Tuesday, June 28, 2016

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.  


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