Joanne Burns Poems

i) i trawled through an inner-city newsletter and assembled various phrases and fragments, 'renovating' them fairly often -
ii) added my own images and phrases as they made their
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cough up quotations

from that fossilized
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when the martians moved in
to alaska boulevarde they
levelled the heritage dwellings
and built homes in the shape
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it’s still the same, signs on the grass
say don’t feed the fish, instead of
don’t eat them, still the same tired old
sports star tropes, failed golfer falls
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under the house in the soft
brown soil you lean
against bleached wash
tubs wringing parrot
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under a canvas awning, a few
metres above sea level, with backs
to the harbour the poets are reading —
their audience reclines on smooth fresh
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from our deep cool verandah we spy on the world passing by. we both wear glasses in order to pick out the details. even as children we noticed all.
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in order to upgrade the community's appreciation of poetry during the international year of cultural enrichment stage 2, members of the state's library progress committee decided to establish a small library of t-shirts on which would be printed quality verse in vivid, bold colours and lettering.
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there were so many books. she had to separate them to avoid being overwhelmed by the excessive implications of their words. she kept hundreds in a series of boxes inside a wire cage in a warehouse. and hundreds more on the shelves of her various rooms.
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war is a noun and so is peace. uranium is a noun like armchair. plutonium and
perspiration are both nouns and each has four syllables. bliss and terror are also
nouns.
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