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When I feel lonely I search myself
and find little to amend this guilt
for being the one to smell hash browns
when the whole world is smelling cement;
it is this shame I swallow away
from you. There are big things to be done
as the sky digests itself and while
somebody purposes chicken and
waffle flavoured chips, in a white lab
alone. In fifty years my love for
you will be a circle of egg and
bacon flavoured pizza. When love is
no longer love and just another
thing we iterate, when the world is
already very full of junk food
flavoured to taste like other junk food.
What does a potato taste like now?
It has been such a long time for us
and their advice is, just brush your teeth
to confuse the hunger. The fruit rots
around us, the bounty harvested—
we give the grass one last look and shrug.
Practicing gratitude is mixing
oil into water persistently
and knowing they’ll never become one.
You say the sky might flesh itself out
again, like the chunk out of a thigh;
like shaking out a glove, it rights
itself.
Mall Poem
I always had the intention to make
you dinner, to have your muscles
contract in new ways, to stamp
upon you first time for something;
to make you firm up like concrete
was never enough. I was longing to
be the oak that grew amongst the
shopping centre, hell, to be the sad
oak that parents designate as
meeting place, to be the only oak
whose friends are travertine, whose
companions are dirty fountains
children pierce with jelly bean
fingers, who feels unnerved by this
devotion, 'only tree in the mall,'
to have my rough skin separate me
from the reliability of halogen. I am
sorry that I wanted to be oak and not
gold veined marble; we are limited
only by our imagination and I
never once thought 'diamond.'
Zoe Dzunko is a writer from Melbourne, Australia. She is a doctoral student in Creative Writing at Deakin University and the author of three chapbooks: All of the Men I Have Never Loved (Dancing Girl Press), Bruise Factory (NAP) and Wet Areas (Maverick Duck Press, forthcoming 2014). Her most recent poems have appeared in The Age, Going Down Swinging, Banango Street, and Guernica.