after Kaitlin Wadley
it is easier to want
after nightfall: being
of your being born
in blood spill, shedding
all that light. what
blueprint sits unfinished
in you—your
body the wound
between object and eye, architecture of your
brain built unforgiving, brimful
with memory
of those seen but unseeing. the space
you fill and the space that fills you
is a muscled expanse, and so little
of the universe is empty.
you can’t cut deep
enough to hit bone, but
skin is its own story: inter—
soul into body is an act of
violence and I will not forget
to bleed. in your godhood you
dis
mantle and
re-
member
what comes back, what
sleeps under stone until the mourning
cloak is lifted, what excavated absence
opens its eyes in the dark and stirs
against your limning hands.
Shastra Deo was born in Fiji, raised in Melbourne, and lives in Brisbane. Her work deals with the intersection of trauma, memory, and selfhood, with a particular focus on corporeality and embodiment. Her first book, The Agonist (UQP 2017), won the 2016 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize.