Anthology

Helena Pantsis

(she/they)

@hlnpnts

 

Helena Pantsis (she/they) is a writer from Naarm, Australia. A full-time student of creative writing, they have a fond appreciation for the gritty, the dark, and the experimental. Her works are published in Overland, Island Online, Going Down Swinging, and Meanjin. More can be found at hlnpnts.com.

*** 

Functioning Body

 

It's there in childbirth,

a love rosy dry,

Open legs seeking retribution.

a fallen power,

coursing through an air of

what was once flames.

 

Hands rolled,

a body seen in speech,

like thoughts,

and cypresses flooded by waste.

She gives all her truth a poetry, 

 

it becomes deathless.

Splinters against wood,

surpassing limbs

donned and taken like hung cows,

each slaughtered by the innermost axe.

 

Wonderful and not,

and of but nothing

all, all by the blowing winds.

Only the meadows see us naked 

 

daring the fate of the beaten night,

that miserable hunt,

 

the wilderness, light 

the shore, made of stars

And not darkened

we flinch

from the gift of the stag's mouth.

 

still edging, afraid, toward heaven

having grown lifted, living silent;

the waves of poetry become withered.

 

None have the healer's knowledge,

Not crown nor goddess

and bittersweet even earthly ailment

can no ocean stop.

 

It drives that power

on fresh fate that the sea lives as a painting,

an emboldened Greece drinking in the moon kingdom. 

 

Gods hateful when sky troublesome,

humans rosy against wild shadows of grief.

wind is the fight 

cuckoos speak of galaxies

 

a gift, clear;

a painting I cannot cleave.

A mother but sent by

whirring stars, calm by stars.

 

Ageless griefs bright against god's will

divine flowering love

here fallen by her garden;

 

No storm keeps the nemesis' lilies 

from destruction.

They cup like withered leaves.

 

*** 

 

 

king woman

 

land of dirt

packed so dense

the oceans tremor. 

footsteps float here,

fangs screwed tight

in gums of sand

and soil.

 

mother's hand

drags over teeth of cactus

in search of hearty waters.

the hills rock,

the wind suspends itself

on barbed wire fences.

 

secrets whisper tight in arid aisles.

barren waterholes

made unempty by circling screams, whirlpools of 

burnt turpentine 

 

they take no visitors.

the uninvited turn to thrips

and drink from

abandoned wells--

unmarked graves.

 

only us, our sword thrust

in watered rock

the shape of hands in prayer,

make good of what we owe.

 

transformed to earth

chest hatched of stone.

the land weeps,

 

it is morning.

the death of winter night

makes sleepwalkers of

those that roam.

buried

 

in hollow caves

our bodies remind us

they're whole.

 

 

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