I came home after a long long time and in the hallway I bumped into a seventeen year old girl. I said ‘it’s me’ but she shook her head like there was water in her ears and salt in her eyes. I said ‘it’s okay’ but she looked at me blankly. I said ‘it won’t kill you’ but she hurried past and turned that dark corner. In the room I grew up in I opened a wardrobe and an old friend fell out, the yearbook photos where we sat side by side staring the camera down. Arrogant and eagle-eyed. That year it rained and I wore his jacket until it smelt like him and me and his hair and my smile

Alchemy by Meggie272, literature

Literature

Alchemy

I often think I left half of me in my mother’s cupboard; as a child I would inch open the ill-fitting white-peeling wood and look at small dusty bottles of coriander, vanilla extract, cardamom, bi-carb, rosewater, dye. I believe I thought of it as all the potential of life itself trapped within sticky- lidded glass. An apothecary, profound and intricate and strange. I was so excited by the one that seemed to be a vial of blood, at the thought of dropping it and staining the floorboards red. I wanted to put all of it in one of our heavy saucepans with the handle Dad made of old piping and boil it till it stung my eyes, till some gr

Palmleaf by Meggie272, literature

Literature

Palmleaf

There have always been hard, bright prophets their words filling our mouths like the tipping of sunlight and wine. There have always been Christs placing two fingers under our chins and smiling, blinking dust from kind and distant eyes. We have always asked questions of the sky. Someone has always tipped our faces up, and said: ‘Look – look. There it is.’ This is what we find.

Little by Meggie272, literature

Literature

Little

His parents were shouting, and hated each other, flush-jawed and aching across the cheap table, the cheap hot rash of kitchen air all filled with meat and 3 veg and everything else, so the boy went outside, where it was a desolate and bitter July, with the paddock grasses of frost-slick knives; went outside, sat down, drew his knees up to his chest like a foetus held loose in the black coiling womb of sky. A mad neighbour shouted – a cow lowed, a soft sad call. He stayed sitting for a while kept small kept his blood cool until he'd lined his lungs with winter, bright.

Knitted by Meggie272, literature

Literature

Knitted

The men, they come into my home loudly strung with all night’s stars, all beer-glint, all roughly-bright; they bring their heavy boots, their boots and their heavy mud. Their brassy, mirthful talk; harvests and ale and golden things. I have been in here alone, excepting the dogs in their slumber, husband, husband’s brother, and I have been spinning. And spinning, and spinning; spinning mice, and men, and fates, and coarse grey wool. You clap each other’s backs, the centre of your beings in the largeness of your hands. You bring the cold night’s mud on to my floor. I am the centre of your beings, men, I link you.

Reel by Meggie272, literature

Perth by Meggie272, literature

Literature

Perth

In Western Australia, it’s likely that we have no prophets, we have no damned, there’s probably no heaven to be found – only this dry and aching span, roads laid down on burnt red dirt like tar-crossed, humming brands. Only construction sites laid open. You know, this city, it doesn’t grow, it doesn’t burn, it only stands. It is all, and endlessly, and only, the slam of car doors being shut, the tradie’s first cigarette, the mother’s harassed reply, the toddler’s sticky grasping hand, the tight and cerulean sky. The freeway, the peeling tunnel, the sloping oases of white sand.

Fleeting by Meggie272, literature

Tunnel by Meggie272, literature

Literature

Tunnel

In several tiny ways I put my head on the block: his head is heavy, thin limbs drooped with sleep, and I don’t move away like I should – there is a bright, beating second of contact, then the train jolts him awake newly born and blinking. This is one. Tired, heart-dazed, amongst all the stars of the city spinning in all their roaring dark, I readjust so that our shoulders do not touch.

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