On whether I subscribe to my name

Esther Ottaway

Esther Ottaway holds multiple national and international prizes and shortlistings, including the Montreal International Poetry Prize, the Bridport Prize, Mslexia Poetry competition, the MPU International Poetry Competition, the Tim Thorne Prize for Poetry, the Tom Collins Poetry Prize, and 2022 People’s Choice in the Tasmanian Literary Awards. Her new collection, She Doesn’t Seem Autistic (Puncher & Wattmann, 2023), shines a light on Esther’s own hidden autism and that of countless girls and women, who are being misdiagnosed and unsupported. Esther is noted for her powerful poems about women’s experiences, including birth, motherhood, divorce, and autism. She is co-editing a new anthology, Raging Grace: Australian writers speak out on disability (Puncher & Wattmann), with Kerri Shying and Andy Jackson.

It feels like toppling, first sound a surprise—

excellence and error equally portended
by this avian downdraft of breath,
open lips, tongue’s brink curled upward,
and just when I fear the vulnerability
of exposed and entered, the endless fall,

s gifts me wings: I’m an egret
wheeling above the wet reflective estuary,
altricial, exhilarant as estrogen,
and high on the boldness of yes. Esprit
and escape, spirit of fledge and pinion,
I’m at home only in flight, inability to define myself
circling and circling, so that when my claws
clatter and grab onto the t of tea-tree
the branch whips and bounces, everything up in the air
Est labels me extremes: quietest, brightest,
esteemed, estranged, and it’s a relief
to find myself, at the last, anonymous
behind the lazy language of my culture,
the broad, bright a of hard yakka
and the battler, Esta, good onya.
Only in night’s room, curled behind my collarbones,
lies like a truth that tender prayer of her.

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