Feature poet

Feature Poet: Ren Alessandra

Power Lines

From the power lines down Memory Lane, I recall all the women I have been

The houses look so diff erent from up here.

Soaring, I reflect on the way these rooft ops seem from the street. How perspective, is a kind of hindsight. How time has done its best with everything that it had. How I did my best, with all I knew I had, at the time.

My story begins each day when I wake, so many times, in so many beds, on couches, on floors, next to men I thought I loved, who I swear in moments loved me.

From the power lines, I watch flowers shiver in their beds wine bottles reflect the sun, my cat, wandering all of these houses look the same as I remember, but aren’t the same as I remember, nothing is.

These houses I see, are doorways into the past versions of the woman I am yet to be.

Why is a building named a building if it is already built? Why is a woman named a woman if not to woo man? Woe man…Womb man?

Is this house of mine not built for anything more than to serve the other? Language, so inherently destructive, subconsciously constructing the way we see ourselves.

From the power lines, I consider my power lines, that perhaps, they are here, in these lettered strings, stretching from mouth to house, from age to era, all of them ending, stretching into unconscious beginning.

These houses house humans that are built for more than

language determines.

There are predetermined roles in other lettered strings, & they are things that I am reworking.

So yes, name me building, for I am, constantly.

Ren Alessandra is a poet and educator based in Melbourne. As the 2020 Australian Poetry Slam Champion, she has competed and performed interstate and internationally. Her poetry explores her relationship with her body, women’s fundamental rights and love in all its colours. Some of her work can be found in the 2020 Poetry D’Amour Anthology and the Pocketry Almanack.She will appear at Byron Writers Festival 2021.