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my mother was a bear that couldn’t walk itself |
| her reside a sulking weight I trailed |
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grief hauled from under the volume of her |
| my reflection, an infancy of sound-gathering |
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like an instrument archiving its vibrations |
| I stored language for both of us |
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tooled it to fill her gaps |
| we bore the cacophony as one |
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she arranged its tenors |
| woefully concrete, stalkingly anchored |
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the shape of me lined with benevolent deceit |
| her indebted angel-monster |
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at the door she would cant, hoping it might open |
| night would plummet and I would flinch |
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breathe in what had been committed |
| abandoning her in the light |
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words formed and stuck to the back of my throat |
| when I measured her |
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I got an elliptical question that reinforced our wounds |
| petrified its answerer |
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steeped into the matter of things |
| staining the passage |
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some are lost learning to speak |
| some have voices that shake walls |
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fill quiet rooms |
| but the reprise, the inverted translation |
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desecrated us together |
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| we needed to finish like this |
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with an aching acid chest |
| marched to an absolute |
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now I am emptying my mother |
Alison J Barton is a Wiradjuri poet based in Melbourne. Themes of race relations, Aboriginal-Australian history, colonisation, gender and psychoanalytic theory are central to her poetry. She was the inaugural winner of the Cambridge University First Nations Writer-in-Residence Fellowship and received a Varuna Mascara Residency. Her debut collection, Not Telling is published by Puncher and Wattmann. www.alisonjbarton.com / Instagram @alison_j_barton