Live Encounters Poetry & Writing February 2025
Flowers and Feathers, poems by Magdalena Ball.
Flowers and Feathers
The boa room was a pop-art camphor closet. Fifty strips of turkey Maribou
hung next to Chandelle, hand-sewn ostrich, single and double thickness.
Iridescent Coque shimmered under a fluorescent strip. Detangling and
fluffing the boas was first job of the day, a finger comb-through, grouping
colours into clusters of ROYGBIV, the rainbow of possibility. The Coque
was the most expensive, but dreams could be purchased in vivid pink
down for twelve dollars a strip or three for thirty. The room always elicited
a gasp, the camphor a headache, especially if you were inside for more
than an hour. If it was quiet, I could tidy flowers, practice Spanish or read,
subversively, under the counter. It wasn’t often quiet. Except on Saturday
morning when I counted pheasant feathers, predicting stock versus sales.
I never thought about the birds. Plucked alive, starved in feedlots across
South Africa, hooded and held. Slaughterhouses, formaldehyde dyes, miles
travelled on carbon-belching ships. The pretty room was a lie, draped on
bare shoulders, kicked up by the Rockettes, paraded down main street,
built on an industry a long way from home. The shop is long closed. The
garment industry gets it flowers and feathers elsewhere, imported from
overseas factories of slave labour. Flattened feathers and non-biodegradable
flowers are rotting in a cellar somewhere. Back then, a poor student,
I moved apartment frequently. My mail was delivered to the shop. Maybe it
still goes to that repurposed building, piled high in a dusty corner.
In dreams I collect
neglected stacks of old mail
thirty years of waste.
Breadcrumbs for Pigeons
Black glass is a mirror
sunlight on grey tarmac, pigeons.
There are over three hundred species
including the flightless Mauritius
non-bird we called the Dodo
a fatal acquiescence, lesson unheeded
Lazarus on the boil, ready to return
shameful as hothouse Earth.
Take the Passenger
imagine what it was like
shooting the last one
dark blood mingling
with the blush of its broken
neck. Transgression.
Luckily there are still
homing pigeons, who always
find their way, gleaming bodies
against a mottled grey sky, war-bird
drawn to the nest, unlike me
my homing instinct watered
lifted by wind
a woman stripped of labels
swearing to forget the
boundaries I’ve crossed
my role as commodity
or how I might not be capable
of all that needs doing.
Patterns of Energy
Intelligence isn’t
what it used to be.
We are little more than
light, chemicals, temperature
tied together
with invisible string
no one falls alone.
Watching from my position
on the floor
waste products
cycling through organs.
If we make it past
the contractions
transition to transmission
we will become
something different
connective filaments
like bees
collective flight patterns
against the absence
of all those species
sipping nectar, dying slowly
as if we had all the time.
© Magdalena Ball
Magdalena Ball is a novelist, poet, reviewer, interviewer, Vice President of Flying Island, and managing editor of Compulsive Reader. Her work has appeared in an extensive list of journals and anthologies, and has won or shortlisted in many local and international awards, including, in 2023, the Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Competition, the SCWC Poetry Award, the Liquid Amber Press poetry prize, the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s international poetry prize, and the Woollahra Digital Literary Award, as well as shortlisting for a Red Room Poetry Fellowship. She is the author of several novels and poetry books, most recently, Bobish, a verse-memoir published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2023.