Author: mascara

Marjon Mossammaparast

Written by mascara on April 6, 2015. Posted in Poetry.

Marjon is a secondary school teacher of English/Literature residing in Melbourne, Victoria. Her poetry has been published in Australian Poetry Journal, Antipodes, Southerly, The Moth Magazine, Island, Gargouille, Blue Dog, and Going Down Swinging, and am forthcoming in Contrappasso magazine and The Australian.

Goodbye To Mother

Wet fog rolls over the city as you roll out,
Upon the water.
We row you out
Over the anchors, into the channel
To scatter flesh preternaturally made dust
Where the dead can finally walk like the miracle.
Which way will you float Mother?
Along which blue corridor shall I lap in the dark
For your hand
When all I am is body,
The heaviness that sinks under the swell?
We are gathered here, the ungathered
Clutching you to our bosom,
Drifting with the tide,
Where once you heaved us out of
And gave us to earth.
Who will name me now that you are everywhere
But silent look on this great parody,
This elemental shadow-world?

Catherine Cole

Written by mascara on April 6, 2015. Posted in Poetry.

Professor Catherine Cole is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong. She has published novels and two non-fiction books. She is the editor of the anthology, The Perfume River: Writing from Vietnam and co-editor with McNeil and Karaminas of Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television, (Berg UK and USA, May 2009). She also has published poetry, short stories, essays and reviews.

from War Aphorisms

21.

If you fuck in the fields on a summer night the moon will appear at midnight.
Such is the nature of elongated days that when at last you see a face in the enamelled sky you must remind yourself not to be afraid:
it is just the moon, veiled and bursting.

22.

I stand on the edge of a field, on the edge of a trench full of poppies, runaway barley, weeds.
In the trench is all history since 1914.
Isn’t a trench a cruel thing?

23.

Two hares box in the frosty field,
their hind legs turning hoare to crystals.
A halo of frost around their heads, ears long flat ribbons.
Naked fun.
They disappear, white tails the last of them.

24.

Sometimes a horse looms from the mist,
ghost or real, who can tell.
It’s hooves send clods flying.
I know horses.
I know mist.
I know soil.
What truth can be found in that trinity.

25.

An old stone wall with eighteen bullet holes.
Probing fingers enter the wall.
If the souls of the dead need somewhere to go it surely must be holes filled with abandoned swallows’ nests.

Meeta Chatterjee

Written by mascara on April 6, 2015. Posted in Poetry.

Meeta Chatterjee is a lecturer in academic language and literacy in Learning Development, University of Wollongong. Her academic and professional interests lie in the area of doctoral research and writing. She has written about humour in Indian women writing in English for her Masters thesis. She has been writing poems for decades, but has only published occasionally. She enjoys the challenges of creating multisensory images to tell a story.

Erasure

Those who saw her go, deny that she was naked.
She tugged the sky off the clothesline, wrapped it
round herself and walked into the river-they said.

Fourteen days later lamps and rumours flared
on the banks of the Ganges.
Fishermen say that she strides into the village
stark naked, on full moon nights.
She ignores offers of clothes,
ties her wet hair into a bun
and walks past the living.

Some say she visits the temple, clangs
the bells to crescendo and then
dissolves into the flame of an oil lamp.
Others have seen her behind the abandoned house
beckoning drunken gamblers.
“Very unbecoming of a Brahmin girl-even in death”,
they shake their heads.
Others claim that they have seen her big with child
waving her voice at the wind—
her songs naked too.

In her own home, no one speaks of her.
They’ve blacked out her pictures from family albums
and scrubbed her off collective memories.
But on some cold winter evenings, when the sound of the conch
scatters and scatters
through the incense-filled prayer room
images of my dead eighteen –year old aunt dance
on grandma’s eye-lashes
asking to be grieved.

