The people across the road are drunk and two of them are planning to have sex together tonight for the first time. That’s at this stage, it’s not even dark yet, we’ve still got the Fight that Blows Up Out of Nowhere and Falling Asleep in the Pizza up our sleeves. Their voices carry and […]
The strange screeching of tropical birds spurling into midnight’s blue sky at 6 o’clock, as the night gathers like a dew, forms like a band, a marching band of strange and unaccountable, uncountable, nasty-beaked bird, weird big birds, glossy little birds, green birds and brown. Brisbanana. You are utterly the weirdest, my sweet suburban love.
It’s getting dark. The gentle end of a slow and satisfying farm day. My farm is a tiny lakeside property which belongs to an absent friend. I am alone today. Last night we walked round the lake, or dam, and I told my German visitor all about bunyips. Today he rang from a nearby mountaintop […]
One’s German companion begins to assimilate. He is working his way through a jar of Vegemite, observing that it contains the exact same colouring as Coca-Cola: 150c. “The trouble with Vegemite,” he says, scraping the traces of its oily residue into his gullet to clean the butter knife, “is it kind of contaminates the knife. […]
Brisbane. Took me ten years to settle here, having uprooted from sultry Jakarta and a school which had barely two students of each nation in one class. This was the first time we’d lived in the suburbs, since I was a tiny baby by the sea, a child learning to walk in the desert. I […]
Ok, so: imagine you have a lover whose second language is English and who one day refers to you unexpectedly as his spoose. Your spoose is another word for your beloved or your partner and rhymes (conveniently) with caboose. I can tell you that any little irritations you may hold against this person are going […]
A small scream from the other room. “What? What?” “Can you come here?” On the rug is lying toes-up a small, lucid-bellied, iridescent, recently murdered gecko. Its tail has been severed to a bloody stump: it didn’t just drop, it was ripped off. By its extreme corners I pick up the rug and gingerly carry […]
Brother is staying for a few days & brother and Berliner are sharing a desk. They don’t know each other very well. I walk in on them sitting side by side with their computers open, both are typing furiously and music is playing. Cathoel: so are you just taking turns between the songwriters and the […]
Making a pun in a foreign tongue: Lord, but it makes me feel smart. My friend is pfaffing about online & calls me over as I drift past. “Look! My unicorn name is: Soft Beautiful Erdbeerkaese.” Soft, beautiful, strawberry cheese. “Wow!” I say. And then lightning strikes. “So if you ever became King of the […]
All the noisiness of sun. To a German, the crashing in the bamboo at 3am sounds like a housebreaker festooned with plastic bags. How could a little possum make so much noise? Why must the birds all shriek? When you lift a painting off the wall, exposing a transparent lizard, who exposes his heart lungs […]
