Fiona Wright, born in 1983, is a Sydney poet, whose poems have been published in journals and anthologies in Australia, Asia and the USA. Her work was included in Best Australian Poems 2008, 2009, 2010 (Black Ink) and The Red Room Company's Toilet Doors Project (2004). She was runner-up in the 2008 John Marsden National Young Writers Award. In 2007, she was awarded an Island of Residencies placement at the Tasmania Writers’ Centre, developing a sequence of poems about Australians in Sri Lanka
First, the dust cross-pollinates.
Guards in saggy khaki scratch
their noses, spit phlegm
before their stamps rubber
...
My sister doesn't shop at Bankstown any more
because the drivers are all crazy, or else they all
hold both a licence and a pension card.
...
Silt, and minerals.
The brittling walls
now float on the waning water,
...
When their skirts swell in the flouncing water
like the thick wave
of a stingray, and their hair
grows weedlike on their cheeks,
...