Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Five November-December 2024
Three Uneasy Pieces, poems by Dominique Hecq.
Stroke
Yours was a sun brimmed and nature blasted childhood of scratches and
rashes, leeches and ticks that unspooled in free-draining soil, with its smells
and textures caught under fingernails, matted in hair and rubbed into the
soles of your feet.You are a Cyclops now, swimming in the Eurotram. Your
head’s in a vice. Face drops. Sprain your jaw. The Eurotram’s a black crater
now. You freedive. Fail to touch the bottom. You are the Virgin Mary. Ascend
to Paradise Lost. You’re unsure whether you’re Galadriel or Sauron now. Say
you’re Lady Macbeth. The sky is filled with waxflowers. You crush their fine
foliage with your artificial hands, release their spicy aroma. Bees, beetles
and butterflies swarm. Pollinate their nectar-gorged blooms. You pluck an
armful of lambent Tiny Dancers you’ll bring to your own funeral.
Amnesia
The first word to go is a hot air balloon caught in a plane tree. It shifts in
the breeze. Threatens to pull loose. Tears. Free in all its facets falls around
your neck: able, allowed, emancipated, liberated, released, unbounded,
unburdened, welcome, all set free. Next to go is want with all doing thingies.
Very soon after that you know what I mean. No? Well, all the disappeared
will leave a memo, jointly composed, signed and stamped, saying they are
duty-bound to remove the inevitable. Err… Live.
Monosonnet
the
path
is
lost
in
its
stained-glass
window
of
words
traits
inter
lines
memory
hoops
© 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.