Poetry: “I haven’t rewatched The Dressmaker since” by Liz Sutherland

By Liz Sutherland | July 26, 2024

“…Kate Winslet is a masterpiece all on her own / but in 2015 she disassembled both ventricles, they / no longer pump my heart,” writes Liz Sutherland. Their poem is eerie and ominous in the way it evokes blood and media, and it smoothly captures the way we can blur the boundary between art and ourselves, particularly in moments of vulnerability. With an evocative hand and a deft sense of rhythm, Sutherland creates a spooky visual landscape, not easily forgotten or slipped off, impossible slough away like a leftover skin, the poem lingers longer than its initial offering and continues to puzzle, dazzle, implicate, deliver and surprise.

I haven’t rewatched The Dressmaker since

Kate Winslet is a masterpiece all on her own
but in 2015 she disassembled both ventricles, they
no longer pump my heart. Silos frame postcard
memories, sepia even though they’re from the 90s.
Uncle Donald’s farm may as well have been the film set:
backdropped corrugated rust, the stench of blood,
odour lingering on my tonsils for days,
coating my breath with regret.

This atrium receives us, paints small towns red
the colour of valentine’s rose. Organ beneath my breast.
Dressmaker dyes. The trickle down my thighs.
In the cinema when Liam reached overhead,
eased white linen from his chest, a woman behind me
groaned aloud. Arms akimbo from his hips
until they dropped in reaching sacrifice. Renounced
by even shadows, I still see flames within his palms.

Four years later I forgot she could have saved him
with three meagre words. They stuck in my lung,
futile attempt to expel I want this from my chest.
They fell: repentant descendent absorbed
through the stalks of four-chambered granaries.
I’m missing connections between vein-blues and
splashed-rouge. From severed arteries spill
vocabulary; nothing left but your dying breath.

Liz Sutherland

Liz Sutherland (they/them) lives on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation in so-called Australia. Liz is studying a Master of Arts (Writing and Literature) at Deakin University, is the COO of a nonprofit organisation, and is the Treasurer of the Board of Overland. They were a finalist in the Pearl Prize 2024 and the 2023 OutStanding LGBTQIA+ Short Story Awards. Their writing has appeared in Mascara Review, StylusLit, Swamp Magazine, Left Brain Media, ScratchThat Magazine, Say It Out Loud, at Q-Lit festivals, and more.