Author: mascara

E A Gleeson is a Ballarat based writer and Funeral Director. Earlier this year she featured at the inaugural Australian Poetry Festival in Castlemaine. Her poems have been published and read in Australia, Ireland and the USA. Gleeson was awarded the 2008 Interactive Press Best First Book Award for her poetry manuscript, which will be published later this year.

Making a different path

Plunging into the huge pile of rubble, digging through it
she rescued them, whole bricks abandoned for a chipped

edge or a flaw in colour, and then, when it looked as if
there were no more to be had, she went back into that pile

uncovering the halves, throwing them into the barrow and
then thrusting her arms deeper into the broken bricks, each

time going down further, fingers tipping the bricks, sliding
along them, feeling for length and then, gripping fiercely

with her finger tips, she pulled the new found brick through
the pile, setting the others crumbling and tumbling.

With the string lines curving across her block, she placed
the bricks across and down, three by three. She wove

the path across the yard, curving it around the place she’d
marked out for fruit trees, setting it beside the squares

that would become a vege patch. All evening, she carried
aching muscles about the house. Unused to the heft of work,

she filled a bath and eased her body in, stroked the cloth
along each scratched arm, dabbed at each blistered palm

and later, found herself clasping her hands as if she were
holding some hard won precious thing.

Sunday Afternoon Bush Walk

Eucalypts drip amongst the quiet voices
of strangers taking each other’s measure.
Fog clings to the stand of mountain ash.
We step out slowly. Mud sucks our boots
We scramble fallen logs, wade through bracken.
Cautiously, we move to higher ground.

Sliding alongside one another, keeping pace
with bits of chat, we slip in on other conversations:
film reviews, travel stories punctuated
with bird calls, snapping twigs. Paragraphed
by steeper slopes, the talk moves up a notch
hedges on the personal.

You’re telling us about your birth.
Doctors thought you good as dead
offered your mother special care staring
through Plexiglas at your ribs heaving
and sinking.

Rejecting this, she took you home. For fourteen
days and nights, she held you. Snuggled between
her breasts, dribbles of milk, temptation to suckle.

Her heart beating like a metronome.
Her skin.            Your skin.
Her breath.        Your breath.

We tramp along the sodden track.
Bursts of warm sunshine challenge
the winter landscape.

Is this all there is?

i

We spend the whole day together and then the next.  
For me, it’s as if we’ve always had and always will

have a part together. Haio becomes my teacher. I
want to know how to behave in this different country.

I learn that it is not OK to eat a naked banana and eye
contact is not such an important thing, though I notice

that when we are part of the throng of motorbikes
surging along Tran Hung Dao, she turns right round

to talk to me. I am relieved when she leans forward
again, until I realize that she does this to read

the map and answer her mobile phone. I am not sure
of the protocol of gripping her buttocks with my thighs

but as my jeans take the dust from the buses we pass,
I am thinking about other things.

ii

Never have I felt such a part of a people’s movement.
There are more people on motorbikes on either side

of me than could ever fit in a Swanston St. peace march.
Haio weaves her bike through the city traffic as if these

days are all that we have. She wants to show me what I
need to learn. She cuts to the chase. She asks questions

that I never ask before a third date. She points to the people
whose disfigured bodies bend awkwardly along the pavement,

She tosses coins, chats to the locals, coerces the officials.
She takes me to see her friends and the paintings that she loves.

I feel as if I have met someone who might be a Buddhist, well
along the path to enlightenment, or perhaps that rare thing,

a Christian who knows what it is to love one another.

iii

When she is not asking questions, she is my tour guide.
I begin to understand why the figure of Ho Chi Minh

whom I feared in my childhood, will always be Uncle Ho
for her. She shows me what she wants me to understand

and says, “This is what you need to write your poems about”.
I want her to tell me that these huts made from split boards

and bits of tin are summer residences for the rice growers,  
shepherd’s huts for the farmers, that way up in the hills

beyond the paddy fields are cosy cottages all decked out
with woven mats and polished teak and that behind these

are gardens full of vivid vegetables and bunches of bananas
bowing from the trees, but I know before I ask the question

that this is all that there is.

iv

Each time we pass the central Post Office, the man with
the gummy grin is sitting in his cyclo smiling at the tourists

because he does not have the quick repartee of the cyclo
owners with the clean cotton covers and the sunshades,

 “Where you from, Madame?” “Ah my friend in Melbourne.”  
“How can I help you?” “Special price for you, Madame”.

