for Sarah

 

You forget about it, sometimes.

The open-cut of this place, how each day

            feels as sticky and measured as cough syrup.

A curly child dips from her mother's black sleeve

like a teabag.

You forget the metallic tang

of vanilla deodorant and chalk dust, the open cut

            of adolescence.

            Outside the Sports Club

blue backpacks bob and murmur

and station wagons herringbone the one-way streets.

            You forget, sometimes,

writing hours of lamplit letters,

as if you could pin yourself against them.

The classroom doors swollen under the humidity of hormones.

Chewing  brittle fingernails,

            skipped lunches.

The buses grunt towards a funeral parlour

             that offers NRL-themed coffins,

biodegradable and carbon-neutral.

You learn to forget the things

that jostle and bruise inside blue backpacks

            and are never unbattered again.

Students working with Australian poet Fiona Wright explored Red Room Education's learning resource, The Cabinet of Lost and Found, which centres around writing an object or talisman poem. Bankstown Girls' also partnered creatively with students from Sunning Hill School and Pymble Ladies' College. The students' works were collected into a small anthology and a selection of these were read aloud at a collaborative presentation at Sunning Hill School on Monday 13th December.