January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Peycho Kanev’s work has been published in Welter, Poetry Quarterly,The Catalonian Review,The Arava Review, The Mayo Review, Chiron Review,Tonopah Review, Mad Swirl, In Posse Review, Southern Ocean Review, The Houston Literary Review and many others. He is nominated for Pushcart Award and lives in Chicago.His collaborative collection “r“, containing poetry by him and Felino Soriano, as well as photography from Duane Locke and Edward Wells II is available at Amazon.com. His new poetry collection Bone Silence will be published in September 2010 by Desperanto, New York.
Abandon The Moment
Her breasts like temple’s bells
swing back and forth…
and the highway of her legs
disappear in the horizon,
into the mist of the dream:
there is nothing else except
sweat, lust and sorrow.
Everything sinks into the deep well
of the memories,
once her sure body lit candles
for the darkness in me
and now the pulsating neon of the night
is thicker than any light could banish.
What was once
will never be
again.
The sun goes down
behind the hills
and the birds on the wires –
tilting and silent like
boats by the lake shore.
Abandon all
and all will be again
with or without
you.
Learn to
slide.
Empty Space
The sun penetrates the glass
and hits the small plant on
the windowsill
I look at my toes,
I observe my arm.
From the whiteness of the sheets
her face emerges like some fat drunken
moon and asks me:
“Do you have any cigarettes? “
I light one and put it between
the waiting fingers.
I watch the ashes,
I see the butt.
And then she gets up
and walks naked to the bathroom
leaving me in the empty bed
with the swirling smoke
and the burnt desires.
Some people go through all
of their lives without experiencing
something like that
as for me this is my everyday
routine.
Light
and
grey.
Everything fills.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Ansley Moon was born in India and has since lived on three continents.
Her work has been published or is forthcoming in J Journal, Jersey
Devil Press, Southern Women’s Review, Glass: A Poetry Journal and
various anthologies. She has received a Pushcart Prize nomination and
was chosen as SLS Unified Contest Fiction Semi-Finalist. She lives in
Brooklyn, New York and is a Poetry Editor for The Furnace Review.
Visions from a Brooklyn Window
I
Sometime between night and morning
we are awaken to sound of gunshot.
You held me down.
“That wasn’t a gun. Go back to sleep”
But I am reminded of him, years ago.
The rifle by his side. I know that nothing
sounds like a life being taken
but what it is.
II
Sometimes, I am sometimes shaken from sleep.
You always, undisturbed beside me.
My side damp with a feeling that maybe
I could have made what happened
un-happen.
Your snoring, a reminder that reality
exists, only if we believe in it.
Annabelle’s Cove
I
My father baits my worm,
piercing the silver hook
through the flesh. Delicately,
killing it. Each time he says
that I, like my brothers,
must learn the art of killing for myself.
Preparing me for the life ahead,
without him.
II
He pushes the throttle down,
slowly, eases out of the cove.
His cigarette suspended
in his left hand. His beer
in the cup holder.
As we leave and charter
into the mainland, the sun
bakes his skin a dark brown.
III
On the evenings in Georgia,
we would huddle in the front
of the boat as we glided through
the waves. A soft thud as the motor
lifted out and back into the water.
And the gas from our engine showed
our trail of breadcrumbs, but we never
wanted to find our way home.
IV
Year passed. The cove went up
and down, and back up in price.
My brother saving my cousin,
my mom’s Easter lilies, grilling fish,
playing checkers, swimming
in the dark. And all of us.
Washed away with the dock.
Summer
Summer was picking blackberries from the vine,
being the smallest and the only girl, reaching
beyond my brothers. Throwing some back
but keeping the ripest for myself, inside
the bowl I made with my shirt. The stain,
the proof of my guilt.
Scratches like border lines
of divided countries, the blood,
small bodies of water.
