poem set in lounge room/kitchen

The hair behind the door is an entreaty

shorter by half than what you’d seen before

her sojourn to the beach, solo, in winter

where all she found was a pair of blunted scissors

and a box of out-of-date ammoniac blonde

and sand as coarse as if the whole world's teeth had crumbled

and a grey sea and thoughts that funked her out of running.

Replete with the eyes and the world-come-at-me

bearing – pinned shoulders, whiplashed hands

keeping time to a song that’s quick and blares

where you don’t hear it, only her, those

turns of phrase you didn’t know minds as riven

by the need for purpose as hers could even make

she calls herself your lover in loveless July –

Anything sounds like anything from the lounge room.

Her floury, flowery sweet potato fingers

still metronomic, unpacking sizeable cloves

from purple-spotted Russian garlic bulbs

the netting they came in stuck to the fridge with magnets

the bag for the netting lining the compost bin

you determine that the size of her body is unclear –

bigger than the soup pot, dwarfed by the archway between you

Dwarfed and warped, unlike the onscreen women –

you’re watching TV for the first time in almost a year –

who swim in a pool that’s proportionate to their bust size

who pull a daring, tightly-filmed escape from the series

of Lucite boxes drowning them, them swan around

like mermaids some more – and you steal a look at the jagged

back of that blonde-streaked blackness, five cent coins

Of pale scalp at her hairline’s labyrinthine junctures

and you turn back to those mermaids under stage lights

under blue lights underwater, peroxide wracked

by chlorine, bikinis painted, bikinis gone – you can’t feign

an even temper anymore, your blood boils and spits

interposed, the two scenes seem to be sea and sky

no more but a middle ground, a sorcerer’s offing

A hall of mirrors – her body is warped like one of those

and so is this dialogue – the blondes, the music, the onions

bouncing around like the light from CD bellies to the walls.

When you arrived you took off a coat, now you put it back on

maybe she’s thinking how short hair unhands time

or how to place the yoghurt on the table without saying too much

or the connotations of straight-cut or angled bread

Because she’s stalling in there, over-thinking her eyes

they won’t blink without conscious effort – the inventory

to which she submits the rest of her visible self

turns the simmer to a boil so hard you hear it and gently ask

Is everything alright? Put the TV on standby and go see

stir the burned parts back into the peaches and cream whole

once reintegrated, no more heat, no more shirking entreaties

she listens later as you count every strand of blonde.