Anne M. Carson

LUNG PERCUSSION

Sometimes you wheeze and crackle
all day. Plugs of mucous catch
in the net your lungs make. They try to rise,
like elvers swimming upstream.
Eyes screwed tight you protest the pain,
not enough oomph to bring them over
the throat rim and into the pool of mouth.

I play your back, a skin drum I want to
shake a rhythm loose from. The harder
I pound, the broader you smile
and eventually cough the buggers up.

* * *

HOME-GOING DRAMA

When I ferry you from school,
you sit next to me, slumped and
illegal in the front seat
so I can suction if needed.

Sometimes your breath comes
easy and I can't hear your chest
the whole way home.
I pass the doves on the wire
strung gorgeous like a necklace
round the throat of the sky.
I listen to radio songs
and you smile at my voice.

On a bad day I don't notice the birds
and listen for your wheeze instead.
You labour to get your bellows going,
sucking breath so hard
your nostrils flare a warning.
I panic a bit –will you drown
if I wait til the next set of lights?
You head-turn and grimace,
roll your eyes and moan,
your spine a bow curved taut.

I pull over when I can
and fumble the suction tube.
Your mouth opens
a welcome for it.
I guess how deep to go.
It finds phlegm, crisis averted.

* * *

LANTERN FOR THE DARK

I bend over the bed as dusk
folds its aura around you.
In the light-almost-gone time
you swallow dusk.
Twilight stains everything–
luminous skin, long lashes,
locks curling on the pillow.

All of you is golden hued, soft,
you radiate loveliness,
angelic, gentle repose.

The dusk inside, lantern-like
lit from inside out.

Anne M. Carson is an Australian poet who has been published in the USA and widely in Australia. She has curated two programs on the Australian National Radio broadcaster's poetry program — one featuring her suite of poems about ancient Greece. In 2013 she was commended in the Max Harris Poetry Award and in 2011 she won the Martha Richardson Poetry Prize and came equal first in the Stones Winery Poetry Competition. She is also a visual artist and teaches Poetry Writing and Appreciation. She will shortly publish her first full-length poetry collection with Hybrid Press.