Poems by Liana Joy Christensen
|
South Beach Persephone
The stones are mute before the endless summer ends memory stays sedimentary You play on the shoreline accreting and crumbling carbon and sunshine Until that day igneous earth splits and you are seized by deep time and drawn into a fractal dark where ‘I’s’ unbecome in the echoes and whispers of chthonic space Summon the lunar will to stillness Navigate by sonar, and listen. Listen, faint at first, then steady, a fetal heartbeat from this strange gestation dodecahedron, dodecahedron The stones are speaking Reach out and touch each aril The hard nubs gleam, taut with blood tugging at the mythos Slowly you take them on your tongue One by one Hiss the aeolian harp unplucked, strings grow slack, wood warps those of us left to occupy the faded glory of this low rent apartment feeling small in such a high ceilinged space we shiver suspicion of the wind that once howled through aureate orations in this reverse alchemy gold dissolves, tin takes its place in our ears our gaze turns away and unbidden our hands sign avert to baroque and powerful ghosts whose mouths spill pearls and serpents courting disaster we trust instead the cheap portent of fox tells all so we need not see the rust smeared basins that once flowed with oracles we stiffen our resolve, brush off the dust that sifts down from crumbling plaster safer by far to placate the small gods of shabby chicanery drown our dreams in entertainment death streaming graffiti clichés poetry has left the building |
Liana Joy Christensen is a poet and writer based in Fremantle. Her poems have been published in journals and anthologies internationally, including--Prosopisia, Lemuria, Organisation and the Environment, Cicada; and nationally, including--PAN, Unusual Work, Earthly Matters, Plumwood Mountain. She has twice been a guest of the Perth Spring Poetry Festival. She was selected as an Australian Poetry Centre Café Poet and won the Peter Cowan’s Patron’s Prize for Poetry. For seven years she was the MC of Voicebox, Western Australia’s longest running poetry event. Highlights to date include:
|
