Bye bye reef
Bye bye ocean life
Doesn’t matter
We have the Olympics
And can fly into space
by rowena parry
The Commuter by Nicola Sitch
There’s something distinctly sexy about a tram. Perched, as I am, at stop 92 in the latent heat of a Melbourne summer morning, one might admire her slinking, muscular movement. The way her second carriage dislocates as she takes a corner, like a thrust hip. Elegant, self-assured, decidedly feminine. It’s December 2019, I’m working a dead end job writing copy and as her sliding doors exhale cool air onto the platform, I realise that this tram ride will be the best part of my day. Call it what you want- voyeurism, human interest, or stickybeaking- but I am enamoured with the idea of the cabin as a moveable stage. I writhe in my seat anticipating the tapestry of humanity that will unfold here; that I will witness, welcome, contain if only for a few stops.
The sudden inertia of the tram slings a man into the booth next to me. I notice pigmentation blooming across his cheek, betraying an adolescence burdened by cystic acne. The base note of his cologne is warm, and sweat stains clutter his collar. Heavy metal oozes from his headphones and sit in my ear like tinnitus. In the seats adjacent, an elderly couple stare vacantly ahead but something about the way they interlace arthritic fingers feels adolescent. Outside the pulsing window, inner-Melbourne transpires- a mosaic of industrial spaces realised cleverly anew: urban wineries and boutiques boasting in-house tailoring. It dawns on me, suddenly, the affection I have for this city and the sentiment collects in my throat.
The doors part and the tram fills with the ambrosial smell of a well-kept garden. I look up and note Jasmine spilling over the fence of the local primary school. We’re in the bowels of the inner-north now and I notice a man nailing empty baked bean cans to a lamppost. Squinting, I register a plump succulent sitting squarely in the tin. ‘How beautiful,’ I think, but I’ve let my gaze linger (a cardinal sin of sticky-beaking). ‘What!’ he barks as he boards the tram, peering out from underneath his brow. ‘It’s for morale’.
At the Carlton Baths, two middle-aged self-optimising types, still towelling themselves down, plant themselves squarely in the aisle. They are trading opinions on their recent reads at peak volume, and I wonder what it must be like to assume space so unapologetically.
Then, two women board and fold themselves into a bank of seats at the back of the tram, giggling conspiratorially. One draws a persimmon from a plastic bag and holds it against the light, appraising it like a host on Antique Roadshow. Something about their presence in that moment, the way they marvel at the fruit’s taut skin, its gem-like vibrancy, is a lesson in micro-pleasures that will contain me all day.
“I like the way Nikki finds something to relish in the mundane, the fragrant in the sweaty, the warmth in the sustenance of human bonds, the beauty in the strangely universal and isolating experience of the everyday commute. ”
Haggard Bulldog by Joseph Zaresky
How long can a bulldog keep up its grimace?
For the sake of my beautiful mistress
I played the brute; I had to look
like I would eat your leg up
in a chic, adorable kind of way.
My role was to repel and to attract.
As we did the main drag along the shops
and the esplanade, me running
to keep up with her, I was the compact
and fierce embodiment of her sexual power
which she could unleash or hold back
with a movement of her little finger.
Ah! Was it not clear to me that at bottom
I was there to underline her invulnerability?
I was the prop for her image of a carefree
fashionable person who could never be hurt.
Like a faithful creature I let the hurts
that inevitably came fall on me.
All her disappointments and her miseries
I chomped up like a sink disposal. I offered
my own delicate back for her to dump on.
I terrified the anxieties that bestared her.
A bulldog isn’t a stone! Is there any wonder
my face is fallen, and my eyes don’t bulge any more?
“This poem about bulldogs feels like an indictment against us for breeding these strange looking animals to satisfy human whims. Yet their capacity to love us is not diminished by their ‘fallen’ faces. This is such a beautiful ode to a strange creature.”