skinny little thing
leaning with her Akhenaton face

into the hurdy-gurdy reveries
of other faces, spaces

thrumming to the spinning
whirr of strings on brazen wood

fingers like birds,
she a note on air

or a flight of semi-quavers launched
from a taut string

with those fleet fingers
innocent and unpolished

would they have weighed
too red? like stones

turgid with their own solemnity?
slowed their staccato effervescence

on the strings? or somehow deflect
the composition the way the toenails’

rubied ponds catch the fall of notes
cascading from the bow, refracting sound

like raindrops glancing up
from an eternal grail

skinny little thing with her
Akhenaton face ecstatic with the passion

Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello

 

Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello is an award winning poet and visual artist of Arrernte, Chinese and Anglo-Celtic descent. An ACT Creative Arts Fellow, Jennifer is widely published, including the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. She has judged both New South Wales and Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and the David Unaipon Award 2006–2010.

© 2021