Welcome to Phoenix’s world-changing Salon

A port­manteau. A treas­ure trove. A time cap­sule. A poetry book. A diary. A photo album. Memor­ies. Dreams. Wishes. Hopes. An open letter to an unsus­pect­ing public. An intim­ate con­fes­sion to close friends. A declar­a­tion of intent. A whis­per of love. A per­sonal record. An exper­i­ment in intro­spec­tion. A per­form­ance space. A polit­ical rant. A wild yawp. Why do any of us pub­lish our words and images online? Come, dream with me.
Car?

Car?

Last night we dis­covered ourselves with unex­pec­ted free time, so I pro­posed we go check out a second-hand car I’d been eyeing off online – a little red 1995 Peugeot 306. Called the guy whose house it was at… sure, we could come over. It’s his daugh­ter’s car but he…

When geeks conceive…

I prom­ised blithespirit  I would post this poem I wrote in 2003 in response to a ques­tion from frou_frou …Why not?It’s like this bodyis a new pro­gram, and the way I see it,first thing you do,check out all the menus,flip through the manual(read it later,…

Vale Dorothy Porter

Dorothy Porter, Aus­tralian poet, inspir­a­tion and mentor, has died of cancer aged 54.Dorothy, I first met you when I was 18. I was a young poet, bright and shiny-eyed, des­per­ate to impress you. You were my new poetry teacher at the Uni­ver­sity of Tech­no­logy, Sydney, and…

A human rights act for Australia

This is hugely import­ant. It’s the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Declar­a­tion of Human Rights.The Aus­tralian Attor­ney-Gen­eral has just announced a con­sulta­tion panel to invest­ig­ate the pos­sib­il­ity of a Human Rights Act for Aus­tralia. We are one of the only…

Floorboards!

Floorboards!

Took a while but here you go:The crib was gifted to us by the won­der­ful Vicki and Andrew and is cur­rently just filled with cush­ions. We need to buy a new mat­tress (it’s one of the things the SIDS people say you’re not allowed to have second-hand) and I found an…

I’ll be a post-feminist in a post-patriarchy

I’ve been mean­ing to do this post for a while now.Amnesty Inter­na­tional recently pro­moted 16 days of an end to viol­ence against women. One in three women in Aus­tralia will be vic­tims of viol­ence by someone intim­ately known to them in their life­times. I count myself as…

Administrivia

Theme changed due to mul­tiple com­plaints about com­ment­ing issues. Also needed a “calm blue ocean” thing going on. For the record, if you hate someone’s theme/commenting system, simply set your journal to view every­one else’s journ­als in your style (can force…

Phoenix Emberstone

Phoenix Emberstone

pas­sion­ate polit­ical poet

These are poems and mean­der­ings that made their way to the page. I’d love to hear what you think of them. Want to get in touch? Drop me a line!

Photo of Rosanne Bersten

View my portfolio

I am also known as Ro Ber­sten, a com­mu­nic­a­tions spe­cial­ist with more than 20 years’ exper­i­ence. See my CV and pro­fes­sional projects.