Susan King-Smith
 

Sue King-Smith is currently completing a PhD in Creative Arts at Deakin University. For three years, she was the co-editor of The Animist, an electronic arts ezine that has been archived by the National Library as part of the Pandora Project. In the past few years, she has had poems published in various journals including, Famous Reporter, The Paradise Anthology, Tarralla, Blue Giraffe, Woorilla, Pendulum, Oban ‘06 and Tamba and she has had essays published in JASAL and Linq. Her first collection of poetry, An Accumulation of Small Killings, will be published by MPU in early 2008.

Swimming the Unconscious

Before degrees of separation, 
we swam the mire, quick-silver dark
with pores as porous
as water. Schools of fish caught us
in collective darting tides, 
all of a mind, singular, no beyond
or outside and we rode the sliding
fractals of existence. Opening rice-paper
wings in unison, and rising 
into flight we soared the curdling
updrafts and hung like tiny origami
marionettes, guiding strings
unseen. Migrating south we bounded 
down a mob of kangaroos, eyes slight
for dangers, our sinewy legs 
like springs. Life was a small 
f lowered chaos and we duck-dived
kaleidoscopic centres.

Sometimes still, synchronicity swims 
through ether, and you send 
me an email, and I send you a book,
that cross unlikely paths in
cyberspace. And they speak the 
same language, tell the same story,
and we laugh across the coincidence
that is not coincidence at all. (We shared 
a primordial womb once.) And at night, still,  
we dive head-first into waters embryonic
and old as time, swimming the 
unconscious.