the basilica dome
is obscured by various antennae,
leads laced and looped/ hanging
down the apartment block like vines, or
jackets thrown listlessly over shoulders
and bird-like legs
traipsing down an alley as the sun creeps in,
cool and pink milky-blue.
heads just moving; circling, pushing. daisies quiver in the
grass, gravitating, reaching toward one another with little stringy-petalled
limbs.
they are silent and gentle/
their fingers interlock above them. clench
and then slow and still again, a pond.
i watch him in the side mirror. my thumb is stained with a
band of green. his eyes are deep and blue –
i am full tonight.
Who are you?
My name is Lisa Smit. I am twenty and two years old, born and raised in the Netherlands and currently residing in Melbourne.
What do you love about Melbourne? What do you miss about home (the Netherlands)?
The thing I love most about Melbourne is its inhabitants. All the people I've met during my 11 days here are beautiful. They are one by one lovely, friendly, genuine and extremely open-minded human beings. For example: today I went for my first bike-ride and my tire went flat, but other cyclists immediately came up to me if they could help me out. Who doesn't want such helpful people around? Speaking of bike-rides, I kind of miss the Dutch cycling lanes a tiny bit...
Your favourite book?
"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac. Or maybe "The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger. It's a fifty-fifty.
What is your typical travel camera setup?
Depends where I'm travelling to. Preferably just one camera.
What makes a successful self-portrait?
"The" light. Always the light.
Have you got a blog, or any other websites you'd like to mention?
My portfolio, my flickr, my blog.
you are
perched on a stool,
with one ankle
propped up on your
other knee.
your face is covered in
curls.
maybe you have a pair
of purple shoes on,
laces dangling for the
ground like long fingers
raking across sand.
somebody is stacking
plates in the kitchen.
i sigh, and rearrange
my own legs on the couch.
when you are around, they
become a pair
of wonderful flamingos.
they pressed you face
down
and pulled you in tight;
a marigold, between weighted pages.
tufts of hair lingered like
dandelion seeds
tufts of hair lingered like
dandelion seeds
your green corduroys were
flat and hollow,
a sucked-out stem -
all of the life had
swarmed to your irises.
tabby ones, grey ones, tiggy- striped-tiger ones.
tiny undernourished ones. squinty, sleepy,
glass-bottle-green eyes, electric-shock hairies
that
recoil at your breath. ones so black that you only
see
their eyes in the night time. and a pair of pink
milky ears.
nut-brown, bony man
strokes and swirls with them, tails twining,
cigarette smoke salsas on the breeze. a
wooden ballerina in jeans and check,
tangoing on the cobblestones with
the cats of castelnuovo.
Part of an ongoing documentation of the cat colony living in Castelnuovo di Porto, Italy.
One of a number of impressions of Palermo briefly made intelligible while leaving on a bus.
the smoke of charred carcass rises from the alley in plumes;
the roller-door restaurant is open for business.
he deftly guts the octopi –
thick, worn fingers push into the orifices, tentacles draping
over the hairy wrist like lover’s legs,
eyeballs disappearing into the bucket
of miscellaneous sea-creature pieces.
he plunges it into a bucket of water,
first cold to rinse then
boiling, then dismembered and curled about spaghetti or
straight onto the plate like a puppet,
steam rising from the suckers.
.jpg)
sometimes arrows
sometimes, a paper plate.
sometimes a flag, beaten in the wind
sometimes the span of a pair of hands.
sometimes, a fly on its back. sometimes
the speckled exterior of an egg. some
times a barrel of wriggling minnow. sometimes
black protein spots, sliding
across the film of my eye
straining and reaching for the pallid sky.
