Rockhampton

Jen Webb

Rockhampton

 
 
Below the cast skin of the bull, things were a mess. Students painted mappa mundi on its flanks. You taught me how to handle a nineteen footer, how to tack between the rocks that gave the city its name. Bull sharks in the water after cyclone season. There be dragons. Falling mangoes that smashed windscreens, date palms brushing our hair. After the second murder things grew taut between us. After the day you had the cats put down. After you fucked me on the edge of the balcony, three storeys above the gravel yard, me passive, you attentive. I wasn’t really passive. I was waiting to make my move.

Jen Webb is director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra, and writes prose poetry. The ACT editor of Australian Book Review’s States of Poetry annual anthology and co-editor of the bilingual anthology Open Windows: Contemporary Australian Poetry, she is also the author of several poetry collections and of collaborative artist books. Her most recent poetry collection is Moving Targets (Recent Work Press, 2018).