Featured in

  • Published 20230502
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-83-2
  • Extent: 264pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

Here are some other stories. I made my home at the outskirts of the temple complex, out of the way of the priests, but sitting where pilgrims could see me as they approached, a tin cup to catch coins, my body a warning and a promise. Or, I appeared unremarkable at my birth, until my bones began to grow in an impetuous fashion, torso clenching into a fist, pressing my heart and lungs into a space too small. Or, I survived, but in a remote cave, smudged with a mystical bitterness, visited by other outcasts, whose hands reached out to touch my hunched back for prophecy or consolation. Or maybe I was never born, the prenatal test results causing a look of concern on the doctor’s face which my mother couldn’t resist falling into. I have to tell you these things that never happened – or what happened to others like me, and will happen again – before I can think of what did. For too long, I have felt alone in this body. The past, an inaccessible crypt. The future, a mirage.

There are many ways to carry a story. My father smothered his stories with bravado. Here he is, laughing at the sea drenching him on the deck. There he is, shoving money at the doctor to cure his dying mother. Another time, his chest deflated when the nurse reached for the pink blanket. His survival was never one step at a time. It was the leap, the stumble, the fall. Another form of inheritance. When my home was a hospital for too many nights, he left the visits to mother. I felt her walk the corridor towards me. She said, you know your father. I knew him. His struggle to tell another story of scarred shame.

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

Is poetry disabled?

In poetry’s capacity to self-define, to reject conventionality, to be in a constant state of flux and to hold the contradictory together in its granularity, it subverts formal systems of designation time and again. Poetry then avoids simple diagnosis, at least pre-emptively.

More from this edition

Back to the red earth

FictionBefore she opens her eyes, she knows with the very same certainty that she is of this land that Juanjo, her lover and the father of her five guris, isn’t going to be asleep by her side. But she could for once be wrong. So, she stretches out her arm and feels around. Instead, her fingertips touch his perfectly tucked-­in bedsheet. His side of the bed is vacant like the rows of this year’s failed crop.

Antecedent

PoetryBetween one end of the gap and the other the gravity of our gaze can but scratch like banksias  at your fingertips before starlight splits the present  across his teeth into pearl and lime stanzas.

The age of discovery

In ConversationPrior to Homo sapiens, populations might have just moved on or gone extinct in the face of environmental risks, whereas with Homo sapiens we were able to disperse widely across the world despite great ecological challenges. The underlying reason for that may be rooted in our social relations, our high level of co-operation – we don’t necessarily see that with earlier human species.

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.