As her to you, unhurried,
pair formations addle a skyline,
extrovert welcoming traffic, selfless despot on the inner.
Even so, his pin-cushioned face glues to the backdrop’s nest of wombats.
The city changes from one skyscraper and slate
to the creek’s bag-junked ripple,
decisive formaldehyde splitting a cloud’s anagram of discontent,
replacing slouched velodrome with mouse-topped stove.
The introduced species pursue a spalling bridge.
No purpose other than as butter pat,
styled nuptials pick a branch.

Gig Ryan

Published in Have Your Chill (2017), edited by Pete Spence.

You long for night to push away injunctions and sodalities,
sky’s hexagon clouds,
as veins lined with velvet straighten the road and undone casket
and morning’s birds click through dream.

Rest your eyes on the road like an inn,
bundled rubbish a corpse on the nature-strip.
You take the waters.
You embrace a door.
Snaked fields welter through molecules
as you burrow a dynamic exit.
Day tells you to circulate.
Royal blue flowers greet the neighbourhood’s ducks
and the palms-out front-yard grottoes,
but in the shells of Hades
or the mirrored corridors of Elysium
Castor and Pollux sing

Gig Ryan

(Idyll II, Theocritus)

Where are my bay leaves and charms, my bowl with crimson flowers
while him inexorable
has gone from my bed like a dress
Distance: spells of fire wreathe you

Shine on this spin or grave
As sight stunned me

leaves burn
Wheel of brass turning from my door

Now wave is still and wind is still
My heart stopped in its foundry

As horses run, so we to it
Starts love’s knife

whose hair shone like dunes
whose body greased with labour

He had brought apples and his hair sprigged
unasked love into the oak and elm

and words went and came
Now from my lintels

Day drags from me and tells his flowers elsewhere
Farewell, ocean and its team,
whose white arms wrap
Silver flute who sang, and bright-faced moon
who knocks on a door of shadows

A rose for you, to match the wound
but tomorrow’s like now  

Gig Ryan

Chris Wallace-Crabbe