Poem: Components (via link)
November 11, 2025
If you go to this link, you’ll find a poem I just had published at the venerable AntipodeanSF, called “Components”. It involves a horse and cart, which allows me to use that wonderful illustration by Phiz, of a scene from Dickens’s David Copperfield.
The poem is about routine and magic, and is rather long, by my standards. But by no means Dickensian.
Poem: The Smell of Heaven
October 16, 2025
To a truck driver
Nullabored,
it may be McDonald’s
The dog combines
bone with noseshadow
of absent master
The writer mixes
new printed book wisp
and any wine
Christ died scented
with sweat and piss
and others’ spit
Only a dead-brave poet
would mention roses
but yes, heaven
will be those too,
and we will turn thrice
and smell that which
we smelt in the womb —
warm blood and love.
As that dog, replete
with his master’s tang,
knows meat and bliss
were always one.
PS Cottier
An old poem, this one, first published in Eureka Street ten years ago.
Our sense of smell is so weak, compared to that of the creature in the photo, but I think it’s an important sense to explore in poetry.
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.
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.
Budgies and shortlisting
October 1, 2024
Budgerigar
Ten million green commas punctuate blue sky,
quick breaths of swooping wonder, multiplied.
Water-hole is your target; liquid rope pulls you down
and the whole emerald sky is falling, diving,
as miniature bodies scoop into pool.
Your individual markings have taken you
further than native flight; outside the Louvre
I saw you, cold, trying to break in, as pointillist
as Pissarro but acrylic in your finish.
A proud but damp escapee from French balcony,
regretting the lost seed and the found liberty.
So plump and fresh, I have heard you were good eating,
a winging fast food charred to a turn;
as far from stringy battery chook as fingers in the fire.
Most know you singly; whistling in cages,
bowing and bobbing, rattling plastic mirrors.
Driven mad you ring and ring chink-chinky bells
or make love to that hard, hard-to-get reflection.
What joy to see you
just once, as you swoop,
one stitch amongst the tapestry,
a blade of grass in feathered turf carpet, magically landing,
transforming dreary waterside with that fallen sward of Eire.
Swift dragon of twenty million wings,
fluorescing with your simple, beak-filled joys.
PS Cottier
I have just returned from Boulia, in Queensland, about 300 km from Mount Isa, where I finally saw budgies in the wild. These have been my main target bird for ages, but they’ve always avoided me. We also saw wild cockatiels, which was wonderful.
***
In less ornithological news, I have two works shortlisted in separate national competitions. Firstly, my book Tuesday’s Child is Full (In Case of Emergency Press) is shortlisted for the Society of Women Writers (NSW) Book Awards for Poetry. This one is announced at a ceremony Sydney in late November.
Secondly, The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin, a novella manuscript co-written with NG Hartland, has been shortlisted for the 20/40 prize, run by publishers Finlay Lloyd. The main prize for this one is publication, so it will be a very exciting announcement later this month.
PS Cottier 