April 30, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Shastra Deo was born in Fiji, raised in Melbourne, and lives in Brisbane. She holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts in Writing and English Literature, First Class Honours and a University Medal in Creative Writing, and a Master of Arts in Writing, Editing and Publishing from The University of Queensland. Her work has appeared in Cordite, Peril, Uneven Floor, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize; her debut collection, The Agonist, is forthcoming from UQP in September 2017.
Road Trip
In the summer of 1995 my mother and I took
a road trip, followed the Murray River
all the way up to Echuca. Our lives were bundled up
in garbage bags, weighing down the trunk, and at the start
the tiny hatchback could barely make it up the hills. The engine
was as ragged as my mother’s breathing.
Every twenty kilometers we’d stop and she’d throw
a bag into the river. We would watch it
long enough to make sure it would sink, then drive on, lighter
and lighter. I don’t remember the trip back, but I imagine it must have been
like the drive past the redgum wharf: the windows down,
the freshwater wind soaking my hair.
The engine was thrumming and I felt as though
I could outrun anything.
Salt, Sugar
You never told me how it happened—bones trembling
beneath your skin, fluid collecting in your joints,
vertebrae ready to snap as the pressure
built at the base of your skull.
On autopsy they found bubbles in your brain,
your lungs swollen and soaked in sea-water,
ribs caved in. Paradoxical breathing—
your documented cause of death.
They didn’t stop searching until they found the sorrow,
tucked away in your thoracic viscera, the longing
distilled in the pedicle of your liver, hunger
hidden in the mitral valve of your heart,
didn’t stop until they had you cut and gutted like a mackerel
on a Sunday afternoon. In the low light your hands shone
phosphorescent like fish scales. Somewhere, the sea
stretches out for you, gleaming with promise.
Pass me the salt, sugar—you smelled of old empires
and the smoke of sacrifice—because salt preserves
and it purifies. You had the sea in your veins,
before they filled you up with chemicals.
Pass me the shovel, lover. It’s just you
and me, and I’m still waiting for you
to get up and walk away.
April 30, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mindy Gill completed her Honours in Creative Writing at QUT. She has won the Tom Collins Poetry Prize, a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Voiceworks, Tincture, Hecate, Australian Poetry Journal, and Island Magazine. She is an editor at Peril Magazine.
Home is the Solace of Small Towns (Springbrook 1991)
Eucalypts filter light like fly screen
onto the tan brick corner store,
a sign advertises Cornettos,
OPEN painted in soil-red.
My mother buys a newspaper,
two cans of Coke, counts change
from dawn-pink five-dollar notes.
The sun curls away as my father watches
the edge of town, devout
to the quiet of valleys.
He looks up at the grey gum bellies
of baby magpies, suspended moon-like
in the leatherwood.
My mother leans against the hot back of the car,
vermillion as a bird, vermillion
as this country.
The shop dog sleeps
like a mosquito coil
at her feet, blue back
dusty as drought.
Orchid Avenue
With a line from Jeet Thayil
When my grandfather hears the first curlew
break the morning, before paradise
cracks its shoreline, the ocean shucks
away the tourists, he instructs
himself quietly, The best thing for stress
is to believe in God. From the third, glittering
eye of the high-rise apartment, among
the white-wash, the steel-skinned glass, the blue
of paradise, he watches the horizon like a line
or a flame that bars him from the dead, the past.
Under the prodigal sun, the gulls, ruthless with hunger
patrol the pools left by the tide, and the brine
dries the golden surface of paradise, and his last
word is not a word but a shudder.
April 26, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Paul Dawson’s first book of poems, Imagining Winter (IP, 2006), won the IP Picks Best Poetry Award in 2006, and his work has been anthologized in Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013), Harbour City Poems: Sydney in Verse 1888-2008 (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009), and the Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology, 2016 (Hunter Writers Centre, 2016). Paul teaches in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales.
The Wreck of the Heartland
You have chosen your compass for this voyage.
It is not the fixity of the astronomer’s chart –
the neck-craning gaze of the brilliant night.
It is not the arrow that aligns itself to those
distant winters in your palm. It is the ebb-tide
below you, the bloody chamber that tells you
with each rushed second that you are alive
for now. It is constant in its fickle desire.
