pause

& smile
aaaaand cut
commercial break

& the ute gate report creeps
further down the broadcast rung
kamikaze politics / trumped
by suicide somalians  
black might-as-well-be arabs
those
probably-muslims
at the jihad game again

fair shake
of the sauce bottle / mate
is that a child i see / on deck  
blur the snap &

overboard we go again

Maxine Beneba Clarke

Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian author and slam poet of Afro- Caribbean descent. Her short fiction collection Foreign Soil won the 2015 ABIA Award for Best Literary Fiction and the 2015 Indie Award for Best Debut Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Her memoir, The Hate Race, her poetry collection Carrying the World, and her first children’s book, The Patchwork Bike, will be published by Hachette in late 2016.

More by Maxine Beneba Clarke ›

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