Author: mascara

Adam King grew up in Newcastle, Australia. For the past 15 years he has taught English—a decade or so in Osaka and, more recently, in Guangzhou.

Naaz

the cow likes the music rowing the sun down steps aflame ancient boatload of straw COOL BAR ice cream smile friend one rupee for bananas is it mister I thought and saw 3 boys hand in hand in hand at the flower market mornings evenings walking funny Broadway sweat a reservoir mama baba the onions in her purple bag is there anywhere to park under the water gut he stands over his tiny fire the doors the windows all blues big stitches returning soon too hot to write it down she wears the old chains night of the 10 Kingfishers beating white sheets 2 at a green table bamboo ladder and scaffold day at the races where they burn the bodies ok take the cake Adam’s building 1893 1 for you too on the roof lime and soda pink Ganesh opens all the trick locks welcome HOTEL SEALAND movie star glasses they let the vultures pick them to bits cricket crackling over the radio start at THE NAAZ thanks for that Suhail paper stars hang in dirt houses down by the sewer site CO-OPTEX SARI HALL Preeti the sun goes my eyes close what I’ve forgotten the stone men life on the back of a truck steel dust prize always a Wolfgang loudspeaker glimpse of a song a little love tale what else she can’t sit 12 years rust stand under the gateway my 1^st Bristol smoke on a rope how many miles kilometres feet make a grey page on Marine Drive a red double-decker your super fast bus to 100 per cent shakti throwing sparks what time the boat he told me a lighter each year in Sri Lanka slow rosewater cart heat because o I would be a sparrow come here for your crumbs no need for keys cutlet menu bells silver biriyani a bundle of sticks your calling how could he carry that weight over and over where it fits hurts 1 word says it all for the broom prime minister calendar took a week the ferry ride Shiva help him up the bald scabby hill crane tell the 1^st word to Mr Xmas on the taxi licence get the nets from last night’s tide remaining 1893 a is for auto rickshaw 1 coconut pink straw drink daughters barefoot bright about her it is not the colour of the bus I sing transport mode bike tyre marks cycling recycling the wheels of the living structure he is trying to shake Sister Hyacinth could she be ready his arm on the hip stance to attention salute the doorboy rice glue to seal this venture of the heart mud and cardboard you knew the whole deal crank getting a cutter fork I thought laughter when Sammy Seven played that wedding if it’s sincerity get the head nod turned off the nose knows no rose balloon in a torn shirt better empty bolted steel door impregnable barbed wire broken bottles reading grey wall scratches perhaps a cheetah fight the last guest I wrote in a notebook champion brand names from the gods anxious about the burns not hurting you run you expect to catch up the song getting lost around scrap corners painted eyes every day a new window blessing the narrative of the bus salesman all your brothers crows flew into my dream what was it just a chassis bubonic thunderstorm whipping tea in an arc dusk dawn daal to cultivate OM GEMS DK TIME LAKSHMI CEMENT the spray cry of a lotus the flies will ignore the circle you drew around your lunch cockroach chalk what is it called when the breath ends ananda you’re after toys the bus leaves a tree waves the cow likes the music

Among SMS’s books of poems and poetic prose are, most recently, And then something happened (Salt, 2004), Dementia Blog (Singing Horse, 2008), and the forthcomingMemory Cards: 2010-2011 Series. She wrote A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary Poetry (U of Alabama, 2005), and edits Tinfish Press out of her home in Kane`ohe, Hawai`i. She’s taught at the University of Hawai`i-Manoa for over two decades. Her blog can be found at http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com.

Memory Cards: Oppen Series

The lyric valuables.  Your memory will be contained in a cloud.  All that’s required is a little bit of feature extraction and data compression to complete the prosthesis.  It’s called a “natural language,” this interface between me and my gadget.  It does not answer to lament: I have lost my earrings; I have lost my teleprompter; I have lost my mind provokes only information.  Unlyric me!  I shall be mystic of the Knowing Cloud, on my wrist a gizmo covered by diagrams of slant patterns and draw plays.  The poet’s a quarterback; she needs completions.  She is only arm, the cloud’s prosthesis.  An all-knowing receiver already struts.  The only lyric is the lyric of fourth down.

