May 12, 2025 / Nathan Morrow / 0 Comments
Judith Beveridge is the author of seven previous collections of poetry, most recently Sun Music: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2019 Prime Minister’s Prize for Poetry. Many of her books have won or been shortlisted for major prizes, and her poems widely studied in schools and universities. She taught poetry at the University of Sydney from 2003-2018 and was poetry editor of Meanjin 2005-2016. She is a recipient of the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal and the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement. Her latest collection is Tintinnabulum (Giramondo, 2024).
Listening to Cicadas
Thousands of soda chargers detonating simultaneously
at the one party
*
The aural equivalent of the smell of cheese fermented
in the stomach of a slaughtered goat
*
The aural equivalent of downing eight glasses
of caffeinated alcohol
*
Temperature: the cicada’s sound-editing software
*
At noon, treefuls of noise: jarring, blurred, magnified—
sound being pixelated
*
The audio equivalent of flash photography and strobe lighting
hitting disco balls and mirror walls
*
The sound of cellophane being crumpled in the hands
of sixteen thousand four-year olds
*
The aural equivalent of platform shoes
*
The aural equivalent of skinny jeans
*
All the accumulated cases of tinnitus suffered
by fans of Motörhead and Pearl Jam
*
Microphone feedback overlaid with the robotic fluctuations
of acid trance music
*
The stultifying equivalent of listening to the full chemical name
for the human protein titin which consists of 189,819 letters
and takes three-and-a-half hours to pronounce
*
The aural equivalent of garish chain jewellery
*
A feeling as if your ear drums had expanded into the percussing surfaces
of fifty-nine metallic wobble boards
*
The aural equivalent of ant juice
*
Days of summer: a sonic treadwheel
Peppertree Bay
It’s lovely to linger here along the dock,
to watch stingrays glide among the pylons,
to linger here and see the slanted ease
of yachts, to hear their keels lisp, to see
wisps of spray swirl up, to linger along
the shore and see rowers round their oars
in strict rapport with calls of a cox,
to watch the light shoal and the wash scroll,
and wade in shallows like a pale-legged
bird, sand churning lightly in the waves,
terns flying above the peridot green
where water deepens, to watch dogs
on sniffing duty scribble their noses over
pee-encoded messages, and see a child
make bucket sandcastles tasselled
with seaweed, a row of fez hats, and
walk near rocks, back to the jetty where
fishermen cast out with a nylon swish,
hoping no line will languish, no hook
snag under rock, to watch jellyfish rise
to the bay’s surface like scuba divers’
bubbles, pylons chunky with oyster shells
where a little bird twitters chincherinchee
chincherinchee from its nest under the slats,
to feel that the hours have the rocking
emptiness of a long canoe, so I can relax
and feel grateful for the confederacies
of luck and circumstance that bring
me here because today I might spy
a seahorse drifting in the seagrass
with the upright stance of a treble clef,
or spot the stately flight of black cockatoos,
their cries like the squeaking hinges
of an oak door closing in a drafty church,
to walk near the celadon pale shallows
again where I’ll feel my thoughts drift
on an undertow into an expanse where
they almost disappear, and give thanks
again to the profluent music of the waves,
and for all the ways that light exalts
the world, for my eyes and brain changing
wavelengths into colour, the pearly
pinks of the shells, the periwinkles’ indigo
and mauve, the sky’s methylene blue.
These poems are published in Tintinnabulum (Giramondo,2024)
May 12, 2025 / mascara / 0 Comments
Alison J Barton is a Wiradjuri poet based in Melbourne. Themes of race relations, Aboriginal-Australian history, colonisation, gender and psychoanalytic theory are central to her poetry. She was the inaugural winner of the Cambridge University First Nations Writer-in-Residence Fellowship and received a Varuna Mascara Residency. Her debut collection, Not Telling is published by Puncher and Wattmann. www.alisonjbarton.com / Instagram @alison_j_barton
Mirror
|
my mother was a bear that couldn’t walk itself |
| her reside a sulking weight I trailed |
|
|
grief hauled from under the volume of her |
| my reflection, an infancy of sound-gathering |
|
|
|
|
like an instrument archiving its vibrations |
| I stored language for both of us |
|
|
tooled it to fill her gaps |
| we bore the cacophony as one |
|
|
|
|
she arranged its tenors |
| woefully concrete, stalkingly anchored |
|
|
the shape of me lined with benevolent deceit |
| her indebted angel-monster |
|
|
at the door she would cant, hoping it might open |
| night would plummet and I would flinch |
|
|
breathe in what had been committed |
| abandoning her in the light |
|
|
words formed and stuck to the back of my throat |
| when I measured her |
|
|
I got an elliptical question that reinforced our wounds |
| petrified its answerer |
|
|
steeped into the matter of things |
| staining the passage |
|
|
some are lost learning to speak |
| some have voices that shake walls |
|
|
fill quiet rooms |
| but the reprise, the inverted translation |
|
|
desecrated us together |
|
|
| we needed to finish like this |
|
|
with an aching acid chest |
| marched to an absolute |
|
|
now I am emptying my mother |
July 29, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Lindsay Tuggle is the author of The Afterlives of Specimens (2017), which was glowingly reviewed as a cover feature in The New York Review of Books, American Literature (Duke UP) and American Literary History (Oxford UP). Her debut poetry collection, Calenture (2018), was one of The Australian’s Books of the Year, shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature’s Mary Gilmore Award and Australian Poetry’s Anne Elder Award. Her work has been supported by numerous international grants, including the prestigious Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress, and a Travelling Fellowship from the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2023, Lindsay was a Writer-in-Residence at Château d’Orquevaux in France and Bundanon Trust in the Shoalhaven of Australia.
Read more at http://www.lindsaytuggle.com
The Arsonists’ Hymnal
Our story starts in the field
and ends in the bath
or vice versa.
I can no longer remember when things came full circle,
when our endings and beginnings began
to eat their own tales.
In the middle, there is fire.
Summer was not yet the vast,
burning thing it has become.
Arson is a form of prophecy.
Flames have tongues, and so do we—
whether we use them or not.
The fires were warning us,
all this time.
No one believes a prophet,
until it’s too late.
That night, we lay on the grass,
watching for heat lightening.
We cannot sleep without seeing
that jagged rupture in the sky,
a tangle of stars and satellites
discernible only by blinking proximity.
After the lightening
our adolescent
poison quickens, then recedes.
After, we sleep.
But not tonight.
Tonight, we speak again in our mother tongue,
a dual fluency we alone share.
At first, we don’t hear the shift.
Slippage is like that, both sudden and gradual.
They forced it from us long ago
or so it seemed.
We remember the doctors’ creeping hands
encircling our throats,
probing the wet insides of our mouths.
A needle. A parade of arms.
Slowly, we learned to speak
the Queen’s tongue.
We forgot to remember
the poem unfurling
in the air between my sister and I,
the slow dance of our exhalations.
Then,
at thirteen,
a murmuration escaped.
Our bodies begin
to stretch and swell.
Our marrow aches.
We are always hungry.
Games over who can eat more, or less,
then dance til exhaustion.
Our limbs crave sleep,
but are too long for our narrow beds.
So we lay in the field,
waiting for the heat to break into light.
We didn’t set the fire.
Not with our hands.
We dreamed of burning for so long,
at last the lightening answered our call.
We lay still as the grass flumed ever closer,
let the dying embers kiss our skin.
In our secret tongue, we agreed
to remain, unmoving,
to let the ending write itself.
Did we wake in the bath
or the grave?
I can no longer recall
which of us resides underground.
Oracles and fire-eaters share fatal tendencies.
It is a dangerous business, prophecy.
Paralysis is innate, in the face of extinction.
Fawn response on a global scale.
When ashes fall from your mouth,
remember, you asked for this.
Swallow hard, sister.
One last time.
June 10, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ben Hession is a disabled writer living on Dharawal country, south of Sydney, Australia. His poetry has been published in Eureka Street, the International Chinese Language Forum, the Cordite Poetry Review, Verity La, Bluepepper, Marrickville Pause, The Blue Nib, Live Encounters: Poetry and Writing, Antipodes and the Don Bank Live Poets anthology Can I Tell You A Secret? He has reviewed poetry for Verity La and Mascara Literary Review. Hession is a music journalist and is involved with community broadcasting.
Cemetery Visit
Sun-faded synthetic flowers adorning
the name plates – flourishes of petals, each
touching on personal, paled memories
of good works that had abounded
in life’s now abandoned field.
One day, their visitors will return, I guess,
to these living artifices of fidelity,
in hope – that plastic, resisting hope –
against our impermanence:
we’re seeing today, remaining in bloom.
April 25, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Chris Ringrose is a poet and literary critic who lives in Melbourne. His poetry has won awards in England, Canada and Australia, and he has published critical work on modern fiction, literary theory and children’s literature. He is the co-editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and a poetry reviewer for the Australian Poetry Journal. His latest collection of poems is Palmistry (ICoE Press, 2019). Creative Lives, a collection of interviews with South Asian writers, was published in 2021 by Ibidem/Columbia University Press. His poetry website is http://www.cringrose.com
Widow
She listens all day
to the flapping of sheets on the line
the banging of the barn door
At evening, unpegs
the sweet-smelling washing.
An arrowhead of migrating geese
stirs a longing for elsewhere
Their honking
drifts faintly down, breath
speaking Earth’s subtle logic
Two years have passed
like the backwards shuffling of pages
as one searches for forgotten lines
She has shut down the news, knowing
that when the big thing happens
someone will knock on the door
Notes the silver trail, leading upwards.
Last night the snail scaled the wall
that the hound could not leap.
The way things are
The rain is talking to the night.
It’s blustered on the farmhouse panes
for centuries, and never blown itself out.
The trees are reined back by gales
then plunge their heads like horses.
Our farm is manhandled by the seasons:
plunged into an icy bucket of winter
hauled out spluttering into the towel of Spring
summer bristled in an upheaval of grass, crops and weeds
shaved by the blades of autumn.
Our cattle dung the earth;
the clouds scamper across East Yorkshire
to the North Sea or glower through the drizzle.
This is the way things are, year after year.
Tenants of earth and sky, raisers of stock,
we walk the bounds at evening with dog and gun,
smell pine resin in the place where we began.
Christmas Day’s a work day
when the grass beneath our feet
crackles like the icing
on the massive cake indoors.
Future farmers conceived to the sound
of hail that volleys on the bedroom wall
as the farm hauls itself
from season to season
and we run to keep up.
We speak to the trees.
The woods are slow to answer.
Servants of the soil,
we gather the eggs,
shoot the foxes and crows,
and walk into summer.
Sap pulses in the stalks, below
disintegrating dandelion clocks;
they, too, have to hand on life.
Pigshit and steam, and
this summer’s swallows
bolting from the stables
to wheel up and around
the insect-laden air.
December 18, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Joanna Cleary (she/her) is an emerging queer artist. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The /tƐmz/ Review, The Hunger, Gordon Square Review, Apricity Press, Digging Through The Fat, Typehouse Magazine, The Gravity of the Thing, Funicular, Canthius, and Queer Toronto Literary Magazine, among others. Follow her on Instagram @joannacleary121.
Tree Poem
Today, my ecology professor starts class by asking
what a tree is and all I know is that they’re hulking,
impenetrable things I could never climb: my palms
breaking on bark and my body stuck stupidly below
while my brothers clambered from branch to branch,
but occasionally I catch myself thinking of the time
when I almost did it—clung to a low-hanging branch
and lifted my feet off the ground, found my footing
on the trunk, allowed myself to become suspended
in air—until my arms gave way and I dropped down
like all the other times before, my face red, the tree
unmoved as I leaned against it in either silent prayer
or defeat, waiting for the poem I started that moment
to end, though it wrote and rewrote and rewrote itself
even after both my brothers outgrew climbing trees
and the hours they spent hoisting themselves higher
became memories, even as a pretentious grad student
raises his hand to say how we can find god in nature
(like it’s that easy), and I could reply saying I haven’t
but perhaps I once did: in that moment above ground,
no longer standing on tree roots, I could’ve believed.
November 18, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Marcelle Freiman’s poetry collections are Spirit Level (Puncher & Wattmann 2021), White Lines (Vertical) (Hybrid 2010), and Monkey’s Wedding (Island Press). Her poetry has appeared in anthologies and literary journals that include Antipodes, Axon, Cordite, Mascara Literary Review, Meanjin, Meniscus, Southerly, StylusLit and Westerly. She is an Honorary Associate Professor at Macquarie University.
Camera Lucida – photograph of my mother as a child c.1931
A few seconds of time, a day
when you were four, maybe five –
your gaze intent
towards the camera’s lens –
and it’s only in the way
the light is caught by the right side
of your cheek, your white socks
and bedroll held on a shoulder,
silver birches alongside, pathways
crossing behind you lit between shadows,
the far shimmer of a lake beyond the trees –
that you were there
that moment, that day – the click
of a shutter, your mother? your nurse?
who had cropped the dark hair
framing your face – your clear eyes
seem to see into facets of a future
you could not possibly envision, then.
Chemical iridescence
as negative turns to image –
it’s in the captures of light that day
that I am given your confident stance
the sassiness of your gaze – transformations
of light – the way that overlapping scales
of a butterfly wing
will come alive and multiple
with falling angles of the light –
you, in a deep shaded forest
November 14, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dorothy Lune is a Yorta Yorta poet, born in Australia & a best of the net 2024 nominee. Her poems have appeared in Overland journal, Many Nice Donkeys & more. She is looking to publish her manuscripts, can be found online @dorothylune, & has a substack at https://dorothylune.substack.com/
Author photo: royalty free picture of a ladybug
Terra nullius
The concrete
foreground is italicized, it lifts,
the first to die in the sun is my Phoenix,
she incarnates as a rifle—
protector of all placeholder-kind,
I send an inquiry to the Australian government
& it reads: why do I
burn before I tan, perhaps it’s true
that it’s the same with death— death of skin,
death of language,
something inexact comes to be
a spokesperson. I enshrine my unbelonging as a
self invitation, my
unbeknownst to Australasia,
despite this I’m identified as unfurled. My womb
rose up & the
insolvent babe dried away
two thirds of its material— I was the last to break on
a screed, damp &
pale like an English settler,
the ivory turret strayed from his castle— there are no
English crowns here.
I aestheticise my identity
with maroon knit turtlenecks & buoyant hair that curls
upward like a
beach’s evening crest—
enclosed yet open & furled in public winds.
November 10, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Raised in a family of step-siblings and a procession of stepmothers, Ellen soon learnt the art of resilience and the importance of finding her own voice in the world. From early on, poetry was the
language she used to align the uncertainty of her world. Delving around wires of disconnect, her words find strength from wherever she calls home at the time. Ellen’s work appears in The Canberra Times, on a footpath in Adelaide, Cordite, Manly Ekphrastic Challenge, Australian Poetry Collaboration, Woman of Words, Rabbit, Australian Poetry Anthology and Westerly. Out of the Blocks is out with Puncher and Wattmann.
crashed
it rained and the tv went numb
the atmospheric antenna
dialled-in the wild
then fogged up the bulb
i wanted to be more than my surrounds
to be
unaffected by storms and poor reception
but my fortress of rock collapsed
from being
too much
they gave me a test
and labelled me antisocial
pegged me to a journey
to define the triggers inside
an answer to the speeding
an explanation to the experimental
too ready too reactive too risky
i harnessed heat
to weld the friction
and still i strayed
fast cars
and boys
those stark corners of acceptance
my hands reaching
for the physical attributes
of a connection
October 2, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Priya Gore-Johnson is an Indian-Australian poet, writer, aspiring academic, and textile art enthusiast based in lutruwita/Tasmania. Their work tends to focus on grief, liminal spaces, and fragmented identity and the ways in which these topics are often intrinsically and intricately linked. They are deeply passionate about translation and reception studies, especially when concerned with classical Sanskrit literature and the contemporary “so-called Australian” diasporic experience. You can currently find their work in the University of Tasmania’s student magazine, Togatus.