My legs, a map of all my sins;
the trees I climbed. And almost
being caught. On someone
else’s property.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Viki Holmes is a widely anthologised and prize-winning British poet and performer who began her writing career in Cardiff as part of the Happy Demon poetry collective. She has been living and writing in Hong Kong since 2005. Her poetry has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Wales, England, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, Macao and Singapore. She was twice a finalist in the John Tripp Award for spoken Poetry (Wales), and was a runner-up in Hong Kong’s inaugural Poetry Slam. Her first collection, miss moon’s class, is published by Chameleon Press (Hong Kong) and she is co-editor of the Haven (Hong Kong) anthology of world women’s writing Not A Muse, which has launched at literary festivals in Ubud, Hong Kong, and at a variety of locations in the US and Canada.
aqueous
We didn’t know what to drink, what was possible
when the light beckoned; kinked finger’s promise
of a coin flicked to the ocean’s wishing well:
spun from thumb to fore-finger,
tossed in the tumble of tide and night.
We hardly noticed it at first, huddled
in the depths of the evening, but
the doors hinged open, in an instant,
we were more than warmed, cuddled up
in an amber glow. We were soaked
in light: sub-mariners peeking
from a fringed amber bubble,
questing for treasure.
Our eyes swum; we found a place to sink into.
Shoals of wanderers ushered the closeness you’d written.
Reassurance shimmering
through the fronds, we plunged together,
a kiss predicted, promised. I replied:
fumbled clutch at a coin’s wish; latched
in the murmur of a mermaid moving seawards.
Silently but singing.
discoveries made collecting botanic samples
after Adam Aitken
on these cliffs we imagined we knew one another
looked back on how we’d nostalgised endlessly.
it was over before it started:
caravan’s land of grey and pink, pre-history,
pre-liminary. set adrift, we fashioned
joints from bamboo, made fires over
sand-hoppper cities, watched cliffs
burn. it was our last place, running
away from a hatful of acid and
not enough drugs. the sky loomed
and we came back here, parked
up in your red car, shivering
through the sun’s comedown.
somehow we made it, and in
the cradle of the night’s arms
we almost made it right
that time. yellow gorse
trifoliate spines
waiting for the scorch
for regeneration
fire razes some,
others need the
heat so they can burst.
a cormorant flashed
for a moment,
years below us.
off-duty, watching
us let go.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mehnaz Turner was born in Pakistan and raised in southern California. She is a 2009 PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellow in poetry. Her story, “The Alphabet Workbook”, is forthcoming in the August 2010 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Asia Writes, The Journal of Pakistan Studies, Cahoots Magazine, The Pedestal Magazine, Desilit Magazine, and An Anthology of California Poets. She is currently at work on her first poetry manuscript, Tongue-tied: A Memoir in Poems. To learn more about Mehnaz, visit her at www.mehnazturner.blogspot.com
Mugged
This morning a bird mugged me,
its beak pecking at my hair for twine.
The oven mugged my ginger cake
this evening. After thirty-four minutes,
it was shaped like a canyon.
For years, Iraq’s mugged the television,
oil hungry despots have mugged Iraq.
Last night, the sky mugged
by 1200 clouds, signaled an apocalypse.
California’s mugged my Pakistani roots,
mugged every square inch of Lahore out of me.
My mother says, nothing can mug a person’s
memories. I say, the empty suitcases
in my closet have mugged my optimism.
The last time I tried to visit Lahore,
the airline mugged my ticket, the computers
had mugged my reservation. In London,
I had to make a U-turn.
That December I spent two solitary weeks
reading in my apartment. The homes
in Ventura had been mugged by Christmas lights.
Snowmen with carrot noses grinned
clown-like on the front lawns.
One night, near midnight, I drove
around town looking for something to mug.
My pockets were empty. I hadn’t spoken
Urdu in months. I ended up at a diner
where a shiny waitress brought me a mug
of coffee. When she asked about my eyes,
I told her they were waiting to look
at everything I’d ever lost.
Once when I was sixteen, I was mugged
after mosque. A philosophy book shot an arrow
through every minaret I’d seen. Snow gathered
around my heart. For years, it seems, I’ve been
scraping pans, drinking fire, dodging birds.
Everything New
That night, I couldn’t escape menace.
