Les Wicks
　

Someone Slipping Up

This isolated cottage is hectic
as mice, millipedes & termites are battling for supremacy.
Winter sun - coaxing in its last hours
my heart is beating like a sieve
on a hunched verandah.
The family are too far away.
Possums fighting on the roof at nightwords wasted,
turned to tin with sharpened points.

-previously published at Shampoo
　

Anne

I last saw him in John’s car
swatting demons from his hair (that
choice of a horror movie
was not a good idea) the marijuana
was a blessing.

Emails come in from Mexico she
almost died after the sex change operation
but still gardens a dry-climate peace with
fronds of fellow complexities, paints
out front of her gallery.

The art is a blaze, saw
this cascade on a website. Her
girlfriend is famous, not least
for those wings tattooed across her back.
Aloft, everyone, no decision.
That promise of cash & burn.
Our children playing in the scars.

-previously published at Jacket 40


Set Free

Beside water
I find a space, read again your letter.
A pregnant wattle leans over my shoulder.
We understand
that even light is captured.
Beside water
bishops decide to quit.
A teenager buries a knife in the coarse riverbed sand.
We go
& are blessed (in our ways)
irregardless of choice, pretension or wound.
Birds call out, but not to us.

-previously published at Cordite Poetry Review


Guide To

Perth needs a little more time
it’s kinda a pert &
under gantry is
constructing its H just
part of a broader growth-spurt the
energy of stones.

Tinplate ghosts, another people’s river
“workable” red timber
basic travel writing
comfortable shoes
worn on the head to protect from glare.
Our will, the surrender
be still, be tender.

Today is its wind.
I’m the Joe at Cottesloe, then light
Swanbourne indeed, Melon Hill, 360°
seems too many,
Ok be aloft - Kings Park is a launch pad
bind us tight against gravity
the dogs all know
their splash of tongues is anchor,
all is heaven scent.
This acclamation of signs
this muscular tidiness.

-previously published at foam:e