Issue Seven May 2010
Benjamin Dodds
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Benjamin Dodds is a Sydney-based poet whose work has recently appeared in the pages of Southerly, Etchings, Cordite, Harvest and at the brilliantly named Chickenpinata.com. He maintains a weblog at http://benjamindodds.blogspot.com/
Pig
There’s a pig in the grass
and broken bricks
and caked pads of sawdust
piled up behind the gun club’s rifle range.
It’s only slightly buried beneath it all.
The punk-rock haircut of subversive green
is healthier than any lawn in town,
and the white smiling teeth,
top set only—the lower ones lie in soil,
could sell Colgate on TV.
After its rest, it will stand
and shake the turf
and building rubble
from its lightly downed back
and prance down the mound
on pretty, pointed trotters
or so I tell my nephew
who reaches to prod
the balloon of belly
with a bent, spent welding rod.
Wrested
Splayed out like Vitruvian boys
on the concrete cap
of the raised water tank,
they draw a day of hoarded heat
through buttocks and backs.
The rude, familiar honk of an approaching car
and a wholesome hello launched
through the kitchen window below
shatter their world completely.
Screaming drifts of galahs,
as pink and grey as the sky that holds them,
signal the death of this hot-blooded day.
One last protracted clasp of hands,
and two monkeys skim
down the parchment-smooth skin
of a convenient branch.
On the anaemic lawn, two country mothers
smile over a quick cup of tea
at the reluctant arrival
of their perfectly normal sons.
Subcutaneous
since it happened
I have been waiting
for this other event
for the crust to form
for the thin weeping to slow
and for you to move within me
I have seen it in my head
your white fingers fumble
with curve-pointed scissors
as you slip one blade under
and snip the thread at a point
beside the precise black knot
I feel a sudden slackening
just beneath the surface of my flesh
and the anticipated slide
of scrupulous slicing nylon
at a depth whose nerves lie dormant
all times but this
I sit ready tonight
and see you sense a mood in me
that seems incongruous to you