A foot floors the accelerator. Flowers
of flame blossom on the rocks below.
The voices of fame chorus praises:
Thelma and Louise become sky riders.
Even though the scales of justice were a
funeral pyre, their freedom ashes on a valley
floor, this propulsion of car through air
reveals the secrets of transfiguration:
minds as cold coruscations, eyes as fire.
Now their band of horses gallop
through the silica sky as their orbs flint
the heavens alight. Now these celestial
flares are gifts for poets, their words hot
blooms combusting the strictures of patriarchy.
Peter Mitchell is the author of the poetry chapbook, The Scarlet Moment (Picaro Press, 2009). Living in Bundjalung Country, Northern NSW, he writes poetry, short fiction, memoir and literary criticism. His poetry has been published in Eureka Street, Landscapes, Windfall: Australian Haiku, Blueppepper, and Eucalypt: A Tanka Journal, among other international and national online and print journals and anthologies. In 2014 he was awarded the Dorothy Hewett Flagship Fellowship for Poetry (Varuna Writer’s Centre) and is presently writing Fragments of the Lurgi: A Mosaic, on an Artist with Disability Grant (Australia Council).