Her back pages

The back pages curve like a wave. Each list in the classifieds tells her to fly — for work, for travel, and for the dying. She watches her hand touch down on the paper.  Its rough yellow smells of pulp and ink. She hears a faint crackle, imagines its sourness — as you see a taste of salt round the rims of rock pools. The beaches are cold now but the gossip columns say Elvis has been seen sheltering at Bondi behind the Pavilion. Maybe he’s after some luck. No-one told her to fly. She’s learning to build gardens, bought a shovel, Nitrosol, and a spray gun of Zest. Because they’re new, they need no instructions. Not like ‘splice the mainbrace’ or ‘pass the salt’. The fading moon of the season hangs over her efforts, but night on the ground is flooded by the glare of lamps. She will pay a million dollars for wings of sleep, for night to give up its plans to disturb her. One day she’ll learn the secret of closing her eyes. She will take to a south-west bed. It will haul the wind of her breath into walls of hope. Not for her the choruses ‘que sera sera’, she will never be still, nor listen when the window shouts back into her room. She moves through these sounds as she takes on the wave.