Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume One November-December 2024
Film credit: Girl #3 in the canteen, poems by Paris Rosemont.
Film credit: Girl #3 in the canteen
My mother—in her heyday—had been quite
a looker. Pretty enough to have been a Bond girl, framed
in a sniper’s scope to the brassy vibrato of Shirley Bassey.
As a teen, poring with fascination through plastic sleeved
albums (eight curved-edge retro-tinted photographs to each braille-
backed double-page spread, fizzing lightly with clingy static at each
turn of a page), I wished I’d inherited her gamine charm instead
of the broad-nosed, dark-skinned, stocky sensibilities
of my paternal line. My father gave me his buck
teeth. Most people leave them in denture cups
on nightstands. But I keep them in my mouth. I s’pose
I should’ve been thankful I hadn’t been pretty enough
to have got into any real trouble. I was simply
a supporting sidekick, blending blandly
into the smoothie of society, like a carrier-
ingredient nobody ever requested by name.
© Paris Rosemont
Paris Rosemont is an Asian-Australian poet and author of poetry collection Banana Girl (WestWords, 2023), shortlisted by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature for the 2024 Mary Gilmore Award for a first volume of poetry, and longlisted for the Poetry Book Awards 2024. Paris’s poetry has won awards both locally and internationally, including first prize in the Hammond House Publishing Origins Poetry Prize 2023 (UK), second prize in the Whitsundays Literary Heart Awards Poetry Prize 2024 and shortlisted for the International Proverse Poetry Prize 2023 (Hong Kong). Paris has featured at events including the Red Dirt Poetry Festival 2024 (Alice Springs) and Ubud Writers and Readers Festival 2023. Her second collection of poetry, Barefoot Poetess, is due for release in early 2025. www.parisrosemont.com