Killer Rack

By Sylvan Spring

In their generous and often euphoric first book, Sylvan Spring is constantly and irresistibly in motion. These are poems for the sad bitches, the silly billys, the divine transsexuals, the girls who were first to get piercings not in their ears, the ones who dream of dissolving into a river, the Cocteau Twins obsessives, the average bros, the immaculate twinks, the retired popstars turned chicken farmers, and fans of 2001 masterpiece Charlie's Angels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Release date: Mar 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9781776921935

Book preview

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Dear Kim Sasabone from the Vengaboys

Kindy teacher aside, you were my first

love. Which I guess makes it the purest,

because don’t we just collect jaded reasons not

to love as we go through our lives? I know

you’d understand, Kim Sasabone, because

when you sang boom boom boom boom I want

you in my room to spend the night together

from now until forever, I felt

it in my veins, your words unspooling and reaching out

for blood not yet coalesced and I know it takes a

very complex understanding of the nuances of

love to speak about it so simply, and you, sweet

Kim Sasabone, have seen pain

immeasurable, and still set

your course for Ibiza. I want to kiss the tender

skin of your forearms, for you to whisper the lyrics

of ‘24-7 in my 9-11’ – which, bizarrely, came

out in the year 2000 – over the frantic tides

of my heart, to bend from the sky in your enormous

platforms and deliver me to the lilt of a peace

that isn’t conditional. Pick me up in your

Wingroad five-door estate and play me

your unplugged #1s on the stereo as

we drive through rigid little towns that

will never know the embrace of you or

your greatest hits. Tell me the fragments

of your life you thought had fallen over

the edge. Tell me: do you long for the illegal

beach parties of the early days? When you and your

band broke up in 2002, I stood my stern seven-

year-old vigil on the steps of the school church

in full mourning garb, not knowing if

the Vengabus would ever ride again and steadily

losing faith in the kind of love that could

save me. My heart did not go shalala lala at any

hour of the day or night for at least a month.

But time is an unclenching fist and I had to do

algebra and the dishes and stay out of people’s

way or else, and it was easy to forget the sound

of your voice. In high school, I heard the band

was back together and you had an odd new single

that I think Pete Burns wrote, something

to do with Uranus?? Oh, did you feel

adrift on a childish and strangely

horny raft when all the others came back

with spouses and children?

Did you know that other people

wouldn’t fill you up but yearned for them

to try anyway? I still wish I could hold your head

in my hands and gently unpick the knots

in your hair and tell you there are things to be

afraid of, but I will always hold your pain as

if it were my own until you can pick it back up

again. Did you ever end up going to San Francisco?

Was it gross to watch adults

drink chardonnay from plastic cups and

grind on each other to ‘Up & Down’? Did you wish

you could retire to a little hamlet

with a library and some chickens?

I do.

I, too,

have been

trapped in festive torment, forced

to endlessly relive the words of my past.

But,

Kim,

we are both still here. The bus rattles on.

And happiness is just around the corner.

Hell is a teenage girl

or rather, hell was when I had to be one.

A fag walking around in girlsuit,

trying to pretend like I had any business

playing goal defence or touching boys’ necks

at school discos – a transplant among

the cluster of girls at the sleepover, tense

on my mattress on the floor, heart

violent with the knowledge

that someday I’d be discovered,

that today could very well be the day

that one girl, probably the meanest of them

(fucking Harriet), would spring from her sleeping bag

and screech with indignance as she pointed me out,

and the whole room and everyone in it would yell