Tell me that last week it was different, that the tourists
hurried to his cyclo like children to a merry-go-round,

that he took them to the mountain statue of Buddha
and the huge church with its concrete Virgin Mary

and said same same but different and laughed at his own
joke and the irony of it all, but I know that when we’ve

ridden past late in the afternoon and he’s sprawled
across the cyclo, that every day, this is how it is.

v

Haio takes me to visit the children whose parents
were hit by the orange bombs. The crazy boy

who is tied to his cot with his skin dropping onto
the linen, yells at me. And the girl who seems to be

all torso and head, reaches out and pulls me towards
her as if to show that for a hug, a neck is not necessary.

There are children who stare blankly from misshapen
bodies and others who grin and giggle and bottom shuffle

towards us clutching at our hands, rolling us the ball,
peeking into our bags. As we walk from the last room

in the Peace Hospital where the children’s heads
are  bigger than any of my questions or answers,

I turn and ask, “Haoi, what do you believe?”
She tells me, ” I don’t believe in anything.

I know that there is nothing but this.”

Ashley co-founded Egg(Poetry) in 2002, which sadly ceased publication in 2006. He is currently studying Arts and Education at Monash, while co-editing www.holland1945.net.au and singing for his band. His work has appeared in a range of Australian print and online publications and his poem ‘Ember’ was runner up in the 2007 Monash Poetry Prize. His first collection of poetry pollen and the storm (2008) was published with the assistance of Small Change Press.

endure

like Sophocles inventing
pain
her perfection
is made
knot
by knot

as she rakes the spyglass across the horizon
in one long smudge

as she leads him home
weary of visions
and
of fighting him, placating
his attacks
eating his
blues.

pedestrian

in the possible hush
of 6am the
road is dusted
in pastel-smoke

feet bully the pavement
and cars slip down the highway.

on rubbish bins
crows flick glances
like struck matches

and the wind
squeezes by, rustling
plum blossoms
with clumsy arms.

late night

I know there’s no way to stand out –

and it’s very easy
to make someone’s throat clench
with piano
and a montage or a bit of slow
motion, soundtrack
really makes
up for substance

but what have I got – just lines
on white
envy
and really, why bother when
everything is so obviously impermanent

I guess the great lie of our time is capture –
it’s comforting to believe
everything can be caught, recorded
and remembered
so we don’t have to appreciate
anything in the moment.

april

could we meet
somewhere else
in april
maybe
on stone
with rain beading in your hair

I’d listen for once and you’d be strong
I’d be able to sit still
and you’d be happy
for the first time since april

everything would work
and we’d be able to talk, without
feeling crushed by the weight of stars
their cold light, dry as wind

and the streets, empty at dawn
but full, of yellow leaves
and little hurricanes.

yokan

full moon
splattered on the field

stumps’ moot.

Tenzin Tsundue is a writer and activist in exile. He published his first book of poems Crossing the Border with money begged and borrowed from classmates while undertaking his Masters degree in Literature from Bombay University. His literary skills won him the first ever Outlook-Picador Award for Non-Fiction in 2001. His second book Kora is in its fifth edition having sold more than ten thousand copies. His third book Semshook, is a compilation of essays on the Tibetan freedom movement. In January 2002 Tsundue’s profile peaked when he scaled scaffolding to the 14th floor of the Oberoi Towers in Mumbai to unfurl a Tibetan national flag and a ‘Free Tibet’ banner down the hotel’s facade. China’s Premier Zhu Rongji was inside the hotel at the time. He is also known for his trademark red headband which he has vowed to wear until the day Tibet is free. Tsundue’s poetic voice speaks powerfully of the suffering of Tibetan exiles.

