Your plumes are as black as the dresses and jackets we wear at the edges of burial plots. I’ve read stories of the storms you portend; how you are a cipher to an inch of rain. For weeks, I’ve watched you plane the sky’s bayberry vellum, seen falling light transpose your silhouettes into a straight-cut … Continue reading
Two halters of rope around your neck, and two bodies jammed hard against your sides, is all it takes to hold you while he slips his blade beneath your eye. You hear the wet slide and suck as he scoops the eye out. He does the other, they roll together in the dirt. Does it … Continue reading
My father knew stone. He’d sit cross-legged at the hearth, felt cloth on knee, bent over with hammerstone, wooden punch, and bone tine, knapping at flint or chert, knapping it to knife point, sickle blade, arrowhead. I’d watch the stone give way beneath his deft blows: fine flakes splintering from face or rim. The curved … Continue reading
It’s dusk, and I’m listening to an old Indian devotional, the woman’s voice is a coil of plum honey. As the sun slips down the empty western sky, the tiles of houses are silvered in light. At some angles the sun is forked by newly budded branches. I’ve stared too long at its gold-lash pinwheel, … Continue reading
Maybe she’s made a shelter from mulga branches and spinifex out on the plains somewhere. I imagine her walking from the west in grey light, barefooted, a walking stick in her right hand, a small lyre dangling at her waist. She must arrive as the clouds in the east begin to roil with the day’s … Continue reading
Dimitra Harvey has a Bachelor of Performance Studies from Theatre Nepean – University of Western Sydney, and a Master of Letters in Creative Writing from the University of Sydney. Her poetry has been published in Meanjin, Southerly, Mascara, and Cordite; her poetry has also appeared in Australian Poetry’s Members Anthology Metabolism, the 2013 Jean Cecily … Continue reading
Poem and Dish 