Polaroid of a Girl with a Sparkler
Happy New Year!
Is it though?
The world is ending and everyone is dancing.
Faces awash in the yellow glow of sparklers, bodies moving freely to the slow syncopated beat.
The air is full of the impenetrability of youth, the apocalyptic glory of it all.
Each note, each breath, bursting and scattering like fireworks.
Happy New Year!
I am in it.
It’s all around me, I can’t escape it.
My body moves against my will, my hands engraving gold into the air.
I smile. I laugh.
I am so sad I feel as though I cannot hold it all within me.
It could spill out of me at any moment,
saltwater running through my hands.
Mindless chatter.
Endless dread.
You are gone and my world is ending.
Everyone looks through me
but never at me.
My sadness flashes back at them like light off a mirror.
It blinds me too.
My world has ended!
I want to scream and scream until they understand it,
the way it sits twisted and brittle inside of me.
It’s not that I want to stop the party
or break the illusion
that allows them to revel in the ambrosia of their youth.
I just want them to look at me.
Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.
Can you see it?
The sharp teeth of loss?
The cavern of grief?
The swirling, endless, void
filling me up and up and overflowing
down my cheeks and arms and belly?
I used to be one of them.
The weightlessness, the pure unbridled joy, the drunken haze spinning reality to unreality.
Now I can’t imagine it.
Reality sits balanced on my first rib, poised to drop like a rock to the pit of my belly.
Nothing is the same
as it was before
and it never will be
again.
My world ended last year. How can theirs keep going?
Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.
Tell me that you see me.
Tell me that you see that I’m not the person I was.
Tell me that you love me anyway.
I feel the immense weight of what I’ve seen and felt and lost pushing down on me.
The grey uniformity of hospital beds.
The monitors keeping rhythm with our drowning hearts.
The profound horror of it all.
And your soft voice in my ear:
You’re going to have to cry about this, I’ll tell you that one for free.
I love you. I love you.
And theirs, a gentle echo of yours
moving across worlds.
Happy New Year.
September 24, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
joanne burns writes poetry, prose poems, short fictions and monologues. She has been active in the Australian Poetry scene since the early 1970s. Her most recent poetry collection is apparently, Giramondo 2019. She is currently assembling a new collection rummage.
cataloggia
the aperitivo antipasto
hour slidels into view
there’s something in the air
verando aperolicks
proseccutions muebles wickeramas —
organic or synthet why not just
click/collect
raj meets gatsby in the lumen
of a hubble bubble no unnecessary
toil or trouble a wicca wonka
spelling bee pollinates in the furnished
suburbs of the blest
flock
her white as rice gown
just fitted not the best
choice for an elongated
heatwave her white as rice
hem grazing her diffident toes
where was her hair brush the audience
was waiting somewhere out there stranded
commuters in a summer delirium larks hidden
in the crimson braid that ran down the sides of
her costume like vascular complacency were
refusing to sing she couldn’t locate the lyrics
to any of her songs, just petite hums where was
janis when you needed her or florence her long dead
godmother who looked nothing like a fairy that sprawl
of teryiaki tofu squares on the floor of the train should
have been a warning in that lingering afternoon & all those
enigmatic tattoos on the arms and shoulders of the texting
harpy opposite no point wearing those snazzy new shades
if you can’t read the tracks
September 24, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jo Langdon lives and writes on unceded Wadawurrung land. She is the author of two poetry collections, Snowline (Whitmore Press, 2012) and Glass Life (Five Islands Press, 2018), and was a 2018 Elizabeth Kostova Foundation Fiction Writing Fellow. Her recent writing is also published and forthcoming in journals including Cordite, Griffith Review, Island, Overland and Westerly.
Performance
Sure—there were flowers then
petals where they’d trembled
their own lovely heads loose. I wrote
in thanks & the reply came, ‘Is that it?’
I guess it was—an ending signalled
well before the roses’ demise.
We offered each other nothing
of consolation—the flowers & I
at odds, though they might have told
that they wanted no part
in this production, that it all came down
to hyperbole and waste, whatever
there was left to feel rotten about.
The flowers were worn out
like similes—contrived
in the roles ascribed to them, parts
I confect for them even now, long gone
though they are. I am sorry
only that I neglected
their certain beauty, neither exchanging
their fetid water nor giving
much mind to their final
dignity—how they towered even as
they came undone.
August 10, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Webby, AM FAHA
9 February 1942 – 6 August 2023
Respected scholar, literary critic and author / editor of over 200 works, including books, articles, and reviews. The following is a very short selection of some of her many writings about nineteenth century women poets, poetry, and print culture, a field she defined through her work.
Elizabeth Webby, Early Australian Poetry: An Annotated Bibliography, Hale & Iremonger, 1982.
‘Born to Blush Unseen: Some Nineteenth Century Women Poets’ in A Bright and Fiery Troop: Australian Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century. Ed Debra Adelaide, Penguin, 1988.
‘Introduction’ The Penguin Book of Australian Ballads, eds Elizabeth Webby and Philip Butterrs, Penguin, 1993.
‘Writers, Printers, Readers: The Production of Australian Literature before 1855’ ALS 13.4 1988.
‘Foreword’ by Elizabeth Webby in Katie Hansord, Colonial Australian Women Poets: Political Voice and Feminist Traditions, Anthem Press, 2021.
Photograph: Rosalind Webby
For Elizabeth Webby
I could say that I first met Elizabeth Webby at an ASAL conference. And I was incredibly excited to, and to first see her, looking on in the audience, as I nervously presented my first ever paper on a little-known nineteenth-century woman poet, knowing that she was the almost only other person to have written or ever thought much about her. I think that she felt the same excitement, from the other side, that somebody was finally interested and pursuing that same obscure subject, the things less recognised, that she had also given her time to, because of the same recognition of a huge imbalance and a desire for justice – and had never forgotten despite many other priorities pressing, years ago. But it isn’t exactly true. I first met Elizabeth Webby in a more unusual place than that. I was there looking for something to make sense of everything (or maybe just anything) through. I was looking for other women’s poetry. I suppose at its heart I was looking for someone who thought, or was, a bit like me… somebody who expressed themselves and their queerness against the ways of the world in ways that I could understand and feel understood through.
The place I met Elizabeth in was a book called Early Australian Poetry: An Annotated Bibliography. One of several books that Elizabeth wrote, and this one she had published in 1982, the year before I was born. This is a more strange book though; unlike any other book I’d read. It incredibly contains all the titles, author names or their initials, dates, page numbers, and a frequently utterly hilarious brief descriptive note (something like: ‘on a recent bank robbery’ or ‘long, rambling love poem’ or ‘wishes he were in a less restrained society such as Italy’…) for the hundreds upon hundreds of poems that were published in newspapers in so-called ‘Australia’ before the year 1850. I knew I could find more women who were poets in there, if nowhere else, and so I went looking through it all very carefully. Of course, that was how I first found Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, the poet whom I was talking about at the ASAL conference where I met Elizabeth for the first time in person. It was how I first found most of the poets. But before that, I was already in awe of this incredible book full of the potential for answers, doorways into more questions. And in awe of its author. If that wasn’t incredible enough, she later told me she had wanted to go all the way up to the year 1900, in writing her amazing bibliography of newspaper poems – but she’d had a baby. We laughed. I’d also had a baby not too long ago. In fact, my new baby was at the conference with me, little Arlo. Once I’d found the numerous entries of poems in Early Australian Poetry: An Annotated Bibliography, I knew this was what I had been looking for: women poets who had been consistent contributors to newspaper poetry. Then I found the little book of some of some of Dunlop’s poems that Elizabeth had published, also in the early eighties. I learned a lot by opening and going through those doorways in Elizabeth Webby’s annotated bibliography. It undoubtedly changed me, to embark and pursue the questions I had about gender and poetry and the past and the contexts of production and reception so deeply like that, and to be allowed and even encouraged to, flowing with myself into writing instead of trying to fit the wrong ways in the world, and thinking of ways through it all. And Elizabeth’s encouragement was so unwavering, warm, certain, and loving. She was eventually an examiner of my PhD thesis, when it was completed. She was also tough, had high expectations, and expressed frustration, seeing me at an event on women’s writing after this, that I had not kept going, done more work. I didn’t know how I could explain to her, but everything then seemed to be going all wrong in my life… I was on my own, my mother had died, and I had fallen into a dark place of hopelessness about the world and all memory and meaning. Somehow, Elizabeth still believed in me even there, and encouraged and supported me to turn my thesis into a book. I still pinch myself now that I did it. She believed in me, even when I didn’t. And because she did, I somehow could. That was how it happened. This was a part of her magic. I remember that I cried the first time she signed an email she had written me, love. It really meant the world to me to have her support, and always will. I know she gave this same gift so generously to so many people. I am heartbroken that she has now left this world. We know being only one person, it can easily feel like things are too big and too impossible to change. I have felt this many times, but I have also felt in myself how her wisdom and curiosity and generosity and kindness really did affirm things, change things, make things possible, make a difference, and so I think, can ours.
Katie Hansord
August 1, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Vale Alf Taylor
(18.11.1945 – 29.7.2023)
Last weekend brought sad news of the passing of Alf Taylor. Alf, a Yuat Nyoongar man, brought his unique perspective to bear on the fields of Aboriginal literature in particular and of Australian Literature more generally for nearly three decades. He produced a substantial opus which has impacted on many different audiences and will long continue to do so.
I first met Alf at the launch of Winds in 1994 at Dumbertang in Perth. I remember he was cracking jokes and put me at my ease. Later when I was compiling the material with Rosemary van den Berg and Angeline O’Neill for the anthology, Those Who Remain will Always Remember, I asked him if he would be interested in doing a piece about how he started writing. The work he produced for our anthology became the seed of his astonishing autobiography, God, the Devil and Me.
Taylor was a member of the Stolen Generations. He grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in the Benedictine Monastery at New Norcia in Western Australia. His writing opens a door for many readers onto this troubled period of history, giving us a heart-felt personal account of someone who lived through it. In an interview with me he said that in the mission the children were told that ‘our Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal language was a mortal sin.’ He recreates the world of childhood in his short fiction, poetry and memoir, bringing alive the resilience, intelligence and creativity of children – their care for each other, their love of Country, their ability to heal, the weight of memory, their penchant for playing tricks, and their strong bonds as young Aboriginal people. He also brings to it the piercing vision of the adult – the clear-sighted and uncompromising critique of empire and of the dysfunctional elements of the church.
He describes life in New Norcia in God, The Devil and Me. The book is characterised by his very fluid sense of humour which became a tool of survival for him both as a child and an adult. In the interview he said: ‘without humour … I would have been dead’. He loved writing about ‘clowns’, joke-cracking characters who laugh above all at themselves and made other people laugh along too. Alf would always make people chuckle. His writing is infectious but thoughtful as well, and often pointed.
Taylor was a master stylist; he’s a deft satirist, sharp but generous, and a careful observer of people. His poetry and fiction bear evidence of the skilful use of Aboriginal English and the Nyoongar language. His writing gifts us a rare and precious glimpse of the living language of Aboriginal people. He was fortunate to benefit from the expertise of Magabala Press who were able, for example, to provide an editor such as the Nyoongar writer, Rosemary van den Berg who edited Long Time Now. This relationship nurtured his work and allowed it to flourish.
Taylor was a master storyteller. Much of his work bears the trace of the spoken language(s) and the embodied encounter of storytelling. This included his skilful use of humour and irony which always kept me guessing as a reader.
Alf will be remembered by his writing. A versatile and inventive writer, He wrote two books of poetry, Singer Songwriter (2000) and Winds (1994), a book of short stories, Long Time Now (2001), a memoir/autobiography, God, the Devil and Me (2021), and his selected poems and short stories, Cartwarra or what? (2022). His work also appears in the anthology Rimfire (2000).
Taylor and his work are a bright star that mesmerizes us, captures our attention and holds it. As a non-Aboriginal reader and teacher, I’ve seen him enthrall students across the world, in Australian classrooms and lecture theatres, and in Germany, France, Spain and China.
It has been a great privilege to read and teach Alf’s work; a privilege that students all over the world have shared and will continue to share. Many of my non-Aboriginal colleagues who read, teach and write on his work have talked to me about the sense of great good fortune they feel in coming upon his work and the responsibility it engenders in them. His passing makes the gift of his writing all the more precious and pressing.
Anne Brewster
UNSW
June 30, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
James Salvius Cheng was born in Myanmar, though he lives and writes in Western Australia. When not writing he works as a doctor. His poetry has been published in Meniscus.
History intrudes upon the marketplace
Your body walks in grey space under grey light.
People whisper and tongues weave their bright
memory. The little ones flicker, pluck and pull, pushing
by tall men with dirt upon their elbows. You, pulling
the log from your eye, will pluck a needle from the shelf, will stray
to the counter and stare unblinking in the stranger’s eye.
Your mind returns then to soft lips, to softer
fingers, to the warmth of old nights and winedrawn laughter.
You leave behind your love, yielding to the flat gaze,
your palm, holding white, smooth and eternal.
June 28, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Leila Lois is a dancer and writer of Kurdish and Celtic heritage who has lived most of her life in Aotearoa. Her publishing history includes journals in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA. www.leilaloisdances.com/writing
Fade into you
At the airport, teary-eyed, I reach for Coco Mademoiselle, sparkling jasmine, rose, patchouli.
I want to remember myself in my breathless twenties. I confused departure lounges with
home as a child. Doesn’t age bring both depth and anxiety? I order a glass of wine on the
flight, listen to Handel’s Oboe Concerto, & think of all the poems I want to write about you
as if no one has ever been in love before, your heart dances in your chest, which is beautiful
by the way, statuesque. Last night, Hope Sandoval sang “I want to hold the hand inside you”
& your finger was inside me, our bodies signing infinity. You are every dark lover in new
wave cinema, every soft-papered love letter ever penned. I drift, zero gravity, the aircraft
scaling the sky. I never want this feeling to end.
June 8, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Funny Ethnics
by Shirley Le
ISBN: 9781922863737
Affirm Press
Reviewed by MEGAN CHEONG
My greatest flaw as a critic is my inability to maintain critical distance. I actively seek out books that I expect will resonate with me: a novel about a mother who writes poetry, a collection of essays exploring the nature of intergenerational trauma. Shirley Le’s debut novel, Funny Ethnics, is about Sylvia Nguyen – the only child of Vietnamese refugees – and the formative experiences that are supposed to culminate in her ‘coming of age’. Instead, Sylvia exhibits Sinbad levels of endurance as she sweats through multiple cycles of the same institutionally-inflicted suffering (tutoring centre, selective high school, law degree) until she is rendered ‘physically incapable of absorbing any more dry information’ (213). This reads like a criticism but is, for me, the most relatable aspect of Funny Ethnics, as well as the characteristic that gives the novel its curiously flat topography.
Other, arguably less profound but no less familiar details of Sylvia’s world: the ‘cork coasters of all shapes and sizes’ (1) deployed to protect the prized marble dining table where Sylvia strategically chooses to announce her decision to drop out of law and pursue writing ‘Just in case things became physical’ (1). The hilariously militaristic but actually dead-serious sentiment underlying her selective girls’ school motto, ‘Work. Conquers. All.’ (84). The catalogue of media clips showcasing Australia’s particular brand of early 2000s racism (John Marsden’s Lee, Chris Lilley’s Ricky Wong). The cringing parody of her dad, with his ‘beaming moon face’, (2) and her mum, first glimpsed praying to Buddha beneath a ‘hairspray-lacquered’ (2) perm. Funny Ethnics made me laugh so hard it induced a kind of out-of-body event in which I saw, with perfect horror, that I was laughing at the same Asian stereotypes that I’ve been laughing at, for the sake of everybody else’s comfort, my whole life. It is precisely Le’s ability to write in that uncomfortable sliver of an intersection between stereotype and reality that makes her novel so funny – I laughed because it was true, and to relieve myself from the discomfort of the fact that it was true.
