unhinged
By Melissa Petrakis

Last night
a woman
was unhinged
ever so gently
from her reason.

This is how it happens
not
as some landslide,
some cliff face falling
into the sea.

Evidence present earlier
is in language foreign
in dialect unfamiliar
the symbols: muted hieroglyphs
scrawled in chalk and smudged.

There will never be
enough interpreters,
enough linguists, enough
statisticians or anthropologists
to make sense of this.

Melissa Petrakis is a poet, playwright and artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her poetry has been published in arena magazine, Centoria, Dan Poets, Hobo, Meanjin, Moving Out Moving On: Poems of Dislocation, Postgraduate Review(University of Melbourne), SideWaLK, tiny epics. Her first book of poetry ;The Naked Muse; (Domain Press) was published in 2001; her second book ;Attic Dweller; (also Domain) was published in 2002. She can be contacted via melissapetrakis@email.com , and welcomes general comment and, of course, book orders.