Michael R. Griffiths is a Lecturer in the English and Writing Discipline at the University of Wollongong. He received his PhD in English from Rice University in 2012 and was INTERACT Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University from 2012 to 2014. As an academic, he has published on topics ranging from settler colonial biopolitics to indigenous life writing to the critical theory of decolonizing poetics, and much besides. He is writing a scholarly book, tentatively entitled The Distribution of Settlement: Indigeneity, Recognition and the Politics of Visibility (under contract, UWAP). His poetry has previously been published in Paper Nautilus.
 
 

Sidney Poitier Sighs

Now the green waste truck has gone,
they’re coming to take me away.
Moth-like I sit; Blanche DuBois
not swooning over Stanley,
but broken as the teapot they find
going through my garbage
in the surveillance van.
Sidney Poitier sighs.

Of Cartilage

If there is order to this world,
it is a reckoning of remainders.
With chips of brick on a building site,
bloody wedges, redolent of cartilage,
the earth reminds us of what is stripped away.

Three hundred and sixty five days in a year;
three hundred and sixty degrees of rotation—
those five days hang heavy as lead fishing weights
choking the wire even as they aid the lines passage—
to the depths where the dhufish live.