Jane Frank

​ 
Circuit
 
Strange shapes bend in lukewarm greeting: leaves of wax, spotted red beneath, boards curving across a thicket, over a root maze, a wall of spikes protruding through silt. I frame abstract patterns in this fractal-lace realm while benthic creatures sway in half-clear water as if painting themselves. In a bird hide, a brown honeyeater sings. This is the place of salt (it said on the sign), also mudskipper, mangrove jack, blue thread-fin, bream. Mangroves exhale poison, saline through cork-brown pores: dark capsule fruit feed on what washes to them. Far out, a cobalt-striped strap of sea & crab colonies to the horizon.  Below: ankle-deep inundation, crustaceans scurrying along a narrow stretch of sand to a tight meander where boardwalk juts over creek mouth. Mangrove lips smile up between the palings from where it is still, dark & busy with growth. Ahead a ghost grove of paperbarks with rusty ankles. No more boards. Instead, a crunch of red clay-pan, crumpled shell. Now a ti-tree copse. Against a diamond of blue sky, a brahminy kite curls high on a thermal, circles that hypnotise me all the way back to the asphalt road.
 
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From the West Wing
 
The hospital sits within a concentric circle of time: through the window a black bird sits in a white-trunked tree, a vacant car park sprawls, a train hurtles by. A sunless day sucked of joy is suspended grey on a hanger. I have special powers: can see forward and back, remember the future in fine cartographic lines — jigsaws of boats that blur to become animals drawn with fingers on hot sand. There are coastlines of touch, a vulnerability in the face of sharp pointed instruments — I am reminded of miracles: the small happy cloud I lived on mothering two small boys. You scroll endlessly on your phone and I turn the pages of a book with images of temporal sculptures from water, ice, leaves, feathers. It occurs to me that we live in a world that is both hard and soft: not easy to distinguish between them. The magenta wall of this room is an unkind industrial colour. You sleep, half-turned away and your lashes sweep a cheek that moments ago was an angry red. Time is a stretch of nerve fibres: anticipation and regret. Across the river, first lights blink.
 
**
 
After a Storm

Beach turned malachite late afternoon. There was a storm last night: the rockpools were disturbed. The day before I’d found blue periwinkles, zebra shells, limpets, mulberry whelks. Today: foam, dark rags of weed, piles of fine broken shell the colour of aubergines. Sand mosaiced, a savage surf carving crenulations in hard wet ochre, a return to ancient chaos. And at the bend in the beach, a strange solid shape in silhouette against the shoulder of the dune. An armchair? High round back, sand encrusted in ornate quilting, rusted studs, shredded velvet oblivious of light spray. Three exhausted butterflies blown by the wind, cowering under its wings, trying to dry their own. And over its back the sea: the inexplicable: the unconscious. One lone cruise ship passing across its eyeball. A forest of furniture growing beneath the frazzled surface? An aquarium of 1950s living rooms, sea creatures gathered around their wirelesses? Lettuces— so familiar — growing in rows.  On the unperturbed sea bed? A quiet intertidal holding together, or some kind of reprieve in evolution? The chair’s beautiful forlornness: a comfortable place to sit out a sudden heavy scud of rain.
 
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Your Soul in Five Parts
 
Heart — So many hearts are thrown into a lake of fire, yours light as a feather of Egyptian blue, your Negative Confession long, compelling; your spirit still skipping between good deeds         Name —             I say your name aloud at the end of the garden to remember its sound. Repeat it in a whisper like a secret. A gift that rises from dull green switchgrass to ears of deep orange cloud. The word written in hieroglyph wisps         Twin —              A black and white bird with your face. On its way to different places at once: the creek on the island’s inside beach, the triad of gums you planted, the lawn of your childhood home. Soaring through every sunrise    Persona —      I watch the birds for facial expressions. To the one that swoops with drama: you don’t need to remind us to remember you. I often feel warm wings around our house when the stars come out          Shadow —        Your mouth fell open and your essence flew to join the others. I find myself asking if I please you. Seeking approval from shadows. Questioning if the colours I’ve chosen will ever be strong enough
 
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Author's note: The ancient Egyptians believed the human soul consisted of separate parts, each with its own role to play in the afterlife.
 
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Strawberry Farm 
 
On the road to the weir just past the farm where we buy the pullet’s eggs, a turn right at a faded sign with dancing red fruit. Trees scribbled beside car tracks, at the end a green opening like an island: a strawberry island. Ram-shackle house of weatherboards: caterpillars hang on gold threads from poinciana boughs, sway in a breeze. Puddles of rainbow after rain. Red beds of earth between a labyrinth of sunshine paths. Voices that call from behind—my mother, my brother—are submerged in blur. I run among runners, my lungs full of sweet air. The farm is concave—its edges sewn onto a tall eucalypt fringe. Sky a parachute. Flat round mountain my conscience: a solemn dark lump against the horizon behind me. But I ignore it, swing my bucket. Choose a row to start where I can see the jewels glistening, in among white star flowers, leaves of fur. I run up the row, haphazardly picking the crimson fruit—knowing to skip half-green berries. The morning shakes like a snow globe. And the day is curly, not straight, with ladybirds that can’t tell time. Now and then, as I pluck the berries, I look casually around for beanstalks, straining up through glare at the clouds for places they might grow to. There is a moon as well as a sun. I like the way the berries crouch, not always easy to see. You two are dolls, the strawberry lady said to my brother and I and I imagine us with porcelain faces. He is in the next row with my mother. His blonde hair almost white. But I hide from them. The after-dinner mint she gave me in the brown silk sleeve has melted in my pocket. Sometimes I eat a berry. A whiskery horse leans over the fence when we return to the car with our tubs over-flowing. I am allowed to reach up to pat his cheek. He is very old. My hands smell of strawberry juice. Of rain. Of sunshine. Of mud. Of horse. I wonder if the taste of horse is poisonous. But I don’t die when I forget and put my fingers in my mouth. Going home, we cross the Lamington Bridge and I search for crocodiles in the muddy water. I often worry when my cousins jump from the rope swing. I search for children floating in the water, too. 
 
