Live Encounters Poetry & Writing May 2021
Special edition featuring poets from Australia & New Zealand.
Dorothy Simmons is an Irish-Australian teacher of English/Drama whose first ‘published’ work was a stage play (MRPG). Publications since include four young adult novels, an historical fiction, Living like a Kelly, and a number of short stories published in literary journals such as Best Australian Stories, Etchings, Four W, Hecate, and the Newcastle SS Award. She has lately experimented with micro fiction; her work appears online in Spineless Wonders. Her poetry has mainly been private… until now. Her website is www.dorothysimmons.org.
Streetlife
HidingLurkingHeartbeat
Hidinglurkingheartbeat
haven’t found me yet
for all their wailing sirens
wailsongwailsongwailsong
hidinghistingheartbeat
hist
ifonlycouldreachonlygetonlyset
fingers on seethrough rope that single skyward seethrough rope
the why in the wailthe where in the whine
the stretched mosquito still
splitsecond
stab in the dark
if only could
handoverhandoverhandoverhand
be shinning skyward
could be
safe as light years
self as I
hidinglurkingheartbeat
HidingLurkingHeartbeat
T. Rex, Gent.
Up from the sanded, C-scooped shore
Mince … the dinosaurs.
In the endearing diminutive of distance,
they seem elegant, effete,
slope-shouldered Victorians with
drooping, ineffectual hands: T. REX, GENT.
Not Tyrannosaurus…
We watch from our glib transparent dome
– the world’s contracted thus –
as sand turns to gravel, as
hands curl to scimitar claws,
hover like hawks for the swoop,
the snatch and dismember.
It’s our watch.
beyond our complacent shell,
two scaly lids
coveruncovercover
convex sheen of a reptilian eye
cold and unavoidable as radar.
TYRANNOSAURUS.
On our watch,
the bare skin children,
how their faces zoom
inandoutof
scream.
At The Races
Sweat scuffs stopwatched tendons,
smears thoroughbred hides. The horses
somnambulate stallward, slack
as exhaustion.
The bay mare baulks, shudder-sways as
piston legs stagger, flail and fail,
mute nostrils screaming, eyeballs fixed:
a carcass weight.
The tidal crowd surges in and around…
lapping splayed legs, ogling downy
shrunken teats… ebbs briskly away to check
odds on the next.
© Dorothy Simmons