Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." was originally hatched in a NYC club during BEA back in 2012. It's a fun little series, where authors record themselves reading an excerpt from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.
Today, Magdalena Ball is reading from her book Bobish. Magdalena is a novelist, poet, reviewer and
interviewer who grew up on Lenape land (NY) in the US, and currently lives and
writes on Awabakal land (NSW) in Australia. She is Managing Editor of
Compulsive Reader, and her work has been widely published in literary journals
such as Meanjin, Cordite, and Westerly, along with many anthologies, and is the
author of a number of fiction and poetry books, most recently, Bobish,
a verse-memoir published by Puncher & Wattmann.
Click on the soundbar below to hear
Ocean
Mandala
Solitude
was the feedback loop
she'd
sailed in on.
Every
shade of blue reduced, saturated
intensified.
Her
eyes became a kaleidoscope
spiralling
with the water, refracted
through
tears she kept from falling
as
the boat steamed towards a destination
imagined
and unknown. She was younger
then
she looked and she looked like a child.
The
steamship was so cramped she claimed
the
space beneath her feet just to breathe.
Do
I look sick in the eyes?
The
sky and the ocean reflected one another
polarised
light roiling with the boat.
She
swallowed her sickness.
Sickness
was not allowed so she kept
her
head up, straightened narrow shoulders.
When
the boat docked, the city opened from
the
deck in blue cobwebs, spirals, tunnels
an
interconnected pattern she would learn
to
understand. There were so many people
it
took three days to disembark. She had been
promised
a house, a job, food.
Dizzy,
she grabbed the rail for balance.
When
she earned enough she would
send
a ticket for her parents
if
she could find them again.
In
the meantime, memory was Prussian Blue
a
cyanotype carried like ghostly love.
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