I stared down at the dripping faucet
in my kitchen, cursing under my breath.
The evening had been a fickle light bulb.
A long conversation with my mother sparked
by the flame of our tongues, the phone
heavy in my hands as the light seesawed
on and off. The whole house shook like
the belly of a lamp nudged by a careless hip.
I had worn a night like this before where
darkness thickened behind the shades, where
I was the skin and the veil, the neck
and the wrench. I spotted a spider teasing
out a web in my dining room, and later
sifting through saris in the closet, my fingers
pressed over dust, and I imagined each garment
in the tomb of its own unwearing,
like the weeks when no light bulbs glowed
inside me, and there were piles of memories
on my desk. I had managed with my khakis
and cotton tees, the odd dress which suggested
I had the fleeting charm of a tourist.
But that night, in Los Angeles, I made sure
to touch the green-lipped hems, even the turquoise
shawl my mother handed me once as a wish.
Scarf by scarf, shoe by shoe, I spelled a prayer
with my hands, making everything new,
even the belts and the caps. Even that too small
ruffled skirt I once bought from a clothing store in Lahore
with all the white of a summer cloud
between my eyes, light fusing with my breath.
China Silk Shoes
I womaned my way into fourteen pairs in the rack.
Three more in the coat closet and four under my bed.
My husband hums the math, skims a puzzled look
over my feet. His favorites include the red sneakers
and flamenco heels. Men are simple, he says with
a shake of his head, as if complexity were a tarot deck.
And I wave through the twin response: part zen
teacher, part succubus. How can I explain that city
women live in the clickity-click of their imaginations.
The sidewalk’s a runway, a yellow carpet spilling
into countries of leaf. How can I explain, when there
are the other days I wish I could pivot barefoot
through the weeks. But my soles would grow restless.
Nothing like a leather strap over each ankle to make
the dinner wine taste like meat. It’s not just a pair
of shoes. It’s that weeping woman in Picasso’s oil
on canvas, getting up and stepping out. She gives her
hips a purposeful shake. I’m headed crimson, she says,
reaching into a kitchen bowl to grab a handful of cherries,
before she puts on her china-silk shoes and colors free.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Aimee Norton is a research astronomer with a PhD from University of California, Los Angeles. She is a lecturer and researcher at James Cook University in Queensland. An emerging poet she has published in Many Mountains Moving, Paper Wasp, Byline and Literature in North Queensland (LiNQ). She was a featured reader in 2008 at Edge: A Reading Series of Emerging and Young Writers hosted by Casa Libre en la Solana in Arizona and a finalist in the 2005 poetry competition hosted by Many Mountains Moving as judged by Marcus Cafagna. She enjoys the parallel ways in which physics and poetry can compress great, big experiential truths into small spaces.
On the Road to Sexual Freedom
I’m grateful to lovers, every one, who flashed me the salt in their eyes
or Morse coded me in pleasure text to say passion
is a part of compassion. But my memories are pocked on all sides
by girls in tight cotton wearing NO on silver necklaces,
bank tellers of reproduction, these ascetics sat upright
with books covered in the brown, grocery-sack paper of thrift.
They insisted I do the same. Fear rose from them like startled birds.
The No-girls quick-syllable words were bought behind counters
stocked with lottery tickets and plastic saints.
I pitied such shortsighted chastity.
What they called a one-night stand was transformative.
Sex dissolved pain in the detergent of time. How empowering
to be chosen, even neon-light briefly, by another.
As a genius teenage fuck, I won the Nobel Prize for loving
several years running. My talent was seeing each brittle yeoman
for who he really was. In return, I was dubbed as easy, gained
a reputation spread by the fire tongues of the No-girls,
I threatened the sexual economy. Brigitta called me Slut
in her strangled pigeon voice. So I played parade music,
straight-ahead drum and bugle, and marveled on the downbeats
at all the No-girls didn’t know. This: a talisman against loneliness
is an old lovers name spoken aloud. And this: even a memory
of being held remains strong against the bowhead of time.
