Thirsting for Lemonade

  Interactive Press

  Thirsting for Lemonade

  Heather Taylor Johnson is the author of two books of poetry: Exit Wounds (2007) and Letters to my Lover from a Small Mountain Town (2012). She was a poetry editor for Wet Ink magazine from 2005-2012 and is currently the poetry editor for Transnational Literature. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide and tutors in Creative Writing at Flinders University. She is an ex-pat hailing from all over the US, now ecstatically relocated near the Port in Adelaide. She lives with her partner Dash, their three young children – Guthrow, Sunny and Matilda – and their spunky dog Tom. Her first novel, Pursuing Love and Death, will be published by HarperCollins in 2013.

  Interactive Press

  The Literature Series

  Thirsting for Lemonade

  Heather Taylor Johnson

  Interactive Press

  The Literature Series

  Interactive Press

  an imprint of IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)

  Treetop Studio • 9 Kuhler Court

  Carindale, Queensland, Australia 4152

  sales@ipoz.biz

  ipoz.biz/IP/IP.htm

  First published by IP in 2013

  © Heather Taylor Johnson, 2013

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Printed in 12 pt Cochin on 14 pt Snell Roundhand.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Taylor Johnson, Heather.

  Title: Thirsting for lemonade / Heather Taylor Johnson.

  ISBN: 9781922120366 (ebk.)

  Subjects: Australian poetry.

  Dewey Number: A821.4

  Also by Heather Taylor Johnson:

  Letters to My Lover from a Small Mountain Town (IP, 2012)

  Acknowledgments

  Front Cover Image: Carol Lefevre

  Jacket Design: David Reiter

  Author Photo: Anna Solding

  Some of these poems, or variations of them, have appeared in the following journals: Antipodes, Bukker Tillibul, Etchings, Finger, Five Poetry Journal, Four W, Griffith Review, Mascara, Nonce Journal (US), Poetrix, Prosopisia (India), Social Alternatives and Transnational Literature, as well as in the anthology Small City Tales of Strangeness and Beauty. Full credit to the General Mills headquarters in Golden Valley, Minnesota, where “Hunger’” was hung on a bulletin board. I am grateful to Arts South Australia for a grant to assist in the completion of a first draft of this manuscript.

  Thanks and squeezes to my sis-was, Cassie Flanagan Willanski, Cathoel Jorss and Kerryn Tredrea, for a wonderful year of workshopping and sisterhood. Also to the usual suspects for general writerly comforting and support: Anna Solding, Rachael Mead and the fabulous former KPT (Bel Shenk, Kim Mann, Lucy Alexander, Shen and Tim Sinclair – will our poems ever cease popping up in books?) Thanks also to Carol Lefevre, and to David Reiter and the rest of the IP staff. Love to those who have inspired so many memories: Mom, Dad, Tony and his house of girls, Liz, Rebecca, Fletch and the rest of the Fredericksburg crew. And, as always, thanks to Shirley and Les. My biggest thanks go to Dash, Guthrow, Sunny and Matilda, who will always be my home.

  Things…

  Things

  Familiar yet

  the fabric of this couch

  still un-stretched,

  no smudges or stick

  on the white shag carpet

  where my toes warm themselves

  and fiddle.

  Home is a relative term.

  This family meeting

  festive, somber

  we joke as brother and sister do

  while Mom lays trays of dip

  and Dad spreads out

  the papers.

  The last time we met for

  ‘the discussion of the wills’

  I was too young to drive

  though I had a say in euthanasia.

  Now I am grown, I’ve flown faster

  than the sun and turned back time

  to be here, where

  the dishes are the same

  but I’m unsure

  in which cupboard they reside.

  Residence is impermanence.

  Dad with his lips like mine

  asks if there is anything we want to claim

  so nothing becomes messy.

  I’m stuck on claim and mess.

  Mom is busy, asking about jewelry,

  wouldn’t I want

  jewelry?

  I’m thinking it’s the things

  that are meant to sum them up.

  My brother and I are still, save for my toes

  in the carpet and his allergies waiting

  for the rain.

  Everything Rolling Stones to my dad

  because this is how we’ve related

  thought the other really cool

  sang words aloud on family road trips

  and years later over tequila.

  My father gushes quietly,

  as is his way

  with pride.

