homecoming — a poem
1 week back in Meanjin / Brisbane
I stroll the Meanjin streets
The faint smell of rotting fruit
Like tendrils unfurling
My fellow walkers
Scuttling like green ants to escape
the humid oppressor
The sun, novel to me still
My bones, attuned to the brittle cold
Long since my emigration turned exile
So I
Let the heat push and cut into me
Familiar and not unkind
There is something to be said of an unexpected homecoming
The fruit, rotting
Makes me picture my own marrow
returning to mulch




This was SOO good! Omg