Maling - Border Crossing

Caitlin Maling is from Western Australia. She has published poetry and non-fiction throughout Australia, the UK and the US, in places such as Best Australian Poems, Prairie Schooner, Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Book Review, cordite, Westerly, The Australian, Stand and The Threepenny Review, among others. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston and is a previous recipient of the Harri Jones Memorial Award and the John Marsden Poetry Prize. In 2015 she published Conversations Ive Never Had with Fremantle Press. It was shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Award and in the WA Premiers Book Awards. For Hannah

I want the building that stretches up past the top of the white like driving up a summer road into heat haze that ends, might end, here with low grey and I never noticed the sky. For Hannah I want the building that stretches up past the top of the white like driving up a summer road into heat haze that ends, might end, here with low grey and I never noticed the sky.

Why fear whats out of the frame? I cannot name this city except to say I went there once and everywhere was white and perpendicular and nothing was like myself or my city. Man has not burnt with fire, this building shall not either. Black has a falseness. I grow nostalgic for primary colours, for sound. I think the sky is clouded but maybe its not. I give myself the lassitude of stone.

I wanted none of this. Speech beyond speechlessness. A slow lyric. Step away from me, back towards the cars parked resting in a row. I want to gather together our last breaths and float. Step. Step.

Ill find a piece of wood, a bridge. Im casting shadows you cant see. Here. Its all the way gone down slow. Talk slower. We tear tissue thin, skin, voices the opposite of cloud.

Ive missed the sensate elements of thought. Your mouth tastes metal as you fall or as you remember falling. What my hand holds is not mine but the sensation is, those small tendrils of electricity. I am never going to be a person. I am never going to be a person who dies in a fire, I am never going to.

A man wearing a sandwich board wants gold. A man wearing a sandwich board wants gold.

Another holding a piece of cardboard wants just enough to get home for the holidays. The light of January in Houston makes me feel like a piece of static in an old CRT TV. When Im driving I forget Im translating Australian English to American English, and the birds mimicking leaves on electric wires I mistake for forests. Houston is densely wooded with Targets & Walmarts & Petcos & Churches & Night Bingo & Day Bingo and none of these buildings have any windows and in that way they are like trees. Curving through south-east Houston, understanding panaderia, carceria, tortilleria, mean only bread, meat and round bread, flattens the world out like a penny, which is why some religions let their gods remain nameless and from above, these concrete monoliths cup the freeways in their boughs, a fleur-de-lis of faceless beauty. But from the road if these are trees or gods they are ringbarked ones.

Neptune banished by the towering rigs of the Gulf Coast, trying his luck inland. From my bed when I hear this road I can believe its the sound of waves. For this I like the freeway best when it rains, when the cars have prows and wakes. The lanes dissolved by falling silver, cars moving only in relation to one another. The flooded underpasses and outer lanes forcing us to go deeper and if its heavy enough all the billboards can sell is muffled light. And after rain, wrong-facing utes in underpasses make the descent from storm a passage, and flowing through Galleria in the jet stream of a road train I coast on the memories of my stepfather driving trucks around the country.

When Mum couldnt afford a babysitter she would send us to the docks where we would read the truckies horoscopes over the radio, the long cord of the CV stretched back to where my sister and I hid under a blanket no children allowed at the port. I would look at the cranes, wondering which would be strong enough to pick us up and deposit us in the Swan. My stepfather told us about driving across the Nullarbor straight through a mob of roos, the blood and fur caught in the rims and wipers, how when you drive you can never stop. There are no kangaroos on the 610. What we drive through is the afternoon, plowing through the minutes. In the outstretched arms of the Energy Corridor, if Id wanted to I couldve found a love of silt and pimple-prairie, wetlands slowly sinking suburbs.

Even the sky isnt big, just near and heat-stained. But summer storms find me like a Rorschach test of where desires land, large and unmistakable. Cast out of country, on the wind and then the wetness bedding me in the bayou banks, asking me for roots. Is it brave to refuse the home thats offered? Or just another form of denying sight. The soft opal light easing through clouds, lifting the weeds scraggling through the pavement to our eyes.

I take myself out past the end of the Target-Walmart-Loews to find the green. I take myself out past the end of the Target-Walmart-Loews to find the green.

Like a tourist fumbling for language in a guidebook, I look for home and find translation. Not dune but forest uprooted by a wind long blown to brown gulf sea. On the rustling pine-needle floor a log slow burns, ember without fire. From tip to tip its path is ash. What makes a tree burn like that? Already fallen, already dead, the other trees just hurdles to walking.

When the cilia of the inner ear fail in mobility the result is a particular pitch, a drone inside the vestibulocochlear, not loud enough to be a scream. When the cilia of the inner ear fail in mobility the result is a particular pitch, a drone inside the vestibulocochlear, not loud enough to be a scream.

You dont know it, but thats the noise of that tone being heard for the last time. For some people, its silence that brings the noise. Their auditory cortex alone in a room cannot stand the quiet. I have nostalgia for multiple trace theory, the idea that its the path the impulses take which is the thing itself, that the distance between temporalities is as simple as any other stochastic process. The mind as stock exchange. What do we sell for the memories we hold? We look to black holes for the memories of our universe, in Astrophysical Journal Letters a photo of shock diamonds galaxy-sized cosmic eruptures leaping out and back in, this gold trace on A4 what we have of that force which can stop the stars from forming.

We reach out only to collapse. Above my bed I hang plastic stars, they first need light to glow. Sometimes in the dark I am visited by the constellations of home, other times I feel clearly the path of my feet down from Cott beach, the hot bitumen, the peppermint leaves under our lips as we try to whistle the Violent Femmes, our skin blistering beneath the sun.

I. The men on the rooftops of Houston never hoist a gun, only manoeuvre shingles in and out of place, the weather griming towards November. Still the sinister sincerity of the hammer raised, the man shadowed against the sun.Next page