Roland Leach
SunlinE Press
Roland Leach has three collections of poetry, the latest My Father’s Pigs published by Picaro Press. He is the proprietor of Sunline Press, which has published eighteen collections of poetry by Australian poetry and one edition of Cuttlefish, a magazine that includes poetry, short fiction, flash fiction and art. He was the WesterlyPoetry Editor at the University of Western Australia till 2015, and a past winner of the Newcastle Poetry Prize and the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize.
Tilt
She came to this strip between ocean and loose
sand, hardened smooth, always wet, to think
about obliquity, and how to right her axis
back to that comfortable angle that made
it possible for the seasons, and not
winter and autumn to appear so
frequently. She came to think about
that angle of axis, the twenty three degrees
that slipped to forty some days. It wasn’t
racing kids to ballet or hockey or school,
sorting out dinner, husband and job
that tipped it. It wasn’t the things
to be done. More the inconsistencies
inside, that made her run madly happy
one moment, knowing it all worth it,
then that colourless doubt that wasn’t sharp or dull,
but shapeless and sticky as raw egg white,
that made her tilt, made her appear leaning
when she was straight, made her aware
of the fragility of being between
solid earth and the fluidity. So she
had to walk the line of coast, feel the edge
where ocean became land, where ocean came
to an end and those who sprang from it
obliged to accept the heavy drag
of gravity that came with walking the earth.
Roland Leach