The Long Dry
By Amanda Joy
Madness “hath builded her house in the high places of the city.”
— Guy Debord
Men are hanging themselves unaccompanied
by sound in the dark hours before the bottle shop opens
Rope snaking a branch of pepper tree
at the lodging house
Empty tenement. Dark windows bruised by sky
lighting rookeries of collapse and fire crumbling out
until the whole street is vacant
and mud caked
In ragged brown of summer verticordia I peed
near a midden of fleshy arils heaped at an anthill entrance
watched them drag seed deep instilling
acacia in dirt
Withering of certainty spits hisses
The swamps filling with drillholes guarded by adders
Air churned with a fierce screaming
warra! Warra.
Dumbbell of yield and sequence
Through years of discipline I learned containment
or vice versa as natural as speechlike
Upward spiral of spell
A nested equivalence this woundedness
Pinned fury petering in honeyeater as a falcon plucks
its way to the warm core, feathers wafting
down to soft eremophila
Sentences in the Bible begin with And God
As if starting was difficult and well populated
An excess of tangle and downcast
in need of name
The roof rats went quietly once
the python escaped to ceiling rafters of my father’s house
its coagulation of coils echoing shapes
of a nearby bogong moth