  Thunder rumbles in my stomach and briefly

  we look into each other’s eyes

  mother daughter

  father son

  mother son

  brother sister

  daughter father

  husband wife.

  The breeze through the lanai has become wind

  and swelled to a howl, my skin pimpling

  and I rub my arms, dream of ugg boots

  imported into Florida.

  Do you want a blanket?

  Then as if to counterpoint:

  Your piano, ignoring shipping and the trauma

  of the riotous waves, a large crate splintering

  what would be my lingering pain.

  Why would I want the baby grand

  when at nine – don’t you remember –

  I became so frustrated

  with my mom’s teaching

  I stopped playing the piano?

  What about five – remember the tiny

  ballerina behind you all around

  as you played straight-backed and wrists

  relaxed because I will never forget.

  My brother’s fingers touch

  waste time.

  You ask this now?

  He laughs.

  We know it is not funny.

  Keith Richards and JS Bach

  and the shouting rain

  on the condo’s roof

  keep a heavy beat;

  the steady gutter of water

  like strings.

  The Souvenir

  I do not wish to contain anything –

  not the feel of the beaded cove drying on my skin

  or the taste of rum on my tongue

  which flowed down my throat

  like crisp water piped-in direct

  from the billowy clouds that floated above

  or you or the sunset

  or the breeze which played with the bubbles in our bath

  and the feel of your toes caressing my neck –

  but I will buy this pareu at the tourist price:

  to wrap round my body

  which will soon drip of another ocean

  and smell of another harder earth

  which will cover me as I rise from our bed

  make room for the sunlight on my shoulder

  and make for our son a cape to wear

  w
hen he flies from home.

  I do not intend to gather time

  and fold it into creases

  because it is succinct as Xs

  on a paper calendar

  bound by the smooth edges

  of two airline tickets

  but we are feeling people

  the tangible essential

  the pareu vital.

  Daydream

  This is my daughter

  this, my arm cradling

  her neck and these

  are her eyes.

  Deep rush of white wet

  and sweet through

  my breasts: a mix

  of pain and satisfaction.

  And so I feed her. And so she grows.

  And those her fingers around my own

  and that is her suck - mix of pain

  with gentle bliss.

  On the mantel not a metre away

  my parents beyond an ocean,

  there and here

  but never really here.

  Caught-out rapture

  I knit memories that mean love

  and then pretend they are here –

  and those are their eyes

  watching me look at my daughter

  and that is my father’s

  arm round my mom:

  a mix of pain and a daydream.

  Why Australia?

  ...this hills hoist

  formidably crooked

  frayed and full with plastic pegs

  primitive in metal, weathered and smooth.

  I do not miss the clothes drier.

  The clinking of zippers and thudding of weight

  the smell of electricity clinging to socks.

  I’ve lived long enough to know

  this is a metaphor for something.

  ...this hills hoist,

  it rotates in front of me

  dancing to the birds that chatter in crowds

  basking in the radiance of a three o’clock sun

  celebrating a wind

  I’ve only ever felt in spring.

  4 Strings of Beads

  It is a small thing,

  4 strings of beads that frame the passage

  to our backyard curtain-style.

  Break them

  and each wooden turquoise bead has no bearing on anything;

  each plastic yellow one was simply made in Taiwan.

  But whole, there is significance,

  and significance inside of that.

  My first house out of home

  I remember stringing them late at night.

  Freedom was an overused word

  and it was mine

  and it was quiet

  and good.

  I hung them on the wall at the head of my bed

  reaching from ceiling to pillow

  and when I laid beneath a man

  I could look up and remember

  that I owned the moment

  that it was mine

  and it was free

  and it was good.

  Now these 4 strings of beads

  lay bare my history and move beyond:

  to screaming children, to grass

  and garden, to the limitless sky.