So here’s my note to the sanctimonious: Stop dinging
the sides of my dreams with fictive piety. Up ahead,
I see the Romeo nation, where Latissimus Dorsi curve
into the small of men’s backs and a chorus of stories
are sung as forearms become blunt instruments of bliss.
Somewhere here,
a spell of indifference
This body, it could be any body.
Rather, any body could be mine.
And the town, well, it is any town –
the street names wiped clean at dawn.
My husband, an arbitrary man,
is no less and no more than other men.
The children, small dear loaves of life,
are randomly being drawn out by time.
Anywhere, with any one,
any me could be.
I can’t tell if the sentiment
is laudable or laughable,
whether I’ve attained enlightenment
or disillusionment.
But clearly, it doesn’t matter.
The menu is always the same.
The apples arrive with
their leafless stems,
and the bird outside my window
is the same one outside yours.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Born in 1988 in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong is currently an undergraduate English Major at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His poems have received an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Beatrice Dubin Rose Award, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as two Pushcart Prize nominations. His work appear in Word Riot, the Kartika Review, Lantern Review, SOFTBLOW, Asia Literary Review, and PANK among others. He enjoys practicing Zen Meditation and lives in Brooklyn with an 84 year old lady who he nurses in lieu of paying rent. Visit his blog at www.oceanvuong.blogspot.com
Arrival by Fire
Wooden teacups, steam swirled into the blue
then gray of morning. There was no one there to drink.
Before dawn blurred the edges of the sky,
when darkness made fools of limbs, we followed
the lantern’s golden eye, blinking from across the shore.
The river sliced our legs at the waist. Water
could not keep our secrets. When a croc’s eyes lit
like coals in the dark, my mother’s hand
clasped my mouth. The scent of sweat and garlic
would infuse my dreams for years. I had to touch
to believe my father was shaking. But there
is something different about reptiles.
Unlike humans, they do not eat when full.
But to disappear one must be swallowed
and so, we crawled into the bowels of a boat.
When we drifted to where sky and sea vanished
into a black wall, someone began to sing
a childhood song, and someone else begged him
to stop. The air began to tremble
as a hundred prayers hummed through my skin.
And where a fragment of moon fell through the hull,
a blue river of piss and vomit streamed
across the deck—washing away the fallen tears.
When there was too much silence, we would place
a hand on the closest chest, feel for drumbeats
then drift into dreams of chrysanthemums
flickering in the youth we’ve never known.
When we reached the new world, we dissipated
into shadows, apologized for our clumsy tongues,
our far and archaic gods. We changed our names
to John, Julie, Edward, or Susan. How many mirrors
have we tried to prove wrong? Who were we
when burning houses dimmed with distance,
and we watched our fathers hurl their hearts
into oceans where the salt sizzled in their wounds?
Now, on nights like this, when sleep sounds too much
like the sea, when the bed stretches into a ship
we cannot abandon, all we have are these stories, resurrected
like ghosts over steam of tea. Listen. Someone is trying
to croon that old song but the voice cracks over words
like Mother, Home. Nicolas, comrade, brother, whatever
your name, touch here—my hand, and remember: we were drifters,
we were orphans, but mostly, we were heat—steam
escaping
our bones.
If You Are a Refugee
There will be nights when you wake
to touch the photo, your fingers
fading the faces you cannot name.
They are phantoms of your own,
whose eyes have watched the precession
of waving hands
diminish into distance.
There will be moments, between
a lover’s kiss, when you remember
the taste of blood,
and the limits to the answers
one mouth can hold.
When you sweat, you will sweat the oil
that has stained the city
of which you only know
from what is lost.
You will return to that city,
beg the woman whose hair
has grayed to scalp to tell you
your true name. You will stare
into her turbid eyes and ask
of the crescent in your mother’s smile.
And when you dream, you will revisit
the body in the forest, say
it is not your brother’s. You will see again
the naked man crouched
by the charred house, licking ash
from his fingers to taste the bodies
he can no longer hold.