Yet though Sylvia spends much of the novel criticising her ‘stupid brain’ (191), hers are not the kind of ‘self-hating jokes’ (147) for which she dismisses Fat Pizza’s Tahir Bilgiç. Beneath the fear that she cannot fulfill her parents’ dreams of entering into the sort of profession that would earn their community ‘a bit of respect’ (9), and beyond the realisation that she has no desire to be a lawyer/banker/doctor, is a bedrock of pride in Western-suburbs Vietnamese culture, and in her family. This pride lends the caricatures of extended family members and other noteworthy personalities in the Viet community the affectionate tone of family anecdotes and directs the pointy end of her observational satire at the encompassing society that denies her and her community respect in the first place. While some of the girls at Sydney Ladies’ College shriek when the ibises that inhabit the school grounds get too close, Sylvia knows from ‘a 7am Google sesh in the computer room’: that the ibises had been displaced from their natural marsh habitats due to urbanisation and river regulation. It didn’t make sense to paint them as pushy or ill-mannered animals when it was our fault they had to make a home in the city, sifting through human trash. (87)
Similarly, Funny Ethnics critiques Australian society for upholding an immigration system that relegates those asylum seekers who are permitted into the country to the literal fringes of the city, at the same time as looking down on the ‘bird-brained Asian’ (68) approach to migrating towards the centre. As one ABC listener whines midway through the book, ‘I drive past a selective school every morning and there are so many Asian students. How do we fix that?’ (57).
Rather than taking the well-trodden path of attempting to garner empathy for the Other by offering up a model of the model minority, Le gives us Sylvia, who consistently fails to flourish in the self-fulfilling machine of Australia’s allegedly meritocratic education system. Instead of expanding, Sylvia’s world contracts when she enters Sydney Ladies’ College. Within the hierarchy of the school, in which the ‘long-legged white girls’ are considered ‘rare and exotic beauties in a sea of ethnics’ (87), the Vietnamese Dux bemoans coming ‘second to a curry’ (82) on a Chemistry exam, and the Chinese and Hong Kong girls gossip about ‘how stuffed’ Vietnam must be ‘if Angelina Jolie had to adopt kids from there’ (172), Sylvia’s only closest friend is Tammy, ‘another Viet from out west’ (63). Sylvia’s days are truncated by the long commute to and from the city centre and continue to be curtailed by the ‘four trains’ she has to take to and from uni: ‘Yagoona to Lidcombe, Lidcombe to Strathfield, Strathfield to Epping, Epping to Macquarie Uni – and back’ (190). Her love interests are few and decidedly uninspiring, if not outright repellent, and over time, she even falls out of touch with Tammy, eventually listing Janine, ‘a Christian Leb chick from Blacktown’ (153) and her only friend at university, as her emergency contact on her first visit to the gynaecologist. I find myself bracing for the kind of prologue in which the protagonist ends up utterly alone and chronically depressed, when, very near the end of the novel, Sylvia attends a poetry slam at the Bankstown Arts Centre where she finally encounters a mirror of the self-respect that has, up until this point, made it so difficult for her to get on with her life.
I loved Funny Ethnics. Not, in the end, for the many ways in which it resonated with me but for the ways that it makes space for itself within the coming-of-age genre: for Le’s rejection of the narrative shapes readily available to her as a novelist, and of the cliché of the quietly brilliant Asian just waiting to be noticed. Sylvia’s story is less one of self-discovery, than it is a long and arduous journey towards understanding that it is a failure of Australian society that there isn’t somewhere for everyone to belong.
MEGAN CHEONG is a teacher, writer and critic living and working on the land of the Wurundjeri people. Her writing has been published in Sydney Review of Books, Kill Your Darlings and Meanjin. She is the recipient of a 2022 CA-SRB Emerging Critic Fellowship.
May 11, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Purbasha Roy is a writer from Jharkhand India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Channel, SUSPECT, Space and Time magazine, Strange Horizons, Acta Victoriana, Pulp Literary Review and elsewhere. She attained second position in 8th Singapore Poetry Contest, and has been a Best of the Net Nominee.
This Heart, This Heart
Who would I show it to — W S Merwin
This heart is a salt lake that cries
its fate of longings. Ways to keep
a season forever inside needs attention.
I found autumn easy for this task. The
gulmohar that saffroned early this year
outside the room window now is an
autumn epic I byhearted twig-by-twig.
Branch-by-branch. A little beauty always
stays in every atom of the cosmos. What
it waits for but a new-angled discovery.
I am mirroring curiosity of a bywind upon
a street. Giving meaning to what but distance.
Many times I desired my heart becomes
a train. At least its march would receive
a settle down. When I want to write this
world, all I can think of is a field. I in the
company of a stubble. How there spentness
has answers but in a language of my sleeping
self. I have a terrible dream memory. After
I wake I can’t recall what goes through my
body, stand between dream life. Morning I received
a hamper from a friend. Flowers two hours
far from wilt. This triggered the memory
of a sandcastle two feet far from strong
tides. How I stood to see it collapse. Sincerely
heartbroken I dug my knees in its no longer
owned plot. The moment became an elegy
while it cradled a sad finish. It had something
magnetic like the night guard whistles. The
thin reach of it to my quilt covered body like
forgiveness fashioned out of ruins. There are
always things that don’t need metaphors. Today
I completed drawing the map of my longings.
Then among the light of my consciousness I
didn’t know the way to explain its crowdedness
and to whom in the language I speak in dreams.
Somedays I act forgetful. That it’s you holding
me like the running blood held by a confident body
March 1, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Acanthus
by Claire Potter
Giramondo
Reviewed by LESH KARAN
Acanthus is Claire Potter’s fourth collection of poetry. Potter writes in a language that weaves mythology with nature, fantasy with reality and then wraps it all up in tulle. If I had to write a one-word review, surreal feels apt, but I don’t, so I’ll start with another one: “acanthus”. This is to say that my first instinct is to look for a titular poem, because in my mind titular poems somehow tie up the work in a loose bow. There isn’t one. Instead, I find a note that follows the contents page, where I learn that acanthus is a plant. Here, I am also offered a sliver of ancient Greek history, of how the leaves became a motif: ‘Passing this votive basket entwined in foliage [on the grave], Callimachus decided to carve it in stone’. A Google search reveals that acanthus leaves are the leaves typically carved into Corinthian columns to symbolise rebirth, immortality and resurrection. This hints at both transmigration and transmutation – of transforming into another being in another time-place.
In her introductory note Potter also quotes Derrida: ‘everything will flower at the edge of a desolate tomb’, and writes that ‘it is on the overlapping edges of these two accounts that this writing might be said to begin.’ I take the words ‘overlapping edges’ to be the heart of the collection. What happens in overlapping edges? The blurb on the back cover tells me of other-worldly ‘literary spaces’ that the reader can fall through. However, it is the self-referential nature of the poem ‘Counterintuitive’ (p17) that further illuminates:
I could never avoid the truth I’d discovered when I first engaged with texts: the self-evident fact of there being no reader nor subject-matter – only images and feelings in a sort of eternity…
— Gerald Murnane
There is writing that escapes the head, rustles
like stars of purple thistle,
moves like the tiniest bones of clavicle, tilts like
a compass from the centre to radius to peregrine. This writing
cannot be analysed or
understood by conventional means. Its solitude is written
in a vine that veins a crumbling ledge, the foliage
of a dream in amber, a map folded then refolded
into the shingles of a summer fan
…
The Gerald Murnane quote could stand in as the epigraph to the entire collection, and the poem itself, an addendum to the note. A handful of poems feel meta and/or performative in this way. For example, I see the first stanza of the poem ‘Errand’ (p38) as what Potter is doing with her poetry:
In and out of leaves the blue tits sew the garden
because to the mother bird in my mind I’ve tied
an infinite string as she zig- zags fervently shirring
distance in a loose smocking of air
By which I mean Potter is the blue mother bird fervently shirring distance with an infinite (eternal) string to create a loose smocking air: the writing that escape the head.
Another poem I want to speak to is ‘The Art of Sideways’ (p 55), because I feel it could stand in as the loose bow that ties the work together. Here, things are ‘layered / and overlapping like shelves of ancient papyruses’. They are also askew: ‘rain can fall sideways’, ‘eyes look aslant’ and ‘there is an angle of forty-five degrees’. Direction (winter light is ‘a trajectory that points in all directions’) and time (a snake’s skin is ‘a simple clock / turning every so often leaving a scaled topography behind’) are messed with, too. Because in such worlds, time, beings and direction don’t play by reality’s rules. To various degrees, these are the themes that imbue the collection’s 45 poems.
Themes and self-referentiality aside, it is the imagery – alluded to at the tail end of the Gerald Murnane quote – that simply astounds me.
A swan sails her cygnets along a stretch of river
—momentarily they rouse in a ghostly armada
a flotilla of milk wings billowing across the grey water
the mother dips her head beneath a lid of duckweed
leaving a swivel of white teardrop behind
Newspapers describe the father as having flown straight into
a building and died without mentioning how or why
The thought takes me back to Greece, to a girl called Scylla who ended
a war by cutting a lock of hair from her father’s sleeping head
and passing it to Minos, his enemy. Scylla was shunned
then chased by her father until a deity changed her into a seabird
The swans preen layer by layer, a soft smoothing by the underside
of the beak, the ruffle and discard of superfluous feathers
The river plays like a silver hook in their glass eyes
…
(‘The Glass Eye’, p9)
Potter’s imagery is startling in its originality, and at times haunting, such as in ‘The Glass Eye’. But when it is sewn together with narratives and spheres of another time-place, such as Greek mythology, the poem erupts little sparks in my mind: How does the swan’s preening and discarding of feathers relate to cutting a lock of hair? Is the mother swan Scylla? And why is the river a silver hook? The answers don’t necessarily matter, but the questions, the doors that open into thinking and seeing and feeling, do.
Another favourite is ‘The Hidden Side to Love’ (p25). It feels personal – autobiographical – given the first-person voice, and is simultaneously magical, melding the domestic with the natural:
All summer, the bees worked
between the bells of laburnum
sockets of foxglove, blades of lavender
—they saw a task and rose to it
I busy myself with the washing
untwisting funnels of sock, boughs of jumper
rosettes of flannel
The images in this first part of the poem sets up the overlapping of the bees with the speaker: ‘the bells of laburnum / sockets of foxglove, blades of lavender’ mirror ‘funnels of sock, boughs of jumper / rosettes of flannel’. This is how the speaker and the bees are subsumed into one being; likewise, their seeing a task and rising to it without being asked. And in the second half of the poem –
I look down my dress and see spikes of burdock
thistles in plaits hanging to the ground
Crayons, soldiers, ropes of daisy
the couch, the doorknob, the stairs—
They all gather to me
Until I stand and rub my hind legs emphatically
until I disengage everything
to its proper place
and emerge like a queen
made anew from decades of trying
– I see the burdock thistles stuck to the speaker’s dress as the chores that gather to her. And her decades of trying as acts of love, where a worker bee can become a Queen bee. Such is the magic of such love, and its music (there is much beautiful slant rhyme in Potter’s poetry, too).
‘The Hidden Side to Love’, I discover, was published in Meanjin (Summer 2016 and online). The only difference I note is the lack of full stops in the collection’s version. This aspect of form is representative of the whole collection: there is, pointedly, no full stops at the end of lines (if a sentence ends there) or paragraphs (in the case of prose poems) – in fact, there’s minimal punctuation altogether; and when full stops appear, they do so rarely, only in the middle of a line, where a sentence has ended, but not always. Instead, Potter uses line breaks, cesura, dashes (sometime multiple in a row to create a solid line) and indented text. Also, many of the works are prose poems; if not, then the lines in several lineated poems echo prose in their line lengths. It’s all very contemporary and lends to the orphic atmosphere of blurring the edges: Where does one thought/idea/image begin and end?
The last poem I want to speak to is my absolute favourite: ‘Metamorphosis’ (p 19). It is a prose poem of two paragraphs and the speaker is a spider; no, the speaker is inside a spider, and we see the world through the speaker’s eyes looking through the spider’s eight eyes:
I wake inside a spider at the pivot of a web. It feels like a graduation from my previous state until the breeze starts up and my webbed skirt starts to give. I cling to the silk threads, tilting backwards and forwards as though pinned to a warbling rocking chair …
I peer out from my lacy steeple. My eight eyes dissect ‘IL ov eN ew Yo rk 20 07’ on a mossed-over mug—crossed-eyed, the sun rotates in a wheel of sixteen. I’m whispering a name—Rumpelstilzchen? … I will wrap my golden thread …
This poem gives me joy to no end. It is playful. I can see then webbed skirt and feel the warbling rocking chair, but what gives me the most child-like glee is the visual representation of ‘I love New York 2007’ dissected into eight pairs of letters, for the spiders eight eyes, and then sun rotating in a wheel of sixteen, for the cross-eyed-ness. And, of course, anything is possible here because we have the whisper of the name Rumpelstilzchen, he who turned silk into gold in the eponymous fairy tale.
To circle back to the beginning, the introductory note, blurb and self-referential nature of ‘Counterintuitive’ might feel as if Potter has gone to much length to explain the work, suggesting that the poetry is challenging; and it is, in that it asks you to disrupt the logical. Thus, as a reader, I see these elements as foundational: that ‘crumbling ledge’ from which to enter the work. I also see them as an invitation: to follow Alice down the rabbit hole, so your subconscious, your inner world, can meet Potters’ on the page. And with that invitation, I find I am free to fall in, to tumble through the labyrinthine worlds without the need to land on my feet – because there is much joy in letting go. And there is much joy to be had here, in Potter’s original, surreal and musical Acanthus.
लेश करण LESH KARAN is a Naarm/Melbourne-based poet and essayist. Recent publications include Admissions, a Red Room Poetry anthology, Best of Australian Poems 2022, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Island, Mascara Literary Review and Rabbit, amongst others. She was shortlisted for the 2022 Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and is currently completing a Master of Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing at the University of Melbourne. Lesh is of Fiji Indian heritage.
February 15, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Kirli Saunders (OAM) is a proud Gunai Woman and award-winning multidisciplinary artist and consultant. An experienced writer, speaker and facilitator advocating for the environment and equality, Kirli creates to connect to make change. She was the NSW Aboriginal Woman of the Year (2020) and was awarded an Order of Australia Medal in 2022 for her contribution to the arts, particularly literature.
Kirli’s celebrated books include Bindi, Our Dreaming, Kindred and The Incredible Freedom Machines. Kirli’s writing features in magazines and journals with Vogue, National Geographic, Kill Your Darlings, and in public art with partners, Red Room Poetry, Aesop, and The Royal Botanic Gardens, Victoria.
Her art has been commissioned by Google, Fender, Sydney Opera House and Government. She is currently working on a world pride exhibition at Cement Fondue and developing her solo play, Going Home, and her second Visual Poetry Collection, Returning (Magabala, 2023).
Community Possum Skin Cloak
(forthcoming in Returning, Magabala, 2023)
~ With thanks to Aunty Loretta Parsley, Nicole Smede, Jo and the O&S Foundation & Bundanon for supporting Aunt & I to teach a community possum skin cloak making project on the river. And to all of the Aunties and Sissys who participated in this magical week of making, thank you.
monoprinted ferns
bakers dozen emerald bower birds
wattle marbled on Banggali
like creamed honey
sore thumb
cherry blossom
and fire weed
beneath shea-oak and gum
a meditation begun
with singing-bowl bees.
