Verse 8: At 35 weeks
You used to call each other Stinky
when first in love – as pet names go,
a little odd. But you were dinky-
di. We watched you thrive and grow
together, get jobs, win promotions,
make a home, fly over oceans
more than once. The sweet stink stayed
for fourteen years. The nest was made.
On Saturday a baby shower
marked the end of DINKish days,
and she-who’s-now-a-lump will raise
the stinky level, like a flower
that opens in the radiant dawn.
It’s just five weeks until she’s born
-
Join 734 other subscribers.
Recent Comments
Top Posts
- Reading with the Grandies 35: Tui T. Sutherland's Lost Continent
- Goodbye Mollie
- Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother
- Mother Mary Comes to me, Arundhati Roy and the Book Club
- Charmian Clift's Mermaid Singing
- The Granddaughter by Bernhard Schlink
- Ellen van Neerven's Throat
- Niall Williams's Time of the Child and the book group
- Tim Winton's That Eye, the Sky at the Book Group
- About
Currently reading & watching- Prime Minister (Lindsay Utz & Michelle Walshe 2025)
- Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath (S. Shakthidharan 2025)
- Remarkably Bright Creatures (Olivia Newman 2026)
- The Sheep Detectives (Kyle Balda 2026)
- Belvoir: Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead (Eamon Flack 2026)
- The Cat Returns (Hiroyuki Morita 2002)
- Riot Women (Sally Wainwright 2025)
- Criminal Record, season 2 (Paul Rutman 2026)
- The Lost Continent (Tui T. Sutherland 2019)
- How to End a Story (Helen Garner 2025)
Tags
ABC Alison Croggon art Australian Women Writers Challenge children's literature comics David Brooks David Malouf doggerel editing Eileen Chong Evelyn Araluen First Nations history Jeff Sparrow Jennifer Maiden journals Marcel Proust memoir non-fiction Novel NSWPLA Overland Pam Brown phone photo poetry Quarterly Essay science fiction/fantasy Sydney Writers' Festival translation-
Recent Posts
- Reading with the Grandies 35: Tui T. Sutherland’s Lost Continent
- Sydney Writers’ Festival 2026, Day one minus 10
- Niall Williams, The Fall of Light and the Book Group
- Starting How to End a Story
- Pam Brown’s text thing
- On the road in dark Yorkshire with J. M. Dalgliesh
- Remembering David Malouf
- NSW Literary Awards Shortlist 2026
- The Letters of Seamus Heaney, third and final progress report
- Sean Kelly Fights the Good Fight
- Eliot Weinberger’s 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei
- Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know at the Book Club
- Carys Davies’s Clear at the Book Club
- Becky Manawatu’s Auē
- Journal Catch-up 34: Heat 21
Archives
