Author: mascara

Ellen van Neerven

Written by mascara on October 1, 2015. Posted in Featured Writer.

Ellen van Neerven is a young Yugambeh woman from South-East Queensland. She is the author of Heat and Light (2014), winner of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists Prize.

Photo credit:

Inga Simpson

from Pearl

At 3 p.m. I looked out of the window to see the three men standing with bags by their boots. They were dressed in camouflage and looked slightly ridiculous considering the weather. Their waterproof pants made their legs look like parachutes. They looked at Pearl’s bright dress.‘Why you wearing that? ’ She shrugged.

‘You dumb bitch, we’ll see how you go.’

I followed them down the streets. I had the advantage of knowing the town and the paths very well. Pearl was in front. Goh coughed on occasion and Bandit smirked. I saw them look at each other and communicate a shared want they could not say out loud.

When they went into the bushland with their gear, the decoys they carried began to weigh them down and they walked slowly – all three were unfit or weak. Pearl carried nothing and walked easy. I noticed she had slipped off the clogs she wore at work and was barefoot.

When the lake was in sight I stopped to find a vantage point. I found the old wooden lookout that had been there since I was a kid and surveyed the surroundings below. The men stepped out and surveyed the area and where they would set up the blind. Pearl half-turned; her eyes found me and she nodded in recognition. The little flecks of light flicking up from the lake caught their expressions and I felt I could see them perfectly. The men crouched to set their plastic painted decoys down in the mud. From where I was, the decoys looked quite lifelike. Pearl had found her spot a little bit further down, closer to where I was. She also knelt and opened her hands, and I saw she had made a grass duck, out of reeds. It was beautiful.

Bandit looked – his mouth gaped for a moment and then he laughed at her creation. I couldn’t help but share his sentiment, as remarkable as it was, there was only one.

They stepped back thirty metres or so into the vegeta- tion and started to get their gear out of the bags. George handed Pearl a shotgun. ‘Don’t miss,’ he said. And they put on their gloves and face masks, and held their calls and their guns. Pearl stood straight and stripped her dress off, spread out her arms and slipped off her undergarments.

‘Shit,’ George said and they exchanged a placating look between the three of them that made them carry on as if nothing had happened.

With her feet, Pearl covered the red garment with leaves. Bandit gave a nod to indicate the start of their hunt and they widened their stance.

Pearl put the call in her mouth. The wind picked up and melded with her hail call, a long, low note. The wind began to pull at the tassels of the lake, and I held my hair in place. The wind shuddered the ten or so decoys the men had laid out, and they fell down in a row.

The men swore loudly but Pearl kept calling. She went to a new call – a rapid round of short, sharp notes. This is what the men in their conversations at the shop had called a feed call, when a hen has found food. I heard the ducks above, and I looked up to see their formation swooping down. The mallards slowed their wings and came towards the outstretched Pearl like a train to a station. There were at least two dozen. Pearl raised the gun and fired. But nothing was shot. The mallards landed unaffected around her. She looked down, confused, at the gun.

That’s when the camouflaged men made their move. With their masks they looked like executioners and that’s what they were. They grabbed Pearl by the shoulders. Goh on the left, George on the right and Bandit at the front.

I got to my feet but there was nothing I could do. Though the wind, as always, was on her side. The gale swept back – it was a wind that bit – and George let go. He flailed his arms out and toppled backwards into the lake.

In the confusion Pearl got away and then she was running and Bandit and Goh were chasing hard and I could not see everything exactly. The heat from the day had carved a dull headache in my mind.

On the way home I find a lover, in a hotel in a one-street country town. She smells like apricots and is too pure for me. I started surfing when I realised I needed something to quell my undiagnosed sex addiction. When I go out to the beach it’s usually to clear my head from anyone muddled up in there. Mystery does not always equal desire, and for every woman I’ve been with there has been one who turned me down. Like that Fleetwood Mac song, women, they will come and they will go.

This woman doesn’t turn me down. We giggle as we pay the clerk for a room upstairs. As she unlocks the door I search her hands for a ring or tattoo or some sort of sign that will remind me that she is not mine. She is the kind of girl I would have thought about being with when I was younger and hadn’t yet fucked up a million times. She gardens and she volunteers at the school near Hune Hill where lots of my mob went. She says she will take me to see the farm where she lives and show me her orange trees. They are the biggest oranges, the size of basketballs and they taste like love.

‘Will you cut them up for me? ’ I ask.

‘Yes,’ she says, slipping off her singlet top.

‘And take the skin off ? ’

‘Of course.’

We take the covers off the bed and she gently puts her hand on my chest and drives me back onto the mattress. She lowers herself and her legs come around my waist – I squeeze her ankles and we kiss like we’ve kissed each other before. How can it be that I don’t feel the weight of her. That there is no taste on her tongue. No drug, no cigarette, alcohol or coffee. I thought she’d taste like apricots or oranges. I’m getting sick, it might be the flu I’ve resisted all winter. Because I can’t continue. My breath is ragged and the shapes and colours of her are blurring.

This extract appears in Heat and Light, page 15-19 first published in 2014 by University of Queensland Press, and reprinted here with permission.

Elena Gomez

Written by mascara on October 1, 2015. Posted in Poetry.

Elena Gomez co-hosts the occasional apartment poetry series, CELL, and co-edits SUS press. She is the author of two chapbooks, CHILL FLAKES (SUS press) and PER, a collaborative work with Eddie Hopely (Make Now Books). Her work can also be found online, at The Claudius App and Cordite.

