The Wish Doll

‘You can make a doll and inside you can hide a list of wishes.’ — Jafabrit, Artist, 2007.

I begged her to make it: the rag doll pattern
beyond me in a Woman’s Weekly pullout.
An arm’s blue outline reached over the centre page
to mitten hands, no fingers for opposing thumbs.

We decided on yellow hair, kinked
from ripped-out knitting; a shaggy fringe
cut across with black dressmaker’s shears.
I plaited it; each strand took a child’s age.

Its pert pink mouth was sewn shut. A pursed X,
and her eyebrows matched as sisters, not twins:
brown back-stitches on thick biroed lines.

I dressed it in my old kilt, a narrow waist
cinching a red bouclé t-shirt and tied on worn
dancing pumps with black laces; criss-crossed, tight.

Cattle Crush

The yearling stores were gathered in the paddock,
go on’d and stick-goaded into the yard

and routed narrower again, a ragged line-up
along the concrete wall behind the hollow bars.

First in line had no idea. He’d stick
his head into the crush-gate’s yawning breach,

a blue cord clamping the grab arm tight to his neck.
Then, wedged to the wall, pincers reached in

for the soft, swinging ‘u’ below his muck-flecked rump.
Quicker than an eye’s blink he’d be freed, bucking

off the white-hot pain in the field, he’d bawl his anger
back at my father, swearing at the next one ducking in.

Sea Horses

Curlicued inside her head —
her own album of the past,
smoothed out grooves of inverted
submerged horns — the hippocampus.

Where significant events are stored
to be replayed and glossed at will.
Like a three year old’s yellow
trousers: blue wellingtons,
the fuzziness of losing a sibling,
not owning a single face-shot
of his blondness; or hiding
beneath a brown-barred bed
to escape tan coloured brogues.

And inside the matter of the brain,
twigs, branches, boughs,
(a sturdy trunk for now)
all contained within a nutcase.
Dutch Elm disease the fiercest threat —
spreading within the whorled passages,
cuckolding the present sense.