Choosing
Earring swishing fell from favour
when the big fake ear vaginas started to get stretched
in all good ears round town a whole damn generation missing
the sensation of throwing long strands
of hair around like air–styles
the light pull felt across your skull skin
our real earrings quiet talismans
the way we would take them off when the time came
when night wore down and the hard core remained
stoned drunk drug-fucked and
as quiet as my breath
in the space below your nose
I’d place them so gently in the palm of the chosen
sex object you would close that fist and
smugly everyone would
smile
The come down
completely reveling in sloth the Sunday
nummy num nums all that’s on your mind
nothing complicated hanging like a string
from last night’s hem it all went off
a treat the band the glam the we are
family that never fails to bring down a house
the anthems binding us like eggs or now in the
globo-vego I guess the pumpkin slurry substitute
that slips in all the crevices and keeps us all
moist that and the forty years of hormones
face cream botox when you can get it plus the
diet of a milk-fed veal calf if they lived on coffee-flavoured milk
and for tea oh it is soup for sure it is so important
to hydrate I’m plumping up the cells at 55
I can buy an arse
to match the face
Conglomerated Sorrow
I found the bags left over from when you still dealt drugs hidden up the back
of our old shed it’s been there for all our wars just behind the little Queen cat
her sat up like an ornament inside the thick gloss paint of the 1950’s cabinetry
fat with the black fine dust our suburb tries to hide in the up and coming
world of houses we hold all our sins in sheds impacted as back teeth
love silted in conglomerated sorrow what never came to pass
our life as a dung heap I had the windows fixed I had the men come in to sort
to drag us into light I found your Lithium each one told me stories I had not
heard you whistle and I come back up the days on disc on film
on fire is where it needs to be the nothing something nowhere files
of all the worlds you were with me
and bulbul means heart
songbirds woke me
this morning absent the alarm
no wonder I forget things
I look down
into a clothes morass
see my brain pill
nestling there
a small synaptic fowl
doing not much good
to torn pyjama pants
all of us who take them
wonder
why make a pill so small to treat
the loss of feeling in your hands
sometimes the skull
is a bone cup
holding words
on paper slips
my big dumb hands go diving
in Awabakal
bulbul means heart
Kerri Shying is a poet and sculptor of Chinese and Wiradjuri family. Her book of poems sing out when you want me was published in 2018 by Cerberus Press (Flying Island Books—ASM) as a bilingual Pocketbook (delighting her family). She is currently at work on a chapbook for Puncher and Wattmann’s Slow Loris imprint.
Kerri has been published in Cordite, Snap Journal, and shortlisted in the Helen Anne Bell Prize and the Noel Rowe Prize in 2017 for the manuscript Know Your Country. She was grateful for the support of the NSW Writers Centre in 2017 while writing these poems, and the mentoring of Kit Kelen. She is disabled by a degenerative disease and lives in Newcastle, where she facilitates a group for other writers with disability, and tends garden with her famous dog Max.