Sweeping leaves is a weekly chore

she liked [found pleasure in it]
to click her tongue and displace

a wire & plastic retainer while
staring into the faces of young

children who turned to seek out
strangers on the south-west bus.

I prefer to describe myself
as plucky rather than as

allergic to scholarship
though it becomes easier

to feign allergy if one embodies
the disease-like components of

it such as limp limbs,
a dim eye

an untended ‘garden’
[to chuckle now would be rude].

the very minute you admit weakness
of literal concepts a fresh spring air

takes hold and carries you forth
to the edge of the football field.

you swoon at the thought of dialectics
not a swoon from desire but from

an overwhelming sense of the walls that
close in you also must perfect the

blank stare, the short-tempered child-like
frustration that occasionally

very occasionally, involves hurling
a remote through a nearby doorway.

would have preferred to be visited
by the ghost of alma mahler.

the beauty of names is they can inspire
thoughts of pleasantness in a woman.

I used to be afraid of long lines, the way
they snaked across a page the way they

furiously eluded my grasp, which already
was a weak sick thing.

K A Nelson

Written by mascara on October 1, 2015. Posted in Poetry.

K A Nelson studied at the University of New England, and once lived and worked in New Zealand, PNG, and Central Australia. She now lives in Canberra. Since 2010 she has won three poetry prizes, had poems published in The Canberra Times, Award Winning Australian Writing, Australian Poetry and anthologised (Canberra poets). She is working on her first collection.

This is a Woman Who Travels the Land

In the early hours of these bitter mornings
when the fog comes down and stays down;
when the only cars on Commonwealth Avenue
are taxis changing shifts or ministerial staff cars
taking the lackeys home; when flags hang slack
in the dark and stiffen in the cold on their steel poles;
my thoughts fly north to the desert – to a woman
who calls me daughter, who took me to Dinner Camp
told me a story, taught me a song, showed me a dance:

She is a woman who travels the land
Where stories are danced and country is sung
Where magic and myth is retold in the sand
Where kinship and totems are like lines on a hand

This is a woman who travels with women
Whose customs and life move in time with the moon
Whose birth on a songline means obligation
Whose night sky is peopled with ancestral kin

This is a woman who travels with crows
Who glides across country as hunter and healer
Who teaches clanswomen all that she knows
Who carries the lore wherever she goes

This is a woman who travels around
on everywhere roads criss-crossing the land
She knows bitumen highways lead to trouble in town
gridlock the cities; spoil old hunting grounds

Kapirnangku nyanyi, kapirnangku nyanyi, kapirnangku nyanyi *

In the early hours of these bitter mornings
when the fog comes down and stays down
my thoughts fly north to the desert – to a woman
I call mother, who took me to Dinner Camp
told me a story, taught me a song, showed me a dance.

She is a woman now elder and leader
She is a woman who travels the land
She is a woman who longs for old times –
God love her!
She is a woman, the last of her kind.

* kapirnangku nyanyi: Warpiri farewell: ‘I will see you’

Blue by Shannon Burns

Written by mascara on October 1, 2015. Posted in Flash Fiction.

Shannon Burns is an Adelaide-based writer, reviewer/critic and sometimes-academic. He is a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, and has written for Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books and Music & Literature. He won the 2009 Adelaide Review Prize for Short Fiction and the 2015 Salisbury Writers’ Festival Short Fiction Prize. He’s had fiction published in various magazines and journals, most recently in Overland and Verity La.

Blue

He was sleeping when I slipped away – I could bear it no longer – he seems to have gone blind – his eyes are grey – they were once like mine – it’s as though they’ve grown younger – perhaps he has too – his body turned inward – an overpowering desire – he will not speak of it – there’s nothing to be done – he sees nothing – he’s deaf as well – I was not quiet when I left – I thought to give him one last chance – if he’d called to me I’d still be there

there’s nothing about – all have gone quiet – I once heard mowers in the distance – every weekend they would hum – that was long ago – there are no weekends – the journey will be long – my only wish is for water – to see it at last will be the last thing – I once visited the sea – it whispered gently – my feet followed it out – when it came in I howled – it marked me out – it seemed to yearn for something – I chased it yelling – for hours we did this – they took me away – I refused drink for days – no thirst could quench my fear of it – it went out and returned, went out and returned – I still see it in my mind – it smiles whitely – it draws close and whispers – I tremble to listen

the road is flat – I picture small inclinations – they spring to life – when I left it was grey – the gate was unlatched – the garden wild – branches torn by something – perhaps the wind – there is no wind – I recall days driven by weather – to go outside or stay in? – today it is grey – yesterday I was inside – perhaps it hasn’t changed – the days are alike – it may be night – the world has spun on its axis – we are at bottom – I am alone – he is too – we may meet again – it won’t be here – someone may walk me back – but they won’t know the way –

my voice is hoarse – perhaps it will vanish – I won’t argue – there’s nothing else for it – I have no say – the weather is fine – I’ll bear it easily – my feet are cold – they never freeze – they’re soft on the soles – when I walk they burn – the road is harsh – there’s no one to clear it – the vehicles are still – they are shells of vehicles – I’ll take cover when it rains – it will not rain – the sky is clear – but there is no blue – I haven’t seen blue for years – perhaps blue is gone– it may have risen further – beyond the grey – I was never fond of it – the word is thick – my mouth won’t shape it – my lips blubber – it is their way – I don’t require them – there is no blue

