you hear year 9 girls fast approaching the staff room? One is yelling “dob if you want”. The other cries, getting out her response, syllable by syllable, between wrenching sobs “I’m. going. to. tell. if. you. don’t. say. sorry”. Even louder are rainy days. On those days, 1200 students are crammed into the buildings’ corridors. The English block is flooded with laughter, card games. I have to hop, skip, jump over students to get to the toilet.

Contextual Essay: This poem is an exploration of the stress and low-level anxiety that mundane things like putting the bins out and trying to access a toilet can cause.

I like how the sounds described in the poem and the full-justification of the prose poem creates a tight atmosphere and that there is no escape from the tension of the persona’s stress until they reach the toilet. The toilet is the only space in a school where a teacher can be fairly confident that they won’t be found by a student or another staff member. It’s the only space where a moment of peace can be found.

Rhiannon Hall has been sharing her love of poetry for the past nine years through a poetry club at the high school where she teaches. She has poems published in BlazeVOX20, Burrow, Cordite Poetry Review, Meniscus, Please See Me, Saraswati: A literary and art Ezine, Tarot, and has published an essay in Axon: Creative Explorations. She is a Doctor of Creative Arts candidate at Western Sydney University.

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