mutinous: two poetry readings

On the train home tonight, I continued reading Andrew Sutherland's Act Cute.

Specifically, I continued reading 'Act Two [you stop me at the airport and tell me that you love me]'. It is a long-ish prose poem. I started it as I rode the long escalators at Parliament Station. I stopped while walking to work because I didn't want to be hit by cars. And Andrew's words deserve one's full attention.

Anyway, the passage that caught my attention on the way home, which I immediately turned back to, on finishing the poem:

I held onto that for a long time. It must have hurt; a lot, even, in the moment. But I had to have known there was nothing secure; I had generated this fantasy as it happened. Nothing promised. I knew you had a boyfriend, or it became clear to me you were with someone, and that was fine. You stayed with me as a missed opportunity, a time-too-short, but also, more obscurely, a disembodied hope for the future; a future impossible to pinpoint or plan for. You know how the straight world has longing but queers have yearning? Something like that. And then I got over it, of course. Of course I did. You faded into other people, other yearnings. I knew that I belonged somewhere else. And really it was the story that mattered to me. You were proof of present and proof of loss. The intensity of my feeling was the way youth romanticises time. A person always falls in love the day before the airport. That way, there will always be every future. That way, the only perfect memories are the ones that haven't happened yet.

oof. that last line!!!!! 'A person always falls in love the day before the airport. ... That way, the only perfect memories are the ones that haven't happened yet.' 

On Sunday, I re-read and almost finished Joss: A History by Grace Yee. I wrote a poem after 'for the chinese merchants of melbourne'. Specifically, this line:

in little bourke street we gamble ramble / sober, assiduous, apt and docile.

I admire how Grace's poems remind us that history lies just beneath the present. 'Playful Bodily Harm', for example, features streets I know like the back of my hand. Albert-street. Victoria-parade, Fitzroy. Little Lonsdale-street. It underscores the violence enacted by 'larrikins' against early Chinese-Australian settlers and the ways this violence was dimished.

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I'm incredibly honoured to be reading at the launch of Grace Yee's Joss: A History this Thursday 17 July and the launch of Andrew Sutherland's Act Cute next Thursday 24 July.

Free, but please book. I highly, highly recommend buying or borrowing both collections.