S E Street

Take as Read in Our Small Country Town

The newcomer wades in,
stroking across the surface,
asking why our award winning
crime writer has turned her back on success,
on her brilliant serial killer—
a malignant narcissist—
to write about her farm.
About birdsong bookending the day.
The azure flash of a kingfisher flying low
above the river in the morning light.
Evening mist settling
into the valley’s hollows
like a curdling, milky sea.
There was once a small child
drugged and carried from her room.
There is, unsullied, a farm,
a map of a new world.
Asking another
why she is writing about cyberbullying,
about images being a weapon
like a knife or a gun
when there’s so much out there already.
But not a daughter,
only an explicit video posted
by an ex-boyfriend.
Asking how you can write
about a marriage being happy
if it holds a lie
like an egg, mid-air.
It is like watching
sea anemones closing,
retracting their tentacles
into their hollows
as they do when water
strikes them from above.

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S E Street’s fiction, nonfiction and poetry has been published in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. She is the recipient of the Dymocks Short Story Prize for fiction, the Hunter Writers Award for nonfiction and is the SCWC HARP winner for poetry.