That fire, they said, was red as red as red
as red as a fox, your lips, a cherry;
that fire, they said spread and spread and spread,
faster than a cheetah or a nasty rumour;

At swimming once,
I went to turn from front to back
and just kept turning,
just kept turning,
turning over,
over and over,
till the swimming teacher said,

I feel it, first as a stir,
turning deep in the murky water.
Surfaces up for air, a twitch
on the lake in my head.
A flip, and it disappears.

Billy chased me round the playground
with hands full of fists

Billy yelled at me across the football pitch
with a mouth full of stings.

The biggest berries are in the centre
of a tunnel of thorny bushes.
A shark gaping wide,
promising not to nip.

The walls of the room are white and clean -
all sign's of yesterdays sorrows scrubbed
away with bleach.

I am in a forest;
My brothers will never find me here.
Over my head is a green umbrella;
I feel the earth under my bare feet.

When they were young,
She kept wicket for her brothers,
They batted,
Bowled,
Padded up
And ratcheted up the score.
She crouched behind the stumps
Keeping wicket.

Miss Flotsam was my reception teacher.
She had travelled the world.
Brown hair turned golden
under distant suns,
clothes carrying colours
from countless corners of continents.

I was born with a map of Australia on my face;
it was beautiful, my mother told me – 
there was nobody like me in the whole wide world
who could trace the edges of down under