Can you Hear, Deer?
A poem
Her stash was gone,
so she smoked the moon.
Within the body of her breath,
she witnesses an invisible blue.
At the piano she plays
only the black keys
and opens up to something
other than herself.
She listens to the lacuna
between sound, intensities
of space, segmented silences
more musical than any song.
She listens but no longer sings. Her light trembles
with the incremental instruments of insanity.
Put a plant in the bathroom, she said.
It’ll clear the air.
If she had windows instead of eyes
she would become water changing
shape, she would drink the colour
of water, replicate the patterns
of liquid light, sway
to the rhythm of porcelain
and scrub away
the kindness in cruelty.
Her lilac-leaking windows
and listless plumage stained
the bottom of the bathtub.
Sirens. Sirens. Sirens.
Can you hear, dear?
Tell her the tiles are not clean.
Stevi-Lee Alver is an Australian writer and tattoo artist. She lives in the middle of Brazil with her wife. She loves bush walks and waterfalls but misses the ocean.
‘Can You Hear, Deer’ was originally published in Southerly Literary Journal, February, 2018.
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