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.
Art by Ellie Stephenson
