Published in The Diamond & the Thief – October 09

Amanda Joy is a poet, sculptor, installation artist and songwriter born in the Kimberley region of W.A. She currently lives, works and gardens in Fremantle and travels as often as she can, mostly between France and Australia.

Her poetry has been published in various journals online and in print such as Up The Staircase Literary Review, Numbat, Killpoet, Fragile Arts Quarterly, Alabaster and Mercury, Heroin Love Songs, The Toronto Quarterly and Black Listed Magazine and The Best Australian Poems 2009 anthology.

She has a fascination with portals and conduits and every now and then she pops out a little limited edition illustrated chapbook for those who ask nicely. Her tiny, yet sincere chapbook, Not Enough To Fold lovingly published through Verve Bath Press early this year. A more sizeable binding of her wordage is gestating.

She blogs her poetry semi regularly at her website Little Glass Pen and Myspace .

Keeper of a dog called Love, her heart still beats like small pink feet on red earth.

Vasilissa’s Doll
By Amanda Joy

I am the house and the hut with chicken legs that turns to face us.
I am the sea cave speared through by the foundations of skyscrapers.
The glitter and shine of bare bones,
the scaffolding and crane, the tented buildings,
the outskirts of the forest with trees bent like ribs.
Strange enough without shadows.

Here I am, one hand in yours, the other searching for skeleton keys
in the soft cloth of her unwritten pocket. Private finger cave
of receipts, crumbs, stones and small change. Here is the dull-eyed doll
who comes to life at night, feeding my cheeks of milk and blood
as my hair grows down to my waist.

I like to tell you this story, you, keeper of water and all
the paths it makes when trapped, bent forward in your chair
like the red rider, have asked me to close my eyes and feel
the quiver, Saraha haha.
I laugh, I know you’re winging it.

This is grown in the dark too, in the chambers of involuntary muscle
and it will go one way or another. I am picking
the black grains from the wheat.
When you tap me on the shoulder I turn
to nothing

Pushlished in The Diamond & the Thief - January 11

Imagined Interiors
By Amanda Joy

Tonight we spoke like a frequency graph,
like a landscape without edges,
extruded strokes of light to my lips like fingers
stretching through the architecture of your words.
To cocoon the sounds in my ear longer.

I scavenge images to furnish this room
that holds you in sprawling pieces,
with feathered edges that overlap and repel.
I smear the walls with my tender vision.

This passage doesn’t permit complexity.
A blocked aperture half-closed
by the debris left, a fragment fallen.
It obstructs my view of your dislocation.

Someone coughs in the background.
Your voice lowers to a soft tendril,
I hear your body run in your sheets
As you describe the darkness
that stares back at you.

In these implicit movements I accrue
the graduation of weightless light
that reaches from me to you under
a heavy winter.

Colour will slide in the morning
over the outline of your refuge
   (Like an unfinished house)
Like music climbs through these sounds.