Karma
Indiscriminate rain and sunlight.
muted light, the room instantly
full of bodies —
the way they pull up your sleeves
and remove your shirt,
examining your arms and chest
as if you were a criminal
yet are still frightened
by what they discover.
when I was taken from the rooftop
and placed in the back of a police car,
it made sense.
I wouldn’t trust me to be left alone
with me —
I was barely awake
when you drove me home
and held my face in your hands,
forcing me to look into your eyes.
you traced my wrists and asked
what I regretted about
what I had done.
everything.
everything, except love.
Roadkill
The body shouldn’t have to answer
for the heart —
you could be one of them.
leave the house without your keys
and never look back.
a hunger, like panic,
that drives the walk through the park
towards the bridge
overlooking the freeway.
remembering when travelling home
one night, you saw the corpse of a fox
lying in the middle of the road,
torn into pieces
where the cars had driven over it —
its blood stained the gravel and tires
but was soon washed away
and forgotten.
the way the severed head and legs
were splayed
and the fur had been stripped away,
made it look almost human
at a distance —
and the knowledge that in an instant,
it could be.
Hatchling
An end is always waiting to greet you —
in the tree outside your window,
where you lay sick in bed,
there was a baby bird
separated from its nest,
bleeding and stumbling
after being attacked by a vulture.
helpless, you witnessed
the fragile creature
struggle to regain its footing.
and watched its tiny body
finally fall,
as it desperately tried to cling
to the branches.
Desolation Song
You never meant for me to find it. the crumpled paper with crudely written, largely illegible words, impaled on one of the barbed wire fences and blowing in the wind slightly. as if waiting. it had somehow freed itself from your body as it stopped moving and swayed. all black ink is red if you look closely. when the ink ran out, you ran a knife through the palm of your hand and let the blood pool on the table beside you. why was that? and why did you need to continue? that was when you wrote your only poem about yourself, watching from the window and seeing yourself walking slowly towards the gumtree at the back of the property. in the pocket of your jeans, a note scrawled in panic, to tell someone you love that you are leaving.
Robbie Coburn is a contemporary Australian poet. His young adult verse novel The Foal in the Wire will be published by Hachette Australia in May 2025 and his most recent poetry collection is Ghost Poetry (Upswell, 2024). He previously served as co-poetry editor of Verity La with Michele Seminara. Find more from Robbie at his website.