Kathryn Reese | Hush | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Kathryn Reese is a queer writer living on Peramangk land in Adelaide, South Australia. Her poems are in The Engine Idling, Temple in a City, Crowstep and Red Room Poetry. Flash in Glassworks, Wigleaf & Literary Namjooning. Collaborative writing in Gone Lawn, Midway Journal & Many Wor(l)ds.

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Also by Kathryn Reese: Aubade for a Fitzroy Apartment I can’t sleep with you because you have an incompatible phone charger All I Own I Will Share With You

August 5, 2026

Kathryn Reese

Hush

There are secrets in this house like organza curtains they move, swell up with the afternoon breeze. They filter the light, slow the movement of air, they do nothing for the humidity. This might be your earliest memory: you have skin, you have sweat, your fingers contain oils that will spoil everything. You also make too much noise, you must sit here and watch the curtains dance and shadows making runes on the opposite wall. Only a stormbird dares to call out for what it wants: a cool change, rain. Crying won’t get you what you want. You want to touch the curtains, not just with your fingers but to wrap yourself up in them, to feel the lace hug your shoulders, your back, your neck, to feel the soft creases against your face to see through the weave and maybe the curtains would dance with you, twirling and billowing out from your waist you, on your toes, the prettiest dancer, a sunbeam. The stormbird calls again. The curtains are sucked back against the flyscreen. You have left a sweaty fingerprint on the windowsill dust.

I wrote Hush in a moment of homesickness for childhood: quiet, sultry afternoons, my grandparents' house, and that stormbird with its too-often unfulfilled hope of rain. I hope the couplets and enjambment give a sense of the lazy breeze and a time when everything could change with a crack of thunder.