  Linger on

  so I’m sitting on my floor you’d be happy

  to know, cross-legged chain smoking listening

  to the Velvet Underground

  seemed as if the world fell hard

  on you that summer, grinned

  like a maniac humming her name

  a quarter of a lifetime for an incense holder

  made from driftwood she found in Cancun

  or the painting she wanted you to have

  because at seventeen you were her muse

  or maybe the dogs, goddamn Scotties

  they barked at squirrels all day

  you could’ve sworn it had been a week

  but we both knew that the moon was full

  and had been so four times before

  you sat alone, barefoot, cross-legged

  listening to the Velvet Underground

  letting ink drip every day

  a kind of blood forming words

  because it was a comfort

  I could not give

  life had been easier the summer before

  when we spent seven dollars and bought that first album

  thought we’d been witness to Lou Reed’s first breath

  over a six-pack of Foster’s in a muggy Atlanta

  one-bedroom downtown grit red corner house

  we tried to understand it all

  I remember your long, wise face

  the soundlessness of your airy laugh

  the slump of your shoulders, those patched-up jeans

  bless Lou Reed who had taken his first

  and all of his consecutive breaths

  in a time and place we will never know –

  bless us for trying to imagine.

  My Father

  In a forward move toward the second phase

  of the day that held within its grip

  the loosely structured walk on the coast

  the playground and the fish and chips

  the perusing of the grocery aisles

  and the walk past the old freight trains

  we returned to our tent for one last swim.

  When the wind picked up, the swimming

  the chatting the laughing had ceased

  & in that moment

  I put my hand to my chest to catch my breath

  gulp the frenzied flow of air and felt the space

  of the missing pendant I’d worn

  for twenty-three years.

  The groover enlightened my father an Aries

  just like me at seventeen had worn the horns

  of a silver ram around his neck

  and at fourteen I’d watched him clasp it

  at the back of mine

  & in that moment

  all I really understood was that I had become

  a groover like him

  one of the enlightened

  now somehow with family values

  summed up in a necklace.

  Somewhere in Port Lincoln it lay

  like a 20 cent piece not-so-shiny anymore

  in places scraped with time and the touch

  of my fingers feeling forever feeling

  and in its absence I saw the past

  his present you still wear that smile

  but felt the bareness of his spirit

  no longer clinging to my chest.

  So what is left?

  Of course I cried.

  It felt as if my father had died.

  Hunger

  Post package brown

  the loveliest of colours

  straight off a slow boat from America.

  I know my childhood sits inside.

  I smile like I’m seven

  sound out the name aloud: Star –

  the nurse from Idaho

  who promised a six-month pregnant me

  no child she knew would grow up without Cheerios.

  Not talking the Cheerios I saw here in the store

  the white boxed sugar-sweet ill-marketed import

  to an imagined Americanised Australian mum.

  but Cheerios:

  the original in the bright yellow box

  retro logo, good for the heart

  taught every Yankee baby dexterity

  in picking up each unadulterated O

  Oh! and I open the package

  then open the box then

  handful the cereal into my mouth

  before I’ve even opened the door;

  a dozen or more tiny Os

  the formation of the letter M

  singing on my lips.

  Because it’s not that they’re luscious

  or a delicacy by any name

  but rather a staple, practical

  uplifting in simplicity

  and can I ever forget t
he morning

  while I wiped down counters

  as I talked on the phone

  of the joys of seeing my children eating

  Cheerios for breakfast:

  You’ll have to find an Australian cereal.

  It’s silly to spend all this money.

  My heart broke momentarily

  for all that my mother could not comprehend:

  identity in an air-tight bag

  postage 13.26 US dollars.

  The Hundred Dollar Blanket

  It is not as if it were a cloud

  or a beetle digging in the earth

  or a foetus or a flame.

  A piece of pink and lime floral fabric

  in a small silver picture frame

  is only material

  yet I’m lost in the marvel of its function:

  how he lay on it, we squirmed on it

  and slept then woke to spill red wine.

  How we paid the hotel manager

  one hundred dollars for the damage.

  And it is not as if it could experience action

  or reaction, as if it had perception

  like objects of nature or the divine

  but it sits just so

  doing what it does

  phenomenally.

  The Fooseball Table

  My heartland lay in compact splinters,

  wood that has aged better than I.

  Metal shoots when in use and ca-ching contraptions

  resounding an anthem I was not forced to learn in school

  or sing during summertime baseball games.

  It is not the ordinary keepsake one might consider

  when a fire threatens to destroy a home

  for it cannot be folded or crumpled in arms

  and it takes two grown men to shuffle it a plain metre.

  Identity is funny that way.

  Seeing my foundations reflected in Plexiglas

  felt in the blow of a single white ball

  shot from the goalie travelling the field

  and reaching its destiny

  untouched by foreign obstacles—

  odd, to say the least.

  But who am I to choose the hows and whys

  when I’ve hardly had control of the wheres?