Anthology
Helena Pantsis
(she/they)
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.