–27 January 2011

There is a simple ego in a lyric, sometimes in a crowd.  A man lies on the ground, surrounded by other men.  I didn’t mean to shoot you in the face, laughs the boy playing Halo.  The man who drowned with his daughter lost his father to drowning.  When the guy at Starbucks asked again what I wanted, I said I’m visiting my mother with Alzheimer’s, I’m used to repetition.  Two of the mummies were destroyed, to which Bryant said but that’s our future!  They found the digital camera; she was smiling, the water was calm.  To retrieve the past is not to guarantee it.  We used to develop photos, but now they’re downloaded.  When memory fails, the eye enlarges to take it in.  He said a tourist turned her back on the ocean; a rogue wave threw her on the rocks by the tide pools.  Their first aid kit came in handy.

–29 January 2011

I dreamed one night that I was in a hotel room filled with my books.  I had a plane to catch, but I couldn’t carry them.  Sell them! someone said, but I said I could not.  I woke at 3, checked the news of Egypt, then listened to the sound of my own voice cataloguing my mother’s books.  To each shelf I said no and no and no.  It was as if whatever was contained in them was leaking out, as if memory had less to do with the past than with our attitude toward it, the intonation that covers it like red grease.  The tail hook down, cables outstretched, you approach the carrier at a furious speed.  Your fighter is but one word scrawled on the deck of a ship whose hold is an ambiguous space, full of men and machines and violence.  I was here during the war, he writes, I was / in a house near here tho I cannot find it.   The past tense of dreaming becomes the present past: I was.  I was here, but now I cannot guide me.

–31 January 2011

This is the sky.  This the poem constructed of sky and the children in the square grasping signs, and the parents of the children in the square, and the chanting in the dark space of sky that opens like a lid to its antithesis.  The poem never intended to be a dictator, but it insists on form, control, an ordered space.  Mine clamps down at the moment of counter-protest; you will not enter this square, it is closed against tomorrow’s sour sunlight, its barricades.  The official narrative is of beauty, only.  Once upon a time there was a crowd inside a square who sang.  Once upon a time the force of their singing dislodged a pharaoh.  Once upon a time the unacknowledged were

–3 February 2011

Whether one loves / The world or loves / Shelter / From it  it is, if is continues.  Tahrir Square is no shelter, though people sleep there.  The poem is no shelter, however square.  Neither affords protection from a torturer who lived in Texas and Florida.  Exported pain is still pain.  A man calls out, “Where am I?  What is happening to me?  Tell me!”  No one says, as we did to Sylvia, “you live here; this is your home,” because prison is not home but way station, where way is suffering and station is not shelter.  She asked her interrogator where she was: “you are nowhere,” he said.  Nowhere is not station or shelter or square; it lacks all geometry.  “If you look up you will see something you don’t ever want to see.”  The regime demands pre-forgetting.  Those you leave behind were blindfolded; you emerge into a part of the city you’ve never seen.  It’s outside your history, if not theirs.  You can go now.

–5 February 2011

It is the air of atrocity that settles onto the tent-city the square has become.  Radhika can’t decide why some words end in –ys and others in –ies; the differences between “gurneys” and “families,” between “armies” and “pathways” are rule-bound, abstract.  A young poet tortures himself on distinctions between night and Night, between dawn and its opposite.  He writes down ideas he cannot explain, and in not explaining, loses them.  The police state parses its words less delicately, demands its “children” go home.  Torture is clear speech, though what is gleaned from it is not.  I was wearing a blood-stained shirt, one says; it marked him as one of them.  I heard myself tell the boy to clarify his grammar, glue limbs to his poem’s body.  I asked him to construct a box for his cloud.  Obama demands Mubarak clarify his language, spell it out.  There’s no future in telling; it’s all show.

