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ISSUE 2: ADAGIO

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MAHICA JAIN

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The Phonebook Sonnets

Mahica Jain | poetry

I:  

Phone book petals cling: a newborn rose. 

The first true winter you spend away 

Is frozen wind breaths, your spiced clothes 

defenceless to the burbling rain.  

The overfull gutter-rivers flow and ebb. 

You have travelled oceans to become 

a raindrop suspended in a spider’s web. 

White light fractures, cool and numb. 

You string together raindrops like streams 

that draw near and part and parallel 

in distant lands that awaken in dreams 

of home-soil and long ago farewells. 

The wrinkle of paper where you stand 

as winter closes and the days expand.  

II:  

Numbers, people from the yellow pages. 

Memories blot into a myriad of colours, 

tear-drop seconds bleed to ocean ages 

of fossilised people and forgotten lovers. 

“This is the place where no-one goes,” 

said boats that first scallop these shores. 

he truths that bind and pull and hold 

the coiling sea onto its sandy close. 

Then I, who has existed forever, 

might etch upon the opened land 

the severed threads we tie together 

to hold fast to places we understand. 

Phone book petals cling; a newborn rose. 

These are the things that no-one knows. 

III:  

Late evening; a round through the park. 

The innocent flower grows from stone, 

a bleed of purple ink, fragile and dark 

petals wilting. Undistilled, yet unblown. 

Here are the footsteps of my women, 

fickly pressed onto a far-away shore 

that froths and slashes and weakens 

hese anchors, left to age and erode. 

The broken opals of sunburnt hills 

behind which the ripe sun sets west. 

Stories like lost drafts in the windmill, 

ploughed and turned and unaddressed. 

The prams leave and flock like tides. 

Through these pages, the serpent slides.

Mahica Jain is an Australian poet with a love for the art and works of Seamus Heaney. Alongside publishing a picture book "Connected Apart" with the Australian Department of Education during the pandemic and her verse narrative 'River Veins' with the NSW State Library in their Young Writer's Showcase, she has also been awarded 2nd place in the Australian Woorilla Poetry Prize (2019), 2nd place in the "Arts of Peace" Poetry Competition by the Gandhi Peace Association Australia (2019) and 1st place in the Cumberland Gingko Writing Awards (2017). In her school years, Mahica was also Editor-in-Chief of her school magazine, regional finalist in the National Speaking and Writing Competition (2018) and was involved in writing for the PAVE festival and Emerald Messenger (both based in Victoria, Australia). Mahica is currently in her first year of the Doctor of Medicine (MD) course and in her free time runs a blog sharing writing tips and advice to other young writers.

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