Girl #3 in the Canteen

My mother—in her heyday—had been quite
a looker. Pretty enough to have been a Bond girl, framed
in a sniper’s scope, I mused to myself. As a teen,

thumbing through plastic sleeved albums (eight curved-
edge photographs to a double page spread, fizzing

lightly with static at each turn of a page), I wished
I’d inherited the gamine charm of her youth, instead
of the broad-nosed, dark-skinned, stocky sensibilities
of my paternal line. I spose I should’ve been thankful
that I hadn’t been pretty enough to have got into
any real trouble. I was simply a supporting
sidekick (not even a best friend), blending

blandly into the smoothie of society, like a carrier-
ingredient nobody ever requested by name.

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Paris Rosemont

Paris Rosemont is an Asian-Australian poet whose work has been published in Verge Literary Journal, Red Room Poetry’s ‘Admissions’ and Heroines Anthology (vol.4.).
In 2022, Paris was a Living Stories Competition judge, WestWords Academian, Frontier Poetry scholarship recipient, awarded an Arts Access Australia mentorship, WestWords-Varuna Emerging Writers’ Residency and was named runner up for the Writing NSW x Varuna Fellowship 2022.