–10 February 2011

The vocabulary word of the day is euphoria.

 –11 February 2011

The shape is a moment is a monument in process no flash no focus but a flag of our disposition winding around the square circle inside of box inside of cloud faces like voices coming and growing louder then quiet when Al-Jazeera turns to sports then back to euphoria in the circled square young woman in a shawl on youtube (this was 25 Jan) exhorts men to be men and old women in the square their mouths wide open and middle-aged men sweeping white dust with huge fronds and the body functions for once as a system blooms like a flow chart needing more space the lines across which are not final but dipped in martyr’s ink no one wants to leave the square or the circle they sleep propped against tanks against pavement against sharp angles violation of geometries of this body working this body with its stark white bandages over noses and cheeks and foreheads this coming into shape which is so beautiful to see

–12 February 2011

Juggler, why need I invent so much as if always in a space where time falls and picks itself up, replacing scratched post-it notes with new names for what is still a bus, a house, a square.  He bears a name; she carries hers.  It’s a pod lowered in a mine to retrieve lost men, brought out into a new tense, neither past nor present, but intermediate: yesterday I have been myself.  The word “gas” was “chaos” misheard.  She sent a letter that never arrived, but made sense of the non-response.  Meaning is adopted, names a state that refuses to be still, is found beside a tank in Tahrir Square.  The cloths are for wounds or warmth.

–13 February 2011

 We are troubled by scratched things as by any touched surface.  Abstraction abhors all but the vacuum; vog makes breath mean.  It’s not to choose between clarity and obscurity, but to use one in the service of the other.  The scratch is tracer bullet over an otherwise chaotic square.  What happens next is idea more than event, though one comes encased in the latter like an iron lung that’s only a transitional machine.  There’s democracy in the breath, but we’re holding ours.

–14 February 2011

Each of these memory cards begins from a sentence or a phrase from George Oppen’s New Collected Poems, edited by Michael Davidson (New Directions, 2002).

The memory card form requires that each prose poem fit on a large index card.

Sampurna Chattarji is a poet, novelist, and translator with eight books to her credit. Born in Ethiopia in November 1970, Sampurna grew up in Darjeeling, graduated from New Delhi, and is now based in Mumbai. Her debut poetry collection, Sight May Strike You Blind, was published by the Sahitya Akademi (Indian Academy of Letters) in 2007 and reprinted in 2008. Sampurna’s poetry has been anthologised in 60 Indian Poets(Penguin); Both Sides of The Sky (NBT); We Speak in Changing Languages (Sahitya Akademi); Interior Decoration: poems by 54 women from 10 languages (Women Unlimited); Fulcrum (Fulcrum Poetry Press, US) and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe, UK). Her 2004 translation of Sukumar Ray’s poetry and prose Abol Tabol: The Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray is now a Puffin Classic titled Wordygurdyboom! Sampurna’s most recent book for children is The Fried Frog and Other Funny Freaky Foodie Feisty Poems (Scholastic 2009). She is the author of two novels, Rupture (2009) and The Land of the Well (forthcoming 2011), both from HarperCollins.Absent Muses (Poetrywala, 2010) is her second poetry book. More about her work can be found athttp://sampurnachattarji.wordpress.com.

Why

Space Gulliver has gone.
I don’t miss her.

Then why does her going make me think of an evening in a hot northern town I erased from my biography, rarely said the name out loud, as if it were a curse, or a dirty family secret, the dust from the afternoon storm everywhere even with the windows barred, the floor a singeing tawa under my bare feet, barely fourteen, having shut myself up in the corner room to study, despite the heat, despite the fact that no one has told me to, despite my brilliant cousin, a scientist, visiting, who calls me, like no one else does, ‘tui’, despite chilled lime juice cordial, despite the fact that all around me cockroaches with enormous wings are flying towards the uncovered bulb above my head, monstrous, evil brown hard undying fear, despite the fact that any minute one of them may land on my back bent over my books in a cringe of revulsion and despair?

