Felicity Plunkett has published poems in Heat, Southerly, Hermes, and anthologies including Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets. metastases – (friendship poem) pieces of me fly back and forward through time an oncologist’s blades have made fragments of me      this bit cauterised                                                 this one excised                                                 and this for the traces – poltergeist shadows of what we might eschew this last a dose of poison most of me will abhor well might we eschew the things that eat us: your name on my class roll, a name that can touch and re-touch my heart this is touching the gods send and the institutions punish it is your mind colliding with mine it has no street address it enters through the window, never the door it spells its name in ouija red it is embarrassing to the legislators, troublesome to name, kind to hold it sleeps alongside our lovers, whom we love no safer berth we didn’t book it a room as colleague, friend, stranger no room at the inn for the miracles             at some angle, on some plane truth is its middle name will we cauterise it? – it doesn’t fit with the rest of the body of our lives paul celan has love flying above/between ‘you’ and ‘me’ and invokes it: ‘our metastases’ beauty is big and strange as grief love is all through me, a disease i don’t always know where it has planted itself its hide-and-seek charm woos me into forgetting you wrote that your lover had died                 what clasped me at twenty-five                 loosened its grip and stuck in her craw                 great black bird in the large white places                 of terminal healing the grief in me is for you,                 for subtle friendship                 so sweet you imagine it is a figment                                 for your love: who feels today like the woman the gods took                                 or took me for and me, a cheat, stealing someone else’s life winging it, always in the strange nounless world made for someone else that i inherited from myself when the bird flew advent i am opening french doors at night is this a dream too? conte de printemps advent curls around my thighs they are white under the full moon             rare as tusks the click of the sunrise like bones after thirty day starts itself up your whole life could be eaten by the recurrent pitch and pull                         of other tides you sincerely, faithfully, cordially: making your way across the unforgiving plains, your regards could drown us both there are too many machines in the morning i want a crust of bread and a sliver of apple i am watching myself sitting here on the cusp so sure the world was washed by venus, keening in the landscape of a nightmare i crawling between the flatlands into the last space not buried under landfill after her waxing, a pause then the first hint of                                silvery forests, free passage: immigrant lunatic afternoons love the tumbleweed rolls up to you in some street of a western cliché                                                         climb on this rollick of hay and dream Night Departure at night the dark is a blanket over a woman’s departure. at night a wedding ring tings on the cold hand basin: she washes her hands. at night her own pulse sounds loud to her thrubbing away at disguise. she has counted the number of steps she will need. tonight she will carry herself out of this house in several suitcases. anxiety (i) first phase: still murderously sober at the terminus of numerous sharp vodkas: disguising my peering by interposing the glass' little bottom/ anything to discern what must be approaching this stop the pulse of thinking is flickering on & on with quick nimble slicing feet skipping blithely through my out-bailing veins: this cocktail makes me ever-smarter, quicker quick-tripping over the various trip-wires; flick & my too-perceptive heart gets ahead of itself; flipping through the hand i imagine i've been dealt; face revealing nothing; pulse at the jaw ecstatic flinching/ grimacing/ pre-empting any strike against me: everything flashing past restless relentless eyes, quipping syncopated heart: ever-agile/ strategic, waiting hands (ii) with you in mind, i'd have selected less-apparent glitches: something a bit more fetching, less aberrantly disingenuous: but fear held my hand & stroked my wrist & made me think together we had it made, what with my quick unlikely brain and his animal cunning and sheer unavailable charm & we decided i could evade everything that made me ordinary: make me ordinary for a day & i could rebuild the sandcastle i stomped through, trying to get across/ through to/ over you i'd scoop out sweet soft melting flavours of my erstwhile & putative selves, for you. for you i'd make a sandy sandwich of my charms; homespun, unfractured, wholesome i'd leap into the sea with you, happily ludicrous with a blow-up pool pony well out of its depth instead of this dark hungry self-consuming smile of mine: this perpetual dark wave of breaking. (iii) night-stretch of inexorable thinking: light too bright and darkness irresistible, impenetrable pandora's coming up with handfuls of frippery for me to put into words for her: lassos, fetters, restraints keys to all the vehicles of my escape-to-freedoms, fresh-minted numberplates for new lives beyond the scrutiny ­ mine, yours, the Country Couples' Curious Convention where my foibles make a light trifle to be examined fastidiously wrapped in gingham, providing pause over dehydrated scones & tea (iv) stop, spot, stop! see spot stop atop the spot where i used to run my finger cutting the scar under each word as you taught me to read and i stuck my tongue between my teeth to stop the words forming, and learned to spin out some cordial hiatus: some crystalline answer (v) you steel yourself to lie in bed while night's tide comes in & the hemlock rises engorges itself like an unwanted erection up & up until there's no sand to stand on you scale the sea-wall, skinning your fingertips hoisting yourself above the surges of poison, just you talk yourself through every step: you're intelligent: you've read the instruction book & bought the gear: the ropes, the hooks you can pull yourself over it like a corpse; ride it out like flotsam, like a cork you know you can, but the lapping sound becomes interesting, comes closer: you can hear its rhythmic slap you are paralysed, mesmerised: analytical. sleeping with insomnia thoughts with clicking feet like dogs on lino tap through the roof of my brain possuming into communion with one another bad joins/non sequiturs/strange bedfellows rioting on well after closing time hurry up please it’s time if a picture paints a thousand words would you hold it against me? feelings ajar letting in snatches of ancient conversations it’s not me, it’s you: i’m not in love with sleep the way i used to be sorry i can’t make it (are you?) i’m washing my hare before i stick it in front of the greyhounds of dreaming i can’t be bothered listening to you any more but i’m happy to efface the usual suspects for us both if i said you had a beautiful body then why can’t i paint you?