Mercedes Webb-Pullman

Poésie saisonnière

 

 

Christmas Can Be Dangerous In The South East

 

The Upper Murrumbidgee Catchment Management Authority's

Ladies Auxiliary Social Committee appointed me to organize

 a Christmas party, so I asked the folk from the Nursing Home

to join us for an all-Australian barbecue on the banks

of the Snowy River, our National Icon.

After a wee bit of trouble with buses we set out from Cooma
towing a team of wheelchairs, gummy faces flapping in the wind,
false teeth tumbling onto the Snowy Mountains Highway,
road kill dentate, quite Christo, as far as Berridale, where I had

a quick Resch's shandy or two while the driver hosed down

the wheelchair riders in the carpark at Peel's Inn. We left deaf

Irma Strubbing in the bar with a blind cowboy
and carried on to Jindabyne.

 

Where the Snowy River becomes a lake
we disembarked. A logging truck pulled in beside us

with a couple of wheelchairs embedded in the 'roo bar

and while we were scraping them free
a bloody huge tree (mountain ash, if I'm not mistaken)
rolled from the truck and took out half the Committee as it fell.
Oh well, a few less prawns on the barbie.
 

By then I was into my second bottle of Bundaberg

OverProof rum and feeling no pain
so when a contingent of aborigines arrived to complain
we were desecrating their sacred site, I really let them have it -
the bottle I mean. The afternoon passed fast and furious.

Madame President got off with the truckie,
first time in a decade she'd been so lucky,
while I explained that the site was sacred to us too,
being the burial place of so many of Europe's
displaced persons after the end of WW2. They were impressed,
and promised, when they win government, to erect
an appropriate memorial.

 

Plenty of room in the bus for the return journey,
strange miasma of urine and vomit and jolly Christmas songs.
Luckily, they all forgot about it straight away.

Now I'm working on a design
for a monument to the lost and squashed old folk
and, of course, half of the members
of the Upper Murrumbidgee Catchment Management Authority's

Ladies Auxiliary Social Committee.

 

 

 

what I want for christmas

from deep portals

freshets rise

and flow

 

a sail fills

tightening the spiral of a vine

slow winding

 

his thighs of chimerical trees

his angel

shoulder blades

 

nebulae velvet waves

meniscus-riding

on the line of his back

 

a flaming sword

aloft

 

 

 

A Christmas card for Simon

 

It’s that time of the year again.

I remember how you hated

the frenzy of tacky decorations,

Hallmark sentiments, angels,

boozy bonhomie, too much food,

the choosing and wrapping

and giving of gifts no one needed.

The waste.

 

You were excluded from family

invitations that year, from seeing children

called away; Don’t bother Uncle Simon, play

somewhere else. You decided

to have Christmas lunch with me.

 

You didn’t arrive ‘til late afternoon,

spaced out, on the nod.

I watched as you drifted in and out

of consciousness. I counted planes

through the skylight in the roof

while the day darkened

until finally I threw the food

to the backyard dogs

and went to bed.

 

I know you don’t want to be reminded

of all that, and I’m sorry to bring it up.

I know you’ll probably recognize

my writing on the envelope and throw this card

straight into the bin without reading it.

 

Anyway.

I just wanted to say

Merry Christmas.

 

I still miss you

 

 

 

Mercedes Webb-Pullman graduated from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand with her MA in Creative Writing. She is the author of Tasseography (2014) Track Tales (Truth Serum Press, 2017) and The Jean Genie (Hammer & Anvil Books, 2018). Her poems, and the odd short story, have appeared online (Bone Orchard Poetry, Caesura, Connotations, Danse Macabre, The Electronic Bridge, 4th Floor, Main Street Rag, Otoliths, Reconfigurations, Scum, Swamp, Pure Slush, Turbine, among others) and in print (Mana magazine, Poets to the People; Poetry from Lembas Cafe 2009, The 2010 Readstrange Collection, PoetryNZ Yearbook, many anthologies from Kind of a Hurricane Press, and the Danse Macabre anthologies Amour Sombre and Hauptfriedhof (Hammer & Anvil Books, 2017). She has also won the Wellington Cafe Poetry contest in 2010, and wrote a foreword for their collection of 2012 contest entrants, which included another of her poems. Since then she has been awarded 3rd prize in United Poets Laureate International Poetry Contest 2015, and is particularly proud of having a haiku (the only one from New Zealand) in 100 Haiku for Peace, an international publication in five languages. Her lucky number is 8. Blue. She lives in Paraparaumu Beach, New Zealand.