Two Poems

by Rebecca Cheers

Femme Moderne
 
You crack her door
just after dawn.
Your brother holds his breath
pressed close enough to see
for you to feel his heart
twitch.

She takes slow breaths.
On the windowsill
her make-up sprawls
into a skyline.

Gold and lacquer rise
from the inner-city dust
of the window.
By the low dome
of rouge, pencils fan
to bridge the buildings.
Lipstick pigments cased
in bronze run liquid
in the heat, so that later
colour will feather out
in deltas from her lips.
Lids-on, they are skyscraping
light tripping down
their ziggurats.
The mirror-lid’s
angle a monument
burn of its reflection.

You saw her reapply
her lipstick once, downstairs
in the bar, saw its curve
waned sharp
and grained with skin.
But now you see a staircase
in a windowless tower
mirror-infinite.

Stratigraphy

At number seven, Wilmot St
the hostel’s been bought out.
Polo-shirted men paint doorways
postcard ocean blue,
blue fingerprints collecting
on the elevator’s buttons.

The too-clean hostel hidden
behind federation warehouse brick,
Wilmot St’s sign
bolted to stucco
on the gutted Plaza Theatre,
where Betsy’s used to be.
Its foyer, its gold chandelier
hangs over the McDonald’s.

The floral filigree balcony
lined with criss-crossed ziptie spikes
to keep away pigeons.

Wilmot St is paved
with rain-slick graphite slate
and just beneath, the café
flash-frozen in volcano ash.
Skeletons bend over the bar
against the stove, old even then
out of windowsills
to bellow at policemen.
​
Old stucco
over new road, floorboards,
newsprint packed tight
over shards of broken plates,
thick brown glass, bones.
the frames of folded army cots.

Rebecca Cheers is a writer, poet and playwright from Brisbane. She edited Woolf Pack, a zine publishing femme and non-binary artists, from 2014-2019. Her work has been featured in Voiceworks, Yarn Storytelling and Anywhere Theatre Festival, and was recently anthologised in 'The Conspirator'. She is a Masters candidate at QUT.