Ian C. Smith

A Killing

by Ian C Smith

Alone with him in silence

when a mosquito settles on his forehead

she does what she would always do

smacks it flat.

Engorged with someone’s blood

it never knew what hit it.

He doesn’t flinch.

You don’t become big in his world

by flinching.

What a send-off, she thinks later

breasts squeezed up and half-out of a black dress

thousands of dollars worth of sunnies alone

for a bloodthirsty pest.

********

Green Grass

by Ian C Smith

It was because he faced years of limited or no reading for one who, as a child read by lamplight, a guilty secret in that milieu. A rat reviled, he releases nervous energy mingling outside, scanning for an assassin in a popular city alley, its graffiti attracting tourists. The broken light of joy gleaned when his name was different, haunts him. He would live in a stone house near a pier, the past cast off, with painted window boxes of flowers. A girl walks his way, carrying a basket as he wrinkles a dog’s ears.

He sleeps fully dressed, lit by pulsing neon. Knowing they will come, thoughts funereal, he reasons death awaits us all, listens, tuned into anything different; an approach of addicts’ familiar tread, howling homeless shelter dreams, their sad hopes rotting in rooms with grimy glasses, bare light bulb décor, narrow beds, pillows rancid with despair. A dog whimpers somewhere in the city. He remembers the glimmer of light afforded by books, a girl’s doona-shrouded body warmth.

Stubbing, saving, a cigarette, he longs to disappear, wraithlike, his treasured share of the shakedown gone, grand plans drained like blood from a bullet hole. Stupid, stupid. Beyond the window, that dog again, a cry in the night. Outside his blocked door, a muffled alien sound. A sloped sill reaches a drainpipe, grouted bricks afford knotty fingertip holds if he doesn’t look down. Down is the problem, inching down, his direction until he can run, hide, slide, no longer.

Coyote a caste

apart, senses fine-tuned, sniffs

yellow rainflower.

******

No Joke

by Ian C Smith

All along the cell block, sang the lawyer to the cop. The old lag’s mimicry echoes in here, voice flat, adenoidal like Dylan’s, threat loaded with false jocularity disturbing my reverie of A-list dealing days, that lush intellectual glamour, my domain high above Market Street, leaning on my balcony wearing a crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled just so, listening to distant sirens, ambulances, cop cars prowling the night canyons of the glittering city, looking down on poor sods whose lives run into dead ends.

Fuckfuckfuck I mutter, sweat sour, reflection in stainless steel blurred, a fallen star, boring months, years, stretched ahead as good, or bad, as finished. Over. My erratic schooldays, the ballooning differential between brainpower and behavior, kindled my father’s favourite cark and care comment re fees; Flushing cash down the lavatory, remembered now, pissing, desultory, alone yet not alone. I blew bigger sums, actually, I tell the swirling water, than you dreamed of.

My neighbor, this tone-deaf troubadour of trouble, warbles There must be some way outta here; me, brainwave bankrupt to find this way, inflexible hierarchies being such, my last, dumbest, deal is done. Passion, ignorance, concupiscence. They bludgeoned Fat Carl, another high-profile snitch, brained him with a barbell.

******

Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in, Amsterdam Quarterly, Antipodes, cordite, Poetry New Zealand, Poetry Salzburg Review, Southerly, & Two-Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.