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From: Vol.03 N.02 – Decolonisation and Geopoethics

My Wings, My Excesses

by Jill Jones

My bitumen blood marries cells of red brick dust

through my arms, to sprout bark chips and aluminium.

My breast cracks its bones, its arthritic carbon, my lungs

singing in a Keatsian smear, tinnitus with polyester,

superphosphate and tailings.

 

It’s not all I have, as I feel it in, as it drips me out.

Wait, there’s more, blue as plastic, and fine as soursob

in a suntrap, girt by traffic and potash, BBQ sauce

and lymph. It’s not all personal nor a definition

of smoke, flakey rubber, failed macadam, or space junk.

 

My piss flesh flushes a pro rata scenario, a form on a form

of cloud banks. I love my viscera though it all hurts.

 

Everything that’s killing me is killing me, as if I’m chipping

a small line, pushing excess capacities into wave machines,

with things of sand and tin, a metallic sky that welcomes me

with a high ‘hi’, with strings of helium, holdalls and hemp,

a fertile toast of ancient jackets, a kilt and wings.

 

There’s a future frenzy blasting my precocious whitened nerves,

some spermatozoid trance in the disco of my drains,

my skin and its sulfates are every day engendered in

the church of carbohydrates, paleolithic junk food.

For surely I can fly this thing, or parachute true.

 

I extemporise a chorus with my collective diesel which blows

a baguette of taste enhancers, drizzled with asbestos

and joint cement. It clots my breathing, pierces me awake, spinning

in the mist of phenomenon, busy as an overture, a rom com,

or the 60s, shortsighted as Marilyn, or a train through snow.

 

I have no opinions about nachos or unicorns.

I’m fresh as meat, sugar, or rot.

Published: July 2016
Jill Jones

has published nine full-length books of poetry, including Breaking the Days (Whitmore Press, 2015) and The Beautiful Anxiety (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014), which won the 2015 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her most recent publication is a chapbook, The Leaves Are My Sisters (Little Windows Press, 2016). Her work is represented in major anthologies including the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. She is a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, University of Adelaide.

An Australian and international
journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics.

Plumwood Mountain Journal is created on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and to elders past, present and future. We also acknowledge all traditional custodians of the lands this journal reaches.

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