Jennifer Compton lives in Melbourne and is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. Her book of poetry – Barefoot – was published by Picaro Press in 2010 and her unpublished ms – This City – won the Kathleen Grattan Award and will be published by Otago University Press in July. Her stage play – The Third Age – has been short listed for the Adam New Zealand Play Award and she is hopeful that it will eventually be produced.

How to Cast Off

I poised the needles to do the final thing
you can do for a shawl (before the fringe)
and forgot, forgot how to cast off.

My hands blanked out how to do it and
I have done it a hundred hundred times
I got a fright.

I walked around the house for a bit
but it didn’t come back. I sat.
Learning how not to know something.

I still knew what a selvedge looks like.
And I still knew wool.
I put two and two together.

And worked it out.
Yes, it was late. I was tired. But
casting off had slipped away from me.

Lost Property

Somewhere in the city
I lost the knitting
the sentimental wool
I had unpicked to reknit.

The colour scheme was alarming
but that was what my mother chose
when she was still capable of crochet
so I held my peace and flew her colours.

I had been warned of an imminent loss
the knowledge of loss had thrummed by
so I kept checking I had everything
one hand delving in my shoulderbag.

And more than the knitting is the pillowcase
made by my husband’s mother, now deceased,
she had run it up from a summery cotton frock
with two ties at the top to keep the knitting safe.

My hands know the scarf in progress intimately
I was working away at the royal blue stripe
plain and plain and plain and plain again and turn
the yarn between my fingers running like smoke.

As I rose to leave my train at Upwey Station
a thud of portent hit me – something missing –
my soft bundle pierced by two sharp needles.
And my hands, now, disconsolate as ghosts.

Nicholas YB Wong is the winner of Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition and a nominee for Best of the Net 2010 and Best of Web 2011 Anthology. His poetry is forthcoming in Assaracus: Journal of Gay Poetry, Prime Number Magazine, San Pedro River Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Third Wednesday and the Sentinel Champion Series. He is currently an MFA Candidate at the City University of Hong Kong. Visit him at http://nicholasybwong.weebly.com

Walk With Words

“I never use despair, since it isn’t really mine, only given to me for safekeeping.”
Wislawa Szymborska

Life at 3 A.M. is an elephant
urging me to make choices –

The night chill challenges my social life.
It asks why I commit myself to words
and turn away from humans,
who often talk too much.

Temperature has no speech – it never knows
the setbacks of language.

I have married words. Every night,
I bang on them, wearing my blood red matador’s cape,
working towards perfect orgasms.

Tonight, I am not writing. I walk
in the bituminous street, feeling bitter
after seeing my friends whose life
is made of unpronounceable stock codes.

My feet go numb; my existence, a walnut wafer,
brittle, belittled.

I search in the sky for the mercurial moon –
Not there.
I look back and ask the street how far I will walk

alone

Mark Twain as an Anti-Anti Smoker

Effective January 1, 2007, the vast majority of indoor areas of workplaces and public places, such as restaurants, offices, schools, hospitals, markets, karaokes and bars which are frequented by people of different ages are required to ban smoking.

Hong Kong Smoking (Public Health) Ordinance, cap. 371.

Mark Twain, a heavy smoker
(and literary
                         figure) himself,
is going to rule our city. And he,
                         with his humor and flare,
has decided to set free all
                          underground smokers.
In his inaugural ceremony, he strides
                          onto the stage,
his forefinger curling
his moustache
          when he speaks:
                                           “I won’t bow my head and
confess like a child. I give you all freedom
             in an adult style.
             To cease smoking is
the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know
because I’ve done it
a thousand times.”

You, who exterminated
                    that thing
in the city,
must be dismayed
to know the law
                     is dead.
That law, an infant, which cries no more,
barely knows how to toddle.

That thing –
                     as you insist calling it –
has a white sinewy-lean body,
                     a mini-chimney,
paper-smooth, smell of ancient culture. That thing isn’t wood, but it sometimes crackles when lit

                         in absolute silence. 

I’m warning you! That thing is returning
                       at full speed. And this time,
                       you’ll say no euphemism. You’ll speak
of its real name
as you do when you name
Jesus, Kwan Yin and the one
                     rolling over you naked.

During those bleak days, we felt like
                    fugitives
in the name of the hoary
                   addictive.

