Craft

Craft

Craft

I sharpen
my craft,
like
filing fingernails
down
with intent.

Honing a skill
day and night
bent on
writing
how life
can be rough.

In leavening
tense muscles,
trauma
can feel
like distant
exploding stars

on my quilt
work of
meticulous
colours stitched across
a patchwork of
weaved

feelings
often
stumbling
in the dark,
reaching for
refinement.

Refining is
best done
past nightfall.
For what cannot
be seen,
can only

be felt.
And all
that is
felt will
cleave,
cleave
like

force to fury,
dusk to dawn,
flesh from bone.

Janice Sim

(she/her)

Janice Sim is an emerging writer living on the Gold Coast in Australia with her husband and three boisterous children. She writes between the spaces of work, children and cooking. In her writings, she explores themes of, catharsis, trauma, movement and dispossession, forms of symbolic violence and conceptualisations of experiences as 'living' memory, in experimental ways. In a different space, she works as a sessional academic and is the author of the book, Parents Killing Children: Crossing the Invisible Line (Routledge).