Landscape: Travelling Through South Australia

The coastline disappears-bewitching in its flouncy, racy skirts and the
promise of bare skin.
The smell of the rainforest and the seeds in the shade is memory.
The sky is a chalice, upturned on land –the last drop gone.
Occasionally the soil desperate for seed and water
parts its itchy legs
stealthily to irrigation and grows guiltily pubic.
But mainly, the land blisters and throws up dead animals on the veins of roads.
Bones jutting, skin broken and broken again, the land endures the sun
roaring its orange pulp of heat.
At nightfall, the sky and land meet like wounded saints- too tired to sleep.

‘Erasure’ and ‘Landscape: Travelling through South Australia’ were published in The Journal of Literature and Aesthetics in 2004.

Elizabeth Burns

Written by mascara on April 6, 2015. Posted in Poetry.

Elizabeth Burns lives in Lancaster, United Kingdom. Her latest collection of poetry is Held (Polygon) and her pamphlets include winner of the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets, The shortest days (Galdragon), and The scarlet thread (Wayleave), which is currently a Poetry Book Society featured pamphlet.

Swallow

When I was a swallow, I could fly ten thousand miles
without stopping. I could swoop from one side
of the globe to the other, over land, over sea
in one great sweep. When I was a swallow
I knew when to leave the wheeling sky
above that high wall where I nested:
I could feel days shortening, evenings
growing darker. I did not want winter,
I wanted summer always under my wings,
each year I headed southwards, southwards,
as if the south pole pulled me there, as if by this
I could outwit the turning earth, the lowering sun.

Joseph Han

Written by mascara on April 6, 2015. Posted in Poetry.

Joseph Han was born in Seoul, Korea and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. His fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Bamboo Ridge Press, Word Riot, CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art & Action, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Eclectica Magazine, and Hawaiʻi Pacific Review. As of Fall 2015, he will be a Ph.D. candidate in English at University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa.

Real estate (dream house)

This burning house belongs to my father
waiting for wood to buckle under

the weight of heat. The realtor said
he could keep the land if he remained

standing in the center. Like a good son,
I crawl around beams, past melting

plaster burning ripples, searching
for father through walls. He kneels

in the living room, writing plans with
his finger dipped in soot and saliva

mixed in an empty cup of soju.
We’ll build a hagwon here, father

and son. Next round waiting to boil.
I sit by him and pour in the glass

meant for me, unable to tell sweat from
tears on his face. On my own. They taste

like ocean. He grabs his lower back in pain.
You can teach English, I can drive students,

give a tour. His face melts under eyes,
cheeks sagging. No more taxi cab.

I wrap myself around his legs to hold
him in place, a beggar wondering how

much left of us can burn. Please, no less.
My father stands tall – a faithful candle.

Lachlan Brown

Written by mascara on April 6, 2015. Posted in Poetry.

Lachlan Brown is a lecturer in English literature and creative writing at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga. His first volume, Limited Cities, was published by Girmondo in 2012 and was commended for the Mary Gilmore Prize. He has been shortlisted for the Blake Prize and the Newcastle Poetry prize. His poems have appeared in journals including Cordite, Mascara, Antipodes and Rabbit. Lachlan is currently working on a manuscript that explores his Chinese-Australian heritage, his grandmother’s hoarding, and the complex promises of the Asian century.

(self-justification)

Every stupid thing has a story
that ties it back to the house.
Words follow me outside,
threaten quiet atrocities.
But after a while I stop
listening to outro tracks,
the security door locking on its own,
my body leaving to fill the sixth dumpster.

(even chance or, why you find it difficult to speak with people in a lift)

peaceful evil
turbo-dieselling
consumer sentiment
with your dumb tongue
like that folding bicycle
your uncle brought
back from Taiwan
in his decade of tricks and risk

Jessica Yu

Written by mascara on April 6, 2015. Posted in Poetry.