Luina–
the Blue Wren
fluffs feathers
and cleans beak
of insect crumbs
currawong slinks between
spotted and fig-strangled trees
egret
skips the stones
of her belly
on river skin
within, the marra
rejoice for the warmth of this day
noting the skies
and with them, seasons
always change,
rays of sun
sling sticky silver linings
on clouds in celebration,
they knead the path
from mountains to sea
where
Country
Ancestors,
and seven generations
are proud
of the sewing
we’ve done.
February 14, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Kavita Ivy Nandan was born in New Delhi, grew up in Suva and migrated to Australia in 1987 after the Fiji military coups. She completed a PhD in Literature on the postcolonial narratives of Salman Rushdie and VS Naipaul at the Australian National University. In 2017, she moved from Canberra to Sydney with her husband, Michael and son, Jesse. Kavita teaches Creative Writing at Macquarie University. She is the author of a book of poems, Return to what Remains (Ginninderra Press, 2022) and a novel, Home after Dark (USP Press, 2014). She is also the editor of a book of memoirs, Stolen Worlds: Fiji-Indian Fragments and co-editor of a book of essays, Unfinished Journeys: India File From Canberra and a book of poetry and short fiction, Writing the Pacific. Her poetry and fiction are published in LiteLitOne, Not Very Quiet, Mindfood, Mascara Literary Review, Transnational Literature, Landfall, The Island Review and Asiatic. She has been a recipient of the artsACT grant three times.
Cartwheels in space
Remember those damn kids
Who did cartwheels on the front lawn
On your strip of earth, in front of your damn house
To show you how damn good they were?
Those sporty-straight-legged girls with golden skin
And you tried too, because you wanted to be like them
Never in front of those deep-blue-Pacific-Ocean eyes of course
But in private
But you never
Could achieve that spinning momentum
Dumped on the back lawn each time
With your legs feeling like two lamb shanks
Your dark hair and skin frizzing in the sun upside down
Experiencing disappointment, like a firecracker that fizzled out.
Today, the latest images from Webb’s telescope
Captured the collision of two galaxies:
A cartwheel galaxy.
And you swore to yourself:
failure is transitory/
miracles do exist.
The perfect weather
A colony of witches’ broom
swept over the sleeping reserve
a trident of coldness that
pried open the mouth with vapours,
set upon the mind, haunting it with unfavourable thoughts,
such as sidewalk paraphernalia – plugs and wires –
getting wet in the rain and
feet sinking in soggy ground;
all of which makes one queasy.
Yet it was the perfect weather
to buy a coffin: black, $1,050, until,
the street lamps flickered off
night transitioned into day, and
the sun came out.
February 13, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Naomi Williams writes on Kaurna Country. She enjoys experimenting with poetry and prose. Her poetry has been published in Raining Poetry in Adelaide in 2022 and her ekphrastic prose in FELTspace Writer’s Program 2021. She is a lyric writer and was a creative collaborator with the UNESCO Creative Cities Equaliser Music Video Project in Adelaide 2021. She has recently completed her Honours in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. Naomi enjoys performing spoken word at open mics around Adelaide and performing comedy raps as part of the duo Bubble Rap.
Oranges and Soccer
Orange is the colour of passion that burns so bright it’s almost NEON.
It catches in a retina forever.
Orange on the horizon, the orange I eat with my fingers spills juice and tangs my lips, cell
walls as soft as lips, they burst, or am I thinking of a mandarin?
When was the last time I ate an orange?
They never tasted so good than at my soccer game half-times, the mingled aromas of sweet
orange and fresh mud.
When did I last play soccer?
With my dog in the backyard. She carries that deflated ball in her mouth. A man was
throwing them out one day.
“The boys have got new ones,” he said. “They didn’t want to pump them up.”
The bounce of a ball on grass, the thunk of a boot sending it into the swish of a net— poetry.
I wasn’t fast enough, forgot the value of being alive.
I watched from the sidelines as boys from school played at lunchtimes, legs itching to run for
the ball.
Some lucky times it went near me and I could kick it back.
I only joined in once with a friend.
I was too embarrassed otherwise.
The pack of boys, only the good, or the popular got a kick.
I was neither.
Torturous to watch.
Now I play with my dog.
She’s a bad bitch.
She boops the ball back into my hands like a pro.
January 10, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anthea Yang is a writer and poet living on unceded Wurundjeri land. Her writing has appeared in Going Down Swinging, Kill Your Darlings, Voiceworks and the HEIDE+Rabbit House of Ideas: Modern Women anthology, among others. She has been longlisted for the 2021 Kuracca Prize for Australian Literature, shortlisted for the 2020 Dorothy Porter Award for Poetry, and has performed her poetry as part of Emerging Writers’ Festival, Melbourne Writers Festival, and Red Room Poetry’s 2022 Victorian Poetry Month Gala. Born in Perth, Western Australia, her favourite season is summer.
Onward
i do not know how this ends
except there is a line drawn between me
and my body / me and
the person sitting next to me on the train / me and
everyone i have ever loved deeply /
a line between me
and the place where i am hungry to be
my memory is desiring linearity
remembers touch as an unripened mango, firm except a thumb-shaped bruise touching the surface / soft but unclear of the cause
perhaps what i am trying to trace is a lineage
perhaps what i am always trying to find is a line
let me try one more time:
memory is reaching / is waking to
the moonlight casting a patchwork of shadows
on my throat / i wonder
how much language i am losing / every day
a character learned now missing a stroke
until i am left with just the beginning / 一
the first stroke from left to right: a horizon
one late afternoon i watch the sun blow through
a lineage of trees, casting a shadow
on the building opposite my balcony
and i think about how the word 梦 is made up of
a forest sitting above the evening / how this is a dream
of my real life / this landscape
where I am standing on a mountaintop watching time settle
comfortably into the horizon as if it has done so before / here
my body melts into the shadows and here / in the poem
in the archives / in the memory
i am in abundance.
December 19, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments
Gayatri Nair is an Indian-Australian writer, poet and DJ based on the land of the Wangal people of the Eora nation in Sydney’s inner west. She is a member of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement, has qualifications in Law and Arts, and is working in human rights policy, research and advocacy. She is passionate about pride in cultural identity and using art to affect change. Gayatri has been published in Sweatshop Women Volumes 1 and 2, Red Room Poetry, Mascara Literary Review, The Guardian and Swampland Magazine.
Mystics
Last night you saved my life
There was a fire in the building
and I would have slept through it
But you woke me up and we survived
Earlier that day we had seen the impossible
The unbelievable
Whales breaching out past the rocks
An island which I later looked up, called ‘Rangoon’
‘How racist’ I said, the old term for Yangon
A place I once had a visa to but had never been
And we wouldn’t have seen the whales
But for a lone woman on the beach
who told us to look
No phones no cameras,
nothing to capture it
So I’m writing it down now
You said this is where we would consummate our love
And I said ‘yuck isn’t that like about marriage,’
and ownership of a woman through making an heir
But this morning I googled consummate love
it said it was ‘the complete form of love, representing an ideal relationship which people strive towards… it is the ideal kind of relationship’
I can’t stop laughing at the way
you carried the car keys above your head
swimming with one hand raised through the estuary to the beach
Twice people stopped to ask if you were ok
And I wonder if we can ever go back there?
Like an ending in a Satyajit Ray film
But I don’t think I have a visa to that country anymore.
December 17, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments
Vyacheslav Konoval is a Ukrainian poet and resident of Kyiv. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including Anarchy Anthology Archive, International Poetry Anthology, Literary Waves Publishing, Sparks of Kaliopa, Reach of the Song 2022, Diogenes for Culture Journal, Scars of my heart from the war, Poetry for Ukraine, Norwich University research center, Impakter, The Lit, Allegro, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Fulcrum, Adirondack Center for Writing, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Revista Literaria Taller Igitur, Tarot Poetry Journal, Tiny Seed Literature Journal, Best American Poetry Blog, Appalachian Journal Dark Horse. Vyacheslav’s poems were translated into Spanish, French, Scottish, and Polish languages.
Cold drops of rain
Descending from the roof
the melting handfuls of snow.
Moaning and humming
echoes outside the window
the wind plays with the lonely poplar,
bends thin branches.
In the darkness of the apartment
confusion creeps
how is the Bakhmut city
my frontline friend?
Year of Darkness
A snowflake pinches the cheek,
the frost bites jokingly,
the fog is sliding on the ice.
As thunder tears apart a rocket supply,
the heart in pain, strangulation of the throat,
oh, that black fog covered the country.
There are thousands, tens of thousands of them.
Maybe hundreds of thousands
of worldly souls that flew to heaven,
from the sooty piles of smoke from the huts of towns and villages.
God, why such a punishment?
December 15, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments
Lesh Karan is a Naarm/Melbourne-based writer and poet. Her work has been published in Best of Australian Poems 2022, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Island, Mascara Literary Review and Rabbit, amongst others. Lesh is currently completing a Master of Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing at the University of Melbourne. She’s of Fiji Indian heritage.
The Floor
She took off her earth-caked shoes
and put them on the floor. On the floor,
she stacked her old notebooks and red pens
drained of ink. She placed her sweat-drenched
leggings on the floor. On the floor, her heart
still racing, too. She piled the organic produce
from farmers’ markets on the floor, alongside
the key holes, acupuncture and Advil. A stone
statue of Lord Ganesha she placed on the floor.
On the floor, his wordlessness, too. The mango
tree from her childhood home, she gently lay
on the floor and saw an orange dove
flutter off. Friends she let go, the friend who
let her go, all on the floor. The ill-fitting careers
she stacked like witches hats in the furthest corner on the floor.
She took her mirror off the wall and set it
flat on the floor, looked at herself
from the ground up. The dream home
she dismantled and stacked on the floor,
next to all the how-to manuals she had bought.
The question she couldn’t answer, she tore
and scattered like seeds on the floor. When
the floor cracks, she putties it
with moonlight, Fleetwood Mac,
fresh Moleskines—
and continues stacking.
November 23, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments
Peter Ramm is a poet and teacher who writes on the Gundungurra lands of the NSW Southern Highlands. His debut poetry collection Waterlines is out now with Vagabond Press. In 2022 he won the prestigious Manchester Poetry Prize. His poems have also won the Harri Jones Memorial Award, The South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Award, The Red Room Poetry Object, and have been shortlisted in the Bridport, ACU, Blake, and the Newcastle Poetry Prizes. His work has appeared in Westerly, Cordite, Plumwood Mountain, The Rialto, Eureka Street, and more.
The Sedulity of Soldier Crabs
Red, red is the sun,
Heartlessly indifferent to time,
The wind knows, however,
The promise of early chill.
—Matsuo Bashō
It’s Boxing Day and the sun climbs a lattice work of cirrus clouds, dripping like treacle in the early afternoon. The sandflats are rinsed with the voices of a hundred children and the air teems with the smell of last week’s storm washing through the estuary after its journey down the Woodstock and Stoney Creeks. The inlet runs emerald green and blue in the deep places and three channel markers meander their way towards the point like a set of mis-thrown darts.
Whiting like razors
In the water; each one cuts
A new memory.
II.
This is Yuin country, and it remembers a time before its wealth was burnt in the lime pit at Dolphin Point and hauled by the Burrill Lake Timber company to Sydney; its cedar, iron bark and mahogany forests floated out to sea. A plaque on the Princess Highway recounts how the rock shelter on the lake’s edge makes children of the pyramids and the language the king used to claim the geology of the place—the basalt and siltstone forty million years in the making.
Fourteen cormorants
Take wing; time written cursive
In pages of sea grass.
III
Now, my son’s fingers are little clumps of sand in mine and we run ankle deep across the bar—legs lurching like the loose brush strokes of an infant artist. The pools and pockets of water gleam like the scaled side of a great bream for hundreds of yards before us. He says I’m a sea monster; a shark, an octopus, a crab or whatever he wants me to play. All he knows is the next footfall, and more often, the fall of laughter and salt and the cast net of his father’s arms.
Onshore, paddle boards
Consume the car park, staking
Out their own claim.
IV
I grasp at his arm before he lands on the blue back of a lone soldier crab—an ancient of days, his bone-striped legs the first to walk this water. Sitting. Still. Sifting the sand against the budding toes of my boy. There’s music in the dactyls of his claws, in the iambs of his movement, in the breath of my toddler. Together, they share the notes of time, a semibreve on the boy’s lips—a pause, a new sonata strung in his mind. But he wants to squish it
—Feel the crush of bone
And shell in the webs of feet.
There’s so much to learn.
V
The wind winds us up, it blows purple on our skin and black on the faces of a pair of pied oystercatchers, who pry the sand for the living, weighing the hour like Anubis, with beak and feather. Still, the crab remains. Long after we’ve passed. Out there—a relic of the tides, the small cadences of the cosmos marked in the milky way of its shell. We finish by skimming on the board, the boy riding it like a comet over the water, and I, collapsing Phaethon, at the reins.
Coolness in the shade
Of the wind. Always, the end
Begs quiet and time.
November 11, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments
Stuart Barnes is the author of Like to the Lark (Upswell Publishing, 2023) and Glasshouses (UQP, 2016), which won the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, was commended for the 2016 Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the 2017 Mary Gilmore Award. His work has been widely anthologised and published, including in Admissions: Voices within Mental Health, The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, Best of Australian Poems 2022, The Moth and POETRY (Chicago). Recently he guest co-edited, with Claire Gaskin, Australian Poetry Journal 11.1 ‘local, attention’. His ’Sestina after B. Carlisle’ won the 2021/22 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. @StuartABarnes
Duplex
(Eremophila ‘Blue Horizon’)
I have always adored the desert,
its transformative blues and solitude.
I transform the bluesy solitude
of winter—I polish small gold trumpets—
gold-tinted blue-tongues polish off my trumpets—
I raise my hands, lanceolate and blue.
Lancelot was raised by hands of blue;
I improvise—I play blue notes. Roll low
my soul cries. Playing blue notes, rolling low,
I weave the earth and the atmospheres.
I grieve earth’s people, flatten their fears,
weather the emu, the stormy blues.
The emu untethers glorious blues.
I have always adored the desert.
November 8, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments
Originally from a sunny island in Southeast Asia, Sher Ting is a Singaporean-Chinese currently residing in Australia. She is a 2021 Writeability Fellow with Writers Victoria and a Pushcart and Best of The Net nominee with work published/forthcoming in Pleiades, Colorado Review, OSU The Journal, The Pinch, Salamander, Chestnut Review, Rust+Moth and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, Bodies of Separation, is forthcoming with Cathexis Northwest Press, and her second chapbook, The Long-Lasting Grief of Foxes, is forthcoming with CLASH! Books in 2023. She tweets at @sherttt and writes at sherting.carrd.co
Bak Kut Teh
肉: You peel the chilli, layer by layer, unearthing a clot of
seeds from its copper pith. The soup simmers on the stove,
frothing sunset gold over the blue-gas flames, drowned out by
radio talk of the day’s weather.
How’s your day at school?
The meat melts off the bones in the pressure cooker, pork fat
dripping from softened limbs like snow from black root on a
winter morning.
It’s fine.
You sift the remaining bone-stock with a colander, flushed
with thyme and aniseed. You tell me to scrape the flesh off the
bones with a knife and laugh when my fingers slip, wrangling
silver against each cord-like sinew.
Honey, there’s more than one way
to get to the heart of things,
You whisper as you pull out a larger knife and, taking the pig
trotter from my hands, whistle each hardened tendon – splitting
the ropes – off of the skeleton flower.
