MICHAEL BRENNAN has published poetry and essays in various journals, such as Southerly, Salt, Meanjin, Heat and Jacket. In 1999, he won the Siglo Text/Image Collaboration Prize with Kay Orchison. A short collection titled The Imageless World is due to be published by Folio (Salt). from GEOMETRY OF BREATH Exhaling triangles Already debris gathers, your palm pressed flat against my belly A flood of half-seen, evening descends along bodies’ proximity, demands promise Coming back down to earth where body incompletes A pattern of hollow spaces, opening surfaces, pores mouthing sweat, dermal kiss Beginning now leads to death, elonging completion’s promise A symmetry of retrieval, breath enters body, our mouths enclose reciprocity’s implosion Disjecta moving nowhere from here, plurality seeks reduction, a zero Gasping Fish Hold as loosely as possible, so day surrenders Unfasten the ear and we drift through each other safely just say as little as possible Your breath on my nipples, the breeze smells of salt and petrol With the beach before us we are either a car or a fish no longer landscape between Words fill the cavities of air that are angels we deliver Through the mouth’s vehicle you can accuse or love your scent will say other wise Allow demons to dream us, declare colourful things exist Pause Unwelcome constrictions love, faith, trust On the bridge we expand, the respiration of greater things demands nothing from us Eyes green as leaves inhaling light as elixir There will always be time to be drunk on the notion of our singularity Bogong moths circle above the bridge on fire Our bodies inhale harbour salt, arrest limits’ upheaval touching emptiness, placed upon Each other a fire approaches, words in suspension Out of breath Cooling febricula, the open verandah withstands little Weathering constituted as surplus value, resurrects the storm in smooth edges Night rests, time’s prolongation between cars on the freeway Becoming conscious enlists us in a catalogue of dilections, seed heads broken, the un Folded understanding of consequent friendships, Borrowing form to suit consequence, driving the oversized freeway home resting here, out of knowing, a complicit field