I seek out the water – once it was green – it seems black in my dreams – it will devour me – I am for the most part water already – this I know – it’s getting worse – I overfill with it – there’s none there – our supply stopped – I left him dry – it felt like a verdict – the taps have deserted us – they do not approve – I cannot blame them – no simpler message – the water is gone – we are to follow – if that then this

the path is monotonous – why so flat? – do I walk on the spot? – how to tell the difference between here and there? – perhaps there is none – I’ve never considered it – my thoughts are clouded – there are no clouds – my thoughts are empty – but emptiness abounds – my thoughts are grey – but grey is the world

there’s something ahead – a large ragged dog – its hair thick and grey – I walk his way – he sniffs the air – I turn back – there’s nothing to be said for it – perhaps the dog is the sea, come to greet me from afar – nothing is friendly – hunger universal – nothing lost nothing gained – I go on bleating – I breathe – I walk – to what? – the devouring sea – opening its wide mouth – inviting – welcoming – it’s made a bed for me – that is where the others are – asleep on the sea-bed – I’ll nuzzle them soon – so long since I touched one

I follow the dog down the road – it lifts its leg on a signpost – nothing comes – an empty pizzle – we are as though one thing – I hang back until he disappears – I cannot watch the performance – he’s dwindling to nothing – everything does – he’ll reach the beachhead before me – I’ll follow his pawprints to the water – lie down by his stinking corpse – smell the sea on his putrid fur – breathe the moisture – close my eyes – hold him

Goirick Brahmachari

Written by mascara on October 1, 2015. Posted in Poetry.

Goirick Brahmachari lives in New Delhi. He hails from Silchar, Assam. His poems and articles have appeared in various journals and magazines.

Evening

An old building near Adchini with a warning sign that reads, “Danger” in black
probably speaks my mind. As the world around counts time, I lick the garbage bin clean
and it rains.

Only sometimes, a lonesome training center for the deaf and dumb
can illuminate a smile through the strangers’ lips and fingers and tongue through the glass windows without a sound and eat magic for lunch.

I see the moving faces of government employees who have always gone back home together, in the same bus, year after year, for all of their lives; starting for office, at the same time, early morning,
with some fried potato and few rotis, packed in their steel lunch boxes, and their sullen faces, each framed within the square glass windows of a bus which overtakes yours.

I see the coaching centers and those spoken English institutes where students are still dreaming. I hear the laughter of young girls carrying document tubes; see a few urban potheads who smoke by the private film school which morphs into a Yoga training center by morning. I pass by the stupid, stupid academic council where, every day, at least a thousand school books are raped and slaughtered.

But when the evening comes, I spread my wings and jump into the well of darkness of my room, in liquid dead hunger, in search of the night.

Aquiles Nazoa translated by Ariel Riveros Pavez

Written by mascara on September 30, 2015. Posted in Translations.

Aquiles Nazoa (born in Caracas 17 May 1920 – 26 April 1976) was a Venezuelan writer, journalist, poet and satirist. His work expressed the values of popular Venezuelan culture though in 1940 he was arrested for defamation and criticism of the municipal government. In 1948, Nazoa obtained the Premio Nacional de Periodismo (National Journalism Prize) in the humour and customs section. He was also awarded the Premio Municipal de Literatura del Distrito Federal (Municipal Prize for Literature of the Federal District) in 1967. He wrote for the Colombian magazine, Sábado and lived in Cuba. He was expelled by the Jiménez regime in 1956 for two years. His poems have been reproduced as lyrics by musical artists throughout Latin America from the 1970s to this day.

Rezo el Credo o Credo de Aquiles Nazóa

Creo en Pablo Picasso,Todopoderoso, Creador del Cielo y de la Tierra;
creo en Charlie Chaplin, hijo de las violetas y de los ratones,
que fué crucificado, muerto y sepultado por el tiempo
pero que cada día resucita en el corazón de los hombres,
creo en el amor y en el arte como vías hacia el disfrute de la vida perdurable,
creo en el amolador que vive de fabricar estrellas de oro con su rueda maravillosa,
creo en la cualidad aérea del ser humano,
configurada en el recuerdo de Isadora Duncan abatíendose
como una purísima paloma herida bajo el cielo del mediterráneo;
creo en las monedas de chocolate que atesoro secretamente
debajo de la almohada de mi niñez;
creo en la fábula de Orfeo, creo en el sortilegio de la música,
yo que en las horas de mi angustia ví al conjuro de la Pavana de Fauré,
salir liberada y radiante de la dulce Eurídice del infierno de mi alma,
creo en Rainer María Rilken héroe de la lucha del hombre por la belleza,
que sacrificó su vida por el acto de cortar una rosa para una mujer,
creo en las flores que brotaron del cadaver adolescente de Ofelia,
creo en el llanto silencioso de Aquiles frente al mar;
creo en un barco esbelto y distantísimo
que salió hace un siglo al encuentro de la aurora;
su capitán Lord Byron, al cinto la espada de los arcángeles,
junto a sus cienes un resplandor de estrellas,
creo en el perro de Ulises,
en el gato risueño de Alicia en el país de las maravillas,
en el loro de Robinson Crusoe,
creo en los ratoncitos que tiraron del coche de la Cenicienta,
el beralfiro el caballo de Rolando,
y en las abejas que laboran en su colmena dentro del corazón de Martín Tinajero,
creo en la amistad como el invento más bello del hombre,
creo en los poderes creadores del pueblo,
creo en la poesía y en fín,
creo en mí mismo, puesto que sé que alguien me ama...

