In the back country where I grew up
we sent away for Choose Your Own Adventures
‘You’re the star of the story’
two roomed schoolhouse
‘forty different endings’
the books arrived in brown paper packages
the pages smelled like Sydney
(we imagined—we had never been)
and in the dry husks of silent reading afternoons
we vanquished dragons, slayed hunters, pried open the chest
Above the blackboard
the portrait of a young
gap-toothed queen
beside the portrait
—a clock
and although the summer had bled
the paddocks white
the clock was fecund
our lives flat and still
—the fullness of time all around