If you are a refugee, you will come to praise
the thickness of walls, the warmth
that clings to cotton
from embrace,
the cricket’s song
in a night virgin to death.
But before you leave
what is gone forever,
go back. Go back and gather that boy
you left behind. The boy who stood
at the edge of a field
where your father once prayed
with a pistol in his mouth.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Weam Namou was born in Baghdad, Iraq as a minority Christian, and came to America at age ten. The author of three novels, she studied poetry in Prague and screenwriting at MPI (Motion Picture Institute of Michigan). She is also the co-founder and president of IAA (Iraqi Artists Association). Her articles and poetry has appeared in national and international publications. http://www.pw.org/content/weam_namou
A Childhood in Iraq
Sun shines over a mélange of
green grass and white snow,
like a lime flavored slurpee.
Snow in rarely detected in Baghdad.
Through the window a squirrel
passes by, nibbles at the cereal
I’ve left for it on the deck.
Pets are not encouraged in Iraq.
A lunch of hot tea and a cold slice
of pepperoni pizza I prepare for me,
without removing the pepperoni.
Pork is not halal in the Arabic world.
I listen to the poetic Quranic verses on TV
even though I belong to a Christian minority
who still speak Aramaic, called the Chaldeans.
They’re being persecuted in their native land as we speak.
All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the Worlds…
the imam leads a prayer
I remember the paper bag of baby green apples
my father used to bring home for us.
My younger brother and I tied
their stems to a string,
treated the apples like yoyos.
We had no toys back then, nor swings.
We built play houses out of cardboard boxes
pretended pillows were our dolls,
pots and utensils our musical instruments.
In Iraq, today, children can’t afford to be that simple.
Didn’t need anyone to read to us a bedtime story
aunts and uncles, cousins and neighbors,
were our heroes and villains.
Now, terrorists and gangs rule that part of the earth.
America
I talk about you, as many others do,
sticking labels such as arrogant and gullible
over your name, like stamps over a large Christmas package.
You dress me with possibilities,
I try on this and that outfit of different colors and sizes,
meanwhile focusing on your limitations.
You do not reprimand me for my verbal thoughts,
rather, you listen, weigh the options and consider
whether what I have to say is worthy of action.
Oftentimes, I even receive applause
for pointing out your negativities and idiocies.
In return, you remain true to the First Amendment you’ve provided.
You’ve allowed me to take a deep look at your weaknesses
and in turn caused me to appreciate your strength and integrity.
That’s real balance, the yin and yang, of our planet.
While I love the country of my birth, of Iraq,
where I was blessed with the best childhood,
I must admit, had I remained there, as an adult,
Freedom of Speech is something I may never have experienced.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
A dual Australian-Irish citizen, Nathanael O’Reilly was born in Warrnambool and raised in Ballarat, Brisbane and Shepparton. He has lived in England, Ireland, Germany, Ukraine and the United States, where he currently resides. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Antipodes, Postcolonial Text, Transnational Literature, Prosopisia, Blackmail Press and Southern Ocean Review.
The Hills of Bendigo
For Sean Scarisbrick
We spent the summer of ninety-two
In the hills of Bendigo
Living in a colonial house
Replete with a croquet lawn,
A ballroom, servant’s quarters,
A wine cellar, an in-ground pool
And a deep, dark verandah
Overlooking an acre of grounds
Scattered with pine needles,
Stone benches and rose bushes.
Home from uni on summer holidays,
We lived on my parent’s charity.
After sleeping past midday
In a room with burgundy velvet curtains
And foot-thick stone walls,
Days were spent swimming in the pool
Seven steps and a leap from our beds,
Reading Eliot, Salinger and Hardy
In the shade on the verandah,
Writing long letters to girls
We thought we knew and loved,
Listening to U2, Van Morrison,
And Hunters & Collectors, always
Getting a kick out of the line
“Way out back in Bendigo.”
When the heat was bearable
We walked over the hills
Along winding goat-track streets
Left over from the goldrush,
Discovering tiny pubs,
No more than front rooms
Of miner’s cottages,
Occupied by old blokes
In op-shop three-piece suits
Perched precariously
On vinyl bar stools.
