Sarah Jane Barnett
The Drop Distance
After we leave the cinema
I can still hear the hanging,
his breath sucking
the black cotton hood
audibly onto his lips.
During the storm that night
our ponga split,
the albumen flesh
caught on a power line.
*
When my parents went
through that bad patch
I made a community out of plastic
horses, a corral of bottle top fences,
a proud forest of milk carton trees.
At night I would play by torchlight.
Years later when studying Plato
I thought about shadows;
how we project them,
indistinguishable from the real thing.
