Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2025
Banking Sleep, poems by Jane Frank.
Banking Sleep
… up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about
Ali Smith
I’ve been banking sleep
these almost winter mornings—
been in debt for months—
so I bought mahogany sheets
designed for dreamers
& free spirits,
textural and timeless
as a way of telling myself
that Plato was wrong.
Unconsciousness
is not the same as death
or even the borderland
before it
At first light
in the undergrowth
fern trees are a nucleus
of colour & energy:
I wonder if there are still
tiny fragments of us
caught dormant in the silk
of that golden orb web?
Imprints of you:
the whorls of your fingers
the ridges & deltas
of your green touch,
everything you planted
in this garden cast onto days
in shiny fuchsia film
If I’m honest
a scarcity of time
is on my mind
& when I dream
it’s an organic matrix
of dahlia beds alight
contre-jour with autumn sun,
gums with scribbled trunks,
cascading fountains
of leaves hiding
the crevices where frogmouths doze,
a dog sprawling on the lawn,
a lazy eternity symbol
of fire pit smoke,
tawny blooms
arranging themselves
in a moon and stars vase
& lullaby-birds
circling the old house
as if years haven’t passed
Dream Map
Vicarious
Late afternoon in a part of town I don’t know well & I need somewhere to sit, drink tea, during my son’s guitar lesson. I’ve wound myself from one side of the street to the other like a cat’s cradle & now I’m at a rickety table watching the road spin like ribbon up and around the hill below cassia & coral trees, between fringes of bright painted shops, tiny cars rolling home past me in a blur of end-of-day ordinariness. At the tables around me—a nurse who’s finished her shift or perhaps about to start, three school kids glugging chocolate milk, an elderly woman in a shawl beside a decrepit bicycle feeding shortbread crumbs to a dog in a square basket. I’ve started imagining myself into other bodies, minds, shedding them just as fast, so all the lives I’ve never lived are scattered around the suburban streets & in coffee shops & cinemas & parks & on the curving path beside the bay where paragliders wash upwards into a dark orange sunset
Brisbane poet Jane Frank’s third collection of poems is Gardening on Mars, to be released by Shearsman Books in October 2025, and she is author of two previous books published by Calanthe Press — Ghosts Struggle to Swim (2023) and Wide River (2020). Her poetry has been widely published in Australia and overseas in journals and anthologies including Westerly, Other Terrain Journal, Meniscus, London Grip, Antipodes, The Mackinaw, Poetry Ireland Review, the Liquid Amber Prize anthology and 100 Poets (Flying Island Books 2025). She is Reviews Editor at StylusLit literary journal and teaches in the School of Business and Creative Industries at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Read more of her work at https://www.facebook.com/JaneFrankPoet/
Gardening on Mars https://www.shearsman.com/store/Jane-Frank-Gardening-on-Mars-p734039505
The original artwork for the cover design is by Euan Cummiskey.