She's walking up the gravel strip
beside the grassy berm
along the coastal street
barefoot, blue jeans,
cicadas electric in the hedge
thrashing on their few chords
stuck like a bad garage band;
she's jaunty with sea salt
beachy sweat in her pits
a swipe of sand on her jaw
like her dad’s holiday stubble
and she whistles to the finches
that wheel up from the paddock hay,
chaws on a piece of soldier grass
with its micro tiara of white petals
swaggers, mind flexing,
muscles imagining
nobody's body
but her own.