Tide
A collection of poetry and fiction from the Faculty of Creative Arts' creative writing program
Starting Over
Jessica and I loved to play with worms when we were kids. We’d pluck the fat ones from our dad’s award-winning worm farm and allow them to infiltrate the mud pies we molded into ice-cream tubs and then baked in the sun....
East of Westerbine
Toby fumbled through the stack of envelopes in his leather pouch as Mr Jessop Cole waited, arms folded across his wide chest. Toby remained just outside the yard of the Cole property, his knees bent awkwardly as he leaned back to catch his pouch upon his belly....
The lover’s promise
love had come to rest below my window and i resolved myself to let him in — for he looked ragged and wild , well in need of the rum i offered ( a slick inch of urine in the tumbler , neat — my own with a squeeze of lemon ) also there was the matter of the dove whose heart i had recently come to acquire....
Degustation
My husband’s tiny, a baby, compared to me. He wasn’t even born when I had my first kiss. Even stranger, he’s short and thin and round-cheeked. He can’t grow a moustache. He sleeps curled around himself like a foetus: tiny and gilled. When we have sex he’s a desperate sucking mouth, greedy hands.....
Kung fu, lies and videotape
JOHN AND ANNE’S LOUNGEROOM – DAY
ANNE is cleaning an immaculate room. A knock sounds. Anne opens the front door partway to.....
Absolution
The sky is a baptismal font.
The people of Cronulla
offer up hand massages to the Lord.....
The ocean knows this
Your skin more yellow
where I can’t see it,
face like plasticine
your mouth
a hollow carved out for sound....
12 o’clock sea
Carla Velasquez
It was only after dying that I realised I had all these blank pages left over. My face was still pale and smooth then. I had never bothered to grow any lines or to smile. I didn’t think to create those little tracks or worlds inside me—the kind you take with you when you die. My eyes used to be clear water and they used to say nothing at all. I liked it that way once.
I met you at a party down the South Coast. Jenny had a beach house in Sanctuary Point past Nowra, a cottage that was once owned by her parents. It was more land than house—only three tiny, carpeted rooms that had that musky ‘closed’ smell. It had white-laced windows, a balcony that wrapped all the way around and no neighbours either side.
Jenny and I had been friends since preschool. We shared this broadband connection that Telstra installed and forgot to charge us for. We stayed close because we didn’t have to go about hiding words from each other. Jenny hooked up her mp3 player, set it on random and tilted the speakers out the windows.
Meeting you there, Delmar, was like Halloween. You emerged like a twisted metal vampire from a bat cave on King Street and decided to stick around. You stared me up and down on the back porch and gave me a drag from the cigarette you held in a polished silver pirate hook. You were visible, grotesque—gorgeous like a shipwreck that’s been in the water so long it looks like earth art. Your nose was snake-like. Your skin had burned away and sat in small pink islands. I had known you for only three minutes before I invited you in.
At the end of the night, crushed silver cans littered that yard, along with orphaned multicoloured condoms, hidden by the flowers.
I remember walking around Sydney’s CBD hand-in-hand with you on mylunch breaks. You would meet me on the Town Hall steps at twelve-fifteen exactly. We played this game where I closed my eyes and you would lead me around the city. As we walked I became an electrical storm and lightning bolts of laughter shot out my mouth whenever I tripped or put a foot wrong. ‘You need to trust me more,’ you’d whisper, and I held on tighter to your arm.
We lived together for what seemed then to be a long time. We rented an apartment in Surry Hills that the owners had renovated. You used to draw on all the walls when you were bored with watching movies or reading books or men’s health magazines. You painted symbols with a glow-in-the-dark texta. They started where the ceiling connected to the wall and rolled down in perfectly straight lines. As the months went, on the apartment grew to be covered in them, even the bedroom. Sometimes they made sense but more often they looked something like this: ONONONONONO—which could mean anything. So I’d hug you and kiss you with my eyes closed in the hope that we could make it make sense.
My mouth was a zoo, with uncontrollable words that came stampeding out. Sometimes these words were little promises. I always made you promises that I never intended to keep. Stuff like: ‘I’m going to take you to YUM CHA, the Sky Phoenix.’ With you, these animals would disintegrate and turn into piles of sand that I felt sorry for ’cause I remembered what they used to be. You gave me little animals too. Yours looked like this when written down: ‘One day, one day maybe we’re going to get married.’ And I waited.
Instead, next summer you took my hand and said you were going to show me your ‘favourite place in the world’. We followed a dirt track that was arched in eucalyptus trees and we climbed down black rocks to get to a cove no bigger than god’s teacup. You spoke seriously and held my hands tightly in yours but I was captured by the grey ocean and the place where it connected with the sky. You kept trying to tell me something but the wind suddenly picked up—and where the sea darkens the sand a dry tree cracked and fell, and tiny silver fish swam away.
After that, I wore my heart on my middle finger. It was plastic, shiny and fake. Jenny gave it to me the day she and I drove back to the beach house—the day I threw those damn shoes you had forgotten out the window of the moving car—the night that I set fire to those fucking koalas that hung about in the eucalyptus arch. I had sworn never to go back but it was summer again and thirty million degrees, so we went to the beach. That beach I had attacked with a nuclear bomb in my head. I shivered as the wind picked up.
We decided to make bottle cap necklaces for the moon and started drinking. We uncapped wine and made a glass house for Ariel. The sky looked like your zebra-print collar that brushed your jaw. I remembered when I had put my tongue there and like an ocean wave your smell dumped my body onto a sandbank. I cut my feet on the black rocks still wet from high tide. I found that dried-up tree that had fallen down so long ago, half-submerged and shivering. And there was Ariel clinging to its brittle branches.
She invited me down to the castle for a drink and pearl hermit crabs carried sand over my lips and into my mouth. It wasn’t until after I drowned that she told me I had all this blank paper. So I decided to grow on it like black vines that will eventually, slowly, curl to cover these pages. Unfurl over these ‘no spaces’. And if you were to take them and glue them up on a wall, maybe they would look like very complex heartbeats or even like little animals before they turn to sand.
But that’s not what I wanted.