 **

​This first appeared in Ghosts Struggle to Swim, Calanthe Press, 2023, Australia.

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Dreams aren’t Diaphanous
 
The truth is diaphanous but dreams aren’t. They are lexemes for a language of impossible beauty. Time is scrambled so jonquils sit in pots on window ledges—tropical temperatures outside—while ghosts from decades past read cryptic crossword clues.  There is time to think, as you sip, of something cold and exotic you remember from a bar down a laneway in that city of spires. Through a window, you watch appaloosas grazing in butterscotch fields. You are inside the house with the steep turret you painted as a child where you must now live, your library lining the shelves that wrap a spiral staircase. You are arranging yellow roses, making conversation with a marine biologist you once met on a plane who told you he was bewildered by the colour of your eyes. Your dead father’s pet birds swoop from the silky oak tree to your outstretched hand, and you are able to tell them that he is in his studio painting. Later, you will watch the moon rise over the bay: it has never been so vigorous, so white.
 
**
 
Sgraffito
 
Decades of scratching into days as if the colour is waiting to be dug up. I suppose it started with a bobby pin dipping, earth black, into red cray-pas squares, triangles and hearts; a yellow submarine’s wide-eyed windows; octopi with multi-coloured legs as the song played. Outside: warnings of an eclipse but it was like scraping off the afternoon to see the hollow core of the sun so nothing made sense except that we would go blind because we mined too deep into the sky. I use sharper implements now but sometimes I can scrape whole weekends away without finding a single purple flower or close blue outline of his face so I ask myself if the dark layer is deeper? Children at the gallery drove short words into their sgraffito paintings today between rainbows & m shaped birds & whales so nothing was left hidden. 
 
**
 
Face of the Dune
 
You are at the beginning of eternity. I wonder about the timeless view but have stopped asking you for anything: a note in cloud wisp, a red glint of rock at midday, a wave that curls to ruffle a calm sea, so I suppose that is a kind of faith? The sky was blood orange last night adorned with an outlandish pink moon and I drew you at the top of it as if the universe was the tall dune that time you sketched the sand blow and we counted the striated colours that merged with the sky. Are the pigments brighter? We ran down the dune’s shifting face into the trust of the wind.
 
**
 
I Only Photograph the Beautiful Bits 
 
Figures shouldn’t face outside the frame, but I do. The sky is darkening, the call of birds insistent in a cold dusk— jealous is the word you use when you see my photos of amethyst light over the river. A twig snaps underfoot, intricate like a caught breath, breaking the sound of absence: everywhere speech bubbles. What was said here? done there? I only photograph the beautiful bits: cameos between mangrove clumps, masts lined up with the moon, satiny expanses of blue-black wash, a light grind of pepper where water meets cloud.
 
**

Bad Phase
 
I visit your photograph every night as you sleep, the moon draped round my shoulders, reflected in the coins of your eyes. Through the window, water reflects the wax, the wane, a rippled repeat of days. Phases that will pass, I can hear you say. An anchor for my thoughts when I can’t sleep, a silent listener, strung on gold thread with a hare’s legs and face, making stained glass of the trees while the world’s evil gallops in darkness. I can hear bats in the palms, see an owl perched on the neighbour’s roof, a single tear falling from its eye. A photomontage of devastation each night on the news, the planet draped in web, preyed on by a turnskin: half spider, half wolf. The sky sometimes swirling with lunacy. Tonight the moon is a page in a storybook— the accompanying voice, yours. Light stars speckle my urban nocturne, a calm salve in a tense terrestrial life. Timekeeper. Anchor. Silver mirror. I will try not to use you as a prop, measure contentment by your light.

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​This first appeared in Ghosts Struggle to Swim, Calanthe Press, 2023, Australia.

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​Jane Frank is an award-winning Australian poet, editor and academic. Her debut poetry collection Ghosts Struggle to Swim was published by Calanthe Press in May 2023, and she is the author of two previous chapbooks. Her work regularly appears in journals and anthologies in Australia and internationally— most recently in The Memory Palace (The Ekphrastic Review, 2024, and Poetry of Change: The Liquid Amber Prize Anthology, 2024.  She is Reviews Editor for StylusLit Literary Journal, enjoys reading her work at festivals and events and teaches in communication and creative industries at the University of the Sunshine Coast’s Moreton Bay campus in south east Queensland.