Five Poems

Poetry by Kathryn Reese

Chocolate cake is breakfast food.

You sneak the end piece that no-one wants into your mouth as you fold individual egg and lettuce sandwiches into cling wrap. The boiled eggs are fork-smashes into cheap mayonnaise, not because you can’t afford better but because it reminds you of your grandma’s lips, kiss-puckered with the delight of food with enough salt and tang. You are not really paying attention to the battle cry in the next room: the vocal stim, the ball thumping against the wall, the ongoing search for a lost shoe. You are immersed in the folding of cling wrap, the expensive brand that adheres just so, and the taste of chocolate cake egg mayonnaise licked from your finger.

On Seeing a Picture of Cooking Oil which was Humanitarian Aid, Airdropped for Gaza, that Never Arrived.

Sinbad in a green tin with only foreign words

washed up on a beach. He’s caked in salt,

resting now, head on seaweed.

Sinbad set out by night from the warehouse

shove and scuff, ration crush and free fall

dreams: rice and beans and flour

collateral scattered as cumin seeds

for flatbread. Sacks of fortified flour

sunk to nourish the sea. Only

Sinbad in his tin sailed, course set

by the stars—til the stars turned and pelted

the sea: fire and smoke, breaching, burning

wilding the tide. Not fish, not plankton,

not prawns, not even sea lice survived—

only Sinbad, sealed in a green tin

and someone came to take pictures

of sunrise, keep-cup coffee and pastry

wrapped in a white paper bag, found

a green tin with foreign words.

Nesting

Did you not know this was a graveyard?

Thousands of dead things, becoming dirt,

and you want to turn it over, damp it down, add mulch?

There is a beetle wing by your eye, there is ash in your hair,

and you, Pine-for-smoke, say here, this and now—

But I insist on ancient things, not rushing

to fertility but tamping down—

half our topsoil is lost to the sea, so

much so that we mine small islands for

minerals we discarded and the islands take

the shape of yawning, no, not land, not sea,

but resource-pit and gull bole—and my love—

you still have a beetle wing on your cheekbone,

bottle green and midnight mauve.

Come. Let me comb the ash from your hair, sit

on this stone step and sketch in the dust

where to plant tubers and snow peas

honey persimmon, sage—

and divine where we let the cosmos grow wild.

Remains

The stone in the corner of our open plan living space looks like an ossified dumpling. It could be—its once silken, oil-bathed skin blistered and creased, lined with grey salt crystals or mould. There was that night we had take-away and the baby smeared fistfuls of rice and deep fried meat into her mouth, down her bare legs and over the red tray-table of her high chair. You were meticulous about cleaning up, but perhaps this corner was obscured by a diaper bag or a blanket fort, perhaps this one morsel has lain, undisturbed, til now, its excavation. Or it could be just a stone. Behind a curtain of shadow that night, witness to the unequal distribution of protein, the double-dipping, the shouting, the heartburn that could be indigestion or cardiac failure—you’d need an ECG to know, or time. What would that rock think of us? Labile creatures susceptible to thirst and greed, vulnerable to collapse and yet always after something to throw. You left, in tears, leftovers sealed in cracked plastic and the baby wailing. The dumpling stone remains.

The Mango Seed Weevil Sternochetus mangiferae and its Host

Now you have grown scaled armour, shielded your eyes with chitin lens.

Now you have grown three pairs of legs and a set of wings:

you sleep. Sleep between layers of leaf mould your goddess

provides. You will not oversleep. She will waken you

she will call you with fragrant blossom and a blush

of growth—and you will rise. You will climb her rough cork

and feast:

masticate petal, sepal, leaf;

suck ferment; find or make

love and love and love,

leave when ovaries swell and fruit sets.

You will do as your mother did—though

you never knew mother. Yet some wisdom hidden

in your calyx or in the text of leaves advises: wait til dusk,

then, on the leather skin of unripe fruit, lay your egg,

milk the mango skin-sap, let it drip,

let it set, let tree-blood protect your embryo.

Let yourself fall, then, back to the leaf-litter, return to your sleep.

Hanging in the canopy, the fruit bearing your egg grows gold,

and your youngling grubs its way deep, following fibre

and the flow of juice, inward, seeking seed.

You abandon your babe to the mother-tree-god—

your offspring devours her embryo, the fruit grows heavy

and drops

and rots.

In the protection of lignified husk, your pupae

grows scaled armour, shields its eyes with a chitin lens,

grows three pairs of legs and a set of wings,

crawls out of the leaf litter, shaking off frass.

BIO: Kathryn Reese writes poetry & flash. She lives on Peramangk land in Adelaide, South Australia. She works in medical microbiology and enjoys solo road trips, hiking and chasing frogs to record their calls for science. Her poems can be found in The Engine Idling, Epistemic Literary, Kelp Journal and Australian Poetry Journal. She was a winner of the Red Room Poetry’s #30in30 competition & the Heroines Women’s Writing Prize 2024.