Between Fields of Guilt and Preservation

rooms are higher when you walk through a door as small as a hatch      a rabbit’s warren let the ceiling become a bone a field in smoking      sauna drops of rain like petalled plants i mix the floral tablecloth like ingredients in a bowl      i want to make something sweet

the pictures of flowers own the scent of fruit  

 

the wind drags water in lines      white birds fall down absorbed      hot feathers

my face in the mirror melts into my other face      when women die it is important

to remember to brush their limbs into our hair         

 

guilt can never be buried in fields      it needs to climb out of a door menarche at 11 o’clock      blood makes apples red when the clock strikes 16 it’s important to swoop down the middle      

of two fields      so we can make christmas pudding      in the shape of an egg

suet keeps us conciliatory      i leave you a coin resist making a wish   

 

we are animals      we will do anything to live beneath the sun      i need to turn the mat

upside down in the snow     to exert myself using a mattenklopper      trzepaczka to find

my dead father       growing out of the fields      he talks to me about how his day has been      i can hear people working with stone the milk rivers out       like wrinkles as fine

as electricity      holding hands with the saliva of clouds            

 

i look at my new house      it is so cramped the window is covered with a bookshelf      reading every book will make the glass look like air rarefied                                               i am

 

Ladle of Fantasy

i convinced myself i wanted to be a loving mother      but wishes are not desires

they are the tails of a snake      of thoughts my feelings sculpting how i want to perceive myself      the gulping and looping of fuel when poured out of a jerry can i don’t know

what i desire      is there such a thing as a full stop      or is it that we need to want the want is decorative      our aspiration for the enamel ceremony i don’t see anything kinetic until

my eyes are on it

 

god      a self-correcting word in a sentence      i tell him to remember he was also a child once      our torsos positioned upright like dominos it is not a child’s game     the moments of our lives flicked into a pile a deep-rooted grave the bandage around my head      the pain

in his chest      alleviating the hunger of bugs      enjoying my cellulite hurricane of our thighs     

 

my bag has been rummaged through      someone has desecrated it like a hooker’s body      

i want fear      i can’t make hope without it      i don’t know who i am willy wonka’s golden ticket      i will never take it but my mouth is a spa

 

facing my children’s weaknesses is fighting my neurotic self      i am not a good mother i bloat with lies they stick out of my body like pinocchio’s nose      bring me my father’s pliers my mother’s tweezers are finer the nutcracker but the kernel is not the wish      

it is the way i gift wrap the promise that i will find it      the bunion after a long journey weighed with seed

 

i eat pepita seeds      like squished olives  quinoa seeds with brown rice      i didn’t know

i had a spine that made skin      the bloodless peels wing out like the halves of a walnut

shell      because the importance of domesticity is the crowd of arguments in the knot

of my kitchen      the orphan stone of the island table      my soup as malleable as clay the heat of the stove is unknown to me      the loud banging of my pulse scraping back the ladle                                                 soup of fantasy

 

The East Cote

 

the deep house was built around a clock      it was a safe place but i don’t want to see it again      not even in sunny weather the tree grows forward now its net of hair      rotting cores

the old god was angry      his fingers perforating the sky

 

i was lucky i had a son      although infantile he had a gift      he could swallow shadows

of spiders that came to bury me in clouds      people tell me my mothering is a peculiar habit      

i much prefer it to teaching      

 

the sun burns itself into position in the east      i built a cote within the blocks of my house

i put my children there      far away from winds that curl from propellers      from the bank

for international settlements      from soldiers but pigeons are more beautiful in rainforests      where living and dying are loved in one room there is no use keeping appointments    

 

i was lucky to have a daughter      although naive who shows me how to fold up metal clocks      she knows how to make them work like hearts she teaches me to become aumakua      

a mother should never stop swimming      i could learn to transform clocks into compasses    

 

a device used to wind back moving pictures of myself      of my sins as i sleep the ego

closes to resistances      like eyelids do my daughter shows me her grown-up body trying to fit into very tight dresses      sometimes she looks like me i worry she will run across the tracks and get killed by the train

 

my son carries away heavy blocks      the cote becomes children flying out with the sun

in their hands      they tell me i can live forever if i keep a clock      people with hearts will die hands keep ticking me over into the next dry ditch      i keep falling over concrete curbs

maybe i should just stay on the train      stuck on rails the monotony of the city loop

i don’t want to be children forever    

   

i should get off at the east gate      to be exiled become the pigeons who bathe

in the rain and turn into color      i could be the first mother to live without a clock      

all i need to do is levitate through floors      learn how to poke my fingers through the loops

of nets      to remember that hearts will always beat louder than clocks

 

Annie Blake is an Australian writer, thinker and researcher. She is a wife and mother of five children. Her main interests include psychoanalysis, metaphysics and metacognition. She is currently interested in arthouse writing which explores the surreal nature and symbolic meanings of unconscious material through nocturnal and diurnal dreams and fantasies. Her writing is a dialogue between unconscious material and conscious thoughts and synchronicity. You can visit her on annieblakethegatherer.blogspot.com.au and https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009445206990.