Horizon

From home you have reached
the Horizon here.
From here to another
here you go.

From there to the next
next to the next
horizon to horizon
every step is a horizon.

Count the steps
and keep the number.

Pick the white pebbles
and the funny strange leaves.
Mark the curves
and cliffs around
for you may need
to come home again.

A Personal Reconnaissance

From Ladakh
Tibet is just a gaze away.
They said:
from that black knoll
at Dumtse, it’s Tibet.
For the first time, I saw
my country Tibet.

In a hurried hidden trip,
I was there, at the mound.

I sniffed the soil,
scratched the ground,
listened to the dry wind
and the wild old cranes.

I didn’t see the border,
I swear there wasn’t anything
different, there.

I didn’t know,
if I was there or here.
I didn’t know,
if I was here or there.

They say the kyangs
come here every winter.
They say the kyangs
go there every summer.

Tibetanness

Thirty-nine years in exile.
Yet no nation supports us.
Not a single bloody nation!

We are refugees here.
People of a lost country.
Citizen to no nation.

Tibetans: the world’s sympathy stock.
Serene monks and bubbly traditionalists;
one lakh and several thousand odd,
nicely mixed, steeped
in various assimilating cultural hegemonies.

At every check-post and office,
I am an “Indian-Tibetan”.
My Registration Certificate,
I renew every year, with a salaam.
A foreigner born in India.

I am more of an Indian.
Except for my Chinky Tibetan face.
“Nepali?” “Thai?” “Japanese?”
“Chinese?” “Naga?” “Manipuri?”
but never the question – “Tibetan?”

I am Tibetan.
But I am not from Tibet.
Never been there.
Yet I dream
of dying there.

Space-Bar: A Proposal

pull your ceiling half-way down
and you can create a mezzanine for me

your walls open into cupboards
is there an empty shelf for me

let me grow in your garden
with your roses and prickly pears

i’ll sleep under your bed
and watch TV in the mirror

do you have an ear on your balcony
i am singing from your window

open your door
let me in

i am resting at your doorstep
call me when you are awake

Debbie Lim was born in Sydney where she works as a medical writer. Her poetry has been published in Blue Dog, Quadrant and Poetry Without Borders. She is winner of the 2008 Inverawe Nature Poetry Prize. She was a guest poet at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival.

How To Grow Feet of Golden Lotus

A mother cannot love her daughter and
her daughter’s feet at the same time
                                                      – Old Chinese saying
1.
Begin with a girl of five:
her arches will be firm
but she will not yet know real pain.
Soak feet in warm water and herbs.
Massage. This will be their last
pleasure, though recalled
with bitterness.
 
2.
Curl four toes
under the sole like a row
of sparrows sheltering under a ledge.
Bind with a long strip of cotton
or silk – whichever you can afford.
But leave the big toe free:
this will be her keel,
for balance.

3.
Pull tightly
as on the reigns of a disobedient horse.
Time will break them.
Strive to make toe kiss heel.
 
4.
Every second day
turn your ears to stone.
Unwrap the bandage and ignore
her crying as you rebind them,
each time tighter. Remind yourself,
as your own mother did,
that there is no such thing
as a truly liberated foot.
 
5.
Beware three terrible blooms:
ulcer, gangrene and necrosis.
They are insidious as a woman’s curse.
A toenail can take root in the sole
and left unwatched, the cleft
between ball and heel
nurses all kinds of enemies.

6.
Two years will train them
into pale lotus bulbs
of the most sensual beauty:
iron, silver or gold*
 
7.
When she is older
the mere sight of them
peeping from beneath a gown
will arouse in men
the most powerful kind of desire:
lust combined with pity.
 
