Feature poet

Feature Poet: Carlie Daley

Mulberry Trees

Mulberries are rotting on their branches clotting blood along bark skeins we used to gorge on them bellies full of cloying sweetness plucking ripe ones with fingers crushing rotten ones with toes slipping skins off down by the river washing bloodied mouths clean before dinner

Some year we grew weary of the berries slits of flesh and simmering skin more compelling than childish games As if beyond the flesh was a portal to a kind of heaven afterwards, guilt curdling in our guts like rotten cream

Pop said women looked cheap drinking beer So, I got high instead mother glaring between forkfuls of lasagne granny only had 3 party dresses & a plastic virgin mary with a neon heart

plastered above her bed make-up case at death containing life’s ashes crumbs of eyeshadows and lipsticks decades old and never worn

In time

In time, you will take your Bukowski books John Fante novels

Robert Crumb comics

record player and eclectic collection including Romany wedding band music & Dr Octagon albums catalogue of Iron Maiden shirts spanning decades Tarkovsky & Herzog films male canons of cool

and gardening tools; collection of endearing pieces of old underwear and socks

electric drill and lawn mower row of various guitars accordion and harmonium coffee grinder with the broken blade, set of knives Lady of Kazan figure resplendent with gold paint, and those three naked Victorian-era ladies in that yellow wooden frame who followed us dutifully from house to house

you will take it all away from the shelves; from the house; from the shed; from the bedroom and I will feel the wind

howl between those spaces like the gaps in mouths from rotten, pulled teeth.

Carlie Daley lives in Northern NSW. She has had pieces published in The Long Paddock, Southerly, Gargouille, Capsule, Frostwriting, and Australian Poetry Anthology. She was the winner of the City of Stonnington Literary Festival – Poetry Open Age – NonStonnington prize in 2018 and published her first chapbook with Dancing Girl Press in 2019.