Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025
A Revised Study of Projection, poem by Angela Costi.
A Revised Study of Projection
after Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock, 1954
frame one
every space in her room was danced by her body
as she became feather umbrella chopsticks kite bamboo
she was named Miss Torso
by the Reporter with his binoculars
trying to keep up with her spinning cartwheel
monitoring her every move
Dear Reporter, she is not your torso, she is
all I dared when my bedroom was my palace
the secret beat of my diary
the lyrical spin of words
silenced in the front row pew of an orthodox church
with archaic liturgy
back then, I too got rid of lace curtains, venetian blinds
to see the various tones and hues of birds in mid-air
I too rehearsed for dust motes
and neighborly voyeurs
shunning the frosted and glazed, the tinted and barred
as I read loudly, recited, chanted
frame two
he searched with his binoculars and found another,
an older one, he declared as Miss Lonely Heart
but she was smart to say No
to half-baked lukewarm love
she was the pages of my journal, searching for a kiss
that didn’t bite my upper lip or throttle my tongue
she was Bravery sitting on a two-seater with that
stranger, throwing him out before his groping
stole her brain, inviting her self
to dine with her self
as I too sit with imaginary dialogue
steering it towards decency
she taught me to savor reading between pages
communing with words that walk her street
towards the jazz bar’s stool
to listen, dissect
as I threw out the Mills and Boon box set, gifted
by an aunty who expected me married by twenty
frame three
the Sculptress is next to be landed by his binoculars
spying on her making a man of clay, with each touch
clay-man becomes skinnier
until he hardens to a life
without stomach, she refuses to feed him while she bakes
under an unforgiving sun, fanning away her hunger
with a rumbling churn of phrase emptying my inside
of any decent meal and with the heat of the iron
sweating my face
I took pen and paper
to my mother’s ironing board and wrote my first poem
then steamed shirt after shirt for a father who wouldn’t
frame four
before sleep, he spies on the Composer
scrunching up paper after paper
until the piano loses its keyboard
to a landfill of tired melodies
returning to my mother as our daily conductor
from clothes line to stove top to sewing bench
to think my scratches at verse could escape
the trash while an acclaimed Composer
drowns his daily work
with whiskey,
I lie awake when the camera is dead, let the music
of word after word fuel sleep for a morning’s lyric
frame five
the Reporter roams from north to south windows
to find his targets,
as if it wasn’t me as daughter
as single woman as artist as poet
these fragments of glass illuminate
the fear of a crack, an off-key note, a dumb word
out of frame
when father hit me for throwing a cushion
my hands begged for the sharpest knife
but the curtains were drawn
for the night, censoring
this type
of entertainment
© Angela Costi
Angela Costi is the author of five poetry collections. Her recent chapbook is Adversarial Practice, Cordite Poetry Review, commended in the Wesley Michel Wright Prize. In 2024, her poems were longlisted or finalists in the international Fish Prize, the Grieve Project and the joanne burns Microlit Award, and won the University of Canberra’s Health Poetry Prize. She lives on unceded Wurundjeri land, and is known as Αγγελική Κωστή among the Cypriot diaspora, which is her heritage and ancestry.