El Mayordomo y El Gato

Recientemente falleció en Montana
una viejecita norteamericana
que, en calidad de único heredero
le dejó a un mayordomo su dinero.

Mas la anciana del caso que relato
dejó también un gato
que ha venido a plantearle al mayordomo
un problema, lector, de tomo y lomo,
ya que en el testamento hay un mandato
que le impide aunque llegue a la indigencia,
disponer ni una puya de la herencia
hasta que no se muera dicho gato.

Me diréis: - ¿Y por qué ese mayordomo
no se arma de una estaca o de un zapato
y acaba de una vez con ese gato
que debe de caerle como un plomo?

Ah, porque la viejecita, en previsión
de que ocurrir pudiera cosa tal
aclaró al imponer su condición
que del gato en cuestión la defunción
debe ser natural,
y si no muere así, tampoco hay real.

Lo que le queda, pues, al mayordomo
ante este caso, es conservar su aplomo,
con paciencia llevar su dura cruz
y esperar que se muera el micifuz.
y como el gato tiene siete vidas,
¡esas puyas, lector, están perdidas!

The Credo according to Aquiles Nazoa

I believe in Pablo Picasso, Almighty, Creator of Skies and Earth;
I believe in Charlie Chaplin, son of rats and violets,
who was crucified, dead and buried by the time
but who is resurrected daily in the hearts of men,
I believe in love and in art as the path to enjoy everlasting life
I believe in the miller who lives off making golden stars on his marvelous millstone
I believe in the aerial qualities of human beings
set in the memory of a swooping Isadora Duncan
like the purest dove wounded under Mediterranean skies
I believe in the chocolate gold coins I secretly stowed
under childhood pillows;
I believe in the myth of Orpheus and the magic of music
When, in the hours of my anguish I saw Faure’s Pavane evoked
walk free radiantly from sweet Eurydice in the hell of my soul
I believe in Rainier Maria Rilke, hero of our struggle for beauty,
who sacrificed his life by plucking a rose for a woman,
I believed in the blossoming flowers of Ophelia’s adolescent corpse,
I believe in the silent lament of Achilles facing the sea,
I believe in a sleek and distant ship
that embarked a century ago in search of the aurora;
whose captain, Lord Byron, by the scabbard of archangels,
a blaze of stars on his brow,
I believe in Ulysses’ dog,
I believe in Alice’s Cheshire Cat in Wonderland,
in Robinson Crusoe’s parrot,
I believe in Cinderella's ratty coachmen,
Veillantif, Roland’s steed,
and in the worker bees in their hive within the heart of Martin Tinajero,
I believe in friendship - mankind's most beautiful invention,
I believe in the creative power of the people,
I believe in poetry and to end,
I believe in myself, since I know someone loves me…

The Butler and The Cat

An old American lady
passed away recently
in Montana
and made the butler
her sole inheritor

Furthermore, the old woman
in this case also left a cat
that caused contention
my learned friend, of books and spines,
because there was a clause in the will
that put pause to any pay
even on pains of penury
‘til said cat died

And may well you ask:
why wouldn’t the butler
take hold of a stake or shoe
and finish off said cat
which must be gnawing at him by now?

Oh, it’s because the grand old dame foresaw
that such a thing could happen
and clearly imposed this condition
that the cat in question
should die of natural cause
and if this did not occur,
there would be no recourse

So what’s left in this case
is that the butler should
keep calm and composed
bare his heavy cross
and wait for the furball to croak
but as a cat has nine lives
my learned friend, to all those bucks
you might as well say goodbye.

Ariel Riveros Pavez is a Sydney-based creative writer, publisher and poetry translator. He also writes on experience-dependant Neuroplasticity. Ariel was convener of The Blue Space! Poetry Jam and is founding editor of Australian Latino Press. His work has appeared in various publications including Arena Magazine, Journal of Postcolonial Text, Southerly and Verity La.

Dimitra Harvey reviews “Kin” by Anne Elvey

Written by mascara on September 30, 2015. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Kin

by Anne Elvey

5Islands Press

ISBN 978-0-7340-4897-4

Reviewed by DIMITRA HARVEY

Val Plumwood wrote, “the ecological crisis requires from us a new kind of culture”. She was of course referring to the set of human/nature dualisms that underpin the contemporary West, and which “promote human distance from, control of and ruthlessness towards the sphere of nature as the Other”. Unprecedented anthropogenic climate change and ecological degradation threaten not only the survival of our species but myriad others: we must reevaluate our definitions of our humanity or “face extinction” (Environmental Culture 4-5).

Researcher and writer Anne Elvey’s first full-length collection of poetry, Kin, shortlisted for the 2015 Kenneth Slessor Prize, emerges out of this need for “a new kind of culture”, exploring human identity in relation to, in relationship with – what Elvey has described as – “ecological networks of kind, otherkind, country, air, sea and cosmos” (Plumwood Mountain). At her best, Elvey observes human embeddedness within complex, vibrant, non-human spheres with keen linguistic control and playfulness. It is a pleasure to return to the crisp imagery, and trim, silvery music of lines such as, “the cool acreage of canary light” (12); “All at once, bees fill the flowering gum. / Seed pods tick their dry rain / on the ground” (24); “he dips his finger into a font / to wet your tongue” (72). In “Romancing the creek” (39)

                                         a lizard slips
where the rock face
                                    shears from the earth
and stone stands
                                    stacked like crates
against the sky.
                                    Moss probes
a gap with serried
                                    tongue…
                                    …Weeds
pick out a corner
                                    and an edge.
                                    …beside the track
a rusted bike,
                                    a guitar past
playing and
                                    a frail skin
to toss over a lamp…
…the rock wall
                                    pulls the creek
up to its chin.

