Kate Locke

Curvature

Normal.
Nothing happening.
No curvature of sorts.
No curl of the lip or tongue.
No crinkling of the eye.
No swerving of the thoughts.
Birds calling.
Traffic Passing.
Routine I guess.
But there's no curvature of my head.
My taste buds aren't swerving.
It's just one of those
Straight down the middle kind of days.
Nothing great to tell.
No pressing smells.
It's so full of nothing it reminds me of
Afternoons.
Dry heat lazing sun.
Orange glows light breeze
Grasses blowing dusty billboards swinging
Lone car droning and a bird.
All flying across the faded dusty sky.
The epitome of nothing isn't nothing.
Nothing isn't just blackness or whiteness.
Or whatever your colour preference.
It is stylized gravitised stabilized in our minds
Our nothingness is ourselves
So then it must be something?
Nothing happening.
It's all just straight down the middle.
No curvature.

Schizophrenic dreaming

She sweeps through
the darkness, gliding like a black ghost, emerging here and there, only as
a shadow. Delicate hands, tiny waist. She is miniature, though tall and slender.

The jet crisply cuts a line down the centre of the sky, piercing it and making cloud fall through towards the earth.

I think to myself... when I'm sad I stick to one story longest. It's as if I'm trying to escape from something in my mind, into this other world. For as long as I want to escape, I can write that story.

Fear is the worst. Nothing can prevent fear from taking over the body. There are no drugs that can combat the worst of the fears, the quiet, entangling fears that seem to seep through the skin and entrench themselves in the veins that lead to the heart and finally the brain.

Quietly echoing, my feet paint their way across the cream marble floor. A calm coldness radiates from the walls and domed ceilings. There is no one alive here. It is history re-awakened, the past alive. Dirt and grease coats my hands as I slide them down the railing. A hot wind blows through the tunnel and I hear dull, distant roar building from deep within that blackness beneath the city. It's coming, though it's late. I've been waiting a long time.

Sand slips through the fingers and the sun warms the back. The waves froth gently onto the shore, and children shout and lay. Umbrellas and sarongs flap wildly in the ocean breeze, and seagulls swoop lazily.

The lift gives a short 'Ping' and the doors slide open at the third floor. The air-conditioning hums loudly, and the fluorescent lighting flickers and zaps, casting a sickly haze over the green carpet. The hallway walks are covered in scruffmarks and notice board pins and blu-tack, and ripped posters and advertising, and timetables and notices.

The gum trees scrape and jitter over the tin roof of the holiday house. It is a house on stilts, built in the bush, with a bridge over the creek, connecting it to the road. She lies reading in the cool darkness of the lounge room, with its high ceilings and rafters, and windows overlooking the swimming greenery.

Beveridge, Judith
Bleakley, Kathleen
Boyd, Allan
Brennan, Michael
Burns, Joanne
Cameron, Lainie
Cassidy, Bonnie
Chang, Jessica
Clarke, John
Cooke, Stuart
Crane, Michael
Dechian, Sonja
Doran, Ben
Doupe, Juliana
Drewitt, Andy
Dyson, Mia
Elson, Gerard
Ferney, Liam
Garrard, Phillipa
Gibian, Jane
Greagen, Clint
Hawkins, Brian
Hickey, Kelly-Lee
Hier, Michael
Higgs, Ashley
Jelfs, Bradley
Jenkins, Gareth
Johnson, Heather Taylor
Jones, Jill
Kefala, Antigone
Keily, Tom
Knox, Elena
Locke, Kate
Lowe, Justin
Mackie, Brendan
Mann, Paddy
Messiah, Eytan
Minter, Peter
Mitchell, Paul
Morganics
Narkiewicz, Katrine
Nicholson, Anna Kerdijk
Nixon, Jenni
Oliver, Stephen
Paine, Juliet
Prater, David
Purchess, Andew
Robbins, Rachel
Scott, Ryan
Smart, Steve
Sinclair, Tim
Sometimes, Alicia
Stavanger, David
Stuart, James
Tsaloumas, Dimitris
Walter, Lesley
Webster, Ben
West, John
Westbury, Deb
Wicks, Les
Winch, Ben