Cameron Morse

December 19, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments

Cameron Morse taught and studied in China. Diagnosed with Glioblastoma in 2014, he is currently a third-year MFA candidate at the University of Missouri—Kansas City and lives with his wife Lili and newborn son Theodore in Blue Springs, Missouri. His poems have been or will be published in New Letters, Bridge Eight, South Dakota Review, I-70 Review and TYPO. His first collection, Fall Risk, is forthcoming in 2018 from Glass Lyre Press.
 
 
 
 
 
Centerpoint

Crossing into the main hospital, I remember
the bruise of my past life, thunderheads
of scar tissue in the crook of my arm, vials
of blood drawn weekly while I ate Temodar.
I remember the red river of platelets, lymphocytes,
and white blood cells that sprang
from my weariest vein. After two years,

I’m returning to Centerpoint Medical Center
as another man, a man accompanying his wife
on the hospital tour that will give them triage,
labor rooms, and the mother-baby unit
where she will rest after giving birth to their firstborn
in October—a man with no bracelet around his wrist,
no name, no date of birth, no questions asked.

Apnea

noun, Pathology.
1.

a temporary suspension
of breathing, occurring in some newborns
in the early morning
dark where I walk. When it sounds
as if the whole world is holding its breath, waiting
for a squirrel to pick itself up
and walk away from its body and brains
dashed along the curb, prostrate,
I-70 murmuring like a lamasery
beyond the rooftops, a road tossing
in its rocky bed, all the contrivances of man.
Beside the squirrel, oak leaves choke
the storm drain. No one is coming
to clean up the mess.

Rebecca Vedavathy

December 19, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments

Rebecca Vedavathy is a research scholar studying Francophone Literature in EFLU, Hyderabad. She began writing as a child but only discovered its appreciation when she read a Francophone Literature class many years later. She won the Prakriti Poetry Contest, 2016. She longlisted  in English Poetry for the Toto Funds the Arts Awards, 2017 and 2018. She is currently a Shastri Indo-Canadian Research Fellow interning at the University of Quebec, Montreal.

Autumn blood

Some days I stand in my choicest place:
                              a poem
with a leaf 
I stand 
and let the tree eat me.

Words hang like apples sewn to a tree –
the head of a poet – what was his name?
Didn’t the goddess tell you, it’s not safe to let 
thoughts form words on your lips? 
They aren’t red like hers – betel leaves don’t work.

Words draw shorelines on a passport – 
the Syrian baby flattened on a sandy beach. 
Didn’t the griot tell you, children here 
don’t build sandcastles, anymore? 
Lessons on geography and gore.

Words lay battered, dead against graffiti walls – 
Dalit child and Muslim man.
Didn’t the bishop tell you, baby cows are 
called Mein calves now? 
No, cow urine isn’t red – enough said.

Words explode on the lazy newspaper – 
shrapnel and body on boulevard – Paris.
Didn’t the ambassadors tell you, you’ll
pay for open borders? 
They probably forgot – Gotham city in rot.

This poem has broken ribs and a lost ear.
Where shall I find it?
Beirut or Paris?
I don’t want to stand here anymore.
The autumn leaves are mulched with blood. 
Veins slit, roots flung. Run.
Left I scream.

The nation hears, pretends these are bad
words hiding in a pencil box –
learnt to be forgotten.

This poem has breath. It shall remember. 
It shall eat the mud, the blood 
democracy feeds us
and rise
into red autumn’s green sister.

how to preserve childhood

red monkey insides
part-time job: museum
fulltime job: friend

friend because monkey was not alive. he was a he though. i didn’t name him. he was red. velvet. not like cupcakes. i am sure he didn’t taste like cupcakes. that’s because i tasted him. he tasted like fine red threads. touching tongue. tickling. he was as dirty as my feet. my feet went places those days. without chappals. climbed mountains of construction sand. dragged monkey’s curly tail. a cursive ‘g’ with me. fed him sand. ate some. licked deworming syrup from measuring cups. bit around his black button eyes. an attempt to make them look like mine. he still didn’t look like me. no one with three stitches for a nose looks like a little girl. that was the thing. he was a boy. i burrowed my fingers in his torn armpit. he didn’t mind. like i said he was my friend. i told him my secret. pineapples are just big apples, i declared. that’s why they have longer spellings. right? he heard me.

