BJ Muirhead



Climate

There is a point where a patch of rain or sun spoilt wind burns hair sprouted through sun slick sweat.

Instruction for the forbidden

Tell no one how you push thought aside, nor how lust for the forbidden twitches in your smile. Say only that we all have felt an urge to bark and throw ourselves humping on the goodwill of strangers.

The inevitability of life

Marked by uncertain movement, exploration begins. A ricochet of breath under sky dark with rain and a dozen black cockatoos in raucous flight congealed on aged skin, crumpled loosely around joints, like smoke trapped in the still of summer breath, bodies pressed close: a solitary moment bracketed by the whine of a baby, the clack of rock falling on rock and the soundless creep of water seeking continuance from the day we know we are dead.

BJ Muirhead is a writer and photographer living in rural Queensland, Australia. He has published online and in print journals, and was included in an anthology of Queensland poetry (1986). He has published art criticism and was photographic reviewer for the Courier-Mail newspaper in the 1980s. His writing and recent exhibitions, Primary Evidence (2011) and Flesh (2014), continue his lifetime interest in the human body and its relation to the inevitability of age and death.

An earlier version of The inevitability of life appeared in The Blue Hour.
 
 
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