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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Special Australian Edition August 2023
Habits of Life, poem by KA Rees.
Habits of Life
I
Stream music,
frog & leaf-fall
tadpoles
in creek hollows—
The world has a nasty habit
of ending.
II
On your ankle, a leech
small as my toddler’s
smallest nail
bloods
as it sucks.
III
Green dance of
soft-leaved plants,
each egg bee lays—
pollen & nectar
rain in November.
IV
Bright mushrooms spawn
marbled through litterfall, skin-
same as found in stores but
gills—palest of blue.
‘The world has a nasty habit of ending’– truncated line from
Joanne Limburg’s The Synagogue at the End of the World.
© KA Rees
KA Rees writes poetry and short fiction. Her poems and short stories have been widely anthologised. Kate was short-listed for the 2016 Judith Wright Poetry Award and she is a previous recipient of the Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction. Kate was a 2019 Varuna fellowship holder for her manuscript of short fiction and the national winner of the 2019 joanne burns Microlit Award. She was a resident of the 2021 Sydney Observatory program where she wrote a suite of poems set under the southern night sky. Kate’s pocket book of poetry, Come the Bones (Flying Island) was released in 2021.