Dominique Hecq

​Equinox
 
Sun, high. Folds of foliage whoosh up the clouds and fall. Whoosh and fall. Light and shadow kaleidoscope. Your feet stomp along the Merri Creek track. You peer into people’s backyards and driveways. Here they advertise an Australian orgy at nightfall. BE THERE OR BE SQUARE. You trip. Slip. Twist. Scurry downstream through the wallaby grass. Slow down as you approach the road. Stop. A black stork. Roar of a Jeep. There’s a toddler perched on a bumper seat next to the driver. No seatbelts. Roar. Scream of tyres. Dust explodes in gloaming sun straw. Bells ring. A mastiff barks at you. Dribbles. You glare. Push on. A woman’s luminescent face zooms towards you. Look, she says, showing off the scythe sketched on her forearm, I’m going to have it inked. You heart skips a beat. Nice, you say. Push on. Climb the path towards the overpass. A teenager, hands black and blue, strums his untuned guitar, head lolling. You drop a coin in the ceramic toad’s open mouth. He upturns his pockmarked face. Looks at you, dazed. Cyclists whizz past. You round the corner indolently, curating the anodyne story of your life. Light and shadow kaleidoscope. Whoosh. Your head explodes on the kerb.

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Liquid Desire
 
From the sea, an odour of tumescence. On the shore, turmeric turbulence. Tympani usurp overtones of thunder. Voracious mouths chuck upscale notes. Strident vapours. Magenta mayhem. A finger pressed on blackberry lips you taste kelp. Hanker after air. Suck in a school of fish. Gobble a lobster, telephone, melting watch, moustache, violin, a whole giraffe. Skulls and seahorses. Bubbling masses of nipples. The bleeding world and the tree of life. You are Gala and Elsa, Daphne and Apollo, Tristan and Isolde. You weigh down dyskinesia. Kneel before Fa Luca’s De Divina Proportione. Take off through a chorus of seagulls like a hyperbole. Quixotic desire leaks into lines of flight. You are the Angel of Portlligat. The Madonna of the Aquamarine. Galatea of the spheres. Gold liquor Ophelia atomised.

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Evridiki 
 
You were born in autumn and so, naturally, hate spring. A butcher bird sings your metamorphic body. Cloying scent of blackwood showering pollen. Air licked with gold where the buzzing of bees deepens. The sudden opacity of it all. You run. Run away. Away from the visible and from the invisible. With the pollen clinging to your skin, the sun striking and the darkness beneath your feet settling on gravel. You are a living phobia. A fear of no consequence. Yet as aeons pass in one beat of your beating heart, you hear the rustle under the tree limbs. Taste the bite of death.

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Child’s Play
 
Her hair is done up in funny macaroon buns on her ears, her eyes full, her mouth greedy. My little sister makes up my doll with Textas. Sapphire for the eyes, jet black for the eyebrows, fuchsia for the cheeks. She paints the lips vermillion, the nails, the navel, so that it's prettier. Then decides it's all wrong, scolds the doll, lectures her. Spanks her. Takes her in her arms, comforts her. Whispers burning words into her ear, rocks her gently. Sighs. She licks her fingers wet with saliva to remove some make-up, tilts her face towards me. And startles herself in my gaze. Let’s play bride, she says. Doesn't wait for an answer, sticks glassy-eyed Leda in my hands. Together, we’ll take turns to be the bride, with vaporous veil, and long train, lace gloves, nosegay of peonies, tiny sapphire satin pillow, gold rings… And all the dolls we’ll sit in rows for the ceremony. 
 
Between us, eye to eye, we learn and rehearse the butterfly kiss. Oooh, how that tickles!

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​Dominique Hecq was born in the French-speaking part of Belgium. She now lives on unceded Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. Hecq writes in English and French. Her latest prose poetry collections include Endgame with No Ending (2023, SurVision), winner of the 2022 James Tate Poetry Prize, and a bilingual poetry sequence titled Songlines / Pistes de rêve (Transignum, 2024).