How

Rubidium is a woman she might have liked being.

Odd how the women from the poems keep chasing her through the gullies. Has she let them down? Acrostic, she called across to the long red hair, didn’t you like it? Intuition sucks, and who sees hyacinths anymore. She feels it is futile to argue. Which year do you live in, nineteen twenty-two? A little more spite and she will throw them off her tail. Rooms, rooms of her own. Virginia, Jacob, James. Why so Western? Why the men? Shuck it off. Live, leechlike. Here, take this sentence. A snake, a mongoose and a peacock. Happy? All true, even if it makes you laugh. She is covering up for covering up. One morning a baby monkey had tugged her shoelaces at the bus stop. She spoke to it calmly, it went away.

The house was open to the rain. No one thought of covering the stairs. The house saw a bent back moving backwards down the stairs, rag slowly moving. The house was a man standing at the top of the stairs, confusing morning for night. Eunuchs against the glass. Slippery yellow edible root. The house was new when they moved in. Limewashed walls shedding gently. It was better than the one before but worse than the next. Last riot, they burned it down. 

Where

Behind the breeze the bonfire blazed. No time for tongue-twisters.

Grandfathers have a way of finding where the fish-shops are, even in a strange town, crossing fields, asking strangers, returning triumphant, the fish oil wobbling separately in a little plastic pouch.

Grandmothers have a way of knowing you are awake, of cooking strange flowers.

On no particular day, a line of vultures arrived to sit on the compound wall. Smokie was a band we listened to. All was not unbeautiful.

What

Miss Popular in a homemade frock. Clingfilming, jaywalking. So what if the ringers aren’t dead! Small meridian, the put-put-puttering squeal. Hail, tempo. Squeeze elbow knee and back into elbow back and knee. Not fit for goats. Last time she rode a rodeo was in a tea-truck. Try to imagine you are a picked, curled, fried and fermented leaf. Ignominious patri. Bookworm, fattening slowly, thickening out the world. The mut-mut-muttering formula that sees her through another test. Star pupil in the teacher’s eye. Fall, wish, shoot. These are the ways a girl survives. Nun in a dun sari. Grotto, gay. Carry in a sealed envelope the weal of trust. Amaretto, acerbic. Call nobody home. The tempo, the Matador. Skin a rotten place to hide in. A fist in the breast from a passing cyclist. Scar from the too-tight tie-ups. Lipserving, daydreaming.

What saved her?

When

Your sky travels towards me

I have been trying to outrun it, shifting location rapidly, bell-tower, syringe, locomotive, landfill, a vanished Syrian Christian eatery, Lebanon, cedar pencils, sackfuls of rice. Sometimes I trip in my eagerness to get away, Salamun, Sam Pitroda, sapodilla. If I travel fast enough from the detectives, savage, to the amulet, unread, I might have time to catch the next and the next, Hadron Collider, Right to Education, gas leak, hung parliament, sabotage, the Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Jia Zhang-Ke, exactly my age, not a wrinkle or a grey hair, says: I feel time is a tragic thing. I feel it too, compatriot, smoke rising in the public bath. In a Brooklyn flat a Chinese-American poet puts her baby to sleep. The Chinatown bus to Boston might take me far enough, to clam chowder, mussels steamed in milk. Oh but this is slowing me down, I can feel again the taste of it, this lingering will not do. I have been trying to translate two words for a month now, drunken god, Shiva’s Stupor, should I say blue-god, or just say Krishna, how will I ever get across the story of the snake goddess in the chamber of the new bride? Meanwhile, the clouds are coming, they have the same shape, texture, colour, terror is a cumulus, run.

When the landmass broke away from what would be India and travelled toward what would become Madagascar the small blind snakes went along.

