Big Bridge #9

Poets of Australia

 

Luke Beesley

Fellini's Roma

She has a big bottom. Her nerve curls away like a coy bishop.
Kids run up and down the beach like Romans in the subway.
She keeps peering round the corner breathing butterflies like light snow.

Light snow tickles our ankles and the rumour is there are orgasms. Here the women are
sensitive and lucky.

Oh? Who's that? The fabric of his new suit sits on him like the rare dark of a city blackout.
Don't let him in. Virgin.

She has breasts and they're giddy and religious and move like the sun hitting a rippled sea.
Basilica.

Or let's take tourism for example. The tigers and other striped cats brushing the bell towers
and instamatics. Three sixty degrees of complete capture. Air-brushed landscapes, a
pantomime of new politics. Would you like to see? I have them in a shinny book.

For my next dance, I'm going to lick a lady.
You're not!
Alright then.

He clapped through the whole performance. I was told later. I was sitting beside him.
You'd think I would have noticed.

Sing Trotta Cavallino!

Three men with long noses bop and bend like bird bath toys. The sun is setting and we all
seem to know it in our hearts. Is your bra blue? She answered it over and over and towards
the stewardess, who was taking cellulite prints from gullible patrons. Beautiful really. She'd
blow them up and use them for spider bait or fruit pattern education.

Kiss me for a day awkwardly like the shadow of two trees. Or a naked alphabet.
The capital A.

Tractors and dirt twirlers, earth ticklers (as shadows they're ribbons and bows). Dead
frescoes naked and helpless in complete stillness. Steps and crowds holding hands for a
ceremony, for two centuries. Cracks white and thick. Medical light. Skin dark across pale
surprise. Closed in on us like the soft skin of a new nest or the threat of pick pockets at the
Spanish Steps.

Open the machine let's fuck! Falling out of the elevators and carriages lime and hot pink and
feathers, out and stepping down the steps like the mist of hot ice. A boob. Another.
Women caught up in stares, birds, running after the cup of love. Beards. Bells. Hair. Hi.
And all the ancestors before that.


These beautiful nuns. Keeping love beneath. Quick priests. New surplice robes.

We hid the spaghetti in old Francis Bacon prints. She came out of the plaza running,
watermelon dripping from her face the balloons come in all colours!

Motorbikes and new numbers. Platelets moving through blood like snowflake or granules of
coffee, tea leaves. Armies. See. Unpicking the view. Inspecting the city by the vein. See.
Watch the filigree.



Q

Listen to the cut
of a sharp pencil
on a rectangle

The cups on the sill--
darken inside themselves

A moth falling asleep
in an old jacket pocket.

You unfold a velvet necklet
and throw it on a wall …

                                        q

taking turns we made p i q u a n t--
something lost, just listening.



Luke Beesley was born in Brisbane and has travelled widely, living in London, Montreal and Tokyo. At 28 he is a young and emerging writer of poetry and short fiction, and his work has been published in major journals and Australian newspapers including The Australian, The Australian Book Review, Southerly & The Canberra Times. In 2002 he wrote (and then read) a live poem to video collage, which was witnessed via OHT projection at the Brisbane Writers Festival. He has also read at the Australian Poetry Festival in Sydney and the previous three Qld Poetry Festivals. He was recently awarded an Arts Queensland major grant to complete his first book-length manuscript of poetry. He is currently living in Brisbane, Australia.

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