She will walk
the walk of a beautiful woman.
 
8.
The smell she might live with
for the rest of her life.
But she will learn the art of beautiful
concealment: washed stockings,
draped hems and hours
stitching shoes
of the most delicate embroidery.

9.
A woman with lotus feet
steps through mirrored days
of privilege. She sits
under willow trees, works
tiny worlds with her thread.
 
A woman with golden lotus feet
will always be waited on.
There are just two things
she must never forget:
                 
                  Always wash the feet in private.
                  Always wear slippers in bed.

* The binding process lasted for approximately 2 years. The lotus or bound foot was classified as gold, silver or iron according to its final size. A golden lotus referred to a foot no more than 7.5 cm long and was considered ideal. A silver lotus measured up to 10 cm, and an iron lotus was anything larger.

Extraction

The worms are shrunk in their tunnels
hiding apologies. The cicadas
are banging out a death trill.
While I sit with this ache in my jaw,
my souvenired pain in a bottle.
 
Up in the gutters, nests are falling
apart into shitty straw and the lawn
is a sea of green tips ripe
for amputation. I am sick of waiting
with this mouthful of gauze.
 
From inside, I watch you mow:
dragging your diesel heart
in crooked rows. You see only
the metre in front of you, trail
a blunted yellow wake. That vein
working in your left ankle
will be the death of you.
 
Summer sours everything too quickly,
especially washed skin. My mother sits
in the air-conditioned lounge
obliterating herself with symphonies.
Her mouth has turned into a violin
string, she can stay still for hours
on the verge of breaking.
 
The sun is an old medal
swung through days like this:
cicadas, heat, deafening afternoons.
This dull socket will keep me
awake tonight. If not,
I’ll pray for dreams of snow.

Girl at 6.20am

An ordinary street, suburban
in flat daylight.

But imagine 6.20 am
when the sky
is pale and slowly leavening
there is something secret happening:
cars parked silently
in driveways and dulled with frost,
and how the cold builds
a second skin
around bushes and letter boxes
so there appears to be
two of everything: one visible,
the other crouched inside, sleeping.
 
I could reach out
and touch a gatepost, turn
and walk up somebody’s driveway
if I wanted to.
 
Halfway down the road
there is a tree
I think is cherry blossom.
It leans over the path,
ignores the fence
of the garden it grows in.
Soon it will be loaded with white petals,
cause a sidewalk snowfall
before turning
into a brown skiddy mess.
But just now, as I’m approaching,
its branches are clean
and so dark they could be
stapled to the sky.

Jal Nicholl lives in Melbourne, where he is a secondary school English and philosophy teacher. His poetry has previously been published in Retort Magazine, Stylus Poetry Journal, Diagram, Famous Reporter, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Shampoo Poetry.

Audit

Subtract the tangible,
these pebbles smoothed unseen
by god, by water,
by machine;
         let mortar
wear away the stone
of prison opened to the public,
and of private home.
                   Sculptor,
split the frozen tun:
release the grapes inside,
imagining
the chisel is your tongue.

The Annunciation

The messenger appears, his face
a bright mask over sleeping darkness,
but hazy, seeming an actor in
the kind of dream you have when you know
you’re dreaming. He reassures her,
in his old-fashioned gold-trimmed livery,
his sanguine complexion, the cool blue
light he casts around him, speaking
tunefully; he has come to tell her
that, suddenly (although it’s hardly news
in heaven) she’s at the centre of
the whole plan of creation. Congratulations!
You have been selected . . . he begins,
ceremoniously reading from the letter
whose seal he’s broken; but at some point
as the speech continues he stops reading,
adopts a more intimate tone, as he folds
and pockets what you’d assume
was meant to be delivered, and concludes:
So don’t you dare tell anyone–
of course they’d never believe you–
but if you do and it gets back to me,
I’ll come back and there’ll really be news. She thinks,
Were I to ask the name of his boss–
let alone for some I.D., who knows
what might happen? Perhaps she screams
beneath the whoosh of dazzling wings and arms
that clasp her as he whispers like
a gale in her ear, the name of the disease
he’s giving her.
                 He’s gone, the light gone
From her blinded eyes–but the street
outside the window he came in is squealing;
revived, she can no more cry than sleep–
it’s the supernatural child who cries, already,
to force her to eat, though she’s not hungry;
and soon she’ll have to talk to it, soothe
it with a song, devise a story
to satisfy the world, and keep it straight.

