Featured in
- Published 20240206
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-92-4
- Extent: 203pp
- Paperback, ePub, PDF, Kindle compatible
The first roll I developed,
with its saturated drought-skin
landscapes, spliced
my hometown into a sepia
I could almost swallow.
Five sheep and a fence line –
overexposed spinifex –
Dad’s face in a motorbike mirror –
before. I had been starving,
and the ritual stuck.
Roll by roll. Grain by grain.
Sometimes, when I’m tired
of my own eyes,
I slip the lens cap into my pocket,
its hard little circle
pressing into my hip
as I walk this big soft circle earth
incompletely.
I need to shear my experience of everything
but its texture. Cauterise the moment.
The cattle grate –
the kangaroos –
the manic flick of crickets
in the waterless tank.
History is a heavy handful
and a sore neck, but it
is safer than memory.
You don’t see their little fried bodies.
Only the jump.
Share article
About the author
Alisha Brown
Alisha Brown is a poet and traveller born on Kamilaroi land. She won the 2022 Joyce Parkes Women’s Writing Prize and placed second in...
More from this edition
The fall of the madmen
Non-fictionThe problem with a fear-based workplace – and indeed world – is that caution and compliance are not compatible with creativity. Creativity searches for the things that have never been done before, on which, by definition, there is as yet no data. Scott Nowell argues that the obsession with data has made us lose faith in our own instincts, so it’s not surprising that creativity is not valued the way it once was. And the source of creativity has shifted to the consumers themselves.
Things come together
Poetry After a photo by Annie Leibovitz of Johnny Cash with his grandson Joseph, Rosanne Cash and June Carter Cash, Hiltons, Virginia, 2001 It only takes...
Lines of beauty
In ConversationI studied printmaking because in the mid-’90s there wasn’t so much exciting painting happening in QCA studios, but also because I really wanted to learn new processes for my undergrad and, like most artists, I’d always painted. Painting had fallen out of fashion, and everyone was making installation, then photography and film – the new digital world reigned supreme for a decade. Now it’s all about painting.