Leigh Jordan
she well remembers us, and how we interrupted her (climax wracked, sky bruised, aching for more), when we crept out from under the fringes of her discarded Sunday best; her fathoms of green, more like a wild Friday night, when there were no weeks and she, unsated bemoaning the timelessness of blue; and we, slurpy leachates from a muddied conundrum crying hold me. Hold me. Hold me, my mother. And my father was a fabulist: road kill was some fabricated animal just sleeping. The magpie was a kitten with wings. The car, a dragon. No it isn’t. Yes it is and so it was, and mother was a crow, he said listen to her caw, and so she did between her sobs, as he dragged her by her hair. Nothing seemed funny anymore And now we play ping pong, while orbiting her girth and to think it began, they say, when we, entangled in her rich earth locks, first pillaged through her clay, glory vase or box and found hope to be nought but a deceptive song —fucking want, fucking greed, but still desirous— no riches here, we plundered on: myth as always, the unreliable narrator. So we took the second prize: swallowed the feel good pill, the one from the cross. Got drunk on the blood, flowing from the cross. Grabbed the cross, the one from the hill. Rammed it deep into the place of skulls, where you, my sweet stole the mirror of your shackled likeness, and there we left my father. And how precarious in high heels, now you strut one step above the thin veneer of concrete. Lightly tread and mind the cracks. Your child will not hug you and that’s all down to the genetics of the sky, the blue in the colostrum: The pinball machine was always biased, retro lean, retro tilt. And Photoshopped, dare not squint into the green screen. Push out your coned Madonna breasts, and with algorithms metal muscled we will play with steel girders, construct towers from grains of light fondle buttons of long-range missiles. Scattered, every which way: ants, anonymous, scurry one and all. And those earthworm castings, under your moon-clip nails, that you call dirt, Gaia blessed it, named it soil. So scrub, scrub and scrub, my sweet —the worm bores outward from the core. And the child’s bed is unmade, they cannot sleep. And, if all is nought, there are no shadows in the cave, only pleasure demanding every razor edged immediate moment: gulping bits probing thing, bits and things, and even orgasms drained, cream for more. And lust blinded, non-specific, honey sweet, bleeds covid, climate-change and war. Handcuff us to our observations; give us this day, our daily atrocities forgive us our pathos as even when we dress down to tie the tomato stalk to the stake we dress up, put on our prophylactic Crocs and hope that if we see you… you will well remember, and forgive us.
Leigh Jordan lives in a very small rural town in north-western Tasmania, Australia. One pub, one shop and always onions on the side of the road. With some poetry he likes to unsettle. With some seduce. On other occasions he just sits and stares at base metals.
Old Water Rat Publishing 