Download PDF Here 13th Anniversary
Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Four December 2022.
In the storeroom, poems by Marion May Campbell.
in the storeroom
in the storeroom
the postmen sit on their mailbags
& pass around the elixir
their blood is red ink
parchment their skin
love inscribes its slow
tattoo there they say
poems are letters that go
astray
poems deepen sleep
they multiply
the heart’s chambers
you wake with names
of ice on your tongue
with lava pulsing
at your wrist
your veins map
the roads of change
somewhere a windscreen wiper
moves the rain to tears
somewhere the slave
cuckoo comes unsprung
& flies –
to her young
NOTE – ‘names of ice on your tongue’ is grafted from Marina Tsvetaeva’s ‘Your name is a – bird in my hand /a piece of – ice on my tongue’ from Poems for Blok
flight feathers
as soon as he leaves
the dread of his return
conducts its drip torture
on the metal sink inside her skull
she ducks under mirrors
& night windows for fear
of the sight of her own skin
cling-wrapped on bones – of course
her vivisector preferred
to write Renoiresque the dappled flesh
of young girls in flower
her depletion feeding his power
he’d been famous for a year
then quickly forgotten
his fame had come
from his stylish ease his killer
wit & in its wake these bouts
of terror relayed
the animals shook in their baskets
the little dog the cat
the black rose bloomed
that shameful corolla
her head in her arms
she listens for footfalls
like Jack’s Giant bent on
revenge thundering
down the fire escape
he called her slummocky
so accused she became
mere flab & bloated bruise
her belly a dome collapsed
sparse-feathered mocked
by monthly engorgements
past your use by eh
sterile old bird
that voice pernicious
has coated
her flight feathers in something
much heavier than lead
crash dummy
I sent out an SOS like a crash dummy
to see if the glass would craze
in her rear vision mirror
I didn’t see a sign
that she’d received me –
but our whole
painting was in the background
sharply distorted
an asymmetrical
mutilation
in the retro light
somewhere in digital resonance
two women cried
& in the implicit sidewalk neon
our blue angel smoked on
well-pleased with the cushions
inflated between us
& the dashboard dials
© Marion May Campbell
Marion May Campbell is an Australian poet and fiction writer whose most recent works include languish (Upswell Poetry 2022) and third body (Whitmore Press Poetry 2018), and the memoir The Man on the Mantelpiece (UWAP 2018). Now retired from university teaching, she lives write and paints in Drouin, Victoria, on unceded GunaiKurnai land. Her poems are fed with her dreams and other writers’ words.