Jessica Yu is the recipient of the 2014 Young Writers Innovation Prize. Her recent/forthcoming fiction, poetry and non-fiction can be read in The Best Australian Poems 2014, The Lifted Brow (online), Kill Your Darlings, The Digital Brow, PITCH, Seizure, the Meanjin blog, Peril, Dialect and Right Now. Her short story, “Keh Kut” won Best Fiction Piece in an Express Media Publication in 2014 and her essay, “Flab and Excess…” was listed as one of the top ten essays published on The Lifted Brow Website in 2014.

durian

beneath that thick skull and
prickly personality
you are softer
and sweeter
than diarrhoea

cockles

your two halves open
like ears to a compliment
I swallow your pearl
it falls apart
on the raw edge of my tooth

Shirley Lu

Written by mascara on April 6, 2015. Posted in Poetry.

Shirley Lu is a poet from Sydney, New South Wales. Her work has appeared in Freckled Magazine, Thistle Magazine, A Hundred Gourds, and elsewhere. She is interested in and inspired by the origins of words, the gap between a source and its translation(s), and sunlight.

Buddha’s Hands

Night, wayward. Dreams weave in and out of thunderous minds,
tidal and green. We sway in our sleep. Fruit bats inch towards
the Tropic of Capricorn, towards swirling air. Cats slink, purr, pounce
like clouds. Feet slide along bedsheets covered with imaginary dots
marking base camps. A murmur in the dark. A line of light east of here,
humming. A dull beeping at Bb. Feet fall to bamboo floorboards, heavy
with smog and sunflower seeds. Cats run back to their owners,
who are distracted by coffee makers. Fruit bats hang in casuarina forests.
Day, emergent. We burst out of ourselves like Buddha’s Hands.

RD Wood

Written by mascara on April 6, 2015. Posted in Poetry.

R. D. Wood is of Malayalee and Scottish descent and identifies as a person of colour. He has had work published or that is forthcoming from Southerly, Jacket2, Best Australian Poetry, JASAL and Foucault Studies. His first book of poems is due to be released by Hawk Press in September 2015.

Cento from Paul Celan

for Mervyn Morris

White, white, white
The whitest root
Of the whitest
Mime themselves whitegray
Mourning, gone awry

Black
We stand here
Black – a decoy
No admittance! Blacktoll
The disbranched archangels stand here

To stand, in the shadow
Your dream, butting from the watch.
Still songs to sing beyond
Count them, touch them
You – all, all real. I – all delusion.)

Note:
This poem uses whole lines from Pierre Joris’ translations of Paul Celan’s later poetry found in Breathturn Into Timestead (FSG, 2014). A full list of references can be provided.

Matt Hetherington interviews Stuart Barnes

Written by mascara on April 6, 2015. Posted in Interviews.

Stuart Barnes is a Tasmanian-born, Queensland-based poet and the poetry editor of Tincture Journal and Verity La. In 2014 he was named Runner-up in the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and co-judged the ACT Publishing Awards’ poetry category. An anthology of poetry, with Robbie Coburn, Nathan Hondros, Rose Hunter, Carly-Jay Metcalfe and Michele Seminara, is forthcoming from Regime Books. Twitter @StuartABarnes

MH: Who is the poet who has most inspired you, and why?

SB: At my 30th birthday party a friend gave me a Brunswick Street Bookstore voucher, which I redeemed for Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems (and Mervyn Peake’s The Gormenghast Trilogy, which inspired Faith, one of my favourite records by The Cure). Collected helped me navigate a particularly intense depression. In Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Lowell writes: “[Plath] almost makes one feel at first reading that almost all other poetry is about nothing. … [Although] I can scarcely bear to read her poems through, they are so agonized. A bit formless for my taste, too”. Interesting observations. The former I agree with; the latter rubs me the wrong way. I find Plath’s poetry and prose—Johnny Panic, Unabridged Journals, Letters Home—transformative, distinct, composed; thick with wit, drive, love, hope and well crafted last lines. These aspects continue to inspire; her life’s minutiae only insofar as they influenced her writing.

MH: What is poetry for?

SB: Pleasure. Pain relief. Enlightenment. Escape. Absolution. Past, present, future.

MH: Could you tell us a little about being an online editor? What are the pains and joys of this?

