Alison J Barton
April 2, 2025 / mascara / 0 Comments
Alison J Barton is a Wiradjuri poet based in Melbourne. Themes of race relations, Aboriginal-Australian history, colonisation, gender and psychoanalytic theory are central to her poetry. She was the inaugural winner of the Cambridge University First Nations Writer-in-Residence Fellowship and received a Varuna Mascara Residency. Her debut collection, Not Telling is published by Puncher and Wattmann. www.alisonjbarton.com / Instagram @alison_j_barton
Mirror
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my mother had too much self to give |
| she was a bear that couldn’t walk itself |
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her residue a sulking weight we had to trail |
| I think back now wondering who could see it |
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her grief hauled from under the volume of her |
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| we ended up the way we knew |
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both absent |
| she, the citation |
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I, the mirror |
| I was called precious |
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morphed into hate and rage |
| I do and do not forgive her, |
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I remember my reflection |
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| my life was an infancy of sound-gathering |
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like an instrument archiving its vibrations |
| I stored language for us both |
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used it to fill in her gaps |
| made myself sick and soft |
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for what she carried, someone had to |
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we experienced the storm together, tremors too |
| she arranged the wreck |
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the way I had to pay |
| the shape of me |
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indebted monster |
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at the door, she would stand hoping it might open |
| night would creep in and we wouldn’t talk |
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affection was over |
| I worried on what had been committed |
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abandoning her in the light |
| words formed and stuck to the back of my throat |
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when I measured her |
| I got an answer to a question I couldn’t comprehend, |
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two troubled lives holding their wounds very differently |
| both crashing into the heart of things |
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| some are lost forever learning to speak |
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some have voices that shake walls, |
| fill quiet rooms |
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but a translation, solitude |
| was my way of imagining inaudibly |
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we desecrated together |
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we needed to finish like this |
| with an aching acid alcohol chest |
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marched to an absolute equation |
| the solution distorted then dawning |
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on her trauma stage |
| I am emptying my mother now |
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#Issue 30
Alison J Barton is a Wiradjuri poet based in Melbourne. Themes of race relations, Aboriginal-Australian history, colonisation, gender and psychoanalytic theory are central to her poetry. She was the inaugural winner of the Cambridge University First Nations Writer-in-Residence Fellowship and received a Varuna Mascara Residency. Her debut collection, Not Telling is published by Puncher and Wattmann. www.alisonjbarton.com / Instagram @alison_j_barton