Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Three
November- December 2025
Stay with me, poems by Caterina Mastroianni.
Stay with me
I hear your mother shouting for you
while we circle key verbs in a story.
“I’m in class online” you shout back.
I see your little sister barging
into and out of the screen:
her face, sideways, and grinning.
I hear your brother arriving home
yelling unfamiliar fricative words.
You start, stop, re-start sentences.
I never hear your father’s voice nor
his footsteps. Always, your sullen face
framed by an unadorned white wall.
In our break, I upload a word-cloud,
to fill it with verbs you can fly with,
dress that wall with your word-clouds.
I hear the family voices clashing
and when you return you say,
“I can’t stay anymore, I’m leaving.”
The gift
Tomorrow, my last day, I wish for flowers,
not the Gouldian Finches I had once been given.
The Egyptian student had said, “It is the most special gift
you give a teacher. And you, teacher, look like a bird.”
I preferred an image of a pharaoh with ibises
announcing proclamations and chanting hymns.
Today, I try fetching fragments of poems sparkling
on the surface of the bay, but they slip away and sink.
A fish leaps out, a bird dives under for the fish,
a terrier paddles for a stick, going around in circles.
A sleek back propels out of the water as if
this is the shape of freedom, sinewy and sensuous.
© Caterina Mastroianni
Caterina Mastroianni is a poet and educator living in Sydney on the land of the Cadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation. She has published poetry in various literary magazines and Australian anthologies, most recently in Kalliope X, Poetry of Flight: The Liquid Amber Prize Anthology, Oystercatcher One Anthology, Burrow, Live Encounters Poetry and Writing Journal, and Poetry for the Planet: An Anthology of Imagined Futures.