Alyson Miller

Flight


​There is traffic mobbed across the bridge, the one that almost gave up before it was  finished, the steel mass of its belly kissing into the soft mud of the riverbanks.  Vivisected  by the geometry of iron and concrete, cables and girders cut into the sky as  cars and trucks crawl towards the fume-soaked darkness of the tunnel, nose to tail like   animals sniffing and nudging their way into the bowels of the ark. The heat is as combustible as tempers and kindling, the promise of a southerly as distant and foreign as flight. At the apex, a man stands against the railing, holding a doll-small girl over the  smack of water below, both  as still as the instance between heartbeats. It seems a  cruel game until the drop, the tiny body trapped in that liminal space between falling  and landing, a time that is both forever and nothing. As he returns to the car, arms  emptied, there is only the screaming of gulls, and the weight of breath held, of pulses thrashing against throats and wrists.

Plums


Not the ones from the poem, in an icebox, but those from a friend, a delivery in sag-
heavy cardboard, nestled among zucchini and spinach like  Langshan fowl eggs. Her garden spat forth like some biblical orgy while ours, wind-whipped and paved with tiles  and tin, only gasped with the dead choke of weeds. The plum flesh was thick and dark,  the skin  glaucous; chewing the meat as though eating some animal, gnawing a finger  through to the knuckle-ribbed bone. It reminded me of that time cutting  pomegranates,  the knife that slipped across the  red- purple rind and into my finger,carving away the wet tip that scattered with the gem seeds like a mock sarcotesta. Stains that might have been blood or juice wouldn’t wash out from your shirt or that porous spot on the bench;  but thrown out on the grass, birds pecked clean the fibrous white guts of the fruit.

Rush


​It’s hard not to imagine the time-locked moments of those two spaces: the first, the  seconds after the car tore a road past the crumbled jetty end, hovering for only nine thousand million periods  of  radiation  of  the caesium  atom  before  collapsing  against  the surface of the sea like a drunk into uncertain liquid dreams. The second, those  minutes during equalization as the water chugged into the passenger space and the  open mouths of children wrapped safety-tight in booster seats, cocooned from oncoming traffic but not the madness of a driver who could not block the sirens from his ears. And afterwards, beneath the neatly geometrical phrases of newspapers and journalists, an image: their tiny bodies crammed full of ocean, floating as though  bottled, arms raised towards the screaming of tyres and gulls and tourists, the red wet sacks of  their lungs exploding with salt and  fear.

--
Alyson Miller teaches literary studies and creative writing at Deakin University, Australia. Her short stories and poems have appeared in both national and international publications, including a book of literary criticism, Haunted by Words: Scandalous Texts and a collection of prose poems, Dream Animals.