Shotgun Smoke

October 25, 2022

 

She has been living one foot
in the Pacific Ocean, the other dipping
a curious toe
in the Andaman Sea.

Who is she? Wild
flower flourishing in the hothouse
till she grows tall as a poppy queuing
for the guillotine.

Still, she sighs and cries over
milk spilt from coconuts
bought from fluro-lit supermarkets
instead of farms fertilised with her forefathers’ blood.

This girl, a shotgun curl of wispy grey second-
hand smoke inhaled through a foreign kiss; sucking
down exotic back notes of sandal-
wood, coating lungs with fine-
particle grit. Scar-

let ink drop in water, confusion
of blood; what is her type? She is
distraught. She ought to know who
she is by now. One of many lost
little girls and boys, a diaspora of homeless
toys with fucked-up Daddy issues.

She is a wave crashing on foreign
shores knocking on your white-
picket fenced doors. She heard the call; daughter
of the revolution. Bitter gourd of
dysfunction, mixed cock-
tail solution. All cock-

a-doodle-doo! She heard
the call! She herd the call!
She is knocking on your door.

 

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.

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