With head raised in hand cupped, I feel for you, so fixed and firm, glimpsed from aside, your contoured curve, black hair curl, soft, down, locked eyes and back arched, a fern frond unfurled, a pollen ball of molten lava flung, gone, now not, from where I do not know, who does, a lip twitch and arched away, to ache for us, so out of reach, a memory, a fissure, working its way, night after night, the wind rattling the pain.

The next train is the Tokyo Shinkansen to Kyoto, announced the voice over the PA. The platform heaved. “Stay close, Merle, a gap,” Mike muttered between breaths, with his elbows out as two Frenchmen and an American Veterans group closed in. The air crackled with the jostling and niggling. Mike and Merle defended their position, if not their dignity. The platform attendant gestured them all toward the queue, snaking into the distance. Not since D-Day had the Allies formed and held so firm, but...

I lie in bed, listening to the Eastern Koel—the male, always the male—perched high in the camphor laurel, proclaiming his existence. Coo-ee, Coo-ee, Coo-ee. His first thought each morning, and too often his last: ‘Girls, I’m here.’ Coo-ee, Coo-ee, Coo-ee. What stamina. What self-belief. A narcissist, an extrovert, an egotist—a social misfit, at the very least, drowning out the airwaves. He dominates the more socially-minded magpie warbles, the butcherbird sonatas, the kookaburra chuckles, and...