Two Poems by Amanda Anastasi

Amanda Anastasi is an Australian poet whose work can be found as locally as Melbourne’s Artists’ Lane walls, to The Massachusetts Review in Boston. Amanda’s poetry collection is '2012 and other poems'. She recently co-authored a chapbook with Robbie Coburn entitled 'The Silences' (Eaglemont Press, 2016). Amanda was the recipient of the 2017 Words in Winter Trentham Contemporary Poetry Prize, and is a two-time winner of the Williamstown Literary Festival’s Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize. She lives in Melbourne and is the curator of La Mama Poetica.

Denial

Hinge a door in the forest.

Sew threads into the air.

Descend an upward escalator.

Make your clamour mute;

your silence a bullfighter’s stare.

Make a mask out of circumstance.

Disguise your cries with a snigger.

Peel off your smiles and pack them

with your shoes, coats, scarves.

Sprinkle forget-me-nots on the locks.

Draw a curtain on the sun.

Paint a thousand eyes.

Bury a thousand imaginings.

When you go, the leaves

of the season’s end

will be at your ankles.

The snail will be lingering

by the unstopping train.

Be astounded by

the unbeaten track.

Turn on the light.

Begin the return.

Unexiled

The myopic blur of an out-of-focus snap.

An old assistant vanishing, then reappearing

oddly, through a side door.

The lead in a film for a decade unwatched.

The primary strokes of a portrait once full

and blazing with precision.

An occasional daylight spectre.

The scraps lingering in a directory

of gestures and words.

The accidental utterance of a name.

The cold crawl back to the outside

and the slow forgetting.