New Poetry by Jane Frank

Picnic

All this time later, I still hear the screams

of a lizard flailing in the clutches

of a brahminy kite, cliff height

above the clear stretch of ocean,

a metaphor for that day, I’ve since thought:

too hard to converse, too many tests

set for me to fail between bites of Roquefort

cheese and bread you fed me, a gentleness

that cajoled me into thinking in third

person of a picnic in a painting with a soft

winter sky. It still bothers me that the kite

kept flying so remorselessly over the sea.

Where the Wild Things Are

From Brown Dog Café

I can see cranes

sculpting the skyline

into something I won’t know

and I move beyond sadness,

try instead to shelter

in the neon jolt of laces

on the retro, sideburned man

eating salmon and dill crème

fraiche on toast at the table

next door, the pair of peewits

circling the telegraph pole

beside the nondescript street,

the pleasant numbing of my teeth

on a triangular shard of ice

and abstract patterns of titian

light vibrating on fig leaves,

the sensation of my back

touching the wall – acceptance,

without turning my head,

that it is stark and white,

emblazoned with a drawing

in clear black ink of the Wild

Things boy chasing a brown dog. 

- Jane Frank 2016

Jane Frank lives and writes in Brisbane. Her chapbook Milky Way of Words has just been published by Ginninderra Press. She has poems forthcoming in Antipodes, Cordite Poetry Review and takahē.