Father in Heaven

A lookout over wetlands, like
a cattle chute against a closed gate
in an empty paddock–
See how the heron drops a moment from
his equilibrium, how ducks
dive astutely and with open eyes.
Feel the advance of shadows that will
flood the roads tonight like sand
a tussock facing the sea. Thus
speaks the one whose likeness
you are, pointing to fields impenetrable
to a bored child’s imaginary
hide-and-seek. But you’re well
above the horizon here, as never before
those views you used to try to paint,
though you had to lie down in sand
or grass to frame, for example,
a closed street in the pose of a nape and shoulders
turning to follow a face–
their own. This one who made you
ejected you from shelter, or you left
after a certain age, because
that too was nature. The same now turns
his weekend face on you, having found the place
agrees with him as much as he
with it. Ceci n’est pas un oiseau,
you say; but see how the bird goes its way
conducted by his definite finger,
sped by the name this gesture bestows
as the sun strikes its wing like a window, and
past this horizon, unthinking,
as if it really were.

Peter has been HIV positive since he was 19 years old (since 1988). In 2008, Peter has decided to cease mainstream media. He is launching in March 2008 at radio 3CR in Melbourne a weekly program called ‘Radio for Kids’, which will present kids speaking about their world as they see it. Peter lives in a small town in Victoria; a place where he can walk a few minutes down the road and be in a bit of forest.

Jessika Tong is twenty six years old. Her work has been published in various national and international literary journals including The Age, Tears in the Fence, The Speed Poet’s Zine, FourW,  Stylus, Verandah, Pendulum, Wet Ink, Polestar and The Westerly. She  recently performed at the 2008 Queensland Poetry Festival and her first collection of poems The Anatomy of Blue is forthcoming in 2008 with Sunline Press.

Moscow

Liam Ferney is a Brisbane poet whose work has been published in Australia, New Zealand and North America. His first collection, Popular Mechanics, was published in 2004. It’s follow up the french word for ‘voyage’ should eventually be raised from the depths of the Marianas Trench sometime around 2010.

Kurilpa
       for Paul

all those flat whites & what was the name?
       shopping for bargain bin westerns
       after the donuts

while the day kept it’s blistering silence
like the coal station at black diamond bay
       given as a gift to the jungle.

with no where to go i drink beer with fish
& banished cheap music but
       i remember you making machiatos  
where the cats played sax

before you shopped for kalashnikovs,
gunja by the kilo
            at a 3rd world truck stop.

                   they were beautiful days
tables adorned with tulips and skulls
where renegades retired

       & we are ready to assume
the poise of our generation.
common music betrayed by static,
            the treachery of an fm ocean.

Iron Lion Scion

As abandoned as drive-in’s, tracer fire
no longer fireworkflecks the six o’clock news

and the friends he made in Barcelona
have all upped stumps, migrated to Angola.

So he spends lunch hour’s lolling at the lights,
the cavalcade of unspecific grooming,

a crimped starter at the boom where we all go bust,
melting figurines of Posh and Becks

puddling on the high table, the slow waltz
with the sticky palms and dystrophic hearts.

You’ve cancelled your appointments
but there’s no point apportioning blame

on the circus tent revivalists preaching at the riverbank
or a hedge fund backed Buddhist retreats.

The aficionados swear by the tune in the tumult
a detached viola, adagio on the kitchen radio.