Old Jimmy fished a battered
Harmonica from his waistcoat
Pocket, shook out the saliva
And puffed out a wheezy tune,
His narrow shoulders hunching
As the condensation slid
Down the side of his pot of VB.
Some days we walked to the mall,
After passing the oval, the Art Gallery,
The high school and the park,
Browsed countless racks of CDs
We couldn’t afford at Brash’s,
Left our sweaty fingerprints
On Thrasher and Rolling Stone
Under the disapproving glare
Of the Chinese newsagent,
Took refuge in the Public Library
Where we flipped through LPs,
Discovering Klaus Wunderlich
And His Amazing Pop Organ Sound.
Evenings were spent at home
Drinking my parents’ wine,
Eating thick slabs of cheese
Grilled on toast while watching
Day-night cricket matches on telly.
Or, if the Austudy hadn’t run out,
Drinking Carlton Draught downtown
In the Shamrock Hotel or the Rifle Brigade,
Playing pool and the jukebox,
Bullshitting about the great things
We would do after finishing uni,
What we would do for a living,
Where we would live,
Where we would go on holidays,
Which girls we would sleep with.
At night we wandered through the hills
Drinking from the silver bladder
Ripped from a box of Coolabah Riesling,
Unable to sleep in the January heat.
We took turns waiting on the swings
In the park across from the Milk Bar,
While you or I made reverse-charge
Calls from a Telecom phone box
With shattered glass and AC/DC graffiti.
Afterwards, we went back to the house
For more grilled cheese on toast,
More chilled wine, and conversations
That lasted into the early hours
And echo through the years.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Born in 1963, a Hindu in Malaysia, Anushka Anastasia Solomon left for the United States as a teenager to study journalism. She returned to Malaysia with a B.A (Creative Writing/Education), envisioning change of the race and religion based Malaysian system of Education. Her poem, “13 Ways of Looking at Malaysia” inspired by Wallace Stevens, which appears in Asia Literary Review Autumn 2008, articulates that vision. The Malaysian government, then and now, frowns upon her ideas. In 1998, due to intolerable family violence and persecution after her mother’s premature death, Anushka, her husband, Ben Solomon, and son David Marshall converted to Christianity, fled Malaysia and immigrated to the United States.
The author of two poetry chapbooks, Please, God, Don’t Let Me Write Like A Woman, (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and The Hindu and The Punk, (Pudding House Press 2009), Anushka’s work is featured by Amnesty International at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Scotland, 2007, 2008 and 2009. She lives in beautiful Evergreen, Colorado. (www.atthewindow.us)
Recipe for Success –Slumdog Millionaire
I buy the Bollywood look in Wal-Mart
Gold hoop earrings with yellow beads
$1.50 marked down from 5 US Dollars
Decorate my years shrivel the sari to a
A skirt I buy at Forever 21
$10.00 marked down from more than that
With my skin the color of cinnamon bark
I dress up for a lark. I make naan and
Have An American friend photograph
Me by the Yellow Barn
The lentils are
Cooking slowly, I will add some spinach
And prepare to garnish the dish with some
Dried red chillies
That will crackle in my frying pan
And on your tongue, I will hum a Hindi
Song and you will never know
That perhaps
Like you
I do not know how to live
In a slum.
Cooking A South Indian Curry From Memory
1.
I slice tender red beef, the cold silver blade
Of the knife creating an everglade
Collide worlds in a colander
Demarcate the days on the calendar
Take a cutting from the past
It is not my intention to aghast
Those who consider the cow holy
I just want to cook a curry boldly
Solely
from memory.
2.
Listen. Here in America,
They tell me– the poet – that the onion
an apple and the potato
all have the same taste.
That the differences in flavor
Are caused by their smell.
Listen. Here they prove
these things
Science, Surveys, Studies.
I can’t argue with their facts.
I don’t. The facts mount this
case from Malaysia
And ride it, like a show horse,
around and around until I am
ground into the spices
bleeding the truth in my marrow bones
for William Butler Yeats
and this South Indian Curry I am cooking from
memory because I am
ornery
3.
