Poetry by Jax Bulstrode

               ​Je suis Samuel CC




Sideoftheroadbeing

I am in the night space 
In between a broken phone line 
And the creek 
Rushing and cracking
Just a sideoftheroad being 

But I am at home
Only half lit by a
Foggy flash of headlight
Sunk down into
The gravel and mushed bank 
Mud in my shoes 

This is what I want 
For the passing by cars
To recognise me 
As the river 
As the whole thing 
Running alongside them 
Carrying on into the dark 

In the morning
When the sun burns away 
I get up 
Stretch my tender bruised knees 
And carry myself home to bed 
To wake and become 
The thing the world 
Wants to see 
Believes I am

When I wake 
I go to work 
With a constant shiver 
Cold river water running 
Through my blood 

In the end 
I always return 
With the dusk
To the side of the road 
To my fear 
And the crickets
Under my toes 
Two feet in the water 
It is always the same

I swim until the morning
And tell myself
This is what I cannot be 

​



The thing I am now 

The world tells me I am its creature. The world tells me I am its creature like I am the thing it has
resulted, moulded and scraped together over the years. The world tells me I am its creature and I
refuse to belong to anyone but my 3 pm shadow. The world tells me I am its creature and after
100 years of believing it, listening to the screaming of the empty winter snowfield, I become the
world. Lay down in the grief of who I was to every other person, feel the ice become my bones
​and the thing I breathe in.

Jax Bulstrode is an Australian queer poet. Her work covers the quotidian, the feeling of coming home after a long day and what it means to discover oneself. She has been published both in print and online in Twilight press, Marmalade journal, Soultalk magazine and Stuck in notes magazine. She loves mandarins and is currently studying a BA in creative writing, gender studies and digital media in university, and how to make the best tofu scramble in life.

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