Welcome to Phoenix’s world-changing Salon

Blank pages have always intimidated me And I hesitate to describe minutiae again Lumps and aches, dull anchor points into limb And earth and stretched muscle when I crave flight Gift me air. Gift me uplift. Gift me weightlessness. Kiss me into feathers.

It is a lynchpin of my life Outsider on the inside Yet I slide under radar Designed to trap my fellow Queers, genderfreaks, Colonised souls. I infiltrate privileged spaces with my passing. I come out over and over Discomfit the comfortable I may look white But my...

A small slice of Europe. Cafe Lorca Makes me crave huevos de gamba and strong black coffee Il Papiro whispering to me of Firenze and the old bridge across the Arno looking up towards Ponte alle Grazie Bookshops that laugh at me because I'm not in the Marais and throw...

A child gashes their foot on a sharp screw, unattended. Her mother complacent, absent. A man misinterprets a word here and next thing you know, furniture raised overhead, glass tinkles as it's smashed, drawers flung across a room leave gaping wounds in a chest  —...

And it turns out that's unforgivable Because I'm now writing lines to you in my head Lying in the dark in my bed It doesn't matter that I sent you other words Surreptitious in the social stream Oscar Wilde's hand soft on Walt Whitman's knee Let us be to each other...

I am writing lost love letters to ampersands, my favourite — with its curlicues in arcane typefaces, it peeks out at me from designer invitations & grungy restaurant names & I play seek. I invent reasons to unfurl my ampersands & sneak our way into...

AND here i am again sitting in a seat in the sky rocky, knocked against the seatbelt, thinking how peaceful and my three-and-a-half year old waiting at the gate, thinking not ready to go, not this time, as we glide down and i see your matchbox cars wending through...

my clothes don't match today such a simple thing to turn confident strides into frumpy shrinking such a long way from flowing ochre silks or scarlet coats; my mind hunches in concert, narrowed, pinched, as if the scope of thought permitted directly correlates to style...

When we were young we watched incandescent flickering images of people rising like a sea from train stations, koyaanisqatsi in the Valhalla cinema on Glebe Point Road late at night and we swore we would never become one of these faceless creatures on escalators, on...

My sister unknowingly let me in on a secret today. In our family, there are no diminutive nicknames of affection for grandparents and great-grandparents, merely a rollcall of patronyms: Grandma Bersten, Grandma Levine, Grandma Bass.

I am not entirely certain how any of us make it through unscathed, what with spitting frying pans just out of reach and the temptation of roundabouts reversing cars in driveways epidemics from exotic locales the drunk driver who slams into the rear of the car...

Here's how I imagined it: Take one house, preferably custom-built; add careful wrought-iron fixtures and a wooden spiral stair, ceiling-high bookshelves, a garden filled with lavender and wisteria. Place in a rolling yard backing onto rainforest, a sandstone path...