Hemiglossed
By Kathryn Reese
Published 9 December 2024
Dad sits, crushed panadol and formula milk gravity fed into his belly.
On tv: sourdough, a sear of steak, a dressing of diced peach, torn mint, fresh red chilli—
He dozes, won’t turn it off.
He’s fishing, line in a river, breath rasping, catching
like breeze in the cotton tree, shivering under sweat-drenched blankets—
once we sat by the oyster beds, silent for the stretch of hours it took a swallowtail
butterfly to drift from mangrove bank to the caravan park.
No-one asked to move on.
On tv: a length of sugarcane, grasped, twisted. Juice catches the sun. Remember
the soot, the hungry flame of cane season? The storm leaning over the range, heavy, dark,
the passionfruit vine leaning over the wooden fence? The ox heart planted there for iron.
The fence warped with damp and the weight of thriving.
One last drop of chalky milk descends through Dad’s tube. I push a syringe full of water.
On tv: they pound ginger and thyme to a paste with a pestle the same weight
as we use to crush Dad’s pills.
This is not so much about passionfruit, ginger and sugar cane fire as it is the fingerling bream caught on line washed up, wound around mangrove root, retrieved, untangled
and kept on its coke-bottle spool in the back corner of the shed—Dad won’t let go
of such things, allows only my hands to drag it back to use. This is about how long
it took, to learn to sit still with the driftwood, the cod-hole, the deepening disappearing.
I am waiting for breath the same way I wait for a tug on the line that is not the breeze
or the tide but a life, leaping and twisting in the sun.
Each year as part of Poetry Month, we run the 30in30 Writing Competition. Writers from across the continent are encouraged to enter a 3-line poem or excerpt to win a book by a contemporary Australian poet every day of the month. Three poets were selected from over 2,400 entries to develop their poem further with editorial support from Red Room Poetry staff, and paid publication of their poem. In 2024, the winners of the competition were Kathryn Reese, Natalia Figueroa Barroso and Bradley Bradley.
Kathryn won on two days of the month, and drew from both of her winning excerpts to craft this commissioned poem. Check out the prompts and poems that inspired her below.
Flip a coin. If it lands on heads, write a poem about hunger. If it lands on tails, write a poem about luck.
Lang Leav
#30in30 writing prompt
All of us have inherited something from our ancestors beyond materiality. Write about your inheritance(s)
Zainab Syed
#30in30 writing prompt
