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Ashlee Palmer
‘ROMEA: AN AUBADE’
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ROMEA: AN AUBADEGuilt is the choir of one that hums through the church of your skull when you yawn.
there are hundreds of tadpoles peering through the mouth but in credulous chorus they usher in fragments of an omen.
they are children of no labour for the yoke is what they know.
when giants tire, do you think they put their lips to a chimney?
false advertising to the least patient of December’s children
soaking up death itself from the horizon like Jesus sucking up sins-
i never asked him to do that. i would’ve liked to have had a sin
of my own to cradle and nurture and fill with bread and sugar.
i’d submit to modelling the skin of a narcissist, or some fashioned offcut,
the scales of a shawl, (albeit overpriced, designer)
and don a goat’s carcass on my wedding finger
(my mother’s, to my chagrin;
i should have liked to flaunt a horse’s ribs, like any good sister. i have more dignity than i beseech quotidian.)
anger, i’m sure, comes in seeds that ho-hum within my stomach
(they teach me patience, i needn’t earthly teachers.
what proclaims their tongue to be less at rest than my own?).
with the slowness of a sunstorm, i spy a pulse bucolic.
Juliet is foetal in the palm of a valley and i want to wrap her up in river
however like many fabrics it seems to run away from me
perhaps unsteady without it’s wiring, sin, sucked out of it through a straw.
bastard baby Jesus and his flavoured milk.
i will never know if i am singing of what has or what could.
i’d like to ask her if she’d join me in song
in mellifluous avalanches, the germ of a blackbird could meet compulsion.
she is smaller than me and smaller too is her appreciation for lying down,
to find stillness in a heaving stomach, uprooting cows and churches and trickles of someone’s breakfast.
i should like to lie naked on a crossbow or on the mouth of a lily
and lick the pollen that culminates from the inside of my cheeks;
a sweet moppet has performed her first cartwheel.
i’d like to cloak a petal ‘round my belly
and play pretend i am wombed or wounded
and i’d like to ask more of someone
with a heart and a kidney and a lung and a womb
accommodating the likes of myself.
i can’t afford to be restless, for it’ll cost me kindness
the seed i kissed between her breast and forearm begins to pray,
for time.
you have been sorry and i have been sorry and now together we can be quiet.
Ashlee is an emerging writer and creative from Meanjin/Brisbane currently studying journalism. She wrote this piece over a buttery croissant and Lucy Dacus's buttery vocals.
Ashlee is featured in our issue 01 print . Get your copy here!