Poems by Ann Vickery

un4seen Fxs
 
Typographical err Or makes me live you more
              peach day; all the fruitiest
                            salad days of my unastounding youth
fresh firm to ouch, sluice running rivulets
              down my hum-dingers
leaves of green a sticky miss. Wilt. Upturned facia to cuss,
my inner coast dealings on display,
                                          here they are 4 all 2 cc. Can I
whistle fluent profanities to you if my mood autocorrects
song to joy always as
                            sing tomboy
                            and says you are a hut?
Moonlight soon after by compost Lord pig’s van,
my blind blissful germ and his bland loaves. Fly this motion
              through a sow’s and years. Take a sissy stile
              from Marlena, garbage revival &
              tolled mine leaven in blue angle. Am I four ever tagged
              to you displeasing Parisienne evening? Tear open the pain
and butter freely while warm. Home-maid is best
for service cleaning while you make light work of it.
             Love looks more and more like louvers
when you try to sms this ♥ and find only glasnost.
              Common ownership is now a closed window.
                            [txt] only tampering provokes sudden fonts:
                                          I am wooden blocked.

 
A Poem Like Alice
 
Imagine: the daughters of the daughters
of the good doctor left with
a wardrobe of lilaceous effects,
              all made to measure
but in American sizes. The lyric perhaps
              a little too roomy for those with
cultural cringe. Our intimacies still
              with side crack, or a sign that
says tragic follower, needs new home. I am
not the burning woman you speak of,
              I have not the burning heart, the burning cradle.
                                          Our red centres here,
                                          trademarked and trampled,
                                          have become transposed,
              plain targets for the secular. We are, as they say,
incessantly mall-eable.
 
              And yet passion is still sought
                            the need for sustenance, new grace
                                          beyond the over-imported,
                            boxed synthetic, summer lite.
You offer this tantalizingly, graven heiress.
While we yearn for that which lets
                            lyric be born more handsomely;
                                          the sorrow of things so intricately shipped,
                                          yet custom stalled.
 
             How do we fashion a form, skirt such glamour,
                            thrust the speculum southward
                                          looking for progeniture
                            if “alice ordered me to be made”?

Wall-mount Malady in Western Vic.
 
Love with spurs of an echidna,
its stretched skin adorning the wall
of a kiosk at Wyperfeld National Park.
I expect, on cue, Twin Peaks music
or Sherilyn Fenn sashaying through the door,
elasta-girl in a wrapped backwater brashness.
You know every part of the echidna’s skin
is sharp, even those soft-looking bits.
And its spurs do not poison, unlike the platypus,
all billable hours and flat pack fur-real.
Somewhere over Rainbow way, they know
it as monotreme “Maud”-lin. More often, though,
it’s just played as a folksy native duet
in an old new Australian bar with faux-timber walls and
a plyboard interior that passes for the heart, or at the very least,
a Rimbaudian log-lad. If asking for a map, you’ll get
the gold rustic sucker-punch they call poetic history
with optional Dream-weaver and a packet of Turf,
money on the fridge, pending Dransfield’s overdue return.
The black swan ceramic sits alongside the glaze
of the gas heater; the desk ladies shuffle past
with cups of overcooked tea and weekend scores
practicing pattern-book Cleckheaton and a cuddle
me grandmother aspic ambition for the Grand Final pick.
Readers Digest pack the shelves and the semi-arid
landscape heaves its way towards the border
like a poet laureate on an overripe reading tour
through the Beaujolais ekphrasis. Just like the promos said,
dust on the rose, dust on the divan, that one’s called Laura, coach.
And where is love in all of this? Bandied and splayed,
nose pointing south, dry-snouting the silverfish.
Overlooked memorabilia for those taking the Wimmera
trek through a Leyland brothers rewind, Mike and Mal dead Sea
Lake scrolling and nostalgia rust-thin as the
“Welcome to Japarit” ashtray fly-catching on the windowsill.

“un4seen Fxs” was previously published in Otoliths 22 (2011).