SB: I love editing poetry for Tincture Journal and Verity La, but the online environment is a double-edged sword: 24/7-accessible, yet an energy leech. More and more I dream about living off the grid, but I don’t want to relinquish what I do. To be able to read and edit others’ poetry is a privilege and a great collaboration. I often think I’m more enriched by the experience than the contributors. One of the joys, which outnumber the pains, is accepting that first work by an exceptional new writer: an unearthing of buried treasure. One of the pains is sifting incorrectly sent material; guidelines are so easy to follow.

MH: If you could live anywhere else in the world where would it be? Why so?

SB: Ancient Egypt or British East Africa. Dreams, visions, past life experiences.

MH: Could you list ten of your favourite poetry collections please…?

SB: Alphabetised: Ashes in the Air, Ali Alizadeh; Free Logic, Rachael Briggs; When My Brother Was an Aztec, Natalie Diaz; The Three Fates & Other Poems, Rosemary Dobson; Bone Scan, Gwen Harwood; The Striped World, Emma Jones; The Earth in the Attic, Fady Joudah; Ariel: The Restored Edition, Sylvia Plath; The Brink, Jacob Polley; Akhenaten, Dorothy Porter.

MH: What is your relationship to music?

SB: I was raised in a home where there was always the right LP for the right occasion. Before I could speak I could hum Dolly, Johnny, The Beatles. From an early age I’d set my alarm for 11 p.m. every Friday and Saturday, watch rage till just before my parents woke. I loved, equally, the new music, the guest programmers, the Top 50 Countdown. Besides befriending Gwen Harwood, hymns were the only thing I liked about church. At ten, with my own pocket money, I bought my first record: Bananarama’s WOW! An obsession with everything Stock Aitken Waterman followed. At fifteen I was introduced to The Cure, discovered a number of almost-as-brilliant UK bands: Curve, Ride, Dead Can Dance, Swervedriver, Cocteau Twins, Stone Roses, My Bloody Valentine, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Jesus and Mary Chain. From America: Primus, Fugazi, Red Hot Chili Peppers. In those days triple j was a spring of astonishing alternative music; I digged, just as much, Hobart’s local mainstream stations. When I moved to Melbourne at eighteen I met a girl obsessed with Britpop and electronica. Each week, music drew us to Q&A, Smashing, Teriyaki Anarki Saki. Blur, Pulp and Suede I still listen to; FSOL, Sasha and Digweed and Laurent Garnier, too. At the turn of the second millennium, Warp Records, Philip Glass, Henryk Górecki. Gay, underground and day clubs, raves and dance parties offered up a honking skein of artists. For a number of years I played violin, guitar, piano; for several I wrote songs and sang “as badly as Robert Smith”, according to my family (I always wanted to be a writer, but I always wanted to be a rock star more: too shy; and I never could perfect that union of lyrics and melody). For a couple in the mid-noughties I DJ’ed at three Melbourne pubs. Eventually I stopped going to bars, clubs, gigs, stopped smoking, drinking and whatnot. “Our relationship will suffer!” I needn’t have worried. I became more resourceful (podcasts, SoundCloud, Shazam). Nowadays, I put on music less often, though with no less affection; I’ve learnt to enjoy the silence. Occasionally I miss the dance floor’s sweat ‘n’ bump, its tribal triumph. All music and all lyrics, particularly The Cure’s and Robert Smith’s, have influenced the big things, writing especially. Music has been pacifier and blue security blanket. Catalyst of Dionysian Mystery and screaming at the moon. Music is white flag, time machine, memory aid, stimulant, narcotic. Saint Etienne’s “I couldn’t go to Somerset on my own, so I used Top of the Pops as my World Atlas”. Magic moments (Underworld’s ‘Born Slippy’ at Wall Street at midnight on New Year’s Eve; The Orb’s extended live version of ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ at Earthcore at dawn; Diamanda Galás’ version of The Supremes’ ‘My World Is Empty Without You’ at twilight at Hamer Hall). Music is my North, my South, my East and West. The perfect—the only—drug, best served without preconception. Causes me to dance and sing, get up and do my thing. I am as happy cranking Zappa as I am miming ABBA. Spice Girls are as vital as Billy Bragg. Not every day, but I wake, write, edit, eat, shower, daydream and fall asleep to music.

