Competition

Highly Commended

The Faceless
by Kirsty McCormack
Redbank Plains, Qld

A blizzard of bleach crowns the sheets
Pillow and blankets forsaken to the dark impenetrable moat
    confining her to this prison cell.
Alone together. Paralysis of limbs
    constraints her in the overwhelming fear he may stir,
not even to retrieve the ever so weak conquered fortress of material
    that fell so abruptly in a storm of hands and lightning of zippers.
But therein lay her betrayer, her last defence the lure of eyes;
Wired contraptions of torture to fracture ribcages beneath
fine sheets of fabrics that cover like skin.
She dares not move.

Her rosebud lips smeared across linen.
Her irises cried like ocean into blankets.
Her eyelashes painstakingly ripped from her eyelids.
The flesh of her cheeks slashed from her jaw
   and smashed like a piece of meat over and over into the mattress.
She is faceless.

The room shakes violently under her sad gaze
and spins like the carousel of forsaken innocence.
It is not a bedroom but a torture chamber of the underworld
Daggered and scarred walls; the walking wounded
    only erect by the power of mindless shock.
The mattress of springs, a bed of nails the size of a matchbox
with sheets a repulsive shade of hopeless.
Concealed in the claustrophobic box, she stares at a place she once pretended was heaven.
The world in a globe hangs by a noose of copper
and plastered like the skin of the ceiling lay poster after poster
Women in their most vulnerable, breasts full and overflowing
lips in sensual pouts, hair in thick caress of shoulders, eyes breathing lustful desire
Thighs exposedly parted, reluctantly welcoming
straddling motorbikes, atop cars, lying across one another.
Eyes wide shut with tears she stares at her own haunting hall of mirrors.

Unraveling herself from his thick suffocating stench,
She peeled what remained of her limbs of the springs that had carved their way into her
    Body.
Raw and bloody, she scraped what she could of her grated flesh from the sheets,
peeling pieces of her tongue off his lips and her fingernails from his oily hair.
She scratched out her skin from the holes in the walls
    and forced her ear drums back into her skull that his foul language and distasteful
    foreplay murmuring and repulsive sickening screams her dug from her brain.
Picking out the shredded strips of flesh from the flea infested carpet
She gathered up her parts and pieces and shards and remains and faded into the cold black night.

Highly Commended

First Time on Board
by Violet Macdonald
Battery Point, Tas

You paddle out into the deep
And just kind of float around a while
As you watch gulls flying across the blue sky
And your little brother making sand castles.
And then your dad says
"There's a good wave"
And you turn, and can't see it,
But take his word for it anyway.
And you start swimming forwards,
And pull your board up straight
And your arms start to ache
As you cling to the water logged Styrofoam
And you start shaking as you feel the cold wind
And slowly you start to see
An ebbing flow of water
Rising up and down
Like a blanket of green and blue.
And after what seems ages
You see it upon you
And suddenly it seems much bigger
Than it used to
And just as it's about to break
You pull out and duck
Under its flowing cover
And rise from its navy depths
And your dad smiles and says
"Maybe next time, yeah?"
And you nod and say
"Yeah, maybe."