The Red Motorbike

1. One day the red motorbike was just there.

I didn’t even know I wanted one. A man told me to take it for a spin, but to be careful as the gears can take some getting use to.

Perhaps everyone, when approaching 60, is offered a motorbike.

The bike was cool. I wore my helmet everywhere, even when doing online banking.

2.

I’m in a large country town. It looks like Goulburn but it has another name I can’t remember. I’m with the kids and we are riding home with them perched on the back of the bike.

We get lost leaving town and have to drive through a shopping mall and push the bike up some stairs.

On the outskirts of the town we stop and call home. The kids tell my wife they love riding on the back of the red motorbike.

once coming around the curve the harbour would burst through bush now a valley full of apartments thrown up to stimulate a lazy economy possums follow old aerial trails leaping between roofs remember branches scratch into ceiling cavities to nest & wait bush rates gnaw through fast internet cables urban weeds sprout between broken sandstone the next station a tunnel away

Michael J. Leach (@m_jleach) is an Australian poet, critic and academic. Michael’s poems have appeared in journals such as Cordite Poetry Review, exhibitions such as the Antarctic Poetry Exhibition, anthologies such as Poetry d’Amour 2022: Love Poems (WA Poets Incorporated, 2022), and his two poetry books: the chapbook Chronicity (Melbourne Poets Union, 2020) and the full-length collection Natural Philosophies (Recent Work Press, 2022). Michael has won the UniSA Mental Health and Wellbeing Poetry Competition (2015), received a commendation in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine (2021), and jointly won the poetry category of the Minds Shine Bright Confidence Writing Competition (2022). He lives on unceded Dja Dja Wurrung Country and acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land.

i. country roadside— the motorist holds a blanket ‘round a joey ii. wetland encroached by developments— frogs plonk iii. netted orchard— a noisy miner flies back & forth inside iv. sugar bowl on the countertop— ants v. white noise on the ground floor— rustling in the roof

Irish-Australian poet Nathanael O’Reilly teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Arlington. His ten collections include Selected Poems of Ned Kelly (Beir Bua Press, 2023), Dear Nostalgia (above/ground press, 2023), Boulevard (Beir Bua Press, 2021), (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020), BLUE (above/ground press, 2020) and Preparations for Departure (UWAP, 2017). His work appears in over one hundred journals and anthologies published in fifteen countries, including Another Chicago Magazine, Anthropocene, Cordite, The Elevation Review, Identity Theory, New World Writing Quarterly, Trasna, Westerly and Wisconsin Review. He is poetry editor for Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature.

I knock on the wall between my study and my daughter’s room, call for her to change.

I call to my daughter’s room for her to change into clothes for dance, meet me at the car.

Wear dancing clothes, meet me at the car. Drive past neighbor George arranging bins.

George is in the alleyway arranging bins; he wears gardening gloves, collects trash.

George wears gardening gloves, collects trash from the gutters, the detritus of gameday.

Gutters overflow with detritus from gameday; coffee wafts from the fire station’s open door.

Coffee drifts from the fire station’s open door; I knock seven times on the wall of my study.