one day before convent school taught me “it is raining”. “rain was coming”. and when it came it came down with hail stones. no one was watching. i picked them up. one by one. silver sharp edges. taste of melting. white glass. tongue curled in cold. upside down camel hump. we didn’t have a fridge. i marched to monkey. stuffed his armpit. he had an armpit full of hail stones. i forgot about. later when i looked for the hail stones. monkey was a soggy mess: a museum.

a year later, we bought a fridge. it came with a fridge box. bubble wrap. a cover. that year i played a fridge for fancy dress. the box was my body. i had lines and all. i licked ice from the freezer. it tasted like fridge. i never saw hail stones again.

monkey appreciated that.

Rose Lucas

December 18, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments

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. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate Research Centre at Victoria University.
 
 
 
 
 
Family Portrait

Van Dyck, c. 1619

In their best Flemish clothes –
        lace ruffs and jewelry, brocaded fabric –
this young couple gaze
             intense and hopeful
out of the canvas;
they lean toward me as though
             all this
were as fast as the shuttering
of a lens;

their bonneted child,
dandled on her mother’s knee,
looks behind and up –
she has no need to look my way;

Her parents are vibrant with
        youth and prosperity,
their connection to each other,
their pride in the child;

like every family –
        holy in their ordinariness –
they hold the unfolding generations
squirming
in their richly upholstered arms:
Look! we have made this future –
        it belongs to us.

Only consider –
(and here the benefit of hindsight)
        their willingness to pause,
             to sit while a painter
                  composes
             studies
        takes their likenesses
             in pigment and brushstroke,
        placing them
lovingly
                  within the rushes of time –

Look carefully –
hold fast to the slipperiness of this moment –
it will not always
        be like this.

From Mallaig

Heaving out from the harbour,
        its narrow lean of wooden houses,
                salt-weathered in a cloudy light –

a ferry clanks and judders
        picking its way past little boats,
                their tangle of nets

and out into the slap and wash of darkening water:

stink of diesel and fish swim
                in freshets of air,
rubbing cheeks into ruddiness;

until the hump of island
sails into view –
        its possibilities of destination,
                palette of smudged greys and greens
flickering through the glass;

the angular spine of the Cuillins
        scrapes against
a loamy sky,
writhing in channels of wind;

while, deep in boggy fields,
        something
                shifts,
restless in peat –

These tannin-soaked fields,
this permeable membrane,
this elongated moment when a boat might
        clip and ride,
a shoreline in sight.

Claire Potter

October 30, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments

Claire Potter ’s most recent poetry publications have appeared in The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry (edited by John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan), Best Australian Poems 2016 (ed. Sarah Holland-Batt), Poetry Chicago (ed. Robert Adamson), and Poetry Review Ireland. She was shortlisted for a 2017 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize UK and she has published three poetry collections, In Front of a Comma (Poets Union 2006), N’ombre (Vagabond 2007) and Swallow (Five Islands 2010). She lives in London.

The Copper Beech

I lie you down, spread your branches wide as wings across the grass
Your leaves flatten like cracked shells, letting the sea out of my ears

Breath has gone out of you

You are at the edge of becoming an object
belonging to the wind

From a distance there is no way of telling your dark fallen leaves
from copper-black feathers––or your red-tongued branches
from a split open nest

I walk amongst purple shadows, I sit within the mess
of leaves

But in writing this I am not unique, nor
are these feelings. This experience cannot be said
to belong to any obstinate sense of me

There are many more who weep when birds and trees are falling, when

the mauve of dusk slowly tapers and pre-emptively disappears
When the bone-heavy moon

carves an ending and turns its back on the sea
     and leaves rattle like pewter shells

returning to the beach.

