Emma Neale — Apr 26, 2020

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.