Kirk Marshall

Kirk Marshall is the Brisbane-born(e), Melbourne-based author of “A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953”, a 2007 Aurealis Award-nominated full-colour illustrated graphic novelette. He holds a Bachelor of Creative Industries (Creative Writing), with Distinction from the Queensland University of Technology, and a first-class Honours degree in Professional Writing from Deakin University. He has written for more than fifty publications, both in Australia and overseas, including “Going Down Swinging”, “Voiceworks”, “Word Riot” (U.S.A.) and “3:AM Magazine”. As of 2009, he is the editor of “Red Leaves”, Australia’s first (and only) English-language / Japanese bi-lingual literary journal (http://www.myspace.com/redleaveskoyo). His debut short-story collection, “Carnivalesque, And: Other Stories”, will be published by Black Rider Press in 2010.

 

 

Suite of Haiku

Electricity:
a strobing head, a cut lip
My blood gloves his fist.
 
They hug me once as
pillows of breath are wrestled
from my lungs: farewell.
 
Cities capture light
and reflect them back on streets
slick with midnight rain.
 
Through the winter he
watches from his register:
I greet him for smokes.
 
Moon suspended as
she smiles into her scarf and
replaces her phone.
 
Wolves whine at my door –
On the beach, they chase waves and
devour turtle eggs.
 
I write, knowing a
succession of dead poets
expect something grand.
 
He is heartbroken.
She is not. She is waiting.
He is years behind.
 
She lies amidst reeds:
her nude back is bruised where the
ladybirds collect.
 
Fog hugs the king’s legs
as he forges through bracken:
a fox turns to watch.