骨: Some nights, snow swathes the streets in silent, sleet-wet
pavements. You call me on the phone while you’re peeling an
orange, and like muscle memory, I say I’m busy, distracted.
Okay then listen to me.
You tell me about the lady who stops by the store every day,
never buys anything, just stares at the row of wooden horses.
You tell me how you walked the extra mile to get your
favourite diner coffee, chortling eggs and beans while watching
the busker ignite one-half of a weary skyline. This way, you
can tell your friends we still talk.
There’s more than one way
to get to the heart of things
茶: You tell me about driftwood, sangria, cherry blossoms and
tea, while splitting an orange down the middle, spooning the
seeds off its insides. I fall asleep, cord entwined around my
finger, having heard all about your day. You listen to the rise
and fall of my breath, dip a slice of orange into your cup of tea,
Long over-steeped, almost bitter to taste, still waiting to hear
mine.
October 30, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dean Mokrozhaevy moved to Australia in 2008 and grew up reading and writing in various suburbs of Sydney. They use their writing to work through their emotions and make something meaningful out of distress. Outside of their writing endeavours they also enjoy bushwalking, watching moon jellyfish in the Sydney harbour and sewing with their assistant Concrete the cat.
Foundation
Everything’s fixed up.
Everything but the pink stain in the kitchen grout.
I told you I wanted to keep it.
I don’t know what you were preparing for
But I think you’re done now.
I can’t tell what you’re feeling anymore.
Not from your face.
Your hands are still gentle
You still hold the back of my head when we sleep
You still let me sink into your body and cover us with the
blanket.
You say that the paint is peeling
But I like it
You say that you’re scared
But I’m here
You say that you love me and that you’ll always love me and that I’m the best thing that’s
ever happened to you
And I tell you that we still have decades to love
each other
You give a chuckle and change the subject
Note
When I wake up
You aren’t there.
The sunrise paints gold on the sheets
Not on your face.
I get out of the gold.
It’s not mine.
It’s yours.
The shower’s off.
The living room is empty.
There’s no one in the kitchen.
There’s a note on our shoe cabinet.
Your keys are the paperweight.
I love you.
I’m sorry.
December 15, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Craig Santos Perez is an indigenous Pacific Islander poet from Guåhan (Guam). He is the author of five books of poetry and the co-editor of five anthologies. He teaches at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
Rings of Fire Sonnet During the Pandemic
(September 2020)
We celebrate our daughter’s third birthday
during the hottest September in history.
My parents Facetime from California,
where fire is harvesting four million acres
of ash. “I visited grandma today,”
my mom says. “The orange sky scared her.”
Flames flood brazil’s wetlands
as europe’s largest refugee camp smolders,
granting the charred asylum.
“We might have to evacuate tomorrow,”
my mom says, but tonight we open gifts, sing
& blow out the candles together.
Smoke trembles, as if we all exhaled
the same combustible wish.
Echolocation Sonnet During the Pandemic
(September 2020)
for the orca, J35, and her child, J57
Today, you birthed another calf. I imagine
you both swimming a thousand nautical miles
until every wave becomes an ode, until the sea
is a wet nursery. How do you translate
“congratulations” in your dialect of whistles?
What is joy but our shared echolocation?
My second daughter was born three years ago,
premature, but now chubby & strong.
I cook salmon for our dinner and pray
that your pod has enough to eat.
We haven’t been to the beach in months
due to quarantine, but you remind us:
hope is our most buoyant
oceanic muscle.
December 14, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Chris Armstrong’s poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, most recently The Suburban Review, K’in and Backstory as well as Griffith Review and regularly in Cordite. Armstrong was runner up in the Judith Wright Overland Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Writers in 2015 and received an ASA Emerging Writers Mentorship for her poetry manuscript The Watershed, which was published as a chapbook in 2017. Armstrong is currently involved as poet for The White Bluff Project (https://www.thewhitebluffproject.co/) a collaborative art, science and community project exploring ‘place’ with particular reference to the effects of climate and urbanisation on a coastal ecosystem. Armstrong was raised on the invaded lands of the Gumbaynggir people on the east coast of Australia but currently resides in lutriwita (Tasmania).
Manggaarla
maana ngawaa muniimbugany muniim nyamigundi maarlala
ngawaa muniimbugany words live beyond our needy tongues to
affirm what is you call me to come see the classic smooth and
creamy shapes of stone wash’d in dreamy waves beneath the
white bluff where language too is a sedimentary thing lithified
into the first song within and where after and before daalgiya
ngaanyaw nguuralami giduurr wiigurr nyan muniim nyamigundi
maarlala ngawaabugany muniim maana muniimbugany ngawa
weigh it feel it roll it on that needy tongue feed it to your
children waagay fire yamaarr fish gaagal ocean language that
made me unmade you first manggaarla remaking what was you
juna junaa gayi wear lexis like necklaces of sophora tomentosa
ngayinggi yarrang listen niirum maanyung carrying the sound of
two whales breathing as they rise arc dive into the dark sea
ngayinggi yarrang beneath hooped pines beside cuttlefish
flotsam streaked with copper based blood jarlarrla gagalngay
how is the wind not called a living thing and a breath not thought
a word
Endnotes
Manggaarla is ‘first’ in Gumbaynggir language. Thank you to Gumbaynggir artist Tori Ann Donnelly, with assistance from Kal Morris, for the translations to Gumbaynggir in the poem Manggarla. The poem is part of a collaborative artwork with artists Tori Donnelly and Sarah Mufford for The White Bluff Project at Coffs Harbour Regional Art Gallery from 31 October 2021 to 15 January 2022. See https://www.thewhitebluffproject.co/. It is also available as an image of the final artwork. The poem also acknowledges influences from Gwen Harwood’s poem ‘The Littoral’.
December 14, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dave Drayton was an amateur banjo player, founding member of the Atterton Academy, and the author of E, UIO, A: a feghoot (Container), A pet per ably-faced kid (Stale Objects dePress), P(oe)Ms (Rabbit), Haiturograms (Stale Objects dePress) and Poetic Pentagons (Spacecraft Press).
centocartography, Campsie: that wild society
Adam Lindsay Gordon, ‘Hippodromania; or, whiffs from the pipe’; Adam Lindsay Gordon, ‘Ye Wearie Wayfarer, hys Ballad In Eight Fyttes’; Adam Lindsay Gordon, ‘Delilah’; Lord Byron ‘Don Juan, canto the fourteenth’; Lord Alfred Tennyson ‘Come Down, O Maid’; Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Mighty Eagle’; William Cowper, ‘The Task: Book V – The Winter Morning Walk’; Thomas Moore, ‘Memorabilia of last week’; Robert Burns, ‘Song – Composed in Spring’; John Dryden, ‘Calm was the even and clear was the sky’; Robert Browning, ‘The House Of Clouds’; William Shakespeare, ‘Bridal Song’
December 14, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, essayist and curator based in Bombay. His seven collections of poetry include Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006), Central Time (Penguin/ Viking, 2014), Jonahwhale (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton, 2018; published by Arc in the UK as The Atlas of Lost Beliefs, 2020, which received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2020) and, most recently, Hunchprose (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton, 2021). His translation of a celebrated 14th-century Kashmiri woman saint’s poetry has appeared as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). He is the editor of Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2012). Hoskote has been a Fellow of the International Writing Program (IWP), University of Iowa; writer-in-residence at Villa Waldberta, Munich, Theater der Welt, Essen-Mülheim, and the Polish Institute, Berlin; and researcher-in-residence at BAK/ basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. His poems have been translated into German, Hindi, Bangla, Irish, Marathi, Swedish, Spanish, and Arabic. Hoskote curated India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011) and was co-curator, with Okwui Enwezor and Hyunjin Kim, of the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008).
Departures
for Ravi Agarwal
What if the white mare dragged down by a flabby bridegroom
and underfed by her hungry syce
had the same name as the child ferrying bricks in her head pan
at the kiln?
What if the bat practising a dive behind the shuttered windows
of the Natural History section
could ask the elephant grazing in the parched scrubland
her name
which would not be one of the brightly painted names of the god
tucking his trunk in as his fans see him off at high tide
a departure viewed from the Towers of Silence by a tribe
of scrawny vultures contemplating their journey’s end?
What if you tried to prise a password out of the stuffed orangutan
the taxidermists have enthroned as a totem at the zoo?
In all these names you’d recognise the lost and forgotten seeds
that a sleepy child dropped on the mossy ghats
as the pilgrims from the stars newly arrived swept past
one full-moon night in vermilion and brocade
Who could have told them they would meet us again
stripped of our gaudy masks our carrying voices muted
as skeletons on display
in a distant planet’s Museum of Cautionary Tales?
December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Author of four books of poetry, Two Full Moons (Bombaykala Books), Words Not Spoken (Brown Critique), The Longest Pleasure (Finishing Line Press) and The Silk Of Hunger (AuthorsPress), Vinita is an award winning poet, editor, translator and curator. Joint recipient of the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018 and winner of the Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence USA 2015. She is Poetry Editor with Usawa Literary Review. Her work has been widely published and anthologised. Her poem won a prize for the Moon Anthology on the Moon by TallGrass Writers Guild, Chicago 2017. More recently her poem won a special mention in the Hawker Prize for best South Asian poetry. She has contributed a monthly column on Asian Poets on the literary blog of the Hamline University, Saint Paul USA in 2016-17. In September 2020, she edited an anthology on climate change titled Open Your Eyes (pub. Hawakal). Most recently she co-edited the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2020-21 (Hawakal). She judged the RLFPA poetry contest (International Prize) in 2016 and co judged the Asian Cha’s poetry contest on The Other Side in 2015. She was featured in a documentary on twenty women poets from Asia, produced in Taiwan. She has read at the FILEY Book Fair, Merida, Mexico, Kala Ghoda Arts Festival among others. She is on the Advisory Board of the Tagore Literary Prize. She has curated literary events for PEN Mumbai. Read more about her at www.vinitawords.com
Splendid Poison Frog
Was it a cold December Wednesday
when you left?
A frosty, flinty, pin-point moment
that seals most pull-outs.
Silent like a hushed Mayday signal
reverberating in the ripples of a pond.
What time exactly
did you hop over
to where nowhere exists?
Did the sun flicker
at your vanishing act?
The way yellow convulses on a color palette
when mixed with green
before turning blue.
Was it the hour of dusk,
your favorite hour,
when you looked your dashing, heart-throb best
skin, brilliant coral, eyes, kohl black.
A fungus with a long name
colonized your body.
A local phenomena, some said.
Like a cloud breaking-up
a balmy summer’s evening.
Did the next morning feel
like a fine after-showers morning?
*********
Estimated Extinction date: 2020
Cause: Chytrid Fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis)
December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Tim Loveday is a poet, a writer, and an editor. As the recipient of a 2020 Next Chapter Wheeler Centre Fellowship and a 2021 Varuna Residential Fellowship, his work aims to challenge toxic masculinity in Australia. His poetry/prose has appeared in Meanjin, Cordite, The Big Issue, Babyteeth, Meniscus, Text Journal, and The Big Smoke, among others. A Neurodivergent dog parent, he is the verse editor for XR’s Creative Hub. Tim currently resides in North Melbourne, the traditional land of the Wurundjeri people.
at the end of the rail
in the morning when the sun peels
back like a paper cut and the blue
metal is thunder under our feet
i see shadow-diamonds spread
across the train yard and i feel
as small as a bird and as wide
as a sail
//
last night i listened to your two way radio
i pulled the blanket up to my ears and shaped
myself into a satellite its static jargon a dialogue
with god or grease or grit i heard the miracle of
boom boom boom
we were the
new age of romans with a thousand outposts
we were cowboys riding iron centipedes
//
before dawn i threw off my blankets
like old ghosts sprang from my bed
like new smoke heard your voice
in the walls as you swept
me up in your wings
took me to your shoulders
atlas or he-man or rambo
on the rails duke on the frontier
you smelt of oil aftershave radio waves
you whispered to me in the language
of future and the earth
fell away
//
i had barely seen the blue streets
how the stars grew hazy in the steam
how horizon bled the false border of morning
we lived before the aftermath
i am a fault-line across your chest
liquid gold sprung from your veins
i fill the cavity where your heart should be
i am young country
boom boom boom
//
at the station the rails rattle
in the flyscreen and the man with
the corkboard halo is chequered
like a topographic map
when he grins he shucks open
a territory calls you by
our last name
i hear
a town or a street or a mountain
or the origin of a valley
//
in the office you say
wives and work as if they
tighten bolts avenge crimes
on your holsters there are radios the size
of guns you are blue men with
un-dreams as big as china
under your eyes
everyone is envious
go ahead the man says into his radio
laying the rail with his words
//
at the terminal box you teach
me to splice the rails my body
a limp flag made of flesh
i hang from the lever
asking for islands to swell
on my biceps
birds turn into reverse silhouettes
it’s excalibur you exclaim
stick your foot down like
sinking a spade
boom boom boom
//
when we walk the rails we tell history
this parallel never met by our shadow
i swim onto your shoulders as day
breaks egg-shells
i am the new
collar ironed by my mother
and the space above your
head is a frontier
//
from here the world is flat
borders white lines in the dirt
you can feel a train coming
in the shake of the earth
we are going to be giants you say
gripping my shins
i roll up my
sleeves and flex my arms
giving you horns
//
at the door meccano in full-scale
you swing me into the carriage
the child who is flightless
climbs on the back of the
wind held up a hurt bird
//
in the cabin men breathe planets
onto perspex they hark like myna birds
rooted bitou bush hunched like cane toads
they claim to live at
these gears they’ve got
tickets to show it
they’ve crossed this country
ten times over sleepless
they’ve seen land where water
is foreign where open cuts
are oasis
i sit back and watch you
walk ahead on the rails
//
trees white-paper in the train’s blared
whiteness shape themselves into
memories call themselves footprints
they’re roped to fence posts
this is morning not mourning
my breath leaves my mouth
like a greenhouse
boom boom boom
//
up ahead on the rail you dance
with your arms of red light
and i wonder what it means
to write history with your
body
your blood let
disfiguring the open
cut of morning
//
whatcha think of your dad one of the men
asks his cadence forty packs of imported
cigarettes in his fist is a gear that i know
lights up streets turns show houses into
nuclear families
he’s a hero i say but
the word feels tiny when i’ve seen maps
that lay across this country like a bandage
you’re the beginning
and the end of
of the world
you’re the answer
to everything
//
way off the plant blinks like
a child-killer a christmas in morse code
spaghetti pipes spewing
white venom
ethanol bruising the sky purple
everything screams
the horizon quivers the drivers pull the horn
birds rush to their nests in the clouds
fall through invisible floor boards
burn up on re-entry
//
sometimes i wonder
if you ever stopped in those
towns where you once said
the waters ran like blood
did you own a skeleton key
did you ever peel back
excalibur feel the weight
of the blade in your hands
alter the course of this
track
//
in my ears our heart
boom boom boom
my eyes mirror
the blood-shot sky
the thrum of the engine
rattles through my bones
all my ancestors are ghosts
all my ancestors cling
to the atmosphere
as you walk the rails
fade into morning settle into history
men talk talk talk
we have learnt distance
in this country
we have learnt to never
look back
December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sonnet Mondal writes from Kolkata and is the author of An Afternoon in My Mind (Copper Coin, 2021), Karmic Chanting (Copper Coin, 2018), Ink and Line (Dhauli Books, 2018), and five other books of poetry. He serves as the director of Chair Poetry Evenings-Kolkata’s International Poetry Festival and managing editor of Verseville.
If I Could
If I were a travelling air
without any bony cage,
moral circuits and routes
blowing to the will of paddy fields
smelling the sexual union
of grass roots with wet soil
I would swoop and lift the infant souls
of dead harvested crops
fetching them to their seeds
and allow them to breathe me again.
