Avoidance

Another soft yet adamant thing
clambers to reach you, barred

by a cunning machinery assembled
by your own disruptive hand. Go,

work until you barely feel. Ascend
and trek physical instead of heart

distance; now, snap seeming beauty,
tackle yet another riddle external to

the partially opened one within. Go,
run from the wide-eyed initial version

of you. It’s safe here, though see if
you do not falter, strangely, midway.

Behind every seeming journey’s rise is a lock
to be picked. In a home, an abandoned room

with a window on the verge of collapse.
In that clumsy room is a call. Answer it.


Amanda Anastasi is an Australian poet whose work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Australian Poetry Journal, Griffith Review and Best Australian Science Writing 2021 and 2022, among other places. Her poetry collections are Taking Apart the Bird Trap (Recent Work Press, 2024) and The Inheritors (Black Pepper, 2021). Her favourite sweet is chocolate cake.

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