Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2026.
Terrarium Workshop, poems by Jane Frank.
Terrarium Workshop
Everything I need is on the aged wooden
table in front of me – gloves, trowel,
an aquarium for plants. Outside this gazebo
sunlight is smeared by smoke and ash.
In NASA’s photo, the Earth’s eyes weep fire,
red petechia overlaid like snake bites
on the seraphic sphere of blue iced
with white. But here before me this morning,
life is as simple as a tiny fern forest
with its ideal miniature microclimate. A glass
jar holds moisture no matter the weather.
The instructor talks animatedly about soil
composition and we scoop potting mix
from a bag; take care, as asked, placing
moss, stones, pine cones, shells. It is
a small world that must not dry up. I watch
leaves curl from damp balls like bubbles,
ferns shivering in a gentle spray of rain
We are all wildflowers
pressed between transparencies
I have photographs that conjure vanillin and grassy
notes mixed with mustiness in the Hay Castle bookshop,
but there was also a death-reek through that ancient
grate, the steps slippery with moss and decay. At the
al fresco honesty shelves — a forlorn orchard in the bookish
town — small groups of anoraked pilgrims held rejected
volumes like fallen fruit, exchanged loose change for
finds they made in autumn rain, the remainder left to rot,
their ink run into the earth like blood. A Ghormenghast
of books someone said: the volumes walking like ghosts
at night, the soft sheets inside them white as the moon
I flick through pages in the book and return it to the
highest shelf. The books and I are reflected in the shroud
of night outside, though in this alcove we are bright,
breathing. Prisms of light from the cloisonné lamp play
on the pastiche of book faces: each one murmuring, or
elbowing for attention, each one an hour or a day or a
moment, lost time excavated, reawakened from the
detritus of the past — a café, or a hotel room or a white
beach lined with pines lives again in a faded jacket
or the trapped sand collected in a spine, some pages
as well-loved as the skin of children. Hidden margin notes
are strange measures of the lopsided way I grew; my
own crooked heart chart. Faces layer here in the leaves,
and voices. The scent of jasmine, cigar smoke and turpentine
and a rush of other histories: sutras scratched on palm
fronds with a metal stylus, bark paintings, stories in the sky
with eclipses and exploding omens, spoken books of
Magellanic clouds, festival gifts from Saturnalia, Lin
Xin’s seven epitomes on scrolls of silk, Dibdin’s concertinas
of gentle madness, the miracles of letterpress and vellum,
the readers of first Gothic novels behind Enlightenment
doors — nets of quiet astonishment – obscure firsts and rarities
from Chinguetti or Timbuktu, each pseudonym and
dazzling frontispiece a small miracle, bookmarks of lace lost
in yellowed pages. In bookshops I’ve held books
like survivors; offering comfort to those battered by
neglect, calming their distress, books like puppies in kennels
of leather eyes pleading to be rescued from oblivion.
My tea goes cold, forefinger tracing each delicate spine
across the years, horizontally stacked. Always there is a shaded
caudex for the mind — the peace of having trees inside
Blue Door
I could sense the stars circling
each night when I shut my eyes
behind the blue door
hear my thoughts skipping
in the garden of the unkempt house –
dirty white stucco, high gable,
worn red cement steps, overgrown shrubs –
alone for the first time
I said I’d take the shed at the back
because I could already envisage my desk
adjacent to the window with its view
I could see differently
of a high unruly satin ash hedge
and an ancient bunya pine,
imagine myself waking to the last stealth
a language of survival
of possums and owls and flying foxes,
the creak of corrugated tin, the crunch
through dew to the kitchen on winter mornings,
making fresh prints on grass
avoiding the faces of men my flatmates
might have entertained, but in truth
I wouldn’t see the others much –
a lesson in self acquaintance
would write and doze through hidden days,
rarely back from the restaurant before two,
so I grew brave about parking in the dark
carving out an unconventional orbit
descending through eucalypt
shadows to my pale blue door
luminous under its own moon
© Jane Frank
These poems were previously published in the chapbook Wide River (Calanthe Press, 2020).
Brisbane poet Jane Frank’s third collection of poems is Gardening on Mars, published by Shearsman Books in October 2025 and she is author of two previous collections 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 Ink, Sweat and Tears; Other Terrain Journal; 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.