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Brianna McCarthy

If you want to come with me

I can take you to a place

Share a little dream

While the first blush is still soft…

 

In a landscape inhabited by shifting yellow rocks, their godly bodies sit on haunches and let the weather smooth over their backs. A calm slope, where your feet need to hold on for grip to crumbling sand, leads you down to a basin. The sunlight has laid out on your shoulders, painted a red streak across the bridge of your nose. The giants hum with low voices as your sandals tickle down their earthen forms. It’s barren on the heights save you and a seagull. The seagull stares, follows you as you go.

 

I’d like to eat a slice of watermelon up upon these rocks, with its crunching, slurping sounds. Feel that sweet juice slither, cold, down my sunlit belly.

 

A drop or two land on your thigh. You drink it up like clouds in the sky. Smacking and licking pink lips, dragging teeth till the rind turns white. Leave a piece for the seagull that stands on the hill over your shoulder. They just might answer if you knew the right question to ask…

Brianna McCarthy, 'Sand Dreams', 2021, watercolour and ink, 29. 7 x 42 cm

The weather turns quietly to grey. Clouds settle on the horizon. The beach licks at her paws, lets you walk by.

 

Wet sand. Heavy

Clouds like soaked cotton

Salt on the tongue 

Soft underfoot

The foam sinks, reveals crab holes.

Oyster shells. Sharper than you’d think.

 

Still, there’s that drunk humming from the stones. 

The rocks watch you scuttle about. 

 

My love was torn once

Scorned by the sea

Jagged scars across his legs from when he fled

From one of these spirits

Through the faraway rock pools that glitter black at night

He came home to me dripping with

Shreds of red skin

But he still returns to the place as I do

Showed it to me first, really.

 

I better go back to him…

 

 

See where he’s at…

 

As I wake, my sweet pup wriggles and stretches his paws to the melting sky. I know the place waits for me, to come paint its picture. But today has my cheek nuzzled into purple sheets, and I’ll start perhaps, with a cup of tea. 

Can I make you one too?

Brianna McCarthy is an Aboriginal emerging artist working on Darug land. She practises a variety of artforms such as writing, theatre-making, film-making, visual arts, puppetry, and teaching. In 2019 she wrote and directed her debut play ‘A Game For Flies’, which played at PYT Fairfield. Her practise often revolves around experimenting with wonder, love, and relationships with more than human species, sharing a personal dreaming of this fantastical world.