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.
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January 2025
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