New Poetry by Penny Gleeson

Station Pier 1955

(Drawn from the memories of the writer’s mother)

It had brittle fur

with cross-stitched eyes

and as it was cleaved open

unfurled sawdust

which floated to the floor.

Not like the camels

she saw, as the ship

sliced through the Suez,

their manes cast in the arid wind,

lips curled back

testing the direction of the desert,

their telescopic limbs

tracking the trade-winds.

Her legs still wobbled

like the waves,

as a pink-faced man

with silver-skinned buttons,

unwrapped her fingers

from a felt leg

and disembowelled it.

What are they like?

Her baba asked the one

sweeping the sawdust.

Two hundred years

behind the donkey.

His hands drove the broom

like an oar, and she wondered

whether he had seen

the camels too.

- © Penny Gleeson 2020

Penny Gleeson is a writer, researcher and lecturer. She is a graduate of Cambridge University and The University of Melbourne. Her poetry has been published in Not Very Quiet. She lives in Melbourne with her partner, cat and generations of books and plants.