Two Poems
Jeremy Mair
–
Symmetry/Cemetry
so, we are
riding the number one tram
up Lygon street
together because
it’s warm in here
half my mind
turns to you
enjoys the way
you appear to perceive warmth
like I do
the other half
turns to Mishka,
the talking husky, who
attempts
with limited vocal
and mental assets
to mimic her master’s voice
but of course
Mishka has been trained
to perform this trick
she doesn’t understand
that the clumsy sounds
she strains for
are supposed to mean
I love you
and the whole time
she is probably thinking
about an enormous pile
of lamb shanks
so, we pass
the cemetery
and I am thinking
about Philip Larkin
how he’s ‘surviving’
these days
and I ask you what
you’re thinking and you’re thinking
how if you stacked
every bone in that cemetery
end on end
you could build a tower
that would reach
way up
through
the clouds
and I say
isn’t that funny
I was just
thinking about
a pile of bones
but for completely different reasons
Guernica
Luggage rubbles the floor
under lightbulb glare. On the
dresser, two tickets
— Melbourne, Berlin —
the sense, always, of
having missed something
important; of having
lingered
on the wrong detail.
Jeremy Mair is a writer and musician living in Melbourne, Australia, and is currently undertaking a Master of International Relations at the University of Melbourne. He has lived at various stages of his life in France and Germany, but both countries sent him back. Jeremy can be found at jeremymair1.tumblr.com
Sophie loves the exploration of lyrical/poetic type story telling in her art. Her work is an ambient aesthetic experience, calming but quizzical, deeply enjoyable, often with an emphasis on symmetry, or repetition and visual rhyming. It’s a careful stitching together of different elements to try to get across the sense of a moment in time or of a thought or feeling.