That’s how Black Tuesday sounds on a website,
there were warnings but they were polite

and for once the phoney doctors are right:
“Coin is clarity, that much is bankable,”

(you’re holding it long until the ever after)
“call our hotline,” that’s what they say

coming down off the millennium
        like a bad pill on a good day.

some nights the heat

Coming home
I read the alleyways
like Toohey Forest tracks.
The night is over tropical,
silences and shuffling,
television antennas
and fake iced tea.
Kept awake
by Kinsella’s
anthology aliens
the earth’s thermostat cranks
and I smoke This Plus™
at the top of the stairs.
My accent gets smudged
like important digits
penciled on an ATM receipt
dishwashed against the coins
in your wallet.
Watching the scuffling
drunks at the end
of the street
it’s as though I’m the big prize
on the crooked game show
destined never to go off.
I learned surrealism
from travelling exhibitions
then did my best to forget it
hoping I could come off
easy and casual
like terry towelling hats
or cold beer.

The brave and the free

These are not good days with the Gipper still on TV,
the Kool-Aid sins of the brand new colony;
when the truth is too grotesque to grasp
all we’ve left is a remembrance of things fast.
While the lights go out on Melbourne’s plains
our best friends have all assumed new names.
The things in your cupboard you no longer trust
the graduate scheme analysts are nonplussed.
And like any goomba I’ll extract my vig,
endure the torment when they breach the brig.
It seems like yesterday that Bopper, Bamba and Holly:
the asthmatic engine, the wheeze of Buddy’s Folly.

Kylie Rose lives in Maitland with her four children. In 2007 she was a resident at the LongLines Poetry Workshop at Varuna, the Writers’ House, and was awarded a retreat fellowship to work on her collection, Sea Level. She is due to return to Varuna as a resident/ consultant for the 2008 LongLines Community Week. Her suite of poems, “Doll Songs” was commended in the 2006 Newcastle Poetry Prize, and an extract of Sea Level was included in the 2007 Newcastle Poetry Prize anthology. She is currently collaborating with poets and composers on a project commissioned by the Hunter Writers’ Centre.

Bees,
Nanjing

In cloisonné fields,
emerald greenhouses cling-wrap the earth
and incubate the foetus grain.

At the toll gates, bees rap and rattle
my face painted on the glass eyes of the coach.
Bees propel themselves

at my steely hive with zeal,
their pharyngeal meal meant to ease
the propolis seal stoppering my throat.

Welcome Queen, incarnate, they hum.
Nanjing––plum blossom city––
opens its fist for you.

Hanshan Temple,
Suzhou

Gilt flames squall.
Incense pours into carved
and fecund air.

From the pagoda,
temple faces squint
with faithful irises of coin.

Three blows, the bell’s belly
induces fortune’s triplets.
A fourth strike

renders me
fortune’s orphan.
I leave, a monk,  

robes––dissolved peach––
flirting with fallen
sycamore floss.

One Thousand People Rock,
Suzhou

In the Dynasty of Song,
one thousand men lost their voices
on a stone octave.
Still ringing in the spring rain of peonies,
one thousand voices sink my skin.

White sepulchral birds in unison,
chant through bony, fluted beaks. One
thousand egrets howl a mating dirge,
calling soul from stone
to nest.

Indran Amirthanayagam is a poet, essayist and translator in English, Spanish and French. His first book The Elephants of Reckoning won the 1994 Paterson Prize in the United States. His poem “Juarez” won the Juegos Florales of Guaymas, Mexico in 2006. Amirthanayagam has written five books thus far: The Splintered Face Tsunami Poems (Hanging Loose Press, March 2008), Ceylon R.I.P. (The International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2001), El Hombre Que Recoge Nidos (Resistencia/CONARTE, Mexico, 2005) El Infierno de los Pajaros (Resistencia, Mexico, 2001), The Elephants of Reckoning (Hanging Loose Press, 1993).

