Juliet Cochrane

[ Biography ]

Pastel Frangipani

Two ripe custard apples,
cotton stitched like crosses
and dried frangipani petals,
pushed into drying paint.

I’d write words and read
over cicada sounds,
taking in sweet eucalyptus breaths,
pausing when the sea swelled.

We drank ginger nectar,
sucked orange-fleshed papaya,
scooped spoons of oily avocado,
chewed on sticky dried banana,

and dropped it all to run into a
downpour
shrieks and stomach turns,
rich skin curved on bare backs,
sea beating
sand beating
ears beating
hearing only hard hitting rain.

When it began to sting
we’d rush back,
drip onto your wooden deck,
catching our breath with lifted chests,
gulping juice from kiwi mango mandarin.

Rain to sweat. Paint on paint.
You’d ask me to etch
my jumbled words
into your oil on canvas.

I loathed those words
contrived constructed,
stiff and straight,
scratched through your paint.

My Almost Brother

I went over to your house
to see your body

Over at your house we’d drink
warm milk with honey,
press squashy wallpaper,
squatted in the hallway,
be deep-sea-divers,
toy ships above us on
bubble bath horizons.

Your large bones lay
in the bed we’d made into rafts,
swapped and turned into duvet-dens,
pillow-forts merged into castle-courts,
for hiding when I had to go home.

A fan turned. I sat by your feet.
You were dead like toenails,
dead like hair.
After a while I sat by your head.
Your mouth curled,
‘It’s just like a smile.’
they said, ‘It’s just as if he’s smiling.’ 
‘Isn’t that reassuring?’
‘Isn’t that hopeful?’

You lay apart from me in a white sheet.
Its edge flittered like eyelashes,
and lightly lifted, uncovering skin,
as though you were stirring 
and about to push it off and get up
and get out of bed. I sat and watched you
and could not surrender to,
could not let go of, could not
accept that, dead bodies
don’t move the white sheets they lie in,
fans do.