A poem!

[highlyeccentric]

Coorong Mullets

Particularly salty fish found only in the Coorong, SA

Fat day, Policeman Point,
the warbling bushes alive with birds,
out in the shallows stilts and plovers pierce the haze.

Golden boys run through their blue-eyed summer,
beyond the baking Kingswoods and the plastic air of family tends,
away from you in your towelling dress and girlishness,
alone with the salt lagoon, singing.

-

Coming in on the coast road, hot dusk thickens,
you point from the car at the caravan park,
out to the childhood we've come to save.

Pelicans fly over the shrunken bay,
watchful of where to land, looking, like you,
for the sparkling abundance of the past.

-

I quite like it how there are no questions,
they buy us drinks and we dance until the music
is unexciting, or just gone. That's how it is on the Coorong.

Back in the caravan park the two of us are finally alone again,
we can kiss without witnesses who would change their minds
about the two girls from out of town.

The sounds of frogs and the long unstoppable winds
come through our mouths and meet at our lips.
We are just like any other night creatures

barely imprinting the acres of sand crust,
only metres from the others but in our habitat nonetheless
thriving on love in isolation.

- Maria Zajkowski
(from Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets ed. by Farrell and Jones)