Amirthanayagam’s essays and poems have appeared in The Hindu, The New York Times, El Norte, Reforma, New York/Newsday, The Daily News, The Island, The Daily Mirror, Groundviews (Sri Lanka). Amirthanayagam is a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow and a past recipient of an award from the US/Mexico Fund for Culture for his translations of Mexican poet Manuel Ulacia. Amirthanayagam is working currently on a translation of poet Jose Eugenio Sanchez.

After the Party

       — in Memoriam: Anura Bandaranaike

I remember an evening
flavored by my mother’s
cooking, bringing
two smart patriots
together, to speak
about devolution
not yet realized,
accommodate
what makes sense
seeing the island
from afar, the only
way forward,

two dear friends
who met then
for the first time.
Now, one is laid
to rest, and
the other engages
readers still
to think afresh
about slow or fast
bombs, double-speak,
cynical tongues, how
to bring more than

twenty five years
of war to an end
before all our parties
break up and families
gather, with shot-gun
shells and confetti
to scatter, at weddings
held on holy ground
beside gravestones
where fathers and
brothers, mothers
and sisters are buried.

Adjustment

We walk across railroad tracks.
It’s late, the moon full, waves
roaring on the other side
of coconut trees.  There
aren’t any goons asking

for id’s. It’s 1980 or some
such year before current
flapping of metal wings, birds
alloyed everywhere dropping
pellets right on our foreheads.

Aiyo, we say, how the hell,
machan, don’t buggers
know how to shoot, and
these poisons flowing
in our blood.

What’s become of older
weapons of war, when
knife pricked or bomb
blew off the head but
left the next man alive

to attend to his family
and the fight? Now
cancer multiplies
his cells and we should
not walk across railroad

tracks or down on
the beach off Galle Face,
which today’s children
know as a high security zone,
and their older siblings

as no-man’s land, lovers’
folly, but we protest
too much, surely
we can carry passports
in our bathing trunks?

Rub

(Berries and Chicken)

There’s a rub in these black
berries on bread with a glass
of milk on a Saturday morning
when rain trickles down
through mist and fitful
cold ‘though not to complain
about weather, this is no
long john winter,

and across the Pacific
an old friend rides bullet
trains and types into his
Blackberry about once
forgotten wheelbarrows
and rain water evenings
we ate steamed chicken
outside the library

at Chatham Square
in Chinatown; meanwhile
the poem will not insist
on personal memories,
wishes to barter in
chinatowns, capture hearts
in Frisco or Vancouver,
or even in the birthing

places, Guangzhou
or Shanghai, or some
Cho Fu Sa, or far northern
village; I have to study
the map and ask the reader
to travel with me into the heart
of this ginger and hot rice
beside a white chicken.

Backwards

Nice to walk
backwards,
to that first
time, spade –
thin, I gathered
my wits

outside
typing class
while a girl,
brown-skinned
like mine,
came up to me

and smiled;
I held her hand
and felt her
hold mine.
—a Friday
in Honolulu,

allowed
to wear sandals
to school,
beaches
beckoning
boogie boards,

yet I admit
I did not
know
what
to do with
that hand –

Come Home

Come home,
now– not just
for kiri bath
or poll sambol,
or a salt slick
on the beach
and a tumble
in the hammock.

Come home,
now– wandering
the planet means
nothing
if you don’t
return for the party
and make
your parents glad.

Come home,
now – though
the parable
does not fit.
Father died
abroad,
and Mother’s
left to keep

their house
running
for another son,
and always
local allegiances,
and church
up the road,
and visitors

from England
and Australia
or the island
once called Ceylon,
where branches
of the family tree
flower still
saying:

Come home,
now– for
a stringhopper
feast,
to remember
childhood
jeeps rolling
over jungle

tracks, or
the name
of some half-
forgotten
agreement
to share
all the loaves
in the basket,

before noting
how singular
the Army
has become,
bereft of
minorities,
its esprit
du corps

changed
utterly
into a
question
of loyalty
and tribal
allegiance,
the island

lost at sea,
and now
the alarm
ringing,
time
come
for my
airport taxi.