The human presence – in the form of our detritus, as well as the more subtle presence of the speaker – is decentralised within a sphere of other-than-human, interconnecting lives. Lizard, rock wall, moss, weeds all have their own agenda and agency. The poem bears witness to ecologist Barry Commoner’s observation that “everything is connected to everything else”: there is no “away” to which rubbish can be thrown (19-20).

Even within the highly-developed context of the highway in “Over Eastlink” (37) – where, as Judith Wright wrote in her poem “Sanctuary”, “only the road has meaning” (139): the “wide-winged body” of a pelican “steps / down the air, hangs / at each turn as if at a landing”, and perches “high up on [a] tollway light!”. The poem captures the bird’s strength and agility, its “gravity”, as well as its utter disregard for human demarcations: the pelican is a palpable, powerful presence, “surveying the traffic” with a will, that disrupts the human-centrism of the urbanised landscape. Everything is in relationship: “the cup” of the bird’s “under- / beak / shapes [its] silhouette against / the sky”; the human speaker “drive[s] on” only because she is “neither fish nor water” to the bird.

Elvey’s acute attention to these “ecological networks” means Kin also bears witness to their degradation, to profound loss, including as a result of colonialism. We see this in poems such as “Ecos echoes” (42), which addresses Australia’s extinction crisis. The poem’s disjunctive line signals brokenness: how “(earth things)” are “(riven from) / (the well world)”. In the repeating, dirge-like refrain cataloguing the losses: “gone the eastern hare wallaby / gone the pig-footed bandicoot / gone the silver mulga”, we hear echoes of the last lines of Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s famous poem, “We Are Going” – “The scrubs are gone… /The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from this place. / The bora ring is gone. / The corroboree is gone. / And we are going” (78) – which hint at the ties between cultural and ecological losses.

Explicitly and more subtly, Christian symbolism and ritual permeate the ecopoetic framework of Kin. From the description of Elvey’s mother in “The honour of things” who “told the beads” (19), to the “nails / hammered on a Friday” in the powerfully poignant “Nanoq” (48). Significantly, Elvey’s opening poem “Sheet Music”, begins with two line’s from Kevin Hart’s “Mud”: “We met there, Dark One, all those years ago / You smelled of mud” (11). “Mud” is one in a series of poems by Hart which address the “Dark One”, who, as Davidson points out in Christian Mysticism and Australian Poetry, “is undoubtedly God” (203). Given Western Christianity’s influence on contemporary Western secular thinking (White 1204-1205), and its culpability in the human/nature dualisms that not only underpin the ecological crisis but have authorised colonialism and its violence (Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature 88-89; 41-68) – perhaps engaging with its tropes is part and parcel of the ecopoetic task.

In her essay “On (not) speaking about God ecologically”, Elvey writes that in addressing “patterns of domination and alienation” which “Christianity and the biblical images on which it draws have in part at least supported…[w]hat may be needed is to hold our Christian faith story loosely, not necessarily to turn away from it, but to be open to a mode of attentiveness to Earth and its atmosphere…as part of an ecological spirituality attuned to the community of more than human others with which we are intimately interconnected and interdependent”. In many ways, Kin shapes itself in these terms: not necessarily seeking to scrutinise these “patterns of domination and alienation”, but rather considering ways aspects of the Christian tradition might be re-imagined or reinterpreted to encompass an “ecological spirituality”. This proves both ingeniously dynamic – offering inclusive alternatives; and problematic.

In “Bayside Suburban”, Elvey deftly re-imagines the Eucharist as a ceremony in which everything – humans, gulls, possums, light, wind, sea – takes part. The poem, divided into five parts, is not presided over by the ceremony. Rather, the ceremony is gently inferred in the fabric of everyday goings-on of “Port Phillip” – in the “old / meals the gulls enjoy…the refuse of blood / and wine, the suburb’s flesh, the greasy joes”(61); in the “sand…thin / and brittle as a wafer. The skin…the tongue / to which it clings” (63). We see those who eat and drink are not only human. Everything is implicated in an ongoing sacrament of relationships, exchanges, communions: “A soft light traces the shore’s / length. The wind pushes southward along / the beach. A dog romps and a woman / dressed in rough wool casts a line. Banksias are sculpted against the sky” (62). The passing of time, the rhythms of natural systems and of human and non-human activity inform and open out the ceremony. The poem concludes: “Strewer of a communion march, the day / empties its apron of blossom… / …The sacrament is celebrated slow / with gulls like restive children… / …the tide arrives with the bounding-sea, the soul-fetching night” (63). This inclusive re-visioning of the Christian service of bread and wine engenders a sense of the “radical equality” of all “members of a larger earth community” that Plumwood called for (“Tasteless” 71); or of Mary Oliver’s “citizenry of all things within one world” (34). Here Elvey is indeed “hold[ing] [her] Christian faith story loosely”, allowing other-than-human presences and systems, and our relationships with these, to move through it and develop it.

