Anna Ryan-Punch

Anna Ryan-Punch is a Melbourne poet and reviewer. Her poetry has been published in Westerly, The Age, Quadrant, Island, Overland, Verandah and Wet Ink.

 

 

 

With a fingernail

I carved a dry gourd.

Rattling my history

like a bag of tears,

I poured curling puddles

into dusty earth.

I poked their painful edges

broken crusts of memory.

With a toe, extended,

I scraped out a cactus.

Scoring my passions,

multiple as cabbage moths,

millipedes, crickets and

other unwanted plural creatures.

With a calloused thumb,

I decided they were not

objects of beauty or use.

I crushed their stink bodies,

left them to dry

into brittle filings, and

did not stay to see them

blow away in soft flight.

 

 

 

Gales increasing on hard rubbish night.

Brown Christmas trees

blow up the road, up the footpath

festive tumbleweeds.

Their evergreen didn’t last long this year

barely curled out 12 days

before they were dragged to the roadside.

Brittle needles crisp in smoky heat.

The television calls to resolution-makers:

dieters, quitters and exercisers.

New sneakers stink with good intentions

but newsreaders warn against exercising outdoors.

This is small news for homes in the suburbs

where all flames are out of sight.

Parched clay cracks around foundations

jagged gaps in the bathroom wall reopen.

Dead Christmas trees drift back downhill.

We can look at the sun without squinting

but hardly notice the smoke.