To prove the onion, an apple
and the potato the same
They say – pinch your nose
Take a bite.
They will all taste sweet.
Try it!
Booze, women and writing.
All the same.
4.
I remember my Hindu father swinging a bag
Of goat’s intestines
For my mother to cook, she ran water
In the sink
Obediently washing the insides of a goat
Wrinkling her nose in distaste
Listen. Charles Bu-cow- ski wrote a poem
About a Mexican girl
Who washed his private part
With a rag
5.
Contemporary American men’s poetry
is that sultry
the Buddhist monks who conducted
Bu-cow-ski’s funeral rites
must set their sights a tad higher
for women. Our gravestones
ought to read: “Don’t Try”
like his.
Alternatively:
“Don’t Cry”.
The more things change
The more women I find
On the streets – like loose change.
They, like all things, stay the same.
6.
Or am I cooking this up from memory
Mixing it up with chicory
Using it to pound a point in
Like ginger and garlic
In a medley of flavors
For a variety of favors
Like the Thai and Indonesian women
With splayed toes
Who for a few bhat or rupiah
Rub the stress off the backs
Of the missionaries selling Jesus
Vying for a chance to stand
Beside Bill Gates? Accolades.
7.
I ought to go back to cooking the
South Indian curry from memory.
Don’t use beef. The cow is holy.
Remember?
Use chicken. Hold your nose.
And all the horses in Colorado.
It would be a good idea to hold
Your tongue as well, my belle.
Show some cleavage at Christmas.
And don’t joke about mangoes.
Or tell them that wearing a sari
And exposing the navel is asking
to get raped. Save the juicy parts
for when the Guests go away.
..unless they stay.
8.
Then you can tell them the recipe.
How you stand poised on the edge of the precipice
Cooking South Indian curry from memory
Listening for some inner harmony
Orange and purple bougainvillea
Climbing over the balcony like all
The idealized Tamil lovers
Of the silver screen
Your love of all things
falling unrequited
like the bougainvillia
Bunga kertas, paper flowers
Your nail polish, the new indigo blue of the sky.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Author and musician Toby Fitch was born in London and raised in Sydney. His chapbook, Everyday Static, was published by Vagabond Press, 2010. His first full-length book of poems Raw Shock is forthcoming in 2011 with Puncher & Wattmann. tobyfitch.blogspot.com
Light Switches
As with rocks emerging
in the lull between waves,
flourishing green, rekindled flames,
memories arise comets
with strangely familiar names
seen from the bottom of the sea like somehow
I stepped on a light switch.
But as with autumn’s
undertow of leaves, rained-on
letters, tumbledown dreams,
memories dissolve coins cast into the sea,
while the one I keep sifting for
is lost in the gravel at my feet, the swollen
waves engulfing the rocks.
New Year’s Resolution
On a night of fireworks veiled in mist,
of Ferris wheels burdened by clouds —
after hollow music beat down the door to my ears
and soggy bones had dragged me home —
I found myself on a mattress on the floor
in the middle of a pitch-dark room
awake and listening to the echo, upstairs,
of an old, upright piano playing grand arpeggios —
twenty- to thirty-finger chords,
friends gathered round in warm chorus,
singing old standards with abandon —
and it occurred to me I want to see daybreak again
having become both cavernous and water-logged,
more afraid of myself than anyone else is of me.
Bird in a Carpark
She saw this coming:
stealth bombers hunting bats;
hailstones and lightning;
shadows burnt into the walls.
The land has been lifted
from under her claws
and replaced by a
complex of rectangles
where fluoro lights flicker,
mercurial, sleep-deprived;
where spellbound lemmings
go further and further
down, seeking a way up.
Concrete warren, trap
of all traps — the future
like tarmac setting fast
around machinery both
redundant and indispensable,
hissing with oil, crawling
with sparks. Tangled in
webs, she cracks her beak
on the ceiling of black thunder,
her cry becoming a distant,
dissonant echo.