This re-visioning stumbles in “Claimed by country 3”, the last of Kin’s “Claimed by country” set. The speaker of “Claimed by country 2”, observing how colonialism is an ongoing process as she “com[es] into, out of / country”, asks, “is this / the colonising moment / once again?”(65). In “Claimed by country 3” (66), one has the troubling sense that this is indeed the “colonising moment”, that the land and its inhabitants are being co-opted into a “Christian faith story”. The opening declaration, “This is the rose on the gum”, seems to deny, or seek to supersede, the agency of an already storied land. The rose’s religious connotations, its association with Christ’s five wounds as well as the blood of the Christian martyrs, are heightened in the context of the poem’s other religious imagery. Superimposed on the gum, it not only has the effect of “put[ting] the flag” (Munnganyi qtd. in Rose 24) – a kind of colonial staking of land, but it also converts the tree into a cross, sublimating the tree’s “own meaning”. Similarly, in the lines –

And here,
where rocks shift to wallaby

and edge toward the altar,
the congregation stirs as
by degrees, a full moon

climbs the far side
of the range. With vested
hills, the dancers and the priests

attempt a fugue of ways…

…Insects light upon my

hair and on my skin.
We stand. We sing.

We give a peace
that takes a breath.

– we see country converted into a church; it’s inhabitants into a “congregation” and “priests”. All the complexity of the land’s “own meanings”, the agendas and agencies, the interactions and relationships are reduced to, are described as being in the service of, a very particular kind of worship.

While the closing image of the speaker, who “by the iconographer’s / grace” is “a smudge of white / in the corner of the frame”, acknowledges the smallness of the human element in larger systems, it also literally and figuratively flattens out the dimensionality of country into a religious painting – an image intensified by the metaphor, presumably, of falling sunlight at the beginning of the poem: “the fragile leaf of gold’s / applied to the ground”. Ultimately, the poem lacks the suppleness and expansiveness of other poems such as “Bayside Suburban”.

Despite one-offs such as “Claimed by country 3”, Kin’s strength is its awareness of poetry’s potential to step outside of presiding cultural and social paradigms, to imagine more ethical and compassionate ways of being with each other and our other-than-human kin. As Elvey writes in her poem “Recycling the possible”: “tear into / pieces / the possible /…feel for a place / in the grain and start / writing” (74-75).

Though Kin emerges out of the trauma of ecological crisis, ultimately it gives voice to hope: that through attentiveness to our deep kinship, to our inextricable entanglement with the other-than-human, we are capable of embracing another mode of life on earth.

WORKS CITED

Commoner, Barry. The Closing Circle: Nature, Man and Technology. New York: Knof 1971. 19-20.
Elvey, Anne. Editorial. Plumwood Mountain. Volume 1 Number 1 (2014). Web. 26 Aug. 2015. <http://plumwoodmountain.com/editorial/>
—. “On (not) speaking about God ecologically: Ecofaith conference presentation 23-25 May 2014”. Leaf Litter – Anne Elvey’s research and poetry blog. Web. 26 Aug. 2015. <https://anneelvey.wordpress.com/on-not-speaking-about-god-ecologically/>
Davidson, Toby. Christian Mysticism and Australian Poetry. New York: Cambria Press 2013. 203.
Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge 1993. 41-68; 88-89.
—. Environmental Culture: The ecological crisis of reason. London and New York: Routledge 2002. 4-5.
—. “Tasteless: Towards a Food-based Approach to Death”. PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature. Number 5 (2008). 71.
Oliver, Mary. Long Life: Essays and Other Writings. Cambridge: Da Capo Press 2004. 34.
Oodgeroo Noonuccal. My People: A Kath Walker Collection. Milton, QLD: Jacaranda 1981. 78.
Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission 1996. 24.
White, Lynn. “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis.” Science. Volume 155 Number 3767 (1967). 1204-1205.
Wright, Judith. Collected Poems. Pymble NSW: Angus and Robertson 1994. 139.

DIMITRA HARVEY has a Bachelor of Performance Studies from UWS and a Master of Letters in Creative Writing from the University of Sydney. Her poems have been published in Southerly, Meanjin, Mascara, the Jean Cecily Drake-Brockman Prize anthology Long Glances, and speculative poetry anthology The Stars Like Sand. In 2012, she won the ASA’s Ray Koppe Young Writer’s Residency.

Candy Royalle

Written by mascara on September 30, 2015. Posted in Poetry.

Candy Royalle is an award-winning performance artist and poet who fuses cinematic storytelling, poetry and unique vocal rhythms with confronting, political and heart thumping content. She tackles topics ranging from sexual obsession to social injustice, illuminating the darker areas of the human psyche for her audiences. Few who see her can forget her intensity, her combustible blend of intellect, imagination and heart. Recent accolades include being awarded the 2014 Marten Bequest Traveling Scholarship for poetry, a highly commended award for the Queensland Poetry Filmakers Challenge, and winner of the 2012 World Performance Poetry Cup as well as the AIPF Excellence in Poetry Award in both 2012 and 2013. She has won numerous competitions and has been nominated and highly commended for a number of awards. Her work has been published and featured both in publications and online including Overland, Australian Love Poems, Radio National’s Poetica, AIPF’s Diversity anthology and many more.

In Australia, Royalle is a festival veteran – from the Woodford Folk Festival to the Tasmanian Poetry Festival, the Sydney Writers Festival to the Adelaide Fringe Festival to name just a small few. Her Butch Priestess Tour sold out in the UK and the USA.

Candy says:

“Through the art of poetry and story telling I have a unique privilege to rehumanise not just my own story, but the story of others.” (ABC Radio Interview)

“I’m very pleased that you would like to run with “Stained”, it’s an important piece for me. I think the theme “Between Black and White” really speaks to me. I have always existed on the fringes – never quite Arab enough, never quite “Australian” enough. It’s like an embraced purgatory because I get to choose the parts I identify with. It also means I am comfortable being critical of both.”

