Ann L. Healey was born in Melbourne Australia in 1960. Her poems have been published in Centoria, Spindrift and Poetry Monash. She has participated in various open poetry readings around Melbourne. For the moment, Ann works as an executive officer for an Australian trade union. She is completing a post-graduate qualification in librarianship this year. Literary influences? A grab bag of children's writers, modern poets and novelists ... to name a few, Lewis Carroll, Elizabeth Smart, T.S. Eliot, Arundhati Roy. The following sequence is not autobiographical! It came to stay after a long period of writer's block.
watermarks
dream
salt
strips down my face,
damp creases of rain fret
the brittle sand
over my chest.
black fish swim
like archangels through light.
truth
morose wrappers
scour the streets
... tumours grow quickly,
he says
windows
almost running,
I disregard shop fronts
like magazine covers
synchronised arrangements
of stainless-steel lamps,
sandalwood and polished boards,
ignoring restaurants
taut with faces
and silent cappucino,
and the clear callous outline
of a tumour exposed on glass.
tomorrow
I cannot connect
tyranny with morning
while I wake.
Was it only interference in my brain,
white noise
blowing out
making its own shapes?
Glue
clots in my bones and hair
sticky
on closed eyes.
I hunch over the stove,
where truth writes itself in toast crumbs
under blue flames--
littering the grill--waiting too.
Shower, soap, steam--
the only miracles are
state of the art plaque killers
the scent of dust
touched by rainfall
pervades the hall
So this is tomorrow.
theatre
the light disappears
without protest,
coveting the tundra
of forced sleep
*
A dozen corpses
are fazed by the onset of resurrection.
The surgeon unpacks words
I hardly know,
fumbled guarantees
*
Unreal arms escort me
& x-ray slides flinch
when I validate my ticket,
daylight recoils
beyond automatic doors.
vigil
outside
he watches smokers
staring down light-headed traffic,
the sun's adrift
from the vacuum-sealed night
my mother still hasn't come--
he phones her machine again,
but, by now,
she's repeating herself
watermarks
psychotic grunge --
the tv melds
with my white-whale songs,
a hump-backed sea recoils
and falls clear,
fleets of gulls backbite in sour arctic dialect.
inside blind pieces of light,
the drifting arms of a seawasp set
rigid as lifelines.