December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Rachael Mead is a novelist and award-winning poet and short story writer, with her creative work appearing widely in Australia and internationally. She’s the author of the novel The Application of Pressure (Affirm Press 2020) and four collections of poetry including The Flaw in the Pattern (UWAP 2018). In 2019, she spent a month in the Taleggio Valley in Northern Italy on an eco-poetry residency awarded by Australian Poetry.
It takes a mountain to raise a cheese
A golden shovel of Terrance Hayes’ ‘Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy’
You want answers, so immediately I’m in a panicked state.
What is a regenerative economy, anyway? I’m a writer. My time
is spent exploring on foot, trying to see things differently to others
like the way the piode is a jigsaw from below but from above is a roof.
That’s a bit simplistic. Trying to give you answers is making me careless,
the way I get back to the room, pull off my boots and sling my bra
not even looking to see where it falls. Some think nature is all about sex
but I’m leaning in another direction. I’m missing the moonlight.
All this walking has me in bed with the sun, weighing the valley’s life
and trying to piece it together with words. You want me to show my thinking
but resisting the seduction of witness and metaphor is not easy to overcome.
It’s as if you’ve offered the finest single malt whiskey but refused me the ice.
I’m trying to be critical and speculative but I’m just grinding out the syllables,
constructing poems from form, allusion and a well-thumbed catalogue of words.
I’m great at questions, seeing how problems connect, replicate themselves —
but critical speculation? I’m a dog yapping at unseen dangers. I can’t say
what should happen here, the possibilities clamouring so I can’t tell prank calls
from those with something important to say. The word on the street
is it’s better to ignore what you see. Go with what you perceive.
My bedroom window is black with possibility. This arrangement
feels impossible. What can I offer? I walk. I watch. I make poetry.
If only I was more original, walking around like a pregnant woman
confident in the form of her creation, her offspring welcome among us.
I’m not used to being so beyond my depth. As a wife
I can fake it, clean the house before guests arrive. (Don’t think about that.)
But here, all the surfaces are peeled away, lack of faith in myself
laid bare in these echoing lines. I scratch pen on pages to start fires.
The answers are needed, the world staring down its own destruction
and here I sit twiddling around with rhythm and the fall of a word.
Beyond my window, the darkness resolves into birdsong and branches.
Grass will grow. Cheese will be eaten. These futures are not empty yet.
But I’m not so deaf that I can’t hear this valley whimper.
It’s just that I’ve no particular claim to wisdom –
only the ability to watch, witness and fill with the pities
of someone gifted in seeing backwards. It’s a leash,
the tug of it jerking my head as I peer into the night’s
potential – ghostly, nebulous and keeping me from sleep.
December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ojo Taiye is a young Nigerian poet who uses poetry as a handy tool to hide his frustration with society. He also makes use of collage and sample technique. He is the winner of many prestigious awards including the 2021 Hay Writer’s Circle Poetry Competition, 2021 Cathalbui Poetry Competition, Ireland.
All quiet on the fire front
What is it that makes me see myself
more loving than the capitalist world?
Every time I watch the news my heart
goes out to the lonely orphan bear.
Look: there, as when a cone explodes
during a flare, another dog lay lifeless
on the charred ground, staring at a falling
pylon—the quieting chorus of ruin. Nothing
is blooming today & a man in my mother’s
village is breathing and asking— will the
water be gentle with me as it rises? I’m long
past hopeful and yes, beyond upset, I wish I
could say they’re just animals and my mother
is not sick. Still everything that is burning has
a name. Always something fragile and my father
looks up at me and sighs. We’ve lived in many
shelters. Even after the mud slide, a river slopes
along my heart to forget, for a second, the volume
of destruction. The thing about summer is: it doesn’t
come as joyful as it did once. If we are talking a-
bout a feverish planet, a thick pall of smoke still
hangs over my country’s green lungs. There is a
premonition before a ruin. Every herder I have
ever met said something about drought. More
drought. Or maybe to ruin the moment of camping,
a thousand heat-strokes & oh, there is famine too—
December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Monique Lyle is a DCA candidate with the writing centre at Western Sydney University. She is currently completing her first manuscript, The Park, which explores her experiences growing up in Sydney Housing Commission in the 90’s. Recently her work has appeared in Overland, Flash Cove, Otoliths, Plumwood Mountain and also Dance Research.
a shark
when
i
found am
out
in the garden half
dead
in the weeds
half
floating
in
a pond you
think
of pigeons
and flutter
bies in
over grown grass
field you
think of a
fly
landing on damp.
if a
little
girl is
all alone left
there
will be no
eat there will be
no
sucksuck
there
won’t be any water melon. there
only
will be
tiny hand tiny
arm
tiny
cock roach crawling. by time the
mary
there get
it
will be late too—
eve taken will
have
already
apple cleaned
pinstripe
suit even gorgeous
lips.
when you are
in
an
over grown field with a
bee
on your
knee
and stinging nettle. when
a
purple flutter
bye
lands on a
yellow
dandelion
flower another
bug will
be
there with it
when a
root pushes
into
wet
brown mud, a
small green leaf
lives under
water.
when a small
green
ball
attaches itself
to
underwater, a blue
fish
lands on a
shark
flattening itself
out onto it when a red
critter
scurries through the ocean.
i
her
saw
jagged in the
garden an
out
distance coming one
zig
zag
arm another
zig
zag
leg another
coming
close
in
swimming
zone
i
a shark and
you here
no
December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Lisa Nan Joo lives on Gadigal land and is an emerging writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Her work has previously appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Strange Horizons, Meniscus, Seizure Online and Spineless Wonders.
Plastic Nation
In the end, it feels inevitable. The floating island of plastic is declared a new nation, and becomes the world’s foremost thalassocracy. Ambassadors of PVC and polyethylene squabble over the borders, and stake claims for distinct nation-states among the sea-drift. New language emerges from the percussion of waste: the voice of the sea, but woven into a tapestry of six-pack rings and fishing nets. It sounds like a wave trapped in a torn plastic bag. The new nation sends out armies: swift, many-limbed proxies that surround and submerge their landed enemies, until the old borders mean nothing. The nation buries itself in the skin of the ocean, stretching until it’s fit to burst, and then it purges itself on the shores of the new world, and buries itself here, too, leaving no survivors, implanting itself into the canopy, the humus, the bedrock, the fossil record. Accelerating towards the erasure of organic materiality. The earth is an endling. The last of its species, abandoned to deep time.
December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Lawdenmarc Decamora is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated writer with work published in 23 countries around the world. He is the author of three book-length poetry collections, Love, Air (Atmosphere Press, 2021), TUNNELS (Ukiyoto Publishing, 2021), and Handsome Hope which is forthcoming from Yorkshire Publishing in 2022. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in places like The Common, The Seattle Review, Columbia Review, North Dakota Quarterly, California Quarterly, Cordite Poetry Review, AAWW’s The Margins, and elsewhere. His poetry will be anthologized in The Best Asian Poetry 2021 and had recently appeared in the best-selling Meridian: The APWT Drunken Boat Anthology of New Writing. In the UK, Lawdenmarc’s poetry was long-listed for The Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2021 and shortlisted for Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2021 (Aesthetica Magazine). He was an August 2021 alumnus of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project of the US-based Tupelo Press, and is also a member of the Asia Pacific Writers & Translators (APWT). He lives in the Philippines where he teaches literature at the oldest existing Catholic university in Asia, the University of Santo Tomas (UST).
A Love Story
A kind of relationship developed between C and D.
The former was from a sacred temple, the latter
in an abandoned carnival park. One day a silvery
slope of tiny metal was found packed in an aluminum
foil paper. Glimmering in the glue of sunset
was curiosity. D thought it was chocolate;
C cherished it and both became friends. Soon,
lovers. There’s however a potential health risk
in chocolates, experts said. The two paid no attention
and their cadmium addiction soared 10, 000 feet
into the sky. They wrestled with toxicity, a sex
of pain and smoke parachuting. Earlier C saw D
hiding from tubes among books, hallucinating.
C’s worried face triply glowed. D handed the latter
a transcript underlining a note that read: “Cadmium
is thought to cause anxiety in monkeys.” Their eyes
paused, murmuring, But we are lovers made of chocolate.
Night entered. And for the last time, the two macaques
pleasured themselves in the chaos of ambulance
lights, right before the next laboratory experiment.
December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jennifer Compton lives in Melbourne and is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. Her 11th book of poetry, the moment, taken was published by Recent Work Press in 2021.
An Abandonment
I had done everything I could do within reason
for the ragged rows of broad beans,
their juices were often thick on my fingers
from their first unfurling in mid winter
to the pinching out of the growing tips,
their binding to a stake in late spring.
And then the harvest, soon the harvest done,
and I had brushed through their ranks,
turned hands of leaves upside down,
bent for a better view of their private quarters,
against the sun, the way it is when picking,
nobody likes the low sun full in their eyes.
Their business at an end, I wrenched them from the earth,
laid their lanky stems one upon another,
did not regret their wilting sigh, their quick dying breath.
And clouds and clouds and clouds of ladybirds
crept out from the interstices, showed themselves, and flew.
It was the very opposite of a plague,
because ladybirds do good work, no doubt about it,
but it was very like that sort of thing.
And more and more and more, and then more, a wonder.
They had kept themselves to themselves until
an acrid scent, or an orientation to the sun, or a sudden
knowledge underfoot of sap not rising,
lifted them into an urgency of leaving.
December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Greg Page is a Koori Poet from the La Perouse community at Kamay (Botany Bay). He holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from UTS in Sydney and has been published in the Australian Poetry Journal and the Koori Mail. He lives on unceded Bidjigal land. Dox him at linktr.ee/boypage.
Barbed Wire
Earlier poems on barbed wire have proved unsatisfactory
Not that I know any, but if they were worthwhile I probably would
There’s no bigger symbol of the invasion
And the continent is still covered in the stuff
It might be offensive to talk about barbed wire
Perhaps not as plain rude as asking someone’s salary
A wealthy person’s salary that is
I’ll quite naturally admit my $16k annual jobseeker rate
Rust has a kind of beauty to it
Did they think through what happens to discarded industrial metal items?
‘We all have to go so we may as well go down the gurgler with microplastics’
Perhaps edible plastics might solve all our problems
There’s nothing hidden about the violence of barbed wire
That’s the thing I like most about it
It’s honest truth telling — a voice to Parliament
The ongoing mesh network communicating terror on the frontier
At the speed of light your sadnesses prove ineffective
Good intentions and Koalas are no match for intentional bulldozers
There’s a lot of uncertainty on the land these days
Good labour is so difficult to find even at $16k
December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Debbie Lim lives in Sydney. Her work has appeared in anthologies including regularly in the Best Australian Poems series (Black Inc.) and Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann). Recent work appears in Westerly, Island, Rabbit, Overland and the Willowherb Review (UK). Her chapbook is Beastly Eye (Vagabond Press) and she is working on a full-length collection. She was a Mascara Don Bank Poet-in-Residence in 2020–2021.
Captive
Hapalochlaena lunulata
You are the one who cupped death in the hand.
Watched it writhe in sunlight, tender-faced,
flashing its blue halos, more precise and smaller
than expected. A slow thrall of limbs rippling
away from itself. Everything might have ended
there: a far sea throbbing in your ear as your
own heart slackened, then subsided. Instead,
this sudden act of mercy as you tipped a palm down—
saw a life jettisoned to the shallows.
December 12, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anisha Pillarisetty is a radio producer and presenter at Radio Adelaide and a journalist at On the Record, living on unceded Kaurna Yerta. She is currently in her third year of university studying creative writing and journalism.
Remember to not talk gently when announcing the news, especially if you’re on radio
summers are long and the sky curdles quick
a game:
splashes of cloud or congealing milk left in the bright of the sink
skin circles back into itself
turning the colour of mud flaps on Dad’s old Maruti van bogged after
the first shock of rain
radio says 2020 broke records here
- 1. the third warmest
- 2. the fifth wettest
- 3. the eighth sunniest
- 4. the
radio also says there is a moon wobble
Zoom out to find the Indian Ocean on Google Maps and the searching
blue
is hurled against the window with the moon. The wind is torn between remembering
the kind of rain that disturbs bird calls into static
the kind of rain that is wanting
the Indian Ocean unspools
the tops of the gum trees like a tarp and it sounds like:
- 1. dripping stripes on a gourd sold cheap by the roadside
- 2. your fingers counting the air
- 3. ballooning curtains when my hands
were still small
your freedom – is it mine?
bigger than the cling-clang
at your waist
your laughter is tomatoes in hessian sifted through
1. too soft
2. too green
3. the coins are hesitant to leave the cloth
summer circles
skin.
August 21, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anonymous is a POC health worker and poet living in one of the LGAs on unceded Gadigal country. They write on the Covid delta strain crisis.
Let it RIP, Australia
The dawn of a new decade came with a sting
that became an explosion,
a sniff of opportunity.
And the powerful lined up to strut and pose
they got through 2020 by sheer luck, rising,
as they silenced and crushed all opposition!
They spun a smorgasbord of false narratives
to keep the masses asleep.
They reminded us in other countries
women get shot.
December 2020 Israel vaccinates, Australia is silent.
If there’s a goal, it’s secret and hidden.
Inside the dark wooden cabinet of white men
is a vaccination vacuum.
Strut, pose, wait and watch the world. It’s not a race!
Smiling and lying, they squander the gains,
strutting, posing and rewarding the sycophants
Only 4% fully vaccinated when Bondi starts
as it spreads to Walgett, and Victoria,
New Zealand even. A catch-up game
No intention of defeating this plague.
Deliberate, calculated spread
because when it is everywhere
there is nothing to lose in opening the borders. Ha ha!
1200 cases today and we smile and boast
dissonant, cheerful one-liners.
The price is paid in the hospitals of Sydney
by the beaten and battered clinicians,
falling one by one to radio silence.
By patients who came in for gallstones
but never left because of COVID.
In small country towns where there is no hospital
and no prospect of evacuation because Dubbo is falling
in the dark corridors of the prisons
and the forgotten people in Wilcannia
starving and unvaccinated
Is this planned genocide?
While the experts muse about global equit
While Pfizer is fast-tracked to the Eastern suburbs
So they can be free sooner
Strutting. Posing. The strong will survive and the weak….
Well they were unvaccinated. Ha ha!
Let’s go full Great Barrington today, Haha, they laugh.
Live with COVID, haha!
The children are the sacrifice,
held up to the money god.
The ultimate sacrifice in cringing worship of the UK
Desperate doctors whisper about whole wards infected
Hospitals crumbling
Emergency beds prepared in concrete car parks
Hastening death with morphine and midazolam
to allow new admissions.
Live with COVID, they say, as they strut and pose.
We have thousands of ventilators. Haha!
It’s just the Untermensch that are dying
Westies and Muslims.
Not the important people of Mona Vale.
In the rich suburbs a lady browsing in a non-essential shop
was heard saying “That’s not us. It’s just the LGAs”.
The experts who built their careers trumpeting their commitment
to the vulnerable and disadvantaged
are silent, still grovelling for small favours like obedient dogs
Servants to the state with one foot
crushing the heads of the dying, so eager to help
masturbating at the fate of the poor
as the carnage flows
as the merchants of death conduct their deadly orchestra
with glee
The complicit media who fawned and enabled this symphony of sorrow
are starting to fidget and fuss
Some sense belatedly they are stakeholders too.
Their children will be sacrificed. Oh no.
A few speak out and finally ask the right questions
Too little too late.
A small group of besieged warriors
fought for what was right
but were silenced and destroyed
by the despots and their fawning colluders
by laws twisted to punish
those who dared to speak truth
North Korea style.
The righteous painted as bad guys.
Black is white
And white is black.