                                                                                               We hid in the darkest corner
in universities, diners,
at rooftops, anywhere so long as
                    they were invisible on maps,
                    puff
                    ing
                    and breath
                    ing
at the same time, degraded like dogs which ransacked for food in trash. 

Soon we will hang a Mark Twain
                      flag outside our windows.
                                                        His face
                      soars in proud smoky air,
when we fondle with
that thing
                       legitimately inside. Soon we will smoke in buses, in churches, in malls, in the                 City Hall, in museums, in the Coliseum.
You then will die gradually
                     of second- and third-hand
smoke, and we,
                   devoted chain smokers,
will die faster. Don’t worry.
                   Don’t dissuade –

we are all prepared. Everything dies
                            on a predetermined date,
                  including the law
you once                                                                                         embraced.

Ashley Capes teaches Media and English in Victoria. His first collection of poetry, pollen and storm, was published with the assistance of Small Change Press in 2008, and his second collection Stepping Over Seasons was released by Interactive Press in 2009. A haiku chapbook Orion Tips the Saucepan was released by Picaro Press in 2010. Recently his work has been awarded a commendation in the Rosemary Dobson Poetry Prize and in 2009 he won the Ipswich Open Poetry Award with the poem ‘shell.’

old green paint

beneath the bridge
where the busker and his flute
compete with
urine and the yarra,
a school girl drops a coin
into his case
and her friends giggle

down from the bridge
boats are lined up
like water-proofed hawkers,
no better at boasting than
old green paint
on the staircase,
or the predictable swish
of a waitress alfresco

and across the bridge
flinders street station
lies sun-bathing,
fake-tan yellow fading
and the rhythmic
click of the train
becomes the wrist-watch
of a patterned vein.

by the curve

a teacup sits on the sink
shoe-brown
inside, imagined marks
where you held it,
not by the handle
but by the curve, to fit a palm
aching from winter

and the rest of the kitchen
looks a little strained –
ant-killers nest against
the foggy window and
cutlery stands like a palisade

but somehow your teacup
shrugs off pain
with a sweeping shadow
cast low over the dish-rag,
to me it looks like you might
return at any minute.

 broom-bristle-dance

beneath sunburnt roof tiles
I try to keep up appearances
broom bristles
dancing on concrete
and scattering leaves
like brown paper bags with legs

my neighbour is doing the same
only he’s hiding an alien family
in the caravan out back too,
I’m sure of it
that, and a wig beneath his fisherman’s
cap, hedge trimmers
and a polite face like a button
or a cuff-link

that night a strange glow
comes from next door, maybe he’s moving them
though it could be just the moon, blazing
away, looking over the shed
in a strangely possessive manner
as if the whole town
were his very own chessboard,
driveways and roads
‘L’ shapes for his knights.

Andy Kissane lives in Sydney and writes poetry and fiction. He has published three collections of poetry. Out to Lunch (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009) is shortlisted in the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His first novel, Under the Same Sun (Sceptre, 2000) was shortlisted for the Vision Australia Audio Book of the Year. Poetry prizes include the Red Earth Poetry Award, the Sydney Writers’ Festival Poetry Olympics, the John Shaw Neilson Award, the inaugural Publisher’s Cup Cricket Poetry Award and the BTG-Blue Dog Poetry Reviewing prize. He has taught Creative Writing at four universities, most recently UNSW, (2007-2009). He is currently the recipient of a New Work grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council and is working on a book of short stories and a fourth collection of poetry.

Seeing you again

Driving to your place, I remember
how you said you wanted to carry my hands
around inside your bra. You won’t say that today.
You are married and it’s years since that
dinner dance, foxtrotting under the tablecloth,
my cock wet before I’d eaten the entree.

You said you adored men in dinner suits
and I was eager to strip, loosening
the onyx studs from my ruffle slowly
and carefully, as if they were amulets
with enough power to peel back
my shirt and open up my skin.

You meet me in the driveway, comfortable
in tracksuit and windcheater. Your hair
is not quite the way I remember it.
We don’t have much time alone.
Your husband’s making coffee
in the kitchen as words ripen

on the roof of my mouth like blackberries:
fat icicles ready to fall. My cup wobbles
on its saucer as I recall the last camping trip,
our lilos pushed together, your sleeping bag
zipped into mine, the guttural snores
of lion seals floating up from the beach.

