Alison Boyd is a writer living in the Southern Highlands of NSW, Australia. She writes a regular blog and has had poetry, short stories and a radio play published. Currently writing a novel in an office overlooking the vegie garden, most of her day consists of a series of mad blasts at the keyboard punctuated with the distraction of plant growth, feline antics and a herbal tea habit bordering on compulsive.

Three Poems (January 20, 2010. Issue 13.)

Apollo to Cassandra

The tapestry began, aged twelve,
when you had the chance
to fuck this god
and declined.

How coy.

Now pregnant with woe
you see Troy’s fall:
a nine-year long corridor,
flecked with Myrmidons,
sullied Scamander,
the shadowed brow of Ida.

Helen will be smug.

Dare your tongue to Priam,
Hecuba’s indulgence has waned.
Your web of hair,
threadbare mind,
flutter against plate glass eyes.

Your lullabies:
the cries of war.

Bast

There are others,
dancing,
but she
the only god I see;
feline-faced, sleek-slicked.

Wired well,
fine skeleton
beneath the surface
an afterthought of solidification
as though she might
at any moment, discard
the corporeal
like a muslin slip,
return to the ether.

Dual green suns
channel-set
regard here and afar.

She sees me and through me,
tangential,
so that my own shape
and hers
are ribbed
in whiskered shadow
between us:

possibility/improbability
fantasy/deity

Her purr,
subaudible,
an idea
evolving
enfolding.
In the dance’s
critical threshold

We come to the edge of words.

The Morrigan

Blackbirds roil
through dual-world white.
Henge-ghosts age
the dawn, drink the fog

where hag-neck cliffs
thwart bald hills
above weeping-blue. Stippled
Alba’s there, at the lip of the world.

On shaggy nags,
five shaggy lads
hang barley breath on mist,
a ginger coppice in the stead of trees,

staunching dread-Queen dread
with platted posies,
vivid, untainted,
in still-boyish hands.

while the Morrigan below
shreds petals,
cups the foam,
entreats
the clumsiness of feet.