Age fourteen I was crying in the backyard
feverish with awareness.
Wide awake in the middle of the night.
There was a glow in the bush and no one would talk about it.
Mike had a shaved head like
the furrowed yowl of dead grass.
He hunched over me like
a grieving mother. I complained
to Mike about my father
and Mike said he could replace him.
Mike had a shotgun house
on Banksia St, where I
could secretly listen to the
glow from his living room after he fell asleep.
The glow had many different bodies. The
low hum of the refrigerator,
whirling murmurs of the creek,
the wind from thirty years ago.
My military man grew a
foamy film of dust after
Christmas. I realised that Mike
had no intention of keeping me.
The lithe star atop his tree
had stopped shining so brightly.
Mike has a wife and a little boy now.
Mike will never tell anyone about me.
I aged. I burnt both candles.
I slept in worn vinyl cathedrals.
The oasis of the country
became the expanse of my ritual.
I became Mike’s age when
he discarded me. The glow finally
spoke after many years.
I love you but this needs to stop.
You cannot keep going.
I asked it where I could go
and it said nothing. The bush
was silent with me.
I went back into the night.