Halloween

Dimitra Harvey

Who can say why the night draws in around the child

like a rip? Why she must tread the sucking hours, why her body

feels like an uncaulked skiff, filling up? Her siblings

sleep. Language comes as easily as breathing to them, while something

she cannot name swarms in her like bluebottles—all those smalt,

hair-trigger stingers. At school, her chest—as if deep

underwater—is pressurised, tight, the voices around her

fish-tanked. Who can say about shame? That Halloween night

before he left for good he said, I love you—then years

of silence, ghosting like the vacant eyes of her halloween

mask, the farcical

I love you, I love you

DIMITRA HARVEY was born in Sydney to a Greek mother and grew up on Wangal country. She is the author of A Fistful of Hail (Vagabond Press, 2018). Her writing has been translated into Spanish and Romanian, and appears in publications from Australia and overseas, including Meanjin, Southerly, Cordite, Mascara Literary Review, SBS Voices, Openbook, and Panama Poetico, as well as anthologies such as Best of Australian Poems 2022. In 2012, she received the Australian Society of Authors Ray Koppe Young Writers Residency. Her poetry has been long-listed in the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, and the University of Canberra's Vice Chancellor’s Poetry Prize. Her poem ‘Cicadas’ won Queensland Poetry’s 2021 Val Vallis Award.