Some lost their jobs for speaking up.
While the posing pretenders climbed higher
on the bodies of the dead
and the mountains of their profit
shouting out their propaganda
We have to live with COVID!
Death is inevitable!
July 6, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Michael Aiken is a four-time recipient of a unique and delightful child, and the founder, owner and servant-in-chief of Garden Lounge Creative Space, Sydney’s only specialist poetry shop and licenced café. His first poetry collection, A Vicious Example (Grand Parade 2014) was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize, the Mary Gilmore Prize and an Australian Book Design Award. His second book, the verse novel Satan Repentant (UWAP 2018) was commissioned by Australian Book Review for their inaugural Laureate’s Fellowship, as selected and mentored by David Malouf. His most recent poetry collection is The Little Book of Sunlight and Maggots (UWAP 2019).
Artemis, the moon, and a handball: nightscape
Playing with the moon
blue in my shadow
while you, my little guy
smile about slugs, treetops,
old school or new,
proper service during King’s Revenge…
Practicing your Spongebob voice
Schwamkopf,
silberschein
mein kinderlein, lÖcken
running on the field again
in peace
Elegy
There are no accidents
Said the turtle to the panda
Said the panda to the giant panda
Said the child to the man
and the man realises
he is a man
and the child goes on
realising nothing, realising little
of everything.
Nothing will come of nothing
a serpent consuming its tail
like it, a queen
the people talking
the Odyssey on its journey through space
family all put to sleep, the world
all gone to sleep
the world all gone…
blonde god
Steps into water
don’t emerge
There are no accidents
You’re a great dad
I’ll be your mirror
Now the glass is absolute
elegy
July 3, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Nathanael O’Reilly is an Irish-Australian residing in Texas. His books include (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020); BLUE (above/ground press, 2020); Preparations for Departure (UWAP, 2017), named a Book of the Year in Australian Book Review; Cult (Ginninderra Press, 2016); Distance (Ginninderra Press, 2015); Suburban Exile (Picaro Press, 2011); and Symptoms of Homesickness (Picaro Press, 2010). More than 200 of his poems have appeared in journals and anthologies published in thirteen countries, including Antipodes, Anthropocene, Backstory, Cordite, fourW, FourXFour, Headstuff, Marathon, Mascara, Postcolonial Text, Skylight 47, Snorkel, Strukturiss, Transnational Literature, Westerly and The Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2017.
From Ballarat to Brisbane
After Joe Brainard
I remember falling out of a pine tree
at number 2 Waller Avenue in Ballarat
I remember my eyes puffing up
after playing in waist-high grass
on the vacant block down the street
and the pretty nurse sticking
a needle in my bum at the hospital
I remember riding a black horse
sixteen hands high while wearing red
gumboots and red corduroy jeans
I remember burning my tongue
with tomato soup at recess
in the shelter shed
at Redan Primary School
I remember the neighbour’s German Shepherd
nipping at my arse when I scaled the fence
after retrieving a tennis ball from their backyard
I remember riding my red bike
into a puddle beside Lake Wendouree
sinking in mud up to my handlebars
I remember carving my initials
into a branch high up inside
the eucalyptus tree with a pocketknife
I remember breaking my mate’s thumb
while taking a mark playing footy
on the oval at lunchtime in grade one
I remember moving from Ballarat to Brisbane
when I was six – leaving behind my mates
and everything I’d ever known
I remember standing in the dirt driveway
of 50 Larbonya Crescent, Capalaba
on New Year’s Day thinking It’s 1980!
I remember my mate Ian finding a wallet
stuffed with eight fifty-dollar notes
at the shopping centre and buying
a dozen cinnamon doughnuts
I remember playing barefoot
lunchtime rugby and red rover
ripping uniforms and skinning knees
I remember the headmaster
summoning me to his office
giving me six of the best
for playing outside in the rain
July 3, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Paul Dawson’s first book of poems, Imagining Winter (IP, 2006), won the national IP Picks Best Poetry award in 2006, and his work has been anthologised in Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013) and Harbour City Poems: Sydney in Verse 1888-2008 (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009). His poetry and fiction appear in journals such as Meanjin, Southerly, Westerly, Island, Overland, Cordite Poetry Review, Peril Magazine, Australian Poetry Journal and The Sydney Morning Herald. Paul is currently an Associate Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales.
Thanks for the poems, Covid-19
Here’s me, face-masked in a supermarket
swamped by white people, who are
angry all over again about the yellow peril
now an invisible airborne enemy speaking in tongues
through the inscrutable hospital-blue fabric
that obscures my features, that signals its silent intent
while I peer at the shelves, ensconced in the conch-shell
of my mask – until the bald, wobbly-eyed face of a
Woolworth’s worker appears suddenly beside me
and barks: ‘Social distancing still applies in here!’
Oh sorry, what was I doing? SOCIAL DISTANCING
STILL APPLIES IN HERE he repeats, as if I can’t hear
as if English escapes me, as if this is groundhog day
as if his words were a talisman to keep the threat at bay.
Yes, I say, but I don’t know what I was doing?
And then, from behind, a woman’s voice chimes in
to explain that she had complained because I
was blocking her path, now averting her gaze
as she swerves her trolley past, and I am left
with my own trapped breath, watching the worker
move on to stack shelves within hugging distance
of a white couple, within a whisper of their faces
as they contemplate trays of beef mince. I refrain
from repeating his talisman back to him
because really I want to scream it hysterically in his face
because I take it personally, because I’m not from, and have
never been, to China, because I know that’s the wrong response
and maybe this had nothing to do with race anyway
and why the fuck did I wear this mask in the first place?
And I can’t help but think of Pauline Hanson, circa the turn of the millennium
and all the incidents like this, which I thought had been eradicated
as if the trope of Asian contagion that lay dormant
while Islamic terrorism helped fashion Hanson’s comeback
has now been revived in a virulent new strain
that cannot be warded off by hoarding toilet paper
for this behaviour is every bit as Australian
as our coming together to battle the bushfires
that tear across the nation, and to be Asian-Australian
in a pandemic is – like hoarding – to be suddenly
un-Australian, where one minor encounter can unmask
the searing loss of belonging, the sense of
impotence, the persistent second-guessing
of one’s own thoughts, that typically present
as asymptomatic on all those inscrutable faces.
July 3, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Vasilka Pateras is a Melbourne-based poet and emerging writer whose work is published in n-SCRIBE, Mediterranean Poetry, The Blue Nib and Poetry on the Move. She regularly reads as part of the Melbourne Spoken Word community.
Pusteno oro1
The curve of my spine
I sway
with the clarinet’s call
I am in its grip
pure majestic phrasing
scattered gradations
time signature
12/8
3+2+2+3+2
a gentle hop step of feet
if there was a verse this would be it
if there was a curse it would be my love
for the life of notes that gather as we gather
in the oro
3+2+2+3+2
a step in unison
in memory
a circle’s embrace
this is our protest
of release in the rattle and clack of
the drum
catching me
I wipe the sweat from my brow
the clarinet’s hold
into the unknown
people unstitched
frayed across new and old worlds
trying to pick up the lost stitch
in this I am found
3+2+2+3+2
Melbourne how do I love you?
Wominjeka
at Tullamarine
blazing glass
industry, billboards stream
flat grey basalt plains of the west
into freeway channels
of fast fast fast
how do I love you
true wog wogness of north
Veni vidi vici
market square of Preston
multi-language
multi-faith
multi–tribe
an escape
from the ravages of war
to tamed lions, eagles
white balustrades
lemon trees lemon scented
bitter sweet
fruit of dislocation
how do I love you
endless endless suburbs of east
Metricon, Glenville and anon
faux Provincial, Federation, Bungalow Californian
the home beautiful of
low maintenance thinking
to the row row of hedge groves
how do I love you
southern white-burbs
foreign beige of aspen
dales and vales
that sonorous
lap of bay
against the hush hush hush
away
how do I love you
oh Yarra, smell of brown
waste replete
the glass sheen of Maribyrnong,
canals of Elwood
concreted Moonee Ponds creek
do I dare dip my feet?
how do I love you
oh big city heart
Victorian genteel
Paris end
playground of successive elites
huddled laneways of mystery
artisanal, literary, labyrinths
cannibalised by capital
that cannot been seen
once crane adorned
now pandemic forlorn
oh Kulin Nation
of Naarm
people, country, language
with stories of legend and lore
I hail the cries for restitution
of what was
and is yours yours yours
FOOTNOTES
1. Translations from Macedonian:
pusteno – to release/let go/set free
oro – folk dance
July 2, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Gemma Parker is a poet and a teacher at the University of Adelaide. Her poems and essays have been published in Transnational Literature, Award Winning Australian Writing, Writ Poetry Review and the Tokyo Poetry Journal. She was the 2016 winner of the Shoalhaven Literary Award for Poetry. She is a PhD Candidate at the University of Adelaide as part of the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. She is one of the project managers of the Raining Poetry in Adelaide festival for 2021. She lives in Adelaide with her husband Guillaume and their two children.
Studies in Moonlight
The sparkle on hickory or white-oak leaves seemingly wet with
moonlight strikes one to the heart. One suddenly misses the capital,
longing for a friend who could share the moment.
– Yoshida Kenkō (c.1283-1350)
I don’t even know
what a hickory leaf
looks like. I yearn
to write poems about moonlight,
the wet darkness, solitude.
Far from the light-noise of cities,
to write in a place of true night,
in the medicinal north.
To compose more
than opportunistic poems
about the marginalia of life.
Doesn’t one also miss
the rush of loneliness,
and long for distance
from every capital?
July 2, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Samia Goudie is a Queer Bundjalung woman currently living on Ngunnawal country. She has published widely both as an academic working in health and the arts, and as a film and digital story maker. Samia is a member of Canberra based UsMob writers and FNAWN, First Nations Australian writers network. She has received an AFC mentor award for a short award winning film US Deadly mob and has had four documentaries screened and toured at festivals. Her various digital story projects are available on line and archived with the state library Old and FNQ’S Indigenous knowledge centres. Samia received a Fulbright fellowship in 2006 based around research in creative practices using digital story telling as a method to archive oral stories using new media and as a curative healing practice in First Nations communities dealing with intergenerational trauma. She has had multi media/word/installations and exhibitions of visual art and poetry at various locations including the Wollongong gallery, M16 gallery Canberra, ‘Territories’ at Laboratory of Arts and Media (LAM/LETA) University of Paris. Her multimedia/artwork has been is held in private collections nationally and internationally.
Samia has been publishing poetry and short stories more frequently over the last several years and has works published in the Southerly, IWP Iowa press, Wakefield press, Norton and Norton, 3CCmedia journal, Aiatsis Press, Too Deadly: Our Voice, Our way Our business (Us Mob Writers anthology), Giant Steps (2019) and What We Carry (2020), Recent Work Press and Routledge press. More recently she was highly commended for her submission to the Varuna First Nations Fellowship which gives access and support to Varuna’s residential writing space in the Blue Mountains. She has also won support and runner up with the Boundless Indigenous Writers Mentorships, supported by the NSW Writers centre and Text publishers, which matched her with Melissa Lucashenko as a mentor for her current work in progress, which is a novel.
Box
Won’t fit in The box
Hard edge
Cold steel
Sharp
Refuse, Resist
Don’t fit, won’t fit, can’t fit
Tried
Believe me I tried
Even the box rejected me
There must be something wrong
I contorted, twisted
My shape, my voice
My hair, my hands,
You even tried to alter my soul
I was never enough
Can’t fit
sit still
Move back
sit down
shut up
Refuse, Resist
Even when you medicate me,
debate about me,
label me,
Nah,
Aint nothing wrong
with my voice, my hands, MY shape
My gender, my colour
who I am
I am large and round
have limbs bound with the roots of trees
I can touch the sky
Inhabit stars
Why would I give any of that up?
To fit in your box
It
There is fear haunting us in shadows
Now walking amongst us in full sunlight
Unavoidable
My friend, tells me,
In her community nearly all the Elders lie dead.
There is fear haunting us in shadows
All those Stories gone
All the language lost
Who will teach the young?
Was it like this
When the tall ships sailed in?
Fear grips my broken heart
And now like the last cruel blow
her 11-year-old niece
HAS
It
There is fear haunting us in shadows
She attends funerals everyday
They drive hours to stand in long lines
hoping today they can get a Vaccine
Instead of body bags
She asks for prayers
Please pray for us
She always ends her posts,
Miigwech
It’s raining here
I’m so far across the southern sky
Across the wide ocean
a dark afternoon
clouds brooding
Banksia’s dancing
oblivious
These days
On a good day
I spend time outside under open sky
Seeking solace where none seems possible
There is fear haunting us in shadows
I choose to turn towards the sun
Miigwech
NOTES
Miigwech means loosely, thank you, in Anishinaabemowin also known as Ojibwa. However, it has also a tone that conveys respect and request, recognition and integrity. Gratitude.
May 15, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Marcelo Svirsky is a Senior Lecturer at the School for Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong. He researches on questions of social transformation and subjectivity, decolonisation, settler-colonial societies and political -activism. He focuses on Palestine/Israel, and addresses these topics by drawing on continental European philosophy – particularly the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. He has published several articles in the journals Cultural Politics, Subjectivity, Intercultural Education, Deleuze Studies, and Settler Colonial Studies among others, and various books and edited collections: Deleuze and Political Activism (Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Arab-Jewish Activism in Israel-Palestine (Ashgate, 2012); Agamben and Colonialism with Simone Bignall (Edinburgh University Press, 2012); Collaborative Struggles in Australia and Israel-Palestine (2014); After Israel: Towards Cultural Transformation (Zed Books, 2014), and together with Ronnen Ben-Arie – From Shared Life to Co-Resistance in Historic Palestine (Rowman & Littlefield International 2017).
Barren
Grown to provide
And for no other task,
That was the might,
Of those roses
On a shared soil,
They grew,
Just, and no more than,
To service life as roses
And when the spells changed,
Their house,
Forced by trade,
It was made barren.
Barren of a vile craving,
That sent you without regret,
Making the land a castle,
By giving harvest a name.
Of your tears and cries, barren,
Of your pain,
Barren, until your return…
‘Roses of Sharon’, refers to a field of roses in the Plain of Sharon in Palestine (Ottoman times). The photograph 1900-1905 was part of a collection that was initiated and published by Underwood and Underwood and was accompanied by the book Traveling in The Holy Land through the Stereoscope, written by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut. This photograph, was presented in March 2017 as part of the exhibition ‘Time Machine: Stereoscopic Views from Palestine, 1900’, at Brown University (US) and curated by Ariella Azoulay and Issam Nassar.
April 18, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Josie/Jocelyn Deane is a writer/student at the University of Melbourne. Their work has appeared in
Cordite,
Australian Poetry Journal and
Overland, among others. In 2021 they were one of the recipients of the Queensland Poetry Festival Ekphrasis award. They live on unceded Wurundjeri land.
News of Animals/Nature is healing
The waters of Venice are clear,
almost. There aren’t any sudden swans
or dolphins out of the blue,
the elephants do not get drunk
in tea-fields cleared of the social
distancing efforts of the redoubtable
Yunan workers. It not even
the same photo of the same
elephants, curled up like content
ammonites. Meanwhile
deer in Nara prefecture, Tokyo, without
their vinegar/grain crackers
from tourists, inquire after safe
food in the metro, empty
malls, galleries of “Western” art, disinterested as
that one doe in a cathedral, or that one
dog meme, sitting in a flaming cockpit bottom text I Have
No Idea What I’m Doing, going
viral, haphazardly. Nature
is recolonising Venice, says the owner
of the Venice Hilton. “The water
is so blue and pure”, she says. “Nature
has no name, only what is given”. You’re still
in quarantine, buses are still trickling
over your window, you look at your arm, primate
hairs poking through sunburn.
