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    Honi Soit
    Home»Column

    Ashfield kitchen window

    Honi explores having a sense of place (close to home).
    By Ava BroinowskiAugust 29, 2022 Column 1 Min Read
    Art by Ellie Stephenson
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    The white wall behind the laundry line
    melts into a bright, blank space
    brewed in early hungover sun 
    and laced with fragile shadows
    of a leafless tree smothered with ivy,
    through the kitchen window.
    
    the lightness tingles in the unslept red 
    fractures of the under eye 
    veins that remind you 
    of what you won’t remember, 
    the residual heat, slow and soft, 
    in sticky circles left from glasses on tables.
    
    the gentle discomfort
    melts away, though, 
    in the blue stillness and thumbprint smudges
    of clouds, and the ivy-smothered tree,
    and the damp sweet smell 
    of warm mounds of cut grass 
    in Ashfield park.
    
    the clouds are a little vague, 
    like the cotton in our heads, 
    wilting over the polychrome red brick, 
    of inner-west blocks and their stubborn lawns
    (the modest old Sydney postcard)
    they fade at the edges into blue,
    blooming and sun drenched, 
    in yellows and gold, 
    like the linoleum floor.
    
    And with the little clinking spoon 
    stirring instant coffee granules
    into lukewarm milk for us,
    and then the hanging of laundry,
    and in the slowness of it all, 
    the clouds sigh with us.
    The wonderfully banal.
    ashfield Field Notes poem poetry

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