Annie Blake is an Australian writer, thinker and researcher. She is a wife and mother of five children. She started school as an EAL student and was raised and, continues to live in a multicultural and industrial location in the West of Melbourne. Her main interests include psychoanalysis and metaphysics. She is currently focusing on in medias res and arthouse writing. She enjoys exploring symbology and the surreal/psychedelic nature of unconscious material. She is a member of the C G Jung Society of Melbourne and Existentialist Society in Melbourne.

When I Fly Without Balloons

bodies full of water    reflecting the shapes of shoes      skins of soles make stencils in the ground    the kill feels only feet away    conjoining    the pond    i float in with chiffon skin    swimming
with children    their tails of fish

i crossed a long rope from weeds      a cord    one world pinning the other    and hung
out my clothes    my undergarments in front    i made the rain come    to wash me with light

memories rise over hills      haystacks crowned with sticks      from the soul of the sun
they don’t look like human heads      they have nothing to do with geometry      small knobs
of doors sewn onto the nubs of huts

memory is    voices      slavering out of cut throats      like vases made of skin    gaping
with the weight of our bunch of flowers      and warm-
blooded hands    i need my mother to bathe me in milk

but there are ropes    hanged with hooks in her house    ropes that tie up her hay
they are twisted around like cuffs      sleeping snakes in my spine    the snow
too    is brittle    memory    is my mind driveling like mud    frosting    staining cakes    half-
eaten    bitten like wounds

when i fly without balloons      the smoke loosens its threads    clouds spill                    milk