The Poem of the Month for June 2023, selected by 2023 Anthology Editors, Maria Vouis and Rob Ferris, is 5.45am Sydney by Jules Leigh Koch. The commended poems for June are unpredicted by Geoff Aitken, Blackbird by Martha Landman and The Baby Locket by Cary Hamlyn.
5.45am Sydney
Jules Leigh Koch
at an intersection
a few wax-work figures
wait
while traffic-lights juggle three
coloured balls
in slow motion
the short life span of dawn
is emptying out
all about me
yet
it’s not a new day
for the homeless
queueing outside
the Salvos’ soup kitchen
in an alleyway
where the twisted body of sunlight
is climbing a fire escape
one step
at a time
I put the space-junk of my thoughts
on pause
and as I drive through the fault-line
of the city
another pedestrian is swallowed
by the subway
unpredicted
Geoff Aitken
it fell today
the idea
that the ocean
was just a cloud
shaking out
its wrinkles
in late rain.
Blackbird
Martha Landman
After my daughter left home at eighteen
her dogs, Diesel and Pepsi, were buried
with Little Cat under palm trees in the backyard—
tropical smell of Queensland soil.
I still hear their footfall in the dark.
Leonardo, the lorikeet, escaped
three years earlier. He and Kushi,
the Maine Coone, never returned
from the marshes across the road.
Restless, I moved south with the leftover cats,
They got cremated two years apart.
Their ashes live on the mantelpiece
where I tell them: no more pets.
Today I found a young blackbird
dead on the lawn.
The Baby Locket
Cary Hamlyn
That winter I worked with a young woman,
charged with infanticide – along with her ex.
Jammed in a cream-brick unit, one of six
and hemmed at the back by a power station.
She huddled under a quilt to keep the world out.
Her one-bar heater rattled out a prayer in the corner.
I drove her north to court every month –
a long trek during which she rarely spoke.
She came from interstate – alone, she said,
with no friends or family – anywhere,
no previous nurtured life. Only a boyfriend,
now adversary, whose eyes in court never sought hers.
Every day she caught two buses to the cemetery,
fondling the baby photo she wore on a gold necklace,
tight as an umbilical cord. Sometimes,
when she rolled up her sleeves,
you could see old cigarette burns and
faded pink scars still etched on her wrists.
For months the court case dragged on.
He won on a shadow of doubt.
When she went to prison summer had arrived,
hot and mean, leaving the kittens she’d rescued
to return to the power station,
where their barbed wire fence
provided a safety that hers never would.