Poem: Before the Mustang
June 30, 2025
Before the Mustang
It was reliable, comfy as ug boots,
and just about that chic.
Grey, four cylinder, economical,
totally unAmerican.
Not a hint of speed or sprawl.
It was even easy to park,
and slid out of view
before anyone noticed it.
If you wanted to be a spy,
or a private eye, this car
would be the one for you.
You could dwell outside a house
for weeks, before anyone
thought that there was something to see,
something resembling a car.
I loved it, my first new car.
I hated it for its bland compliance
with a view of what should be.
It broke down exactly once,
and the police were hugely surprised.
It had a cavernous boot for shopping,
and no-one raced it from the lights,
making sport from nothing.
It is gone now, but I’m sure
someone is driving it, somewhere,
that grey slab of suburban metal,
that practical lump of sleep.
PS Cottier
Yes, I know that's not a Mustang! But I had to share a photo of this beautiful object spotted at my local shops.
The poem above appeared in the volume V8, written by myself and Sandra Renew, published in 2022 by Ginninderra Press.
Tuesday poem: The paisley pitbull
December 11, 2024
Each bark is Mozart sweet. Silver flutes
are nothing to the improvised flow
of furry sax buried in soft-toffee bay.
His teeth are crochet hooks. Bites bloom
into perennial tattoos, scars in winter
flutter into hollyhocks come spring.
The cat and the kid eat from his bowl,
sip his milk and crunch his kibble,
and the robin plucks hairs for her nest.
He turns three times three before rest,
and apostrophic patterns erupt
as the canine chameleon settles.
Nightbulls may gore; Pamplonas
still run through his veins,
ghost-genes there in blood’s bottle.
But paisley outs. Stretching into dawn,
he shakes off hard history like dew,
and noses, bee-soft, into day.
PS Cottier
This is an old poem, which first appeared in my chapbook Quick bright things: Poems of fantasy and myth (Ginninderra Press, 2016). The dog in the picture was only six back then; now she’s nearer to fifteen.
The poem touches on myths about pitbulls, which can be as affectionate and gentle as any other breed of dog.
Reviews and sniffer dogs
November 18, 2024
The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin has attracted some thoughtful and positive reviews.
Firstly at Compulsive Reader, where Magdalena Ball wrote the first review of the book. She calls it ‘quirky and strangely haunting’. Secondly, at The Australian. This one is behind a paywall, but the reviewer, Jack Marx, uses phrases like ‘so unusually brilliant’ and states that ‘There is not a bad chapter in The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin, and a delight of some sort – usually many – on every page.’ It’s enough to make an author blush! Seriously.
In other news, a poem I entered in The Thunderbolt Prize for Crime Writing was commended, which is great. I am working on a short manuscript about dogs, and the poem was about sniffer dogs. You can read the winners here. And here is my poem. And a dog.
Ardent nose
We sniff our way through violence,
the dropped hat or jeans removed,
splatters on grass, the blood-crumbs,
we call them among ourselves.
Some of us disinter computers containing
hidden quests for poisonous feasts.
Here a soupçon of arsenic, there
a sprinkle of fentanyl, adding spice,
designed to remove a troublesome life.
Recipes rarely handed down.
Others detect stashes of drugs,
or cash converted from same,
secreted behind hasty plaster walls.
Our indications cause such a havoc
of mattocks, a stucco snowstorm.
We are taken outside, in case we eat
those attractive disentombed baggies
neatly counted into incriminating piles,
photographed and fussed over.
We’d rather be out after truffles,
chase sticks and toys, roll in dung,
but we sense delight when we unearth
what your dodgy senses cannot catch.
Your poor excuses for olfaction
are unable to detect screams of scent
slapping the face of the air.
My friend, the springer spaniel,
trained from a floppy ball of pup,
all long hair, tongue and wag,
tastes the cadaver air, helps reveal
the buried answer to a search —
for don’t all dogs love bones?
Long before your Poirots or Bosches,
your Holmes after that fog-bound hound,
we sleuths found what you could not find,
found the worst of humankind.
We barked, or sat, and simply waited
for you to finally catch us up.
PS Cottier
Note: The word sleuth derives from slough dog or sleuth-hound, a bloodhound once found in Scotland.
Tuesday poem: Fingernails
October 15, 2024
Fingernails
They never stop questing outwards, these epiphytic plants,
soilless roots tonguing the air. Mostly, we cut them into stubs,
mere bulbs awaiting final burial, asserting a sharp superiority.
Some men do allow them to snake their ways around and around,
until the hand becomes mere support for their rollercoaster ways.
Gone beyond decoration, the curling roundabout growths all indicate
each life's road and certain end. Some glue fake covers on each finger,
minute bright coffins jewelled with stones like Egyptian scarabs,
that once adorned the dead. But nails need never die. After host stops
they still grow, scraping coffins with cartilage, tusks of ivory feeling
for dirt long denied. Some are fed finally on fire, and burn with sticks
and hair and skin, external teeth closing on the jerking meal of flame.
A few succeed, reach dark earth, and plant themselves, and grow to men,
who carry new nails on clever, thumb-opposed fleshy tools,
deaf to the breathless emergent growth that tips each handy finger.
It crawls out, from the fecund pinkness, unstoppable; the quick tipped
living pointer, small flat shelled snail, that whispers of unseen bones,
and death that never dies, but clasps us tight as skull holds mind.
PS Cottier
Last weekend I was part of a poetry roundtable as Conflux, a science fiction convention here in Canberra, and read this freaky poem which has obvious horror tropes. Delighted to find this illustration by JA Knapp at the wonderful Old Book Illustrations to go with it! I particularly like the mushrooms growing in the distance. I wouldn’t be eating them any time soon…
‘Fingernails’ first published in Chiaroscuro: Treatments of Light and Shade in Words (ChiZine), Canada, Volume 47, Week 2, April-June 2011.
Tuesday poem: via link
July 17, 2024
I just had a poem published at Eye to the Telescope, called “Stuffed Koala and Other Cocktails of the Near Future”. The theme of this issue, edited by Gretchen Tessmer, is Strange Mixology, and it’s well worth a tipple. Here’s a link to the issue, scroll down for my poem. This publication is run by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, based in the US.
PS Cottier 