Snake Like Charms

Brown Snake, North Lake

Somewhere close, the part

secret of two naughty boys

in gumboots standing on small

tiger snakes’ heads

If you hadn’t shouted

Stop, I wouldn’t have

This one was huge and brown

almost three metres long, slick

umber body languid across the path

As my eyes measured the extent

from visible to obscured, her body

hooked back on itself, arcing

sharply to rise above a shrub

Head, still as stone, tongue

tickling air. A question raised

at my daughter’s fleshy thigh

clamped hard around my waist.

My slackened state shot through

again. Frozen before another

mother, willing my burden to be

still. Then, a place behind my ribs

which might conduct a hush

But more, the wild impossibility

of stepping away







SAVE BEELIAR WETLANDS














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Snake Like Charms

Snake Skin, Roe Swamp

Shedding skin of a snake, will

loosen first at the lips, retract

backward over bluing eyes

dull crown, those sorcerous jaws

Resistance is needed, seeking

friction of rock, chafe of grass

scour and scrub of brown balga

It braces its body and slides out

Slipped fishnet of bubblewrap

mingled with a streaky mandala

of divested paperbark, becomes

my discovery, being its past

I tease open a brittle end, puzzle

my arm inside, until it is sheathed

to the elbow, ghost eyes puckering

my skin. My pulse its unsealed centre

Vestiture of rain spittle in my hair

A cool trickle slides inside my collar

I tear the delicate mesh pulling it off

in what becomes a deluge

God of fragmentation, refusing

to keep things whole, coming

to me later. Showing again

that repetition might simply be

a lack of attention to detail








SAVE BEELIAR WETLANDS













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Darwin's Orchid & Orchid Poems the chapbook

Darwin's Orchid

Single molecule
of moth pheromone
invisible in the immense
freight of pollen blown
over the desert

how halves relate
their common weight
papilionate













~

The chapbook is out now and fabulous through mulla mulla press; click here ->Orchid Poems

~

Amanda Joy’s ability to locate the marvellous
within common ground, and her ear for just
the right cadence imbues her work with
gorgeous music. These orchid poems are
testament to her enduring gifts.


~Anthony Lawrence

Amanda Joy's new book is a series of fine
poems, the concept is delightful and smart,
each poem draws energy from a particular
type of orchid; as one turns the pages, the
static electricity between form and flower
crackles and flows from the act of reading.
These poems are as intriguing as their
subjects, delicate survivors, traced by a poet
alive with the wonder of her vision.


~Robert Adamson

We are travellers in this enchanted world of
orchidry, where poems are tropisms, leading
us through the chambers of desire. Joy’s
exquisite book of orchid poems coaxes an
inner experience from a masculine plant — a
feminine voice which transmits into
reverberating words: fractured propinquity,
charged botany, and interior voyages of the
mind.


~Claire Potter








AND... if you're in Queensland, or feel like a trip to Queensland, I'm very excited to be reading at the Queensland Poetry Festival along with some amazing poets..like.....

Sandra Thibodeaux / Sawako Nakayasu / Jacob Polley / Zenobia Frost / Kate Fagan / Helen Avery / Paul Sherman / Ross Clark / Julie Beveridge / Ashley Capes / John Koenig / Carmen Keates / Cindy Keong / Tim Sinclair / Chloe Wilson / Pascalle Burton / Nathan Shepherdson / David Stavanger / Ghostboy / Johanna Featherstone / Matt Hetherington / Jeremy Thompson / Angela Gardner / Louise Oxley / Lesley Synge / Max Ryan / Ron Pretty / Jaya Savige / Aidan Coleman / Kevin Gillam / Andy White / Marisa Allen / Eliza Hull / Eleanor Jackson / Bit Booker / Nick Powell / Vladislav Nekliaev / Michelle Dicinoski / Chris Lynch / Betsy Turcot / Nicola Scholes / Sheish Money

Rhizanthella Gardner

The sensuous signs offer us a new structure
of time, time rediscovered at the heart of lost
time itself, as an image of eternity
~Deleuze

Sequestered in earth, invisible flowering
truffled to fungus in wet dark. Sniff past
the ground, see past the crack in the soil
incise with fingertips the parted dirt, to find
the threatened orchid, sessile and yawning
breath like honey

He rolls away from her and the smell of them
puffs from the sublayer of sheets, meeting places
of bodies, wet and sticky shrink back in the quiet
away from the heat, sound sinks deep into
their inner ears

These hours are torn from their timeline, her heart
from its shape, her bare hands from their image
She is speaking inside herself and each word
burns long enough to clothe his back in what
she can't contain

Slow speed of night moving into the unseen
deadline of morning like a tongue into a mouth
stroking language

Bucket Orchid

Labyrinthine flower
of courtship, and its
sodden bees, set free
after the glue has set

Looking into its throat
almost the shape of
an eye, or a hand, like
the origin of a myth

Disappointment only
opens its dirty palm
the second time round

The return visit-
she says to him 'Now I
see.' Closes her eyes

Sandal of Aphrodite Orchid

"Looking at the bag-shaped labellum
of the Paphiopedilum gave me the notion that
it had been left here by some kind of alien"
~Takashi Kijima, photographer, author of Orchids


Follow the italic slope
of his refined constellation, his
vulgar nebula, his search for
the insect-like space man

Be guided by colour
By the scarlet veins at the
throat, where it falls open
Measure all things against
the length of your thumb

and when you want to
know who's been loving

check between the fibres
of Aphrodite's doormat

Man Orchid

Be thou opened

Labellum resembling torso
and limbs, head of petals
Simplest accuracy

outside
roar of leaves and her
dog doesn't bark anymore
knowing his smell, sound
of his step

Cluster-like inflorescence
he sees their feet under
the sheet, watches the
half-buried churnings

His lust is pungent and she
can smell him through
the closed window, telepathy
of scent, layered at the mouth

soft tongued and accurate
wired into the word-roots
Orchis Anthropophora
aequitas