I was up to my neck in it before I realised
the portrait was never going to be
convincing. I saw myself, askew and unfixable,

on the narrow verge, felt their furtive eyes,
their assessing, grimy hands pass briefly
over me, those merchants of neglect,

hoarders of quiet loss. I'd even imagined one
muttering, mid-century design...? not quite...
before moving on to consider the tired armchair,

the rickety unfashionable lamp. Come dusk,
exposed to the damp and pointed air, I'd be
hauling in the slow rust again. But there

was too much implied narrative for a poem,
the images veiled under a film
of cool pity. And what would I have been

saying about you, my love, the only one I trust
to see me entirely naked, you who keeps
telling me I've no reason to apologise for this body?

analysts said people had just gotten tired
of being careful officials say people will die
but we say we aren’t dead yet time
and ventilators are scarce you have no idea

who might be vulnerable around you we are

being asked to make enormous, difficult decisions
so that other people can go to the pub normal
birthed me yet normal wants to extinguish me
zoom crip dance parties and contact-free baskets

of extra veggies – life saving crip mutual aid survival

I want to believe that the future is
not just mine but ours am I scared that the hospital
won’t let me in? every single second when anyone
says it’s only the old and unhealthy who are dying

we say stop racist-eugenics now I write

using us, we and our to represent how this community
is part of me bad jokes, memes and tacos
count as mutual aid to not wear a mask is not
an act of freedom – it is callous it is radical to love

a body that the world says is wrong


* Only the title of the poem is mine. Its words come from (in order) Bri M (“Maybe We Shouldn't Go Back to Normal”, The Nation, 30 June 2021), Crip Fund, Alice Wong (“I'm Disabled and Need a Ventilator to Live: Am I Expendable in this Pandemic?”, Vox, 4 April 2020), Anthea Williams (“For Those of Us with Disabilities, Lockdown Won't End as long as Covid Strategies Leave Us Behind”, The Guardian, 31 December 2021), El Gibbs (“People with Disability 'Completely Overlooked' as Omicron Surges”, SBS News, 20 December 2021), Bri M, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (“How Disabled Mutual Aid is Different than Abled Mutual Aid”, Disability Visibility Project, 3 October 2021), Alice Wong, Amy Gaeta (“Disabled Communities in the Covid-19 Pandemic”, Disability Visibility Project, 26 March 2020), Crip Fund, Amy Gaeta, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Anthea Williams, Frances Ryan (“Living in a Woman's Body: this body is a genetic mistake – but it is sex, laughter and beauty too”, The Guardian, 10 February 2022).

for Gaele
I like to think of love as a ribcage without pain – Gaele Sobott, “I like to think of love”

or as the rush of breeze behind this soft
applause of reeds at the edge of the deep, modest
reservoir as I walk awkwardly past,
needing to push out, head-first, into the living

water, to make a wake of everything else,
to stroke and float within the dark blue mirror
and swim back to the shore drenched

in reflected sky and a wash of microbes
who remind me that all time is crip time
(it's just our economy pretends otherwise).
But what to make of the way these hands,

hips and shoulders hold pain without calling it pain?
Spasm of mirror-neurons. Ache of a world
in distress. Love, unable to turn away.

for Paul
sometimes it's a wrestle / but usually it's an embrace – Paul South, “Common Burn”

I'm not a narcissist who thinks this trail
wasn't here before me, wasn't pressed into being

by thousands of dirt-poets like us, but I do like to
pretend I'm alone. It's a relief not to be –

you remind me. Where was I? Head down,
I'd tripped into some kind of fugue state – must have

been the sensory cocktail of struggling eucalypts,
the descending alarms of choughs

I couldn't see, those cubes of wombat poo,
and a gust of wind that had me half in rapture, half

in dread – when our foreheads met
with a thunk. We were knocked out

or woken up, or both, it doesn't matter. The land
here knows I can't teach you anything

about lines, how they break, how we stitch
ourselves together. Only, maybe this

wrestling of yours – mine too – is also an embrace.
A poem of staying alive that has no ending

that would make any sense. That's enough
of these circuitous metaphors – let's keep rambling...