Poet, screenwriter and novelist Emily Ballou was born in Milwaukee in 1968 and moved to Sydney in 1991. In 1996, she was a recipient of the AFC’s New Screenwriters Scheme for her first feature screenplay, Sadie X-Ray. In 1997, she was awarded the Judith Wright Prize for Poetry for her poem, “Enter.”  She has worked with Gillian Armstrong adapting Helen Hodgman’s Waiting for Matindi for the screen, and wrote the short film “Mittens”, directed by Emma Freeman, which was Fox Searchlight’s 2004 contender for the Academy Awards. Her first novel Father Lands was published in 2002. She was one of The Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists of 2003. She is currently adapting Father Lands into a film and working on a second novel, Aphelion, set in the Snowy Mountains. She lives in the Blue Mountains, NSW.

The Kite

The back a separate body

unfamiliar to the face

ceremony of mirrors

to find its graceful lace.

Winged arches with a piston

grip, momentous to the eye,

a notch of bone dressed buttons

trace a finger down the line

to the kite of spine’s skin corsetry

and curves that cave behind.

This that breath cannot erase

is yours and all yours to fly.