Tracie Lark – Inside Of You

Profile Lark LEP&W ANZ May 2021

Download PDF Here

Live Encounters Poetry & Writing May 2021
Special edition featuring poets from Australia & New Zealand.

Tracie Lark aka The Literary Gangster is an Australian high school English teacher living in the native bushland of New Zealand. Tracie’s poems Hell’s Gate and My Elegant Hoon are published in Irish Literary Journal The Blue Nib, her poem Ancient Beauty is beautifully presented in the Australian Earthwords & Artlings Anthology, and Burn and Twirl features in Curiouser Magazine’s inaugural issue. Her poems, Sunsets With The Edgewalker, Stand On A Limb, and Tell Me You Love Me are published in Northland New Zealand’s Fast Fibres poetry anthologies. Tracie often ponders the idea that what is light is also dark, and so this is often reflected in her poetry.


Inside Of You

You tucked away all of his secrets
inside of you

the way an albatross might
consume plastics

his toxins release into your bloodstream
occupy your brain

sheathing thoughts in choked layers
until riddled

they evacuate as holepunched notes
where did I put my keys
did I leave the stove on
tell me your phone number again

until your brain became a shredder
where am I
what day is it
who are you

We watch you fade amongst the sands of time
sands which, when the wind blows expose
the caps from the bottles he drank
the lighter from the fire of lies he set upon us
and the heirloom plastic comb he used to brush over the truth
as I plead against the family motto with ignorance is amiss.

You slipped away from us all
inside of you

the way an albatross corpse decays revealing
the trash which consumed it.


Moonrise

We watch the moon rise
a full and yellow yolk
thighs comforting thighs

the sky, a tomb,
with pregnant moon –
might set before time’s due

dampened by the darkest blue
waning womb, and lover, you,
I will tell you goodbye

to find a place where your
genes can orbit around earth
for many moons

and I will settle then soak like dust
in to the core, melt away
with magna unless, your heart

proves more waxing than your DNA
and my sense of me will fade
from guilt to realisation of another way

another narrative
another ending
another path

like a dyslexic love
an ecliptic judge
a chrysalus mother

born but stuck
in the cocoon that
hangs from the moon


Roses are Red

Roses are red
they are the quintessential
gift at birth, at life, at death
and they sit in a vase littering petals upon
unopened mail, untouched,
they close, they crouch, they shrivel
into dehydrated garnishes,
for memories revived –
on bannered names, on skulls,
on biceps, on breasts, on ankles
as adhered permanence in a life with loss
there is nothing more ironic than
a red rose as a motif of love.
Everything beautiful when touched has thorns.
Look a red rose in the eye and tell me you don’t see shadows
tell me you don’t see pockets of fuzz-skinned secrets and chaos
tell me you don’t see anthropological layers of lives once lived
or logarithmic spirals from the
turn and grow
turn and grow
turn and grow
tell me you don’t see a stem unfurling
from the pressure of trying to
hold the universe together
tell me you don’t see a maze –
a wayside for weary hearts
tell me you don’t see darkness in a red rose.
Roses are red with ego –
they only open with light yet brood with darkness
ah, the red rose, a flaw on a green bush,
a mere weed of trickery, over promising
a Utopian universe
a Fibonacci galaxy
manifesting the cosmos.
How can I hold that in my hand
knowing tomorrow it will be gone?


© Tracie Lark