Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Two
November- December 2025
Passing through, poems by Dominique Hecq.
Passing through
Wherever you come from
or are—
hybrid or not
uprooted or not
you only ever write to prove that you exist.
In doing so, you lose yourself
empty yourself
dispossess yourself
destroy yourself
re-craft yourself.
Only nothingness signifies everything.
It is from loss that you draw your strength.
You pulled at your moorings
moved on
transgressed.
All the while knowing that one never leaves.
Yours is a borderline, insular, precarious, ambiguous predicament:
you keep on displacing the horizon.
On the edge of alien shores
The giant neon swan flashes
white against the black sky.
Beneath, the naked city lies on its back like Leda
knees apart in porno freeze-frame.
The freeway busts right up through.
The territory slides off the map
towards Bass Strait but you’re grounded.
Decay oozes from the river. Gets into your skin.
You choke on its humid breath.
It’s so hot and humid this could be Singapore or Saigon
but it’s the city you now call home.
The further west you go the fewer lights
And all seems on the verge of subsidence.
Stripped out factories crumble under their weight
as mud percolates its way up through the sediment.
When the river breaks its banks the scum of petroleum
rises up the waterways, drowning the eels—iuk iuk iuk iuk iuk.
Cri et silence
You are made of particles separated in time and space, so only truly become yourself in your relationships with others. With leaps into gorges within these very relationships. At the font of all life, which is essentially the other. And which allows you to be yourself and more present to others.
You who also have a dual allegiance as human: to life and death; to time and eternity; to murder and life; to time and eternity, to the unconscious and consciousness. A dual allegiance compounded by your sex: you can give life, but also take it away.
In this world in which we live and which, in its very convulsions, is already that of tomorrow, what is required of us in the first place? If not to work towards the advent of this relationship between oneself and the other. To write. Which is why I can’t dissociate writing from crying out.
© Dominique Hecq
Dominique Hecq is a widely anthologised and award-winning poet, fiction writer, essayist and translator. She lives and works on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land (Naarm/Melbourne). Hecq writes in English and French. Her creative works comprise a novel, six collections of short stories and seventeen books of poetry. Together with Volte Face and Otopos her bilingual sequence, Pistes de rêve, appeared in 2024.