AIDAN COLEMAN

Aidan Coleman has published three collections of poetry and his work has appeared
in Best Australian Poems, Australian Book Review, Blackbox Manifold, Poetry Ireland
Review, Glasgow Review of Books, Poetry Salzburg Review, and Virginia Quarterly
Review and his latest collection Mount Sumptuous (2020), is published by Wakefield
Press. He is currently writing a biography of the poet John Forbes.

---

Oracular

Don't ask me the wind whispers,
and when you check
next door, you can't be
heard over road-rage and the dark
pulse of stadia. You forget
your shopping in a lyric
flourish: presidential

hopefuls—shifting
in their blue and red stables—
can't shape late talk to fit
a dreaming-space. Among
a harvest of fanatics, clever heads
on panels won't stop.






Diagram & Leaf

If
at the wrong hour
the street turns out its pockets
kings or cowards will be
named. There's ever
an argument to talk your way
down from, playing late on the radio.
A forgetful city is always becoming, making
how we arrive:
leaky packages, tricks
on paper, long afternoons
by sparkling water—
the theorem behind obsidian
and mirror.






Jolt

Men's heads pull them
through this suburb like fists,
their trolleys missed and lately collected.
Skin is not equipment
in this shaking off
of targets. Living is all
you digress for:

your heart tuned to the plane's
engine, the slide of air
plateauing at speed,
in what seems certain, blank
and endless—the countenance
of our hostesses.






Albums that are Summer

Kids negotiating sun and shade,
gerrymandering sand.

We pick through iTunes
like after Christmas.

The mind empty as a book
of sayings. You'd rather be

on a thatch pontoon
with a bunch of dickheads

according to the ad, and
when the glass breaks,

you admonish
the room, knowing this an audition.

Back to Front.