Ivy Alvarez

Written by mascara on September 30, 2015. Posted in Poetry.

Ivy Alvarez is the author of Disturbance (Seren, 2013) and Mortal (2006). Her latest chapbook is Hollywood Starlet (dancing girl press). Her poems appears in many publications, including Best Australian Poems, with several translated into Russian, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. Born in the Philippines and raised in Australia, she lived many years in the UK before moving to New Zealand. www.ivyalvarez.com

What Clara Bow Stole

Walking through Kowloon Park, I blow
to cool my gai-daan-jai — steamy treats
crunchy-sweet. Ooh, that fool director’s so beastly!
Don’t speak, he’d said, look pretty.
Too easy. Winking, I opened wide,
facing his one dark eye. Boop-boop-be-doo!
We knew. I won. Plunge fingers,
twist off pastry pieces and chew. A man,
his wife, sit, leaning on each other in the dark.
It scratches my heart. When I stole
my mother’s coat, after she held the butcher’s
knife to my throat, it scratched like that.
One more bite. Just like her, I’m committed
to my paper bag, my asylum of sweetness.

What Ava Gardner Delivered

Under the bridge, a dim lagoon.
Slow notes from a saxophone
glow in the trees. The pool
becomes a black sky, fallen leaves collapsed stars.

Angel, he calls me. Frankie’s name for me. I remember how he
stroked my skin, his wedding ring scratching my chin
as I stood to deliver us from the second gift
of my belly. Afterwards, he gave me jewellery.

Here I am a raven calling out to borders, guards,
the staring crowds: goodbye.
A soldier looks into my eyes, murmurs
something low and kind to me.
I fold into my dark coat,
say thank you.

The Boy Who Believed in Magic by Zahid Gamieldien

Written by mascara on September 29, 2015. Posted in Fiction.

Zahid Gamieldien is a writer, tutor and former lawyer. In 2015, his fiction has been published in Overland, Tincture Journal, Bahamut Journal and Pantheon Magazine.

The Boy Who Believed in Magic

The camp gets attacked on a Monday afternoon. I’m in the antechamber of the medical tent, administering the vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella to a young girl. She’s afraid of the syringe, and I tell her not to worry, that everything will be okay. Her mother soothes her in Manding language, probably Dioula, but even she seems tense. The girl is bawling and I call the Dutch nurse, Klaas, into the antechamber.

I’ll show you a magic trick, I say to the girl.

Klaas nods and I turn to a cabinet, on top of which is a Styrofoam cup. I make a small hole in the cup and push my thumb through it, and then I grip it with both hands. Feigning intense concentration, I lever my fingers and palms from the cup, which is held in place by my obscured thumb, and I shiver the cup through the air as if it’s levitating. The girl goes quiet. Klaas kneels beside her and swabs her upper arm with an alcohol wipe. He jabs her with the syringe. She begins to wail and I grab hold of the cup while Klaas and the girl’s mother apply a bandage to her puncture. Sighing loudly, I return the cup to the cabinet and listen to the girl’s crying fade from the medical tent.

You should give this doctor business up and get into the magic shows, Klaas remarks. We chuckle; I like the way he shushes his S’s.

I’m about to reply when I hear a convoy of jeeps in the distance. Klaas and I step out of the medical tent and stand there, watching. The camp is in chaos. People are running every which way: some roil the dirt as they sprint to nowhere; others dash into their tents, which are draped in white sheets like Halloween houses or Californian bungalows being fumigated. The sheets carry UNHCR branding.

Through a rust-coloured cloud of dust, I spy a man that I recognise. He’s barefoot, carrying a machete, leading his family toward the dirt road.

What’s happening? I ask.

It’s better for you to run, doctor, is all he says.

I don’t move.

The regular doctor at the camp, a South African named Sissy, sprints past me and into the medical tent. Klaas and I follow her. She heads for the tent’s main room, which has two rows of eight hospital beds divided by a narrow aisle. I realise that most of the patients must have fled behind my back: only four remain, and each of them is unconscious.

Too late to move them, Sissy grunts.

Klaas and I wear guilty expressions and now, close by, I hear peals of gunfire, the screech of brakes. My skin feels numb, tinnitus in my ears — no, not tinnitus: I can isolate the screams of individuals, of children, of women, of men, and they get cut short, these screams, abruptly, like when you press the mute button on a TV remote.

Klaas’s brow is moist; he wipes it with a shaky hand. Sissy, the only one of us with her wits about her, drags a sheet up over the face of one of the patients. Klaas and I realise what she’s doing and we follow suit, until the four patients are entirely covered. We head back to the antechamber and wait.

The footsteps on the ground are heavy, jackbooted perhaps, and I know immediately that the people sheltering in their tents are not going to survive: their choral screams rise and grow elliptical and fall silent, the tempo dictated by a grim layer of percussion. I dap my Adam’s apple in my throat and try not to picture it, but I can’t help it. Klaas whimpers; he’s pale as a waxwork and wet with sweat. Sissy places her hand on his back, as if to steady him in case he passes out. Her mouth is shut tight.

Two soldiers, dressed in black shirts and camouflage pants, enter the antechamber. Both have AK47s. One of the soldiers is tall, not yet twenty; he’s wielding a machete as well as a gun. The other is pubescent, a boy, although he has no laugh in him and his brow is as creased as a forty-year-old’s. The tall soldier raps something in a Kru dialect, directing his question at Sissy. He jerks his rifle toward the main room. Sissy stares at him dumbly and he repeats the question in French.

