In London (Julia’s Key)

Lucy Dougan

In London (Julia’s Key)

 
 
Once, when we travelled, you wore a key about your neck. People would stop and ask you what it opened—your heart, your home, the centre of the earth—but you insisted it was just a key that opened nothing extraordinary. Only to the Japanese waiter in the crypt at St Martin-in-the-Fields did you allow any concession. When he asked if he might use it, you answered perhaps.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Note: “In London (Julia’s Key)” was previously published in the Recent Work Press (Canberra) anthology: Pulse (2016, eds. Shane Strange and Monica Carroll) and is republished here with permission. It also appeared previously with the title “Once When We Travelled” in TEXT Special Issue Website Series, October, no.46, 2017.

Lucy Dougan is a widely published and prize-winning poet. Her books include Memory Shell (5 Islands Press), White Clay (Giramondo), Meanderthals (Web del Sol), and The Guardians (Giramondo), which won the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for poetry. With Tim Dolin, she is co-editor of The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky (UWAP, 2017). She works for the China Australia Writing Centre at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia.