1.

Gendre is French for son-in-law,
your daughter’s husband. One Tuesday night
I make cheese souffle because you said
your dad made it when you were small.
I’m sweating, fretting, setting multiple timers
for its final fart-blown emergence.
I did not realise I wanted to be
in direct competition with your father
but the feeling now is that I am
the opposite of a possessive dad with a gun:
I am an egg-beating son-in-law.


2.

My gender is a paper fortuneteller, grubby at the edges
and I’ve already read all the fortunes, so pick
your colour with care and I’ll recite it like a mantra:
G R E Y
	(which incidentally might be the most common non-binary name)
A S H	L E A F	C R E E K,
bodies that turn to the earth. I’m your dog-eared darling,
your schoolyard talisman. My gender is as much for you
as anyone else, as much for me as nobody.
Someone wise once said that everyone ought
to be forced to touch expansiveness,
and these things roll unaligned
like my tyres—which of course
are wearing on one side. As is customary with gender,
we all run a little uneven and none of us
can handle the terrain. I hate
writing about my gender.

ham raffle on a Saturday night:
rugby-stubbied lads in the roar
shedding horns and velvet childhoods
stand lowing ‘round the pool table

the air is thick with tobacco
and the clack clack of the jukebox
peddling choices like a careers counsellor

outside, the moon is a cracked windshield
and winter whines at the door

soon, the young men fledge
to the cities, other dank-valleyed towns
or high, star-ridden stations

and the cold pub air sits disused
smelling of rancid fat and urinal cake.
it gets so you can’t get a meal half the year
just a piss-weak draught

but still the slow old boys come in,
chewing through the days like a combine harvester
to lean back on scratchy square chairs

and affix you with their opinion:
the horses the rugby the rest of your life

until the final grind of rural siren
draws the street out to bear witness:
billow of smoke, structure buckle,
the wild-eyed windows filling orange
as the blaze roars low and final
the neighbourhood stands
with their hems dampening in the dew
and slowly the chat seeps into the night:
births deaths marriages,
the lamb prices, the drought

and like hoggets in a southerly
they turn as one
to warm their burry backs