LK Holt, Birth Plan

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I acknowledge the Wurundjeri and Djab Wurrung peoples as the traditional owners of
the lands on which I wrote this book.
Some poems first appeared, in current or earlier forms, in the following journals,
anthologies or projects: Antipodes (US), ABR, An Anthology of Contemporary Australian
Feminist Poetry, Best Australian Poems 2016, Red Room Poetry,The Poetry Review (UK) and
Writing to the Wire.
‘You’re Going Through Something’ is dedicated to B.B, E.B, F.H, K.H & J.M.
John Leonard and Michael Brennan: thank you.
My love and gratitude to Pippa Holt and Irena Goltz—it takes a village to write a poem.

First published 2019 by Vagabond Press
www.vagabondpress.net

© LK Holt 2019
Cover image © Julian Aubrey Smith, 2017. Niche.
Oil and acrylic on aluminium composite panel. 37 x 30.5cm.

Design and typography by Michael Brennan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. The information and views
set out in this book are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of
the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-925735-07-9

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its
arts funding and advisory body.

LK HOLT

BIRTH PLAN

VAGABOND PRESS



for Ollie & Tad & Roo

CONTENTS

Modern Woman Sonnets .... 9
Is It Serious .... 12
The Dune Garden .... 14
They Were Last Seen Turning Inland .... 16
Día de los Muertos (Bye Dan, Hi Dan) .... 19
Two Students of the Oral Tradition .... 22
Well-Lit then Barely-Lit Poem .... 24
Photograph of the Father [as a Young Man] .... 26
Trajectories at Djurite .... 28
Static Poem for a Two-year-old .... 30
The Expected Guest .... 32
She Was Told to Have a Birth Plan .... 34
Ivan Ivanych’s Nephew has been Taken with Fever, on his Way to Boarding

School and Far from his Mother .... 36
The Small-m Mother .... 38
Telopeas .... 40
Anorexia Nervosa Verses .... 41
Three Limitations of the Eye .... 42
The Island .... 43
The Devil and the Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment

(Resolving the Asylum Legacy Caseload) Bill .... 47
Every Evening, Micromortality .... 48
Two Murals .... 49
Kangaroo Island .... 50
The Abstract Blue Background .... 52
The Leap Second is a Thing Inserted .... 54
Three Shapes of the Apocalypse .... 55
Self-Portrait as a Man on his Lunch-Break .... 56
Vasya .... 58

Preservation .... 59
The Lovers .... 60
The Morning After My Younger Son’s Party .... 62
Cancer Verses .... 66
You’re Going Through Something .... 67
I Don’t Know .... 94

Notes .... 96

MODERN WOMAN SONNETS

What places a man beyond comparison? What shape
and shade and look drives us to despair the least
circuitously, without the patience pace
for comedy or tragedy?
What playlist most befits the whole man,
who can he outsource his outpouring to, who
still plays the lute, who could be Nature for him?
Let’s say we are, at least, a breath-piece
with a sex a gait a few tracts and a brain upturned
and we each can know one thing at a time
and this is mine:
all the art that improves on the world
has a tinkling-nóthing effect
on lust’s blue hot blue overruns.
 



9

\

There’s a face precise from the deep’s allowance:
the stranger on a sofa I knew just once,
the pristine first-sight before
Love claims with its almost-claws.
Seeing how he loved me hard
I took pity, utter, and then fell despite,
in the valley of the young and well
in a lot of little hurries, detailed rushes
in a dearth of field. Grey green.
But as I watch now the low-pressure system
massing darkness its gale-forces
smearing stars, I wonder what did finely arrange
my shipwreck on my rocks,
then cross-hatched in thin ink from cliff-top the scene.
 


10

\

How lovely your eyes and their looking,
small gardens with sex-minded flowers . . .
into flesh la flèche de l’amour shot from
their shaded bowers. My gaze was holding, calling
wrongly your bluff, me and the blown rose
and its fresh interpetals of air.
So I’ve cried my days down the days-drain.
You my eyes were lit lucky objects of his eyes
but you my heart—meat!—with your surface-envy
retreated past red past desolation,
till that first replication which was desolate. . . .
Let none believe I’m a single cell or second
at ease, not when my heart and eyes can’t share
a good or bad or neutral word.


(Labé 21; 20; 11) 


11

IS IT SERIOUS

His fever is a primal engine turning over:
the system, working, thrashes.
‘Mama is that the sea being born?’‘No—
well yes—it’s low cloud
upon an alpine lake where we walked last month.’
Her face underlit with the internet
she scrolls through symptoms, lays her hands on,
him her son and her worldsickness.

An Ebola-recoveree: a little boy,
shines from the Guardian,
walking on through the parting chlorine ‘happy shower’
with his ration, Plumpy’nut
and Solid Therapeutic Milk.

‘Off he goes,’ she says,
she who narrates to understand
nothing but with structure.

She toggles between child and screen,
reason and its sleep, things are seen
from midnight’s height.
‘Attention is the same thing as prayer,’ Simone Weil said
but it’s not an action. Only graceless,
shameless will can save. . . .

12

‘Good hulk of children’s hospital,
in purple darkness newly opened and waiting
for us, your pristine linoleum, internal courtyard
with meerkats on loan from the zoo,
soft steady beeping and doctors flowing in pastels,’
she prays,‘please grow older slower than my children.’
She has a special way of being unafraid:
her death is a fur-ball beside the child’s
that is a black sphinx forever turning in an oiled coil,
bigger than a hospital.

As her son is sleeping she thinks of what
she’s given him—at minimum—
the empty palace of—a human precondition—
to do with as he wishes—off she’ll go.
Glass-faced, he begins to bark in Hellhound, the biteless
telling sound of croup, it’s nothing serious.

She moves on through a parting in
the things that—mostly—never happen.
 


13