Collected

Dominique Hecq

Image is a hand drawn illustration on a bright red background. At the top, a green helicopter floats in the air. Beneath it, a person with blonde hair and a blue shirt is sitting on a blue lounge chair, holding their face in their hands. On their back sits a black crow. In the bottom right corner, a large yellow and white egg obscures some of the image.

‘Collected’ – Caitlin McGregor, 2023.

i

At this temperature, time sizzles. Gusts of wind whip through the cracks and crannies of the undead body of a crone walking her dog. Loose words hang like the pooch’s tongue. Somehow the leash gets tighter as heartbeats grow out of kilter. Dust swirls around the track within sizzling time. Day is night now and the crone walking her dog is a mare. Time’s end bucks back to its beginning. She’s scared of the remainder of Times Moving On. Lost words chime: I’m fine, thank you. Fine phrases suck. 

ii

Sleep is a chopper, eggbeater, whirl bird. It’s a turbine engine hacking at memory and anguish. It’s your new white linen shirt egged out before a reading. It’s rotor blades faring nowhere but to sea. Sleep is no rescue helicopter with an amphibious hull. You wake up soaked, bones broken swirling in smog and crows already pecking at your egg-eyes.

iii

The helicopter fills the sky with silence. Dawn or dusk refuses to wrap around the skeleton of a paper gum. Faces lose their glow. Eyes drown in puddles of words.  Twisted metal crash on the shore. Off the beaten track behind the dunes, lines of lead underline the point entry of light and the circling of a typo. I examine the lie that broke me. Rain. Not a she-oak, wattle, let alone fig tree to take shelter under. I put away denial in the shadow of my archives. 

 

To hear Dominique read her poem ‘Collected’, click below.

Dominique Hecq grew up in the French-speaking part of Belgium. She now lives on unceded sovereign Wurundjeri land. Hecq writes across genres and disciplines—and sometimes across tongues. Her creative works include a novel, six collections of short stories as well as twelve books and chapbooks of poetry. A winner in the 2022 James Tate Poetry Prize Endgame with No Ending is fresh off the press with SurVision.