Maxine Beneba Clarke is a widely published Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent. Tim Minchin has called her work ‘amazing’. Overland literary journal says she’s ‘one of the most compelling voices in Australian poetry this decade’. Oz Conservative has lamented ‘…unappealing. Clarke’s views are the more dangerous ones’. It’s this last endorsement she wears afro-high. Maxine won the 2013 Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript for her debut short fiction collection Foreign Soil and the 2013 Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize for the poem nothing here needs fixing, the title poem to her forthcoming collection.

let alone

the one thing you never counted on
is how hard it is
to be a woman alone
let alone a black woman
alone with kids

let me alone
and get on with your business

how hard it is
to rent a house
in the neighbourhood of your child’s school
or get a job working
the hours you now need to

for five years you paid off joint plastic
and now that same bank manager
talks right through you
you have no ascertainable steady income
i am very sorry
we just can’t give a credit card to you

how hard it is
to get a break
or a loan
or a smile
or a hearing

or the real estate to repair
what so urgently needs mending

your child is the brightest boy in class
behaves besides
but now
they are always watching
waiting for him to slip

let my child alone
and get on with your business

a woman alone
let alone a black woman
alone with kids

the one thing you never counted on
was how hard
it is