What’s my pitch? Well … um … yes. Steep. Like an Edwardian iron roof and as you slip down, the extruding nails rip at your jeans, twist you sideways send you over the gutter sprawling into the frothy hydrangeas below, where the dead wood pokey bits have another go. Or the geography of me, the tipped-out luggage over the bed. Why did I bring those three jumpers and more undies and socks than there are fucking days when what I really needed was handkerchiefs? It’s more like being a northern suburbs yokie seeing the ocean for the first time, running into the cold shock of it the salt the cold the cold the salt the fright of the seaweed round your ankle and the beetroot-faced kid on a tyre floats by smiling because he’s pissed in the water and nobody knows. Laid out in the tingling sun on the too-short towel, it’s the perilous anonymity of it all, the burning toes the dried sand sticking in between words. Influences? Well … um … yes. Detectives. All smoky, eating Mum’s curried rabbit as they staked out our commission house and asking politely for more, my aunty doing Friday night rosary in an eastern country town her prayers in an unwritten language floating like Yeats rhyming sobbing to the clap of a football coming down. The possum in the heating cupboard by the hot water tank the deep mercy in those sienna eyes wanting nothing but the peace of care as I searched for a phrase missing since yesterday. All the remnants adrift in the collage of my making the fall-down-get-up spinning line of proof that the hemispheres collide on purpose, the breathy syllable finding place to wander the stalls of passage. And then, my lungs heaving centuries over the wall at Lucca, lifting dragging heavy luggage cases the plague-dead remittal of travel, and a rasping voice from the tunnel’s echo, who’s going to read it anyway?
James Walton is published in many anthologies, journals, and newspapers. He is the author of five widely acclaimed collections of poetry. The Leviathan’s Apprentice, Walking Through Fences, Unstill Mosaics, Abandoned Soliloquies, and Snail Mail Cursive. He has been shortlisted for the ACU National Poetry Prize, the MPU International Poetry Prize, The James Tate Prize, and the Ada Cambridge Prize and is a winner of the Raw Art Review Chapbook prize. He was nominated for The Best of the Net 2019, and again for 25/26, and is a Pushcart Prize 2021/22/23/24 nominee. He was a librarian, a cattle breeder, and mostly a public sector union official. He began writing creatively as an older person at the age of 60. He is also the author of short stories and flash fiction published in Meanjin, Overland, Westerly, and a number of overseas journals.