That is the only explanation.

Tim Wright lives in Melbourne in a house backing onto a train line. The poems for this issue were written in the south west of Western Australia and are part of a longer series.

From a tank of water to a cup of coffee. ‘Mistral duet’ (toaster). Panasonic. A group called Save Our Suburbs: ‘I think we need to work to address the main concerns.’ An elderly couple at the door with copies of Watchtower, husband and wife, more or less out for a chat. Do I believe that science and the Bible are compatible? The different light of a Saturday. Phana-sonic? Turn the radio down too low to understand.

Nationalism is always bubbling away somewhere. That which is of academic interest. Acts of language. Electronic grizzle, ‘dubby’. Increasing the value of the easily available. Apparently what it’s all about. Black pencil. Turn on water and wonder. Printed out poems now Things to Do lists. Inside a house in Australia, learning the language of France. Cough with confidence and continue speaking. Cracking cans on the porch. Those interesting times of sobriety, like a metallic token collected in the tray of a machine. Stretch your legs.

Boxes in the landscape. The assumptions of architecture. A different beach. The longer a trend takes to reach one. The grimy inner city becomes an idea. Patterns of light through the curtains. The Bolaño effect. Packets of mud. The relatively recent feels distant, yesterday six months. Amnesty. Lines from The Simpsons. Flip book. Guy Maddin’s ‘My Winnipeg’. A Grammarian could be an alien. ‘I can’t even begin to think of that yet’. A missing bracket, bed made of earth.

 ~ ~ ~

Compression: the shape of an animal running. ‘My mind was elsewhere’. Some thing, with other things pressed into it. A warehouse. Crushed leaves and bad posture. Or reaching between leaves to take something back. Respiration: an engine turning over. Next door, not communicated. A temporary cenotaph. I had never seen a swarm of bees before, pouring into itself like that. And the sky incites an exclamation. Browsing as methodology. Cable car.

Toxic green. The sense of expectation, when walking very early in the morning, that one is always just about to encounter a body. Inhale through a turbine. A senile blue. The dream washes over the framework. Bend over backwards. Catch the train somewhere new. A place one was once questioned. Heavy ankle length skirt. Manufactured reply. Dessicated branch, place it in the freezer. Dramatic postcard. Not the work but what the work implies.

Bust wrapped in cellophane; diaphanous transcript. Are we becoming a nation of wimps? A jug of beer carried carefully across a room. Luminous sweepings, staple remover. Drumming on gathered materials. A casual eclipse, seen from behind. Opinion columnist; common irritant. Chain of Ponds Road, western New South Wales. Let the nostalgia run its course. ‘Chromatose’. Having driven through applause. A book, a beam. A drinking song, not easily brushed off. Walking on forest floor. Rushed through a hospital. Darkish glint.

Geoff Page is an Australian poet who has published eighteen collections of poetry as well as two novels, four verse novels and several other works including anthologies, translations and a biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann. He retired at the end of 2001 from being in charge of the English Department at Narrabundah College in the ACT, a position he had held since 1974. He has won several awards, including the ACT Poetry Award, the Grace Leven Prize, the Christopher Brennan Award, the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Poetry and the 2001 Patrick White Literary Award. Selections from his work have been translated into Chinese, German, Serbian, Slovenian and Greek. He has also read his work and talked on Australian poetry in throughout Europe as well as in India, Singapore, China, Korea, the United States and New Zealand.

The Class

After forty years of fiction, he dreams he’s in a class again, back at the beginning. The tutor doesn‘t show herself, as is the way with dreams. All of them must read a story, a classic that they’ve loved for years: Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, Frank O’Connor, Alice Munro. They read them carefully and well, one by one, and  then as if at her instruction, and almost ceremonially, strip the words away like washing and throw them in a corner. The idea hangs there, newly naked, a yard or so above the desk they find they have in common. The dream goes on. He does not wake. It’s not quite his turn yet.

