The dog barks and it's like both of us
being simultaneously abused.
The sound is an avalanche
then one stone
obsessively –
the short hand of the clock
marking the long monotony
of the day.
The dog is the clock. I hear her
pacing the room,
the awful circumference
of her hands.
The day passes like this. Her barking
detonating the hours
both of us turn
black and then blue again.
Jenny Pollak has been a visual artist for most of her life. In 2012 she began writing poetry, coming third in the ACU Prize for Poetry in 2013. In 2016 she won the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize and in 2018 published the collaborative book length poem Shadowplay with the UK poet Philip Gross, Flarestack Poets (UK).