POETRY
      Stuart Cooke — 'Stolen Archivist'

Poetry won’t just
come out; it sticks
and you need to prise it gently
from skin

as if you were rain falling
on withering rock
as if you were the stolen archivist
trapped in tides of submerge and evaluate
- articulate –
the fat crop
of submission

This is to say, It’s wonderful
that I love you, and to hear
in response, ______ - that’s
nothing, that’s infinite
greed
consuming and I’ve lost. The sun,
the one sustaining, it’s a metaphor
for consumption
and the hand opens, fingers
rain out.
I put them deep into alliteration

and death is a translation
of the forgotten word. A heart beats
against a bony cage: we have – wait
for it –
a cardiac arrest.
If this is pursuit then
please, I don’t need time for the past.

Stuart Cooke is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literary Studies. His awards include the Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Porter and New Shoots poetry prizes, the BR Whiting Fellowship (Italy), an Asialink Fellowship to the Philippines, and funding from the Australia Council for the Arts. He has also received residential fellowships from the Atlantic Center for the Arts (USA), Djerassi Resident Artists' Program (USA), Omi International Arts Centre (USA), Hawthornden Castle (UK) and Arteles Creative Centre (Finland), among others, and his work appears in a range of anthologies, including multiple editions of The Best Australian Poems, Contemporary Australian Poetry, and the 50th anniversary edition of Technicians of the Sacred.