I think of what might have been, waking
to a thousand, thousand dawns, children,
the closeness where you don’t need to speak.
Instead, there’s this afternoon tea, polite
conversation, the way I look at you and wish
I could live more than one life.

Wood becoming Rock

Walking down the steep path to the backyard,
I hold the stump splitter like a baby.
I’m an occasional woodchopper, intent
on clearing the logs left by the previous owners
—an eyesore, abandoned.
One huge tree, an angophora, fell down
of its own accord, unable to get enough purchase
in the rocky hillside, harming neither limb nor property.
I’ve already chopped and moved a mountain
of wood, gradually, like a hot-rodder
restoring a classic car.
But what’s left now is the hard stuff,
wood well on its way to petrification—
green-tinged, adamantine, too heavy
for one man to lift. I swing the axe
up towards the hidden sun and the other bright stars,
then bring it down onto the dumb block.
I make no impression on the weathered wood.
Relentlessly, I search for a fissure in the log,
a crack the width of a hair that I can wedge open.
The longer the search, the greater my enlightenment.
If only I could borrow the Marabunta,
those ferocious army ants from the film,
The Naked Jungle, let them feast on the wood,
then stop right there. But as I remember it,
they don’t stop, eating everything in their path.
I swing and swing until I am a riot of noise, a mob,
a serial woodchopper who won’t cease until he’s felled
the forest. I hack until my shirt sticks to my back.
My shoulders ache, my arms have emigrated,
and I am all axe,
as Gimli is axe to Legolas’s bow.
I can’t work, it seems, without making
some connection to popular culture,
though this is not work, this hefting
is not my bread and butter. Sparks flash
blue and yellow at the moment of impact
and I understand how my ancestors struggled
to make fire. I’m tired, wet, almost done
for the day, but over there,
against the fence lies another
and it will lie there until I come for it—
ageless, slowly rotting, obdurate and silent.
I wield my iron-age tool until the wood wails and shrieks
and when I finally cleave through the stump,
the sound of it splitting fills the cave
of my head with the last rays of sunlight.

Judith Beveridge is the author of four award-winning books of poetry. Her most recent collection is Storm and Honey published in 2009 and it was awarded the Grace Levin Prize in 2010. She teaches poetry writing at the University of Sydney and is the poetry editor of Meanjin. In 2005 she was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature.

Vulture’s Peak

From Devadatta’s poems

Whenever I come here, I don’t pay much attention
to the lammergeier circling from the peaks overhead,
but I keep an eye out for falling tortoises, elephant’s ribs,
jackal’s jawbones. I stay on the level where the farm
women scythe and rick, scythe and rick, or pick

tithes of yellow samphire near the stones. I don’t
climb to the summit to take in the view of the valley
and the fertile plains; or as the Buddha suggests,
spend time alone in one of the small, damp caves
meditating on suffering and its root causes in desire.

I stay at the base near the talus and inhale the heady
perfume of the lavender and vetch. I watch the farm
women bend and sweat in the sinking madder sun
before they drink and rest near the ponds. I let desire
have its ground. I take my chances under falling bones.

Penance

from Devadatta’s poems

Some nights, when all I do is scheme
to give Siddhattha schism, infighting, dissonance,
when I think of what a pleasure it will be
to give him “dissentry” – then I plan some days
of penance: to lie among wood ticks, crickets,
the breaching heads of worms and leeches,
to let the gall borers gnaw my toes;
to offer the soft flanges around the tops
of my ears to the water fleas and wasps.
I’ll let mosquitos gather and fly off pot-bellied
with my blood. I wont apply saliva
or mud, use any unguents, no paste of cloves
and honey, and though the moon will mock me
like a pointed instrument, like a round
and cooling poultice, I wont give comfort
to any part of my body, but cover myself
with nettles, itch-weed, with crow and turkey feathers,
with hen-house refuse so that mites, too,
can leave me scaled and scabbed.
I wont climb away from my skin
even if worms burrow, or web-spinning flies
hang threads in my beard and make slime.
Though my fingernails will have grown so long,
I’ll not scratch a single bite, or strike any insect
down, but I’ll palp them like strange antennae.
Then I’ll lie on the forest floor among the burrows
of roaches and long-horned stag beetles,
and the sound closest to my ears will be the sound
of army ants devouring everything to pieces.