Mangrove Girls

Potato scallops from the takeaway that always smells like a camel station

but that my sisters and I can't get enough of.

Pimples show up on our faces because of it.

Tell Mum there was a price increase and that's what happened to the change.

Her smiling, keeping the peace.

Us, already dividing our chips between the five of us to our separate corners of the butchers paper  - careful not to cross over into each other's

chip Country.

I'm there. I'm here. Old time, and new.

I'm still just a little brown girl from the mangroves of north Brisbane,

trying to find her way back to a home she's never lived in.

I touch the brown sand there in Warra and ask my mum why my skin, like this sand,

is inbetween colours.

She tells me why, and says the particles and I have a sameness too,

but I feel closer to the neon-green seaworms navigating their way through the mud canals.

Looks so easy to do from up here.

They're not hidden people,

Like we were.

I watch my sisters and brother grow up here.

Scooter races, beach cleans and night walks dodging cane toads.

Grazed knees and bruised arms - some from the bitumen, but mostly from each other. 

Our scars keep us from forgetting where we've been and who we belong to - 

Warra and each other. 

Baawaa means older sister in my great grandmother's language:

our old-time

mother tongue.

Baawaa is also the word for backbone - strong for carrying little fellas.

I carried them on my hip when they were small.

Hid my pencils from them when they were growing.

Remind them to be respectful to Elders now they're big.

Have to tell Mum to take them to clever doctor man to get their ears checked cause they don't seem to be working.

Oh well.

Love them anyway.

I try to shelter and encourage my young ones,

watch those mangrove girls grow up.

The silver Sandgate ocean still glitters the outline of our faces long after they replace all the cement that holds our names - the expressionistic shapes

of mangrove girls.