Crop, Suffer, &, Barra Nula by Anne Ross
These poems where written on the land of the Ngarabal people
Crop
Escalating straight for plastic bags of tins & plastic bags
I glance some cute queer sipping coffee
in Jamaica Blue
track their hair & crop top in a guilty periphery
eyes aching into back and biceps
All’s still hurting days later
when I glance into a Vinnies
contemplate cute crop tops & short cut jeans
fleetingly
flitting through aisles
fleeing eyes of Catholic volunteers
who look like auntie Dell from Emmaville
I leave with a lime green polo shirt I hate
and know from judgements cashiers didn’t make
nothing really
Suffer
In pyjamas nursing cups of tea
(glowing red-green in the Christmas tree pulse)
I keep myself under wraps
— all my new year’s resolutions far too gay to share
so instead I try to tell you
about this gorgeous python on a hike
a rice-pack sack flopped atop the path
a beam of shining black and fat
and
— I don’t care
If I were there
I’d take my spade
and behead it with the blade
they’re evil and disgusting
creatures I won’t suffer
The next morning,
I’m outside, dew between my toes
and in sagging threads
spins an orbweaver
green & gold & delicate
stitching its xxxxxx
in sunlight & cotton.
Over some other too bitter Dilmah I tell you this.
See
that’s okay, I’ll suffer that
but when they make my walls their floors they get the boot.
When I ask you come to see it though —
— I don’t care
I told you they’re disgusting
& I don’t want to see it.
And maybe I’m angry you boot
so much out of sight
when in the tattered paper of the box-
-ing day hangover flop
I un-box a feeling — a kind of cotton
& sunlight across the path
we’d thought I was cutting
some sort of web delicate
serpent-sinful
queer
and fuck
I hope you suffer
Barra Nula
We climb out of your mother’s clay
dusted x-trail & down
to the creek, my father’s undergrown thongs
slipping my feet with every step
to spread sunscreen then our garish beach towels
on the granite shoulders shrugging through the water
I hop from rock to rock, felsic
grains tear the callous with each bound
all my outgrown in the grass with the thongs on the bank
I slip
into the water
a human body
but for pastel boardshorts
elasticed at the hip
so we climb down Barra Nula
to the falls
feet gouged &
shins scraped
bloody into hot rock
slipping through the slimy pools
deliberately
we come to the waterfall
clamber down its wal
slide into its cool
tannin green-brown depth
to be blasted by the spray
you’re still here & we grin to slip elastic
onto the slick bank
dive
and find no bottom
bodies amber through the surface
burnt,
bleeding
soft
and finally
smiling
Executive Producers
Sue White
Karolina Ristevski
Daniel Henson