Alex Skovron was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and came to Australia aged nine. He is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Autographs (prose-poems, 2008), as well as a prose novella, The Poet (2005). Awards for his poetry include the Wesley Michel Wright Prize, the John Shaw Neilson Award, the Australian Book Review Poetry Prize, and for his first book, The Rearrangement (1988), the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore awards. His novella was joint winner of the FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction. He lives in Melbourne and works as a freelance editor. His New & Selected Poems is in preparation.

Citadel

Then one night the books ganged up on him. He was seated at his table in the studio-den, composing a cheque for the recent fence-repair, when an odd rapping, like muffled drummery behind his chair, a kind of tapping, caused him to cock his shoulder. The books were floating off the shelves to the floor, in random order; hundreds had already sorted themselves in steep spires. As he swivelled, stunned, watching the stacks grow higher, the bookcases empty, each steepening tower like a tottering sentry began to flow, a twitching perpendicular river, converging on his patch in the middle. There was no time to unravel the riddle – he was aghast, then horrified, distinctly, for the piles were merging. Some books had their heavy gilded spines towards him thickly, some their grinning edges – surging, swirling backbones bluntly fisted (convex or squared, many jacketed), or concave ledges viciously snapping, swaying as they listed; thousands of covers chaotically flapping, yet no chunk of any teetering creature (each mystically bracketed) likely to collapse. Cowering now, subsiding to the Persian rug, he saw the twisters lapse to a terminal dance, each obelisk in its terrible advance gave a kind of shrug, appeared to shudder forth and back, clearly readying for the final attack. Desperate by now that it must be a dream, he squeezed his eyes shut, breathed deep, then took a chance. Look! Bookcases crammed again, and quiet – no more savage parade! But flickering on the floor, its pages splayed, a single book.

Maria Takolander’s poetry has been widely published. Her first book of poems, Ghostly Subjects (Salt 2009), was shortlisted for a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2010. She was also winner of the inaugural Australian Book Review Short Story Prize in 2010, and has recently been awarded an Australia Council grant to develop a book of short stories, which will be published by Text. She is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies and Creative Writing at Deakin University in Geelong.

Violence

The goat fished from the old wooden jetty. A hangover, he thought, was a state of mind, like the stench of the slimy pippies on the hook, the pull of the dirty tide on the line. He wiped the residue of the bait onto the tangled fur on his flank and picked up the thermos lid of coffee, cold as the dawn. The sea, he mused, always made him philosophical. A couple of pelicans had settled on the peeling roof of the only boat moored among the mangroves, tucking their beaks into the rancid feathers of their backs. From time to time the goat saw their eyes, rimmed like a drunk’s, move to watch him. It was no use; his bucket was empty. The fish, it seemed, had cleared out of this place. There were mud-crabs, exposed at low tide like rickety bones, and the usual detritus of birds. The landscape, though, had found a way into him. It was something his wife had never understood. Sitting in the deck chair, the goat rested the rod between his pressed legs and poured some more coffee. He heard the sound of the slick water on the hull of the broken-down boat, weighted by the pelicans. He swallowed some of the foul liquid and noted how the mangroves had spread. They were secretly closing the place in. A seagull flew down from the anonymous sky and landed on the boat’s stern. Its orange claws hooked the taffrail, and it began to vomit sound from its neck like something jagged and material. The goat pitched the fishing rod at the bird. The pole landed on the oily water like a praying mantis. The seagull stopped and looked at the goat. Then, with unblinking eyes, it took up the screeching again. The goat, casting his chair and thermos into the sea, began to bleat and bleat in return.

Beauty

She could not be said to think, but standing alone she was bothered by the vast movement and sound of the grass on the plains as the night bloodied the day. When the world yielded and was swallowed, she pressed herself to the hard dust, holed among the rocks with those of her skin and smell and hair and blood, and rubbed herself from fear in the hot place she knew until the wind swept through her. When she opened her eyes she was yet in the ravenous night, among the flesh and sounds of her kin, who were all given to the night within, and far from being riven by the thrill of the wind her body was quiet as a beast with its throat cut.

