My future love, sometimes everything
feels like it’s opening, and then it’s
shutting. Breathing into the house
so it knows me. Making protecting
circles out of string.
My friends, come over and pick
olives from the tree.
Let’s make this
the most exciting day.
We’ll remember
my heart as a T-shirt
ripping under the arms.
Ellen van Neerven is Mununjali from the Yugambeh language group in South East Queensland on her mother's side. Her award-winning collection of short stories, Heat and Light, was published by UQP in 2014, and a critically acclaimed poetry collection, Comfort Food (UQP, 2016), followed.