“There are impressions of me everywhere, traces of pentimenti across the canvas of my life and the life of the world that will remain once I’m gone. As the goanna leaves claw prints or broken sticks or trampled grass for the tracker to follow, parts of me are scattered in my wake – or thrown forward in my path as a future itinerary develops…”

“Grandad felt through chord progressions / Riffs remembered, learnt, forgotten, learnt again / He gave that to me / A language / Easier / Then words / A respite / Somewhere to put the crunchy, sticky pain, hilarity and absurdity / Without making a mess…”

“Lip bit in orgasmic elevation / And I feel no hesitation / To seduce your heart out / With my eyes radiating heat / And pussy dripping warmth / My heart whole and beating…”

“Sofia Coppola could trample me in those powder blue shoes from Marie Antoinette / And make my day / She’s the auteur architect of the gilded cage…”

“Wrapped in spider silk / Bathed in river water / Licked with flame / Our two threads encircled each other / In motions parallel…”

“Between my teeth I held that string, sucking on it on the bus, rolling it against my peeling lips and feeling at its fraying cotton edge with my tongue. At work, I waited for someone to point it out, to ask about the material growing from inside me, or at the very least try to pull it from my face like my mother used to do with the sleep in my eyes, but no one even glanced its way…”

“Crumpled white shapes bobbed at waist height just past the verandah — the glowing heads of wild iris, their spiked bodies dark and rustling underneath. Standing among them was Sal, her hands held out so that the flowers head-butted and kissed her knuckles and wrists, and Jo couldn’t have said why but from then on she trusted Sal, and started looking at her straight on instead of sideways…”

“I opt-out of the binary & the boldness shivers dusk, how cold berates a child. / how a lightning stammers in the hands of a cop, / learning to quench his flame on an effeminate child…”

“they will take their offerings to Ma Cho Po and pray for our journey / for the abundance that awaits us / beyond the plantations and indenture / the coolies’ debt / No Dogs or Chinese…”

“That evening, sitting in the car, / your cheeks wet with saltwater tides pushing / from your moonlit eyes, / you carry the vulnerability of crustaceans…”

“And / it's barely perceptible when / you do move: a small pebble / cast from the boat, and then / another and another; the / tentative ripples stay close…”

“I am crowd surfing / A congregation of queers all with their hands up to support me…”

“This way, this way / you find nothing else said / but drink a late brew tea / on the fibro shack porch…”

“Salt surrounds / Our bodies / We drink / The brine…”

“I snuck a jar of your lemon pickles to Germany in my luggage. I savoured every last piece, every last drop. Boju, I think I have magic too; I stuffed our whole home into a jar…”

“wildflowers, sunburnt, smouldering, little / petals of wanting, murmurs / tickle my ear…”

“The sea disappears into itself. / We hold onto nothing, not even / the day’s warm breeze, white gulls returning / to the flat tide, the sun that fades slowly…”

“today you are blobfish ~ paranoid anchovy ~ rusting wreck ~ but even bleached and brittle skeletons of coral ~ have been known to regrow afresh ~ after a nuclear blast…”

“Whilst you glide away / from the ruins with your fledgling brood towards / new horizons, the last laugh’s on them. They— / with their strange little kinks, slurping on your saliva, / calling it the caviar of the east…”

“now / in this scrap yard / a part of my chassis / is a safe place / for pink anemone / to climb…”