The Morning After a Real or Imagined Flood
The sun just doesn’t make sense,
like a joke the earth thinks is funny.
The scrambling to save my stupid stuff
with my rolled-up bath towel against
a swollen river. I could have sat
and watched it all float away,
made a lemonade and pulled my
chair up to the roof and kept
my socks and jeans dry. I could have
wrapped my towel around my shoulders
and read my favourite book of verse
while I sipped and swayed to gurgle
and gush. Someone would have saved me,
or I would have succumbed to the
filling day with a rhyme on my
lemoned lips.
But no and no.
I’m wet and weary, thirsty for
a mojito and somebody’s
beautiful words, and the sun is
poking its fucking yellow tongue
out at me.
Fish shop at the boat shed in a bathtub
We added his Subaru to our wish list
of happily-ever-after while we ate
the special of the day over-salted.
At least we had good taste in cars.
We overbooked the days on this, our first
vacation at the beach, reeling back in
every doubt before it could
unfurl
and blow us out to sea.
I learnt you play tennis, like to read
and water down your lemonade.
You learnt I talk too loud, dress
too long and want to hold
hands too much.
We never did go back after the children—
too hard to sail with baggage, we said
without saying it.
Didn’t get that Subaru either. Shame,
it would have fetched more than the Nissan
when we split down the middle.
Marriage looked like such a solid word.
We bobbed around
on the surface
with the plug half-out
slowly
sinking, clueless
[or maybe not]
until the last few inches where it
spun
and sucked
and tumbled,
got stuck at the drain
and was still
pulling us
down.
Forest Fire
My eyes stay under the horizon
as I pass you (these moons are caught
in the undergrowth, matured and meshed.
So lovely to have sat in at the start—
my blissful, quiet garden—but how
dry and barbed this dark forest has become).
The snap as a brittle twig yields
to your step and then: a stellar
collision! The memory of nothing
I’ve known rushes back in, flushes
my cheeks with its insolence,
with its insistence, with its cosmic flash.
Hello-
Hemat Malak is an accountant and poet from Picton, NSW, who has crawled back to poetry after over forty-five years away. She mainly writes on themes which irritate her, hoping to run out of them one day. This past year Hemat’s writing has appeared in Rattle, Rochford Street Review, Catchment Literary Journal, Short Stories Unlimited, and anthologies from WestWords and WA Poets. Hemat has two nearly-grown-up children and two rescue cats. She can be contacted at hematmalak.com and on instagram @hematmalak.
Locative Magazine 