*

The day disturbed her with hunger like flint, so they trapped a young beast and held it down and razed its neck again and again until it bled and stopped moving. Her teeth were made for tearing. She took rest on the spoiled grass with the blood and flesh of the beast on her hands and tongue and on those to whose blood and flesh she belonged. There were the sky creatures, ragged as the carcass beneath their floating, and behind a strand of thirsty trees the sloping dogs. Then came the rustling night, always wanting more than the light, and as they fled through the gloaming plains it struck her that she was not afraid but whetted by its unending hunger.

Kate Waterhouse is co-editor of Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986–2008 (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009). Until 2010, she lived in Sydney with her husband and three young daughters. She is currently living in Auckland, working on her accent and two poetry collections—one set in Australia and one in New Zealand, and on a second editing collaboration with Jennifer Harrison.

Cups (what is the sound of a mother breaking?)

all this mothering fills mine up but what about those whose cup got broken / no fault theirs / some damaged / father / mother / uncle / other trusted figure / institution (choose one) / cocking it up before the girl got her own shot at it / who comes in the night when she’s all done with pouring to lift the sob / howl from her throat / let it go like a wing and her baby with it / only a light space left / a feathered echo / where’s the compensation at 2am for theft of a good role model / who turns up in the place of a missing mother / grandmother / sister / functioning family unit / a class action’s clearly needed / think of the damages / diy security’s a difficult business / always demand outstripping supply / there you are carefully filling the cracks/papering over / three coats of the right paint / when the baby arrives in a jugful of milk and under that cup of yours there’s a dark pool and a suitcase waiting / my grandmother gave me a matching cup / saucer / plate set / fine bone china / she knew a thing or two before she laid all thirty of hers out on the stainless steel top / don’t cut on the bench / and fresh lamingtons waiting for the gang to come around before they went out on a boat long sunk / aunts and uncles ought not to fall out at times like that but grandma’s cup had a crack and some of my uncle was lost there in the first few flights of the mothering jug and it went the way of leftover milk at a tea party / I’d rather be the Queen of Hearts than Alice with a broken cup so next time you’re thinking / not thinking of her children / think of the cup and piss off to a cave / choose another portfolio / get some professional help / whatever / she’ll thank you for it

Iron Cove

After the drought, a week of rain and the ground gives up its water. Obviating sleep I run alone through deep pools that bathe the roots of trees. Cloud, close like smoke, amplifies the whine of a 747 hulk ghosting in over Callan Park. Here clouds of leaves lie down on the past but a flaked sign speaks: You are now entering the grounds of an acute psychiatric hospital. This morning troubling no one – runners, cyclists, dogs all absent. Around King George Oval tall turpentines incline towards the north, the queue of planes immune to rain, lantana prettily strangling the undergrowth. Past Leichardt pool where the track breaks out to open ground a Noisy Miner hunches disconsolate in the casuarinas – a grove of them that twins this cove of idle fishing boats to a small Italian town; the rowing club locked, skiffs pulled out like prosthetic limbs, the persistence of water. Red-eyed, a gang of crows shadow a magpie chick abandoned by the path; anxiety, such a human concept, as in: the magpie waited anxiously while the crow looped across the grass sours the world that is, festers in what’s to come. My feet skim sunken ground, overhead another jet engine grinds through the rain, that crushes us with love.

Nicholas YB Wong is the author of Cities of Sameness (Desperanto, 2012). His poems are forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Gargoyle, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, The Journal, Mead, Nano Fiction, Platte Valley Review, The Portland Review, Quiddity and REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters. He reads poetry for Drunken Boat. Visit him at http://nicholasybwong.weebly.com.

Journey

“Monogamous. I’m interested in monogamous.”

