24 September 2023
8 October 2023
before 27 October 2024 rejected Best of Australian Poems 2024

phantom alternative

a deported soul
diagnosed as still alive1
walks like a ghost into a bar2
and asks for milk, imagining

there’d been no trauma
no husk torn
from the grain of what
they were before


so, what happens,
does the bartender tend the drink?
cold, lite, homogenised
in a stemless glass – or does

some pissed patron take offence and
attempt to land a blow not
realising the ghostly qualities
of the soul who hovers here uncertainly?

uncertainty of life, of being alive,
being the quality of love addressed
not to what it is worth to love, nor who,
indeed, it’s better not to love the husk of

anyone until you can’t help
love the grain from which
the husk’s been torn
the grain you’ve never seen, will never know

  1. Johr Ali, a Libyan journalist interviewed by Hamish MacDonald on ABC Radio about 8.20am 18 September 2023, of currently surviving but not yet rescued victims of the dam burst flood at Derna, (the ‘city of poets’), Libya
  2. (1936 –) the comic strip character The Phantom (Ghost Who Walks) usually asks for a glass of milk if he enters a bar in mufti to find someone who can lead him to a villain.