Content Warnings (click to reveal)
Discussed: death, illness, houselessness
No Place LikeHomeThis Car
i.
My daughter tells me to wear to my red shoes while she wears hers. Together, we dance around our home in a car park to beat the blues. Home is four wheels and a dashboard, petrol and a parking spot. Home is registration and a driver’s license, both of which I redirect to my sister’s house. I steal my mail from her letterbox. Home is a home that isn’t mine: sometimes I sit in her driveway and imagine this is our abode. When her husband is away, for work, we crash amid hot showers and couches, hotter meals and the 75 inch plasma playing cartoons and reality TV. These nights, SpongeBob and Real Housewives lullaby my daughter’s dreams. In the dark, her red shoes keep dancing.
ii.
When my sister’s husband is home, condensation on our windows. I rise when the sun does. Asphalt sprawls, floral with shattered glass petals. These beach showers spit and spurt: glacial, staccato, bone-chill bore into us. A hitting of the button, over and over. Our lives reduced to four outfits each, three pairs of shoes, compartments behind seats. The esky is ineffective at keeping meat, unless processed, so we fry morning eggs on a portable gas top. My daughter has taken to shoplifting chocolate. I have taken to being her lookout.
iii.
Home is free parking in carparks along the coast. When people talk about the housing crisis, I want to raise my hand, step into the centre of the conversation. But I am never present. Just a statistic. Like my daughter. We are an abstract shape with thinning cheeks: there is no gingham or picnic basket in this narrative. There are no news crews tapping on the window, asking for our opinion. But the cops know my daughter by name.
iv.
On the weekend, the world is emerald. Beach foam. Park roam. Mall as home. We make the most of togetherness, forget we are houseless. When we park for the night, I reassure my daughter that this is temporary. Every time, she touches my hand. And she asks is it? Fate is a cruel bureaucrat behind a curtain. Pull those strings, make us hunger. Tomorrow, chance might make itself known: a phone call, a lotto ticket, a house falling from the sky. My daughter always wants to wear her ruby red slip-ons.
Curse Loop in The Housing Crisis
We are wreckage. A shipwreck nail is the first ingredient. Ingredients to make a curse include a sheet of metal, spite, a site. Sight unseen, us homeless are invisible, are many. How many times must I explain to Centrelink that yes I have “a house”. Our house, an amber station wagon, the back windows blacked out. Outside, we live in car parks, sea breeze for aircon. Their con: yes, we can support you… in approximately six to nine months. Months of this, of move-on notices–it’s enough to drive a man to curse. Curse the government, curse the rich, curse the bureaucracy, curse their heartlessness. Heart hungers. Hungry to see them held accountable. My account is emotionally empty, without water or salt: a ghost sea. See us sleeping rough, how we shiver. Shivering winter, my daughter’s lungs mucous and emergency. Emergency, offer her shelter while I pace the car park, restless. Restless, I go down to the shipwreck not far from this hospital and I prise a nail free. Free country if you’re wealthy, but if you’re poor, all you have is the crisis, the anger. Angry words carved into metal stolen from a worksite: the names of those in charge, the man who “served” us at the dole place. Place it in the ground at a location I shall not disclose. This close, chant and spit rip rain from sky. Sigh as hands shake, curse ends, torrent licks, bitumen floods. Flooded engine: just my luck, car won’t start. Startled and scarred, my daughter in her hospital bed, waiting for me to return, unsure if I ever will—how do you come back from this–she too is wreckage.
fall
as in downstairs into me over this the small ways a poem does
as if asteroid meteorite comet carving a path back to the expanse
of helium from which it was born mind the gaps I worry about my
89 year old mother in the bathroom at the shops walking the possibility of a hip, shattered on cement porcelain carpet her skin
a net of bruise, catching each day she asks why pre-dawn has arisen on
her leg her arm her hand sometimes we clasp things as they fall, I
explain to her, and she laughs tells me how the world is sliding into her
that old mate, gravity i cut her hair straight white cascade of plume
stories and lineage scatter as if feather to the floor when she showers,
she walks out with her mane over her face, head bent forward The
Grudge, I cry and we laugh such music circumvents dust and
ornaments chimes in the way memory is a chorus of birds each morn’
so past autumn, she is winter forevermore we both know a day will
come when the pull pulls her down to the ground and she will not
get up how a body without a spirit is a weight incalculable to carry
the fervour of blood’s cascade keeps us up at night, when we talk, my
mother imparts all the spells she has not yet taught my grimoire
expands as hers wanes, gibbous such is the way magic descends
night kisses her thigh and a nebula, purple in the loam blossoms
Scott-Patrick Mitchell is a WA-based queer non-binary poet who lives on Whadjuk Noongar Country. They were the recipient of 2022’s Red Room Poetry Fellowship, Westerly’s 2022 Mid-Career Fellowship and the 2023 winner of The XYZ Prize for Innovation in Spoken Word. Their debut poetry collection Clean (Upswell Publishing, 2022) was shortlisted for The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, The WA Premier’s Book Awards, The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and internationally in The Read Rainbow’s Best LGBTIQA+ Books of 2022 Awards. Mitchell is currently completing their second poetry collection which explores the parallel between the fragile ecosystem of the marine park Perth Canyon and the fragility of the houseless crisis taking place in WA’s coastal car parks.
Locative Magazine 