Gay Jesus as You
I like gay Jesus almost as much
as I like you. I like the water
congealing in his side, clear trans-
-substantiation, from a cop’s spear
as much as I like you. The touch
enflames, the matter
-of-fact saying now things will be
different: your body will not be
that of your forebears. I like
the orange pips with gay Jesus’
face inside, conch shells
on the shores of Galilee whispering Christ
is come to the thirsting ear as much as
I like you. I like the hole he made
of his rib-cage, a beautiful before-after
mastectomy photo, of his hands like
a glory-hole almost as much as I
like you. I like the time passing and time
to come, time hiding like the devil
in a stratum of chalk/sandstone,
the outline of an Ichthyosaur or
bird-dinosaur, saying Christ this is
a long time to yourself… as much
as I like you. I like the generations
of spiders you hate— the parallel
church of our gay, eight legged lord
they form— that saw gay human Jesus
saying nothing in their language
going back to cocooning their food
as much as I like you. I like the sense
of a gay beginning and ending, the word
split, tentatively as much as I
like you.
April 10, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Paul Collis is a Barkindji person. He was born in Bourke, in far north/west NSW. His early life was informed by Barkindji and Kunya and Murawarri, and Wongamara and Nyempa story tellers and artists. Paul grew hearing traditional stories of Aboriginal culture and Law. He earned a Doctorate at University Canberra in 2015. His first novel, Dancing Home, won the 2017 David Uniopon Award for a previously unpublished work by an Indigenous author, and the 2019 ACT Book of the year Award. Nightmares Run Like Mercury his first poetry collection is published by Recent Studies Press in 2021. Paul lives in Canberra and teaches occasionally at University of Canberra.
(26th January) – Mend That !
I’m too black to be Blue…
too black I am, to be true Blue Aussie, like you.
I’m not like Johnno and Crew,
too black I am, to be that Blue.
so no happy birthday, Australia,
or
Oi, Oi, Oi,
for You!
Situation In Sydney…
“Na. Not doin’ that. Not goin’ to rehab”.
And then, there’s that silence. You know?
Denial, everywhere.
Denial in silence.
(her skinny little body, a tremble. her eyes fill with shame and pain)
I search her face for a sign, for one little memory, of her.
She knows what I’m looking for.
Eye’s overflow. “I’m sorry, Uncle”.
I think of Christmas morns in PJ’s, and her, lost beneath a mountain of wrapping papers.
Laughter with smiley faces.
Tears of joy as seven bells rang out loud.
Everywhere the Christmas bells.
Think . . .First day at school and new uniform,
slowly turn into first cigarettes and later to boyfriend kisses.
Movie dates and birthday cakes,
and she slowly slips away into a grown-up world.
For a moment, for just a moment, she’s back – that shiny face little kid
back with me, for a second.
I searched the city for a bed in a Rehab.
But all the beds were taken.
All the doors turned closed.
Despair. Now everywhere despair.
Everywhere…
Black Sisters….
They’re all buried out there,
near Fred’s grave. All in a line. We lovingly called them ‘The Black Sisters’.
The Nuns built a small little place for the dying, named it Bethlehem…old drunks and cancers from grog boys and old girls went there and were nursed by these beautiful Nuns until they passed on.
They were dearly respected and loved by us Murrdie people in Bourke…The Black Sisters were Ours.
Most of the Nuns worked the rest of their life and died in Service at Bourke.
An Aboriginal man suicided in front of their Altar one night after being jilted by his lover (a married woman).
Duncan’s suicide announced the end of the Nun’s service in Bourke.
When I was back home there 3 years ago, I ran into some of the Blacks Sisters at the Bakery, early one morning before going to Brewarrina. “Lovely to see you Sister’s” I happily said.
“Lovely to see you, Brother” one Nun spoke, as they all held their hands in prayer position and bowed to me.
“I think you Sisters are all Barkindji now, hey! Its so good to see you again. Will you be here long?”
“Not long. Ha ha…Not Barkindji, ha ha.” The speaking Nun joked.
“Just a short visit, this time.” she finished.
“All us Aboriginal people…. we all love you, Sisters” I said and began to wipe tears from my eyes.
“As we all love You,” Sister concluded.
I waved goodbye.
I walked to the car; it was already a hot day, revved up the air con and we drove the dusty road to Bre. I began thinking of kindness and love acts.
The next day was my last one in Bourke that trip. I went to the Cemetery to say goodbye to my deceased relatives. I noticed fresh prayer papers at the graves of the Black Sisters. I realised that it must have been one of the purposes of the Nun’s visit, all the way from India again was to pay their respects to their Black Sisters.
Judith Beveridge is the author of seven previous collections of poetry, most recently Sun Music: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2019 Prime Minister’s Prize for Poetry. Many of her books have won or been shortlisted for major prizes, and her poems widely studied in schools and universities. She taught poetry at the University of Sydney from 2003-2018 and was poetry editor of Meanjin 2005-2016. She is a recipient of the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal and the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement. Her latest collection is Tintinnabulum (Giramondo, 2024).
Karina Ko lives in Sydney where she graduated in Law and in Arts. Her parents came from Hong Kong. She is working on a collection of short stories.
Brenda is a writer and artist of Wiradjuri and British heritage. She has written three poetry collections and her next, ‘Inland Sea’ will be published in 2021. Her poems and reviews appear in edited anthologies and journals, including Australian Poetry Journal, Overland, Quadrant, Southerly, Westerly, Plumwood Mountain and Best Australian Prose Poems 2020 (MUP).
Petra White lives in London. Her most recent book is Reading for a Quiet Morning (Gloria SMH 2017).
Nicole Smede is a musician, poet and educator of Worimi and European heritage, exploring a reclamation and reconnection to ancestry through language, poetry and song. Her work has been broadcast on national and international radio, published in anthologies and journals and features on ferries, in visual art and sound art works. Nicole is grateful to live, learn and create on Dharawal country. https://nicolesmede.com
Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet. Her first collection, Even in the Dark (University of WA Publishing), won the Mary Gilmore Award in 2014; her second collection was Unexpected Clearing (UWAP, 2016). She is currently working on her next collection At the Point of Seeing.
Amanda Lucas-Frith lives on Wangal land in Sydney’s inner west with her partner and two children. She’s a communications and publishing consultant, and is currently completing the final subjects of a Master of Strategic Communication at UTS. She attended the 2019 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a member of Youngstreet Poets. Her poems have appeared in Snorkel and Cordite Poetry Review.
Debbie Lim was born in Sydney. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies including regularly in the Best Australian Poems series (Black Inc.), Contemporary Australian Poetry and Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (both Puncher & Wattmann) as well as journals such as Cordite, Mascara, Island and Magma (UK). Her prizes include the Rosemary Dobson Award and she was commended in the Poetry Society UK’s 2013 National Poetry Competition. Her chapbook is Beastly Eye (Vagabond Press). She is working on a full-length collection.
Dani Netherclift has been published in Meanjin, Cordite and Verandah. Her work was nominated for the 2018 Judith Rodriguez Prize and highly commended in the Cliff Green Short Story Competition.
Maryam Azam is a Pakistani-Australian writer and teacher who lives and works in Western Sydney. She graduated with Honours in Creative Writing from Western Sydney University and holds a diploma in the Islamic Sciences. She is a recipient of the WestWords Emerging Writers’ Fellowship and has presented at the Sydney Writers’ Festival and the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. She is a member of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement. Her debut poetry collection The Hijab Files (Giramondo, 2018) was shortlisted for the Anne Elder Award and the Mary Gilmore Award.
Simeon Kronenberg has published poetry, reviews, interviews and essays in Australian poetry journals and anthologies, including Best Australian Poems, 2017. In 2014 he won the Second Bite Poetry Prize and in 2015 was short-listed for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. Distance, his first poetry collection was published in 2018 by Pitt Street Poetry.
Claire Albrecht is writing her PhD in Poetry at the University of Newcastle. Her poems appear in Cordite Poetry Review, Overland Literary Journal, Plumwood Mountain, The Suburban Review, the Australian Poetry Anthology and elsewhere, and she is the 2019 Emerging Writers Fellow at the State Library Victoria. Her manuscript sediment was shortlisted for the 2018 Subbed In chapbook prize, and the poem ‘mindfulness’ won the Secret Spaces prize. Her debut chapbook pinky swear launched in 2018. Claire runs the monthly Cuplet Poetry Night in Newcastle.
Sarah Attfield is a poet from a working-class background. Her writing focuses on the lived experiences of working-class people (both in London, where she grew up and in Australia where she lives). She teaches creative writing in the School of Communication at UTS. She is the co-editor of the Journal of Working-Class Studies.
Beth Spencer’s books include Vagabondage (UWAP), How to Conceive of a Girl (Random House) and most recently, Never Too Late (PressPress). She writes fiction, poetry, essays and writing for radio and performance. She has won a number of awards, including the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award in 2018 for her short fiction collection The Age of Fibs, now a Spineless Wonders ebook. She lives on the Central Coast NSW. 
Erin Shiel has poems published in Meanjin, Cordite and Australian Love Poems. In 2018 she was shortlisted for the University of Canberra VC Poetry Prize. She is writing her first collection.
Joseph (known to some as Butch) is a Western Sydney based poet and visual media artist, born to Filipino immigrants. He enjoys doing laundry, long walks through Kmart, and late nights at Mr. Crackles in Darlinghurst. His practice explores the varied experiences of the Filipino diaspora in Australia. His works have been published in UNSWeetened Literary Journal, UTS Writers’ Anthology, and the Australian Poetry Anthology. Joseph’s favourite word is pie.
Bronwyn Lovell’s poetry has featured in Best Australian Poems, Meanjin, Southerly, Cordite, Antipodes, Rabbit, Verity La, and Strange Horizons. She has won the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award and the Adrien Abbott Poetry Poetry Prize. She has been shortlisted for the Judith Wright, Fair Australia, Newcastle, Montreal, and Bridport Prizes.
Aiden Heung is a native Chinese poet, born and raised on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau; he holds an MA in literature from Tongji University in Shanghai where he currently works and lives. His poems in English are published or forthcoming in many online and offline magazines, most notably Literary Shanghai, The Shanghai Literary Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, New English Review, A Shanghai Poetry Zine, Aesthetic Apostle among many others. He is an avid reader. He can be found at 
Angela Costi has four poetry collections: Dinted Halos (Hit&Miss Publications, 2003), Prayers for the Wicked (Floodtide Audio and Text, 2005), Honey and Salt (Five Islands Press, 2007) and Lost in Mid-Verse (Owl Publishing, 2014). Her full-length play, Shimmer, has been remounted at several South Australian secondary colleges, 2016-17.
Carolyn Gerrish is a Sydney poet. She has published five collections of poetry. The most recent The View from the Moon (Island Press, 2011). She enjoys performing her work and is currently working on her sixth collection.
Mark Anthony Cayanan is from the Philippines. They obtained an MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and are a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide. Among their publications are the poetry books Narcissus (Ateneo de Manila UP, 2011) and Except you enthrall me (U of the Philippines P, 2013). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Foglifter, The Spectacle, Dreginald, NightBlock, Crab Orchard Review, Cordite, and Lana Turner. A recipient of fellowships to Civitella Ranieri and Villa Sarkia, they teach literature and creative
Natalie D-Napoleon is from Fremantle, Australia. Her writing has appeared in Southerly, Westerly, Meanjin, Griffith Review, and Australian Poetry Journal. In 2018 she won the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. Her debut poetry collection First Blood will be released by Ginninderra press in 2019.
Jill Jones has published eleven books of poetry, and a number of chapbooks. The most recent are Viva La Real with UQP, Brink, The Leaves Are My Sisters, The Beautiful Anxiety, which won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry in 2015, and Breaking the Days, which was shortlisted for the 2017 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Her work is represented in major anthologies including the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, Ed. Nicholas Jose and The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry. In 2014 she was poet-in-residence at Stockholm University. She is a member of the J.M.Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, University of Adelaide.
Claire Albrecht is writing her PhD in Poetry at the University of Newcastle. Her current work investigates the connections between poetry/photography and sex/politics. Claire’s poems appear in Cordite Poetry Review, Overland Literary Journal, Plumwood Mountain, The Suburban Review and elsewhere. Her manuscript sediment was shortlisted for the 2018 Subbed In chapbook prize, and the poem ‘mindfulness’ won the Secret Spaces prize. Her debut chapbook 
Autumn Royal is a poet and researcher. Autumn’s poetry and criticism have appeared in publications such as Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, Overland Literary Journal, Southerly Journal and TEXT Journal. She is interviews editor for Cordite Poetry Review and author of the poetry collection She Woke & Rose. Autumn’s second collection of poetry is forthcoming with Giramondo Publishing.
David Adès
Richard James Allen
Thuy On is a freelance arts journalist and critic, who writes for a variety of publications including The Australian, The Age, The SMH, Books and Publishing and ArtsHub. She’s also the books editor of The Big Issue.
Ailsa Liu is an artist working across electronic music, performance, installation, fiction and poetry. Her work can be found in UNSWeetened and Westside Jr. She writes strangely humorous uncomfortable stories, on death and semi-autobiographical experiences, of liminal spaces and their feelings of loneliness and anticipation and anxiety as generative spaces. She is a member of Finishing School and All Girl Electronic. She is currently studying Fine Arts/ Arts at UNSW.
Xia Fang, born in 1986, is a bilingual poet and translator. She has published two collections of translated poems and her own poetry has appeared in 
Ella Jeffery’s poetry, reviews and essays have appeared in Meanjin, Westerly, Cordite,
Michelle Cahill’s short story collection Letter to Pessoa won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing.The Herring Lass is her most recent poetry collection. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Meanjin, Island, Antipodes, Best Australian Poems and the Forward Book of Poetry, 2018. She co-edited Contemporary Asian Australian Poets with Adam Aitken and Kim Cheng Boey, and Vagabond’s deciBels3 with Dimitra Harvey. With Professor Wenche Ommundsen she was a University of Wollongong conference delegate at Wuhan University’s 2017 ‘China: One Belt, One Road.’
Janet Jiahui Wu is a visual artist and writer of fiction and poetry. She has published in Voiceworks Literary Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review and Rabbit Poetry Journal. She currently resides in Adelaide, South Australia.
A.J. Carruthers is an Australian-born experimental poet, literary critic and lecturer in the Australian Studies Centre at SUIBE in Shanghai. He is author of Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, 1961-2011 (Palgrave 2017), a book of literary criticism that examines five North American long poems and their relation to musical structures and musical scores. The first volume of his epic poem, AXIS Book 1: Areal, was published in 2014 (Vagabond). Opus 16 on Tehching Hsieh is a downloadable eBook from 
Eunice Andrada is a Filipina poet, journalist, lyricist and teaching artist based in Sydney. Featured in the Guardian, CNN International, ABC News and other media, she has performed her poetry in diverse international stages, from the Sydney Opera House and the deserts of Alice Springs to the United Nations Climate Negotiations in Paris. During a residency in Canada’s prestigious Banff Centre, she collaborated with award-winning jazz musician and Cirque du Soleil vocalist Malika Tirolien. She has also shared her verses with celebrated composer Andrée Greenwell for the choral project Listen to Me. Eunice co-produced and curated Harana, a series of poetry tours led by Filipina-Australians in response to the Passion and Procession exhibition in the Art Gallery of NSW. Her poems have appeared in Peril, Verity La, Voiceworks, and Deep Water Literary Review, amongst other publications. She was awarded the John Marsden & Hachette Australia Poetry Prize in 2014. In 2018, the Amundsen-Scott Station in the South Pole of Antarctica will feature her poetry in a special exhibition on climate change. Flood Damages (Giramondo, 2018) is her first book of poetry.