Live Encounters Poetry & Writing March 2025
Death by Nylon, poems by Simone King.
Death by Nylon
Ghost net rakes the tide. A tangle of teal,
fierce orange and lime. Ghoul gear fishes on
after the fisherfolk leave. Under the moon it snares
three bony fish and a sea turtle travelling to nest.
This is no safety net, no cosmic Indra’s web –
it’s the Halloween edition, a spooky weave
that refuses to be a symbol of interconnection.
Plastic fibres fragment like memories
– they are submerged, frayed, reimagined,
pulled through black water to break the surface.
Forever this flotsam haunts the sea-mind.
© Simone King
Simone King (she/her) is a poet, editor and PhD student at RMIT University who lives on Wurundjeri country, Naarm. Simone’s words have been published in Australian Poetry Anthology, Best of Australian Poems 2022, Rabbit Poetry Journal, Cordite, Plumwood Mountain and Mascara Literary Review’s 2002 Resilience anthology. Simone won the 2022 Blake Poetry Prize and the 2021 Woorilla Poetry Prize. She coedited What We Carry: Poetry on Childbearing, Recent Work Press, 2021.