MORGAN BACH

 

There’s a certain amount of you that needs to lie to yourself

 

so that you can catch your bus 
past the lions surveying the poor 
savannah of Newtown and down 
that long Adelaide neck to the green 
basin, its cracked pavilion, 
the twin terraces whose centre once 
you walked, where your mother 

bought a car after years of taking 
the train to her cleaning jobs, 
while you sat quietly in the big unruly 
houses and pretended not to go 
through those stranger’s drawers. 
How long that mile had seemed then 
with all its shine and roar. 
They’ve shifted the road back 
and forth, in stages of improvement. 
How small it all seems, returning. 
You could try again to be open 
like the storm drains they’re laying 
are to the sky and once they’ve found 
their right and proper place, they’ll seal 
over and carry that crush of liquid 
on the pouring days through 
the city’s concrete arteries 
to the sea. 
 

Listen to Morgan Bach read ‘There’s a certain amount of you that needs to lie to yourself

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Morgan Bach completed her MA at the IIML in 2013, where she wrote a collection of poetry and was the recipient of the Biggs Family Prize in Poetry. The resulting book will be published by Victoria University Press in mid-2015. She lives in Wellington.