Stepsister / Index of What We Found (Stepsister Reprise)

Two poems by Grace Roodenrys

Stepsister

That love, god it wanted nothing from us

the way rain wants nothing from

objects it touches with rain.

Remember how we listened down

to the small economies? Remember

we skimmed the pond for algae, moving

our sieves through the algae-thick pond?

Awkward, that’s what we were. Our faces

unlike each other and big on the water.

The spring it went blind the dog followed

us everywhere, it lingered quiet

in the shallows of the shallow pond.

It moved us, remember? How we heard

sometimes what it heard: its own porous life

opening, or the tadpoles stirring, blind also

Index of What We Found (Stepsister Reprise)

Shade inside shade

Three bite marks (between us)

Camellias (fallen) among the camellias

Complex formations of mould

in the compost

Our own adolescent breasts

Laundry (the neighbour’s)

Underwear (lace) presumed your mother’s

Honeyeaters (living)

Honeyeater (dead)

Honeyeater pulled up by the dog

where we’d buried it

A strand of my hair

Several empty cicadas

Your dog once

standing by the lavender

hearing us

Photo of my parents (their intimacy

troubled us) dated 1996

The dog again (dead)

by the lavender (redolent)

My father, putting on his right leg

Grace Roodenrys

Grace (she/her) writes poetry and criticism on Gadigal land. She recently completed a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Sydney, where she received the University Medal for her Honours thesis on contemporary ecopoetics. Her 41 work has been published in the anthology Ghost Cities: New Writing From Western Sydney, and The Writing Zone Western Sydney's digital chapbook, Patient Zero.

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