Tuesday poem: Snip (contains a very violent kangaroo)
June 10, 2025
Snip
Red earth drumbeat —
crimson kangaroo.
She cuts fingers,
her claws scimitar sharp.
Her pouch is packed tight
with pointy digits,
a pencil case dripping
more red on red ground.
Snip knows what’s up,
and how to remove it.
Put down that gum-leaf.
Turn around. Run.
Or better still,
sever your own finger
(left pinkie will do).
Hold it to your lips,
as if to blow. Blow.
The sound is audible
to Snippy alone.
She will come, avid.
Good girl Snip!
Present your offering.
She’ll slip it in that
bulging, fetid pouch —
mock pregnancy of phalanges.
You are now her friend.
She’ll leave you
with the other nine fingers
which is way better than none.
I just pray
that you’re not wearing thongs.
PS Cottier
Note: ‘thongs’ refers to the footwear that many non-Australians call flip-flops.
‘Snip’ published Midnight Echo 16, ed Tim Hawken, November 2021.
Four-legged loss
May 10, 2025
I work the dread so many times
that it’s a kind of sudoku in my head —
rehearsing death like an actor a play.
Hopefully one day she will just not get up,
lie too long in her habitual basket
and avoid that dreaded visit to the vet.
There, liquid death is delivered kindly,
but the syringe is always filled with guilt
alongside yellow pentobarbital.
How can a dog understand that love
might write a prescription for death?
She can’t. She licks my hand, trust
written in the ageing eyes, so cloudy.
Human minds flick through possibility,
feel the knot of loss before death.
But dogs just are. Until they’re not.
PS Cottier
This poem was published in last year’s Grieve anthology, a book made up of entries to a yearly competition organised by the Hunter Writers Centre. The dog who inspired the poem has just died, being put to sleep at home, so I thought I’d republish the poem here. Anyone who has a dog in their life dreads the moment that they die, and believes their dog to be the best in the world. Vale Mango, my much missed Staffie. Fifteen years, and not nearly enough.
Poem: Colonoscopy
April 26, 2025
Colonoscopy
Such things happen; such medieval things.
Bruegel could have dreamt this one,
a one-eyed snake wriggling through bowels,
controlled by a one-armed Satan.
Curl of guts projected onto screen,
their pink nest of privacy invaded,
in anxious search for polyp eggs
that could house flesh-eating crabs.
It's beyond spread-eagled, this photography,
so explicit; as far from erotic as it is possible to be.
Colon, opened book, tells its twisted tale,
from end to end to avid reading cyclops,
pushing through to final o! of surprise.
Unblinking auditor emerges into sweeter air,
that digital elephant's questing nose.
PS Cottier
Tuesday poem: The compleat cake, part 3
April 1, 2025
3. Royal Easter Show, Sydney 2011
Welcome all, to the arena of cake. Kewpie doll stares with avid blueness, a malice far older than four or seventeen years lies hide in those little pools of scorch, trained like cool napalm at her competitors. She scorches the cute cotton-tail bunny (marshmallow shaped into an apostrophe of fur) and the rosette-less Smurfs; the ribbonless boomerang, its skeleton icing sketch of roo resolutely unrewarded. But oh oh oh, see the Opera House? Meringue fascinators balance like dreams near a liquorice bridge, climbed by grey lozenges, climbing up, up to catch a blue view in a dark net. Eyes eat these cakes; no tongue will ever lick Kewpie, and the Opera House is tasted only by sweet sticky Sutherlands of flies.
PS Cottier
My last slice of prose poem about cake, referencing the Agricultural Shows where cakes are made to resemble all sorts of things, from famous buildings to clowns and dolls. The Sydney Show is quite soon, so it seems appropriate.
And that wonderful illustration is from WikiCommons, and is in the public domain. Unfortunately, the artist is unknown. Here’s what the site says about the work: A collectible card by Elmshorn-based margarine brand Echte Wagner, circa 1932; “Aus dem schönen Echte Wagner Album Nr. 3, Serie Nr. 9, Bild Nr. 1.” It depicts visitors to “Schlaraffenland” (Cockaigne) eating pieces of a wall made of cake to enter the country, with a sausage tree seen in the background.
They are eating the wall of cake in a very serious manner.
Tuesday poem: The compleat cake, part 2
March 26, 2025
Politician’s Birthday Cake, Florida, 1965
Jill-in-the-cake, she waits, hermit crab in cardboard shell inside thin icing. She smells faint fire of too many candles; ears pick up obsequious tinkles of laughter. Smallest Matryoshka, curled over and into herself in cake-womb, body ribboned by expectation, waiting to uncurl herself into room. Her bikini moistens under her breasts, confined in oubliette of quasi-cake, and now, now, she hears the final you of the Birthday song and up she jumps, top-hat of cake swings to one side. Venus comes from the pink-icing-shell, floating above the sea of eyes that lick at her breasts like one huge tongue at Mom’s near-forgotten mixing spoon.
PS Cottier
This is the second part of my prose poem about cake. One more to go next week. The publication details appear in the last post on March 12th. Somehow this part of my epic cake poem seems particularly timely.
That Venus above has strapping feet, by the way.
PS Cottier 