from BARDO

The stars are in our belly; the Milky Way our umbilicus.

Is it a consolation that the stuff of which we’re made

is star-stuff too?


– That wherever you go you can never fully disappear –

dispersal only: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen.


Tree, rain, coal, glow-worm, horse, gnat, rock.


Roselle Angwin

Wednesday 2 March 2011

She wonders if she's losing it: Lyn Browne

Today's poet from the Confluence anthology is Lyn Browne. Lyn is a peripatetic poet: half the year in England and half in Australia. In all the years I've known Lyn I've never known her less than upbeat; and she has a wicked sense of humour, too. Both these things keep her poetry buoyant, though there is always an edge, a little ripple of darkness, in what she writes. She's not afraid to tackle the most difficult of subjects, either. A keynote is the spareness of her work. Lyn's had a number of successes, too, in the short story world.

Choosing a Swimsuit

You can order stick-on nipples,
did you know?
She flips a page of silicone smiles.
In early teens she got the same effect
from stuffing in her socks.

She grins.  They did a neat job.
She won’t have rebuild surgery though.

She's been outside to mow the grass
and sliced the cable,
luckily the switch tripped,
but the electrics in the garage failed,
they found the freezer swimming.

She wonders if she's losing it.
It would be good to float, she says.

Her teenage son with eyebrow clips,
a chip on his shoulder, wanders in.
She beams at him and with a ballpoint,
rings a swimsuit,
starts shading in.


Lyn Browne

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