Live Encounters Poetry & Writing June 2026
The stitch un-pickers, poems by Caterina Mastroianni.
The stitch un-pickers
Once cameras couldn’t see – each learned l-e-t-t-e-r –
interlocked – into a running thread –
each learned word – repaired into a seam –
each learned text – sewn into a handmade pattern –
a stitched language of resettlement –
slowly stitched across war-torn fabrics –
a soft shield deflecting word-bullets – from outside
the English classroom where the first surveillance cameras
in Cabramatta could shoot into the consequence
of translating your being and you being here.
All over the city, cameras insist
on turning right side up,
what was upside down,
on declaring that an image of a text,
or a snapshot of a scene
is the whole picture,
while threads of being –
– flawed – frustrated –
– or flourishing –
are picked and pulled up – – –
until all the panels of textiles –
– are unstitched – – –
and it unsettles me,
no matter how settled I am.
Steelmakers
We were shiny at first,
then second-hand,
then obsolete,
like a rotary dial telephone,
a Holden car or a used fridge.
To make them,
steelmakers extracted a multitude
of hands and legs from drained homelands
and filled the emptiness with bank accounts.
Steelmaking was like people making,
and though they tried
to roll and mould our hot bodies
into a more obedient alloy-
a colder, more useful form
fixed into the frame of a built nation –
we kept the humane parts of ourselves
for our own making
of the next generation.
Some iron bits wedged in:
the metallic taste on our tongues,
the skeleton steel that braced our houses,
the scrapped steel that split a home,
the silent steel inside our bodies,
the tortured steel that smelted secrets,
the polished steel that shined our teeth.
They are rusting talismanic reminders
at work, and at home
reminding us that
we are not cars and houses,
we are not robots and firearms,
we are not tools and devices.
© Caterina Mastroianni
Caterina Mastroianni is a poet and educator living in Sydney on the land of the Cadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation. She has published poetry in various literary magazines and Australian anthologies, including Kalliope X, Poetry of Flight: The Liquid Amber Prize Anthology, Oystercatcher One Anthology, Burrow, Live Encounters Poetry and Writing Journal, and Poetry for the Planet: An Anthology of Imagined Futures.