Bronwyn Lang is currently residing in Tasmania and has had her poetry published in several print and online journals

The heat of the taxi and this particularly hazed morning is one in which circumstance invites confession. We are on our way to see a gynaecologist. I am still high and not yet sober.

My eyes feel discombobulated, set loose and ragged in their sockets.

Silences are fattened with words, fill mouths like fists.

Things we never think of telling are told.

The red dust on our skin streaks with sweat, into watercolours on canvas. We have wound down the windows but the air that enters the car is foetid and tropic. There is dried blood on my heels. I am not wearing underwear.

Tara says now is the right time for stories.

Once she was an actress and met a lover on a game show. Her affairs have ended online or in obsessive analysis. She wants to predict next season’s narrative.

Our skulls are hollowed and sit gaunt above our spines. She speaks of  struggling.

Going in and out of frame.

Off set. Everything is echolalic.

Her hair is still damp. She has recently showered. We share a preference for drying our skin in draught. Today she has chosen a yellow dress from the many that feature in her bedroom, hooked on doors and shelves as if she lived in a boutique.

This morning there was a rape.

I notice that our hands flutter between our laps and mouths as if we are drawing from imaginary Marlboro lights.