Two Poems by Lisa Brockwell

The Door

The door was broken.
You had to hold it shut with one foot
while pulling down your jeans to pee.

Drunk, eighteen, Erskineville pub, my first
boyfriend singing along to Celtic punk
holding his schooner of Reschs.

The writing on the back of that door:
I liked to sit awhile and read it,
even with my legs askew.

— Troops out. Land rights now. Logocentrism is oppression.
Free East Timor … You have to read The Laugh of the Medusa.
Deadset! Écriture feminine – your body is yours, take it —

written in gold by Cixous’ latest disciples.
Schoolgirls last year
from suburbs on the north shore,

most of them known to each other.
Nothing about Craig being a poofter,
or calling Sharon for a good time.

I let the beer befuddle me.
My body a danger, I swamped it
with falafel and loose T-shirts.

There are days I’m still holding that door,
balancing this keyboard
across those thighs, precarious and mine.

The Next Day

It wasn’t dark, it was bright and hot.
Heavy wool coat on a summer’s day.
The road no longer a river in spate,
abandoned now, runnels deep enough
for no car to pass. Third time this year.
Ten kilometres from town, I spotted her legs
caught in a barbed wire fence.
Fetlock lacerated white and stark,
eyes one step ahead, the kind of grimace
only a mare will arrange of her face
fixed now in the buzz and bloat of death.
Across the road an honesty box,
the sign still hanging by a thread:
Dragonfruit, kombucha, free range eggs.

Lisa Brockwell was born and raised in Sydney, Australia and now lives in Kirriemuir, Scotland. Her poems have been published in The Spectator, The Canberra Times, The Weekend Australian, Meanjin and Best Australian Poems.  Her first book, Earth Girls (Pitt Street Poetry), was commended in the Anne Elder Award in Australia and her second book, The Round Ring (Pitt Street Poetry), was published in 2021.