Three Steps Outside the TAB

Pale steps, concrete and absolute
solid and lengthwise between two pillars and a portico
I am waiting on the blue-grey steps
divided into three parts
The first step is physical such that in this heat
my skirt bandages against my thighs
I’ve sat here all afternoon
in this passage of tobacco, jasmine and beer
and I’ve sung, resting my head on my knees
looping prayer with radio
waiting for Grandpa to swing open the doors
scoop my hand into his
and ruminate about the horses
he’s decided not to back
Shiny cars shuffle
across a weft of bitumen and white lines
the rubber tyres wheeze with kids
springing from car doors wanting ice-cream, sherbet
lemonade through a straw
I watch the beetle-tops glistening in the sun––
inside they’re cooking and the steering wheels warp like liquorice
as though I’m Gretel and everything before me
on the steps of this oven, is secretly made for eating
I’m vigilant, too, about Grandpa’s Valiant parked illegally up the kerb
Cabbage-white body, chrome bumper, single front seat, no seatbelts
in the back, two round side mirrors, black
dashboard, chipped, plastic, and a whickering gearbox
Grandpa wears a white shirt––sleeves rolled to the elbows
elbows dry and flaking. Trousers wide
and tall, hoisted with a thin belt
He agrees with everything I say
and these afternoons at the TAB we foist off as dog-walks
Pete in sagging herringbone and rosaceous cheeks
taps my head and comes and goes
through the double glass-doors carrying
a blue plastic shopping bag full of errands and chores
as if it were against his better judgement to be there
I recognise his slippers, Grandpa
wears the same ones, seaweed-brown tartan, thin brown sole
noiseless as he pads across the shopping centre
as if it were his kitchen
and the TAB his blue lagoon
Sunlight passes through an eye of mirror and I squint at it
and begin crying without reason until Grandpa comes out
wipes my eyes with a handkerchief and says he’ll be done soon

The second and third steps are as cold as a whale might be
and beneath my sandals, they’re dimpled with mica and pore
Had I a pocket knife I could chip into them
engrave a heart cordoned with forget-me-nots
or tally-marked with time etched into tiny bales of grey
But I’ll close my eyes against the stone
imagine the rib of steps belongs inside Jonah’s whale
and I’m a barnacle growing there, perchance
or a mermaid in disguise, battering
the hull of this gambling seadog’s skip
with the weight of a huge emerald tail––
but look, he’s smoking at the door with Pete
his spare hand’s outstretched, he wants to go
he’s ready––he heels out his cigarette into a twist of ash
and off the steps, through waves of smoke-blue air
I skip over my tail

Robbie Coburn

August 22, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments

Robbie Coburn was born in Melbourne and grew up on his family’s farm in Woodstock, Victoria. His poems have been published in various journals and magazines including Poetry, Cordite, The Canberra Times, Overland and Going Down Swinging, and his poems have been anthologized. His first collection, ‘Rain Season’, was published in 2013 and a second collection titled The Other Flesh is forthcoming. He lives in Melbourne.www.robbiecoburn.com.au

The Nurse

I often ask for the ending.
blood-soaked white sheets you wake to each night
beneath their betrayed minds abandoned to your care.
I am sorry the body does not decide when.
and that you see me in the hollowed faces and knife-dreams.
not in your duty, all empathy soon becoming misery —
late one night you called through our silence,
a strange voice that spoke as if crying.
your mother was in another town asleep,
your father away at war, further from you than hours could say.
all distance finds loneliness in time.
I often ask for the ending.
no way to reassemble this.
no handbook or tested process written into your tongue.
only this strange voice I still hear
the night shift dragging to dawn
the mercy you breathe.

The Colt’s Grave

I stand at the paddock’s edge
the colt’s grave still visible
where dad has heaped wet dirt.

the ill and lanky body had fallen
several paddocks away, clean wind across the property
drying blood caked to his flanks.

a heartbeat ticking
through the electric fence
that formed a barricade around his small corpse

my father looking on
beyond my interminable confusion
inside my body, something changing

some future trying to enter the landscape.
I walk across the dilapidated horse track
waiting for the rain again.

from the weatherboard house
my breath is carried,
the unmistakable sound of crying.