You will pursue this course beyond the
wreck of the heartland, into the spittle of the ocean
into the blue eyes of the horizon, the slaughtering
waters beneath you. Good night,
good morning, and good night again, you say
because the electricity that sundered the sky
that once, that dawn, is enough, and all.
April 26, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
TJ Wilkshire is a Brisbane based artist and writer. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Writing and English Literature and is currently completing a Master of Arts at The University of Queensland. Wilkshire’s poetry has been published on Peril, Writer’s Edit, and Uneven Floor, as well as winning the Kingshott Cassidy poetry scholarship and being shortlisted for both the 2016 and 2017 NotJack Competition. Wilkshire’s works, both creative and academic, are inspired by birds and feelings of displacement.
The honeyeaters.
“I am half a soul.”
I roll the words around my tongue
And slip them down my throat.
I say them again
And I see your face,
sacred;
like a Kingfisher.
The car pulls up next to yours,
the child inside is three months old.
You know we are there.
The woman’s gaze is piercing,
like ice.
No, not like ice.
Like a lover.
And yet your eyes do not shift.
And yet you drive away.
And the woman tastes no more of sweetness.
And your child will not know your sweetness.
And yet you drive away,
taking it with you
leaving two women
to become hard like marrow.
Two half-souls.
Two Honeyeaters.
Dear Father,
At morning –
I mistake the sunlight’s
skittish movements on the ceiling
for Yellow Turks, flying.
No,
they are dancing.
Looking for something
to sweeten my headache,
I peel myself from a deflated air mattress
that through the night
eagerly reunited itself with timber floors.
I meet with my friend’s father
in the hallway.
Eyeing empty bottles and cigarette butts,
he raises his eyebrows.
I notice they are like his daughter’s,
and I wonder where my curls came from,
though I already know.
So instead, I wonder what you look like.
April 26, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Annie Blake is an Australian writer who started school without knowing any English. She has been published in Verity La, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, About Place, Australian Poetry Journal and Cordite Poetry Review, forthcoming in Southerly and GFT Press. Her poem ‘These Grey Streets’ has been nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize. She is excited about the process of individuation, research in psychoanalysis, philosophy and cosmology. She is a former teacher who lives in Melbourne with her family. She blogs at annieblakethegatherer.blogspot.com
The Sun Was As Yellow As Her Wash Soap
Sometimes I feel glad no one
knows me. I can sit on the floor in front of the glass doors
and stare into my yard to watch the white
linen flap on the line. I think of my Borderline
mother and how I used to pass over the clothes and pegs — I was young
enough to think that all mothers knew how to love. This was our bonding
time — the time to tell me secrets even adults could not
be trusted with. I look at the sun now and I pick up the scent of her washing soap
and I see her hands which were always older
than her face. She used to leave the soap harden until it formed shards
on the wash house sill. The sun was as yellow as that soap. An impenetrable hard
yellow that would not dare dissolve through the first layer.
I remember our small weatherboard house and how my dad painted it green so we could save money. After lunch, the dog barking would mean the mail
had come. A letter from a relative’s slow writing and maybe even a photo.
It is good when no one is home to watch how you remember
things. They were the days I thought my mum was God
and I smile when I think of how I used to jump up for the line and spin around so I could fly.
April 26, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jessica Dionne lives in North Carolina and is currently pursuing an MA in Literature from The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She recently presented poems at the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association annual conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and her work has been featured in The Longleaf Pine, Luna Luna Magazine, and Pour Vida Zine, and is forthcoming in The Mayo Review, and Rust + Moth.
But Sundays
are for realizing. The slightest song, will
bring you back, ignite
other days are brittle and who can say I’m
sorry and me too on a Tuesday?
That inexact release. Clavical, a look, my mouth, your brow
all pulp-hearted and heaving towards something less shivery.
The truth is, we’re truceless. And we tend it
like some living thing,
although, wispy like baby bird bones
wrapped in paper mache’.
Easing into feelings of forgiveness but still remembering
that doctored way you cut me out.
We wrap up in the same blanket and no one’s toes are cold,
but tomorrow is Monday.
April 15, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jenna Cardinale writes poems. Some of them appear in Verse Daily, Pith, The Fem, and H_NGM_N. Her latest chapbook, A California, will be published by Dancing Girl Press in 2017. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
At Least this Music
I’ve filled out
my entire
form.
/
What