JUN 09

Famous Reporter # 39

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BRONWYN MEHAN

                      Darwin Bride

(after Frida Kahlo’s The Bride who became frightened when she saw life opened.)

Up here locals quiz me –

Contract or permanent? Renting or buying?

as if I’m a carpetbagger

with designs on

Darwin

their unwed daughter

 

but they are wrong

Darwin is the wedding feast

and I

Frida’s bride

my eyes widening

at each fresh horror.

 

I sweat inside white gloves

my high primped hair

the soft folds of my satin gown

all dwarfed

 

by fleshy pink peaks

of broken watermelon

hands of fat dog-nosed bananas

scrotum coconuts with stem scars

like wizened faces

obscene slits in papaya

pregnant with seeds.

 

Each Sunday morning

at Rapid Creek markets

these are Darwin’s delights.

 

In my tropical backyard

lumpy toads burst

from bloated soil

            smelling like Clag     like semen

my vegetable patch vomits fungus

jackfruit ferment

like black decapitated heads

palm trees shed sheaths

as curved and brown

as Diego’s trouser legs.

 

Frida, who knows

the hand that holds

the giant blade

that carved

this fruit,

has placed an owl

in the foreground

            the artist herself, perhaps.

 

‘Once mango juice

drips from your elbows,’

the owl says

 

‘- tu nunca te iras.’

(you will never leave).

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Bronwyn Mehan is a writer currently based in Darwin. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in The Sleepers Almanac, CrimeSpace, Famous Reporter, Hecate, dotlit and page seventeen (forthcoming)...