Steph Amir, occasional poet

Posts

Heathrow

My poem Heathrow was written for the 'Dreams' issue of Ghost Girls Zine . I enjoy themed calls for submissions, because it often prompts me to write something new. In this case, I wrote about my recurring dream of running late for an international flight. I am so often lost in an airport, or in tunnels between platforms at unfamiliar train stations. Something I enjoy about poetry is the opportunity to write something completely bizarre, and to have others read it and laugh, saying "yes, it's just like that!" Thanks to Ghost Girls for the inspiration. Heathrow It’s 10am. The plane is leaving at 11. The gate is past the airport juice bar. It’s 4pm. The plane left at 11. You are at the juice bar on a beach in Jamaica. It’s 11am. You are on the plane, with your pineapple-mango mocktail and your sleeping bag. It’s going to be a long flight. You wish you hadn’t left your books on your hotel bed. You are at the hotel, collecting your books, but

Light and Colour I

Anyone who has met me knows that I don't really have a haiku vibe. I'm neither minimalist not serene, but in the interest of exploring different poetic forms, I wrote a few haiku for the 'Light and colour' issue of Echidna Tracks journal last year, and had two published. This is the first one. The editors removed the word "where" , but I prefer the symmetry of the 5-7-5 format. When I read this now, over a year later, the word 'mourn' jumps out, but at the time, it was written with the intent of capturing a particular time and place. Just over a decade ago, I was heartbroken after being dumped by someone who I'd been crazy about. I was living with a friend in Brunswick, in Melbourne's inner-north. The front of the house faced west, and in typical sharehouse style, we had an old couch on the verandah. I loved that I could have the comfort of the couch combined with the warmth of the afternoon sun. The relationship had ended right at

Thirty-Five Fish

At the end of 2004, I had just turned 21, and had been recently dumped by my high-school girlfriend. In between wallowing and distracting myself with endless commitments, I decided to try online dating. Back then, in the days before smartphones, access to the internet meant plugging one end of a blue cord into your computer and the other into the wall. From my desk, I created an account, adding a photo of myself in a pink halterneck dress. I added my search filters (inner-city Melbourne, aged 18 to 25, ticked "reading" as an interest) and dozens of profiles appeared. It seemed like magic: I told an algorithm what kind of partner I wanted, and the algorithm diligently introduced me to a range of people. Having grown up in the 1990s, it really did feel like living in the future. Within weeks, I had a new girlfriend: a PhD student who went to the same university as me. My friends said she looked like Missy Higgins, and I didn't see the resemblance but was pleased noneth

Cash, Handshakes and Crowded Trains

I live in Melbourne, which claimed to be "the world's most liveable city", until COVID hit us harder than anywhere else in the country. For me, 2020 was a bit of a weird time for my city and the world to be turned upside-down by a pandemic. The reason was, I'd spent the last two years fighting hard against obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which hit me hard in 2018 following hospitalisation with a life-threatening illness and ongoing physical disability. My OCD manifested in a few ways, but the main one was around the avoidance of germs. So, it was somewhat surreal to suddenly have everyone else fretting along beside me, but with a slightly different emphasis. While the reality of OCD was very clear to me, it was often spoken about it a way that I found profoundly irritating. The preoccupations and self-protection mechanisms of OCD suffers were described as being completely ridiculous, when in fact many (though not all) are grounded in truth, albeit taken to un

Unwelcome Neighbours

I've been writing poems for about two years now, and one of the first poems I had published was Unwelcome Neighbours . It's about one of my favourite animals: the grey-headed flying-fox (a species of fruit bat). Flying-foxes live in colonies, and in Melbourne the colony used to live in the Botanic Gardens, until there were complaints about them damaging trees by eating and roosting in them. The solution was to move the entire colony to another park, a feat that had never been undertaken before, and I thought it was remarkable. Researchers, government officers and park rangers worked together to use a combination of deterrents (a sound that the bats didn't like) and lures (delicious-smelling fruit) to shift the colony east. The bats never made it to their final destination, instead settling in Yarra Bend park, which somebody decided was a good enough outcome. Thousands of bats still live in the Yarra Bend colony, and they're adorable. Sometimes I take my 5-year-ol

Euphausia superba

Three of my poems were published in Otoliths journal, on 1 August 2022. Otoliths is an Australian online journal created by Queensland-based poet Mark Young. One thing that drew me to this journal was its name. Otoliths are small round bones in the ears of vertebrate animals (including humans). They sense gravity and movement, which is crucial for balance. As an undergraduate zoology student, I spent hours volunteering on a research project that involved removing the otoliths from small fish. The otoliths absorbed minerals from the water that the fish were drinking and living in, so by matching the mineral composition with the concentrations from different creeks and rivers, it was possible to see where the fish had migrated from. I don't think I ever found out what the research findings were, but I do remember that yanking out bits of bone from behind hundreds of fish-brains was horrifying and satisfying in equal parts. When it came time to choose my own research project for