Peripheral Drift

After the Australian Marriage Equality YES vote

Turns out you can still pash in a graveyard
at 28, though by now my fear of spectres
has faded into a more realistic fear of people.
There’s a torch in my back pocket. Her hands
smell of headstone moss and bug repellent.
mosquitoes hunt us: hot, damp figures scuttling
on the edge. Later, the sceptic tour guide explains
how we interpret threats in our peripheral vision:
shapes in the rear-view could be anything,
but they’re probably not the undead.

Right now, we’re waiting for the tour to start,
deciding whether holding hands is a thing.
The night this country tallied its paper yesses,
that’s what we were finally saying to each other.
This week was the first time someone yelled
a slur from a car since I was a teenager.
“If only people would mistake me for a boy
when it’s convenient,” she said, not taking
her hands off me then, or now, even when
we hear a branch crack, or blink at torches
fluorescing the trunks of gum trees.

Zenobia Frost is a poet from Brisbane, Australia who recently won the Val Vallis Prize and a Queensland Writers Fellowship. Her next collection, After the Demolition, is available from Cordite Books.

Note: This poem was previously published in Overland, and also appears in After the Demolition.