C’est une morgue, Sissy responds. Allez jeter un oeil. She’s defiant, but her voice quavers. Squinting dubiously, the tall soldier issues a command to his accomplice, the boy, who adjusts his aim.

The tall soldier ambles into the main room. He pauses near a covered patient and slings his AK47 over his shoulder, and then he takes out his machete and drives it through the patient’s chest. There’s the crack of a ribcage and the gurgle of blood in a throat, the strain of ungreased bedsprings. I stifle a scream, Sissy’s eyes go to her feet, and Klaas holds his breath. We don’t watch any more. The tall soldier returns to the antechamber, dragging behind him a white sheet with which he wipes the stains from his machete. He shrugs and says something to the boy, before he drops the sheet and exits the medical tent.

The boy’s forehead grows more serious and he’s yelling at us in Kru which, of course, none of us can understand. He’s becoming frustrated and I realise that he’s asking us — no, ordering us — to turn around so that he can shoot us in the back. We comply, slowly.

Don’t do this, Sissy pleads. We’re doctors. Médecins.

I glance over my shoulder: the boy is unmoved, or otherwise, he doesn’t understand. I see that Sissy and Klaas are holding hands. Klaas is muttering a prayer. They’re resigned to their fate.

I’m about to clasp Sissy’s other hand when I spot the Styrofoam cup on the cabinet, and I don’t know why, but I grab it and push my thumb through the little hollow in it.

I’ll show you a magic trick, I offer.

There’s confusion on the boy’s face, yet I press on with the routine, releasing the cup from my hands, leaving it perched on the end of my thumb, giving the illusion that it’s defying gravity.

See, it’s magic, I say.

Mah-jik, the boy repeats.

That’s right, I say. Magic.

He takes a couple of paces back and glances outside of the tent. I crush the cup in my hand. Sissy’s expression betrays her puzzlement, Klaas’s his relief. The boy mimics turning a key in a lock, and I’m confused.

Unlock? I ask uncertainly.

I think he wants a car, Klaas observes.

I take my keys from my pocket and jangle them, as if I’m performing another trick. The boy beckons with his rifle and I cant my head to the others, indicating that we should follow.

In single file we step out of the medical tent. In Dutch, Klaas recites the Lord’s Prayer. The camp is a Golgotha of corpses upon which dust is settling like ash, like in the aftermath of a volcano. The tents are silent and riddled with buckshot. Sissy’s hand is over her mouth. I also want to vomit. The boy prods me in the side with his AK47 and we walk — the three of us now in front of him — toward the dirt road, past booted and barefoot soldiers, and the dead, and firewood that is being kindled for a pyre. In the shade of a palm tree is a group of armed men, who laugh out of the sides of their mouths, gravely, or as if they’re chewing tobacco.

As we reach the dirt road, I can hear yelling from behind us. It’s the tall soldier. He’s about thirty metres away, striding toward us and waving his hand to call the boy back to the camp. I expect the boy to stop, but he presses the AK47 against my spine, forces us to quicken our pace. We get to my four wheel drive, which is near the parked convoy of jeeps, and the yelling is getting louder, closer.

I jump into the driver’s seat and the boy gets in the other side, pointing his gun at me. Sissy and Klaas hop in the back.

Make it fast, Sissy urges.

Ja, ja, ja, Klaas adds.

They buckle their seatbelts. I start the engine and immediately my window smashes. The tall soldier is opening fire on us. I reverse and lose the back wheels in a ditch, and I hear them spin unavailingly, and the spittle of bullets against the side door, and then the tyres gain traction and we’re away.

Once we’re out of sight, I move to switch on my GPS and the boy stays my hand.

Where do you want me to go? I ask, and he shuts his eyes in meditation.

He doesn’t know where he’s going, Klaas says.

He saved our lives, Sissy replies quietly.

The boy opens his eyes and yawns. Miles of dead road drift by, and when we reach a fork he indicates that we should take the road to the left.

The other way goes to the city, I suggest, pointing. He sits up straight and places his finger on the trigger; he’ll brook no argument. I say, Okay, okay.

After we’ve been driving for ninety minutes, the boy straightens his fingers. I bring the car to a halt near a village that’s been burned to the ground. There’s no sign of life; only the outlines of the dwellings remain. The boy taps his chest and blinks back tears.

I think he was kidnapped from here, I say. We drive a little farther down the road and then get out of the car. Beside us is a dried up cocoa plantation, the trees forked like dowsing rods that have lost the art of divination.

As we enter the plantation I notice that there’s a camp there, hidden from the road. Tarpaulins are tied to the branches of the cocoa trees and curious people with sunken eyes begin to emerge, to study us as we approach. The boy says something to a middle-aged woman, who nods approvingly. He guides us between rows of trees to one of the campsites near the end. It’s sheltered by a faded tarp and there’s an old man seated there. He’s fanning flies from the face of a woman, an elderly woman, who’s lying on the ground; she has a severely infected wound on her neck and her lips have gone white. The boy puts down his weapon and holds her hand in both of his.

He gazes up at Sissy. Dok-toor? he implores.

The breath flows heavy through her chest. She shakes her head. Sorry, she says. There’s nothing I can do. Désolée.

The news sinks in, and then the boy’s eyebrows rise with hope as he looks to me. Mah-jik, he says, and I begin to sob, and I see that Sissy’s jaw is tight, and Klaas has his head tilted to the sky, and I watch as the boy realises that there’s no such thing.