MH: You are a big writer of centos. What attracts you to them?

SB: For years I’ve marvelled at the art of mixing vinyl, which I never mastered in the DJ days. I’ve never solved a cryptic crossword; the cento, I think, is poetry’s cryptic crossword. The challenge is highly attractive; I like rules, e.g., ‘Forcento’ (Rabbit Poetry Journal #10) lifted one line from six poems about gravity, ‘Penultimates’ (Regime 05) the second-to-last line from each of Ariel: The Restored Edition’s forty poems, ‘Cinquecento’ http://cordite.org.au/poetry/notheme3/cinquecento/ one line from fifteen poems written in the sixteenth century. Also (and this realisation occurred while talking with friend and fellow writer Nigel Featherstone last year), writing a cento is my way of critically engaging with other texts without reviewing them (I enjoy reviewing, but I’m slow at writing prose).

MH: Once upon a time poetry was quite popular. If in fact it still is, what can we do to make it even more popular, without sacrificing any of its difficulties?

SB: Sacrifice its poet-difficulties: the cynics, the trolls, the ogres.

MH: Why is the word ‘poet’ slightly amusing?

SB: “I’m a poet” is almost defiant; I have to find strangers’ and acquaintances’ insensitive responses slightly amusing: “I didn’t think they still existed! Where’s your inkwell, where’s your quill, where’s your powdered wig? Your favourite poet’s Plath, eh; you love all that doom and gloom? Does poetry pay the bills? When are you going to grow up? When are you going to get a real job?” And my favourite, which Ivor Indyk mentioned in Sydney Review of Books http://www.sydneyreviewofbooks.com/20-march-2015-ivor-indyk-on-novelists-and-poets/: “Poets just sit around for months on end, waiting for inspiration”.

MH: How does living in Central Queensland affect your writing?

SB: In my editorial for Tincture Journal Issue Nine http://tincture-journal.com/buy-a-tincture/ I wrote about the astrological implications of living so close to the Tropic of Capricorn. The proximity of rainforest and the sea and clearly seeing the Milky Way have expanded my awareness of, my sensitivity to nature’s rhythms. Rockhampton receives over three hundred days of sunshine a year, a stark contrast to Melbourne, so I’m a happier chappie, a happier writer. Moving from Victoria utterly befuddled me. When I settled, however, the past’s horrors were uncorked and in poured new influences. I started taking yoga and meditation seriously; now, I practice every day. I kind of haunted Clifton Hill from a tiny three-storey two bedroom flat; here I’ve an enormous three bedroom Queenslander with a tyre swing, mangoes, coconut palms … Recently, my first tropical cyclone; in Marcia’s aftermath, as I gape at the poincianas and the gums, I’m reminded of lines from The Cure’s ‘Shake Dog Shake’ (“I’ll tear your red hair by the roots”) and Plath’s ‘The Hanging Man’ (“By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me”). This city’s very different, still very much an inspiration.

MH: Are there any areas you feel poetry should not venture into?

SB: No.

MH: When are you going to put a book out?

SB: A publication, with fellow poets Robbie Coburn, Nathan Hondros, Rose Hunter, Carly-Jay Metcalfe and Michele Seminara, is forthcoming from Regime Books.

~~~

MATT HETHERINGTON is a writer, music-maker, gourmet Indian chef, soccer nut, bludger, and lover based in Brisbane. His first collection of all-Japanese-related forms (and fourth poetry collection) is For Instance, published by Mulla Mulla Press. Some current inspirations are: Timbaland, Frisky Dingo, Jess, Luce, and northern sunshine. Matt’s latest published poetry can be found in a three-way collaboration with poets Ryan Van Winkle and David Stavanger here: http://ryanvanwinkle.com/projects/commiserate-2015/