I am outside your window, apologising. Holy as the bird that flies repeatedly into her own reflection. In the white room of lizards we learn to keep the flood away. To tend to the tomatoes, the ferns. To hold each other without desperation, even as the rain came down. How not to be faithless. Neither of us blameless, leaving such room for loss. A clear day: spoon tapped to the rim of a water glass, clean as a vowel. The cicadas begin their shower of singing. All this new thinking is about grief. Like a story that begins and ends ever in betrayal. Like the pull of a lie, white as a line. Those many dawns. The crack of pink against our skulls. The days we drifted neither toward nor away from one another. Old stillness. Sky marbled to morning. But summer is for such things, a bit of calm, a bit of pleasure.
Who could have guessed I would be the one to give in to such recklessness?
And how I gave in to the stone on stone, white on white, neatness of obliteration. The body retains such little memory—
Mindy Gill's poems have appeared in Australian Poetry Journal, Hecate, Island Magazine, and Award Winning Australian Writing. In 2017 her work received awards from the Tom Collins Poetry Prize, the Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship, and the Queensland Premier's Young Writer's and Publisher's Award. She is Peril Magazine's Editor-in-Chief.