After Fukushima
By Michelle Cahill
No tripping in aleatory light, no thesaurus
for radioactive dusk with incurable ciphers.
I was a ruck, a hinge when the world ends.
Not even the pang of the tattoo needle
on the page, desultory as a gammy rice field.
No empty Styrofoam riposte.
No token, no portal, no slot.
My zuihitsu… ask the one-way paramedics.
Float like a mask in a tsunami.
Self-reflect in acidic nuclear meadows
adrift with refrigerators, bicycles, terns
half-buried in sand, sloped Coca-Cola blazon.
All that remains, the running brush, a train
and a whisper in the machine, half-wilting.
No figures of speech—nothing to speak of.
Over three workshops, poet Michelle Cahill teamed up with Red Room Poetry to guide Year 7 students from Hornsby Girls' High School through selected poetry activities from the Vending Machine Poetry project. She introduced the participants to the ideas of exchange, expectation and production that are common in both vending machines and in writing poetry. By the end of the workshops, the students discovered a new, more playful perspective on poetry and creativity.