— Anne Carson

She pulls the seat belt across her breasts to reach the buckle, a schist in femininity. She looks away. Other cars are arranged in the parking lot neatly like urns. Soon, doors will open, hand-breaks released, people busy getting in and out. She envies those clean and metallic bodies, where a scratch can be covered up by paint. In a car’s life, scars never last long. He turns on the air conditioning, her hands fold on her laps to stop the chill entering her from below the dress. Their car moves, they don’t – first to the bakery, then her office and his. The tires, monogamous to this route, deserve a merit certificate. But when they are about to join the traffic outside, she looks into the rear mirror and finds herself, years younger, in the back seat, where they first made out, where they both thought such desire could last for however long they wanted, where they found nothing in life was monotonous.

Paranormal Panorama

Galicians are proud of their potatoes and watercress; mangosteens and mangoes bear heritage only linguistically. A sheen of shame blows in when the Thai family arrives at the infinity pool with in-room bathrobes and noise. The father nears the sundeck chair whose whole existence is to serve sweaty human bodies. His white sideburns say he is a guru who bareback-rides elephants to his sumptuous poppy fields. His six-year-old bomb-dives, causing ripples that make the water’s face look aged. The mother and daughter are acting maternal at the far end, splashing water onto each other like giant frogs in swamps, ready to lay eggs that look like sago in coconut tapioca. A deserted swing in Argentina sways by itself for ten days, a new tourist attraction. A shark with a snake’s body and toothed gills is found in Japanese waters after earthquakes. More absurd is me closing a book, looking at how they merge joy with travelling. A swimming pool cliché: the father counts from three, his children kicks with skills learned and not learned, departing from the edge of infinity toward me. The clouds are doing their job by hiding the sun, blurbs on the book jacket greased and glazed by tanning oil. This is what the website promised: our resort staff clears floating leaves eight times a day with an extended net, even no one swims there with laughter.

Ivy Alvarez is the author of Mortal (Washington, DC: Red Morning Press, 2006). A recipient of writing residencies from MacDowell Colony (USA), Hawthornden Castle (UK), and Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), her work is published in journals and anthologies in many countries and online, with individual poems translated into Russian, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean. www.ivyalvarez.com.

The secret sister

She appeared in the meadow, two hours after dawn, nightgown fluttering in her wake as the sun gilded the hills, the mist rose pale blue, a scentless smoke. Where she stood, she was a column of white and she herself pale, lips bluing, too, hair a black waterfall. Turning to look at her, the cold grabbed at the skin of my belly, my calves. In a minute, she was younger by a year. You could see it, like taking a watch pin between finger and thumb, and winding it backwards. Shrinking into her clothes, hair rising, skin tightening, smoothing, plumping up, chest-height, waist-height, knee-height, the reeds teasing me with glimpses of her. Then she was a Moses in her swaddling clothes, then the smallest embryo, then a stain. She did not have a name.

The Museum of Inexplicable History

For six months I arranged museum dioramas; in placards explained the scenes; led bewildered tourists through small rooms. The pungent oranges and bright, green wings, ebony mocha okay choking down coffees, teas, distant gazes. Now I am safe in the deep V of a weekday, cradled like a silkworm, suspended, watching the scene below. The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair, green trousers and purple velour sleeves. Queered courtiers, courtesans, slippered feet denting stone steps. When Alice steals away and consoles the Duchess’s baby, it metamorphoses into a pig and runs away from her, runs away. As I would, if I could remember. I do remember. That I, just ten, became the mystery of course, reverse, twitch, emerge. In the distance, a chiming swish of chintz, of pastel polyester: the Avon Lady treks door to door. Pinkness announces itself, calm and self-important. People are sharks, while all the wild protected liminal woods hoist their nets, weighing the harvest. Rough chaff husks falling, blowing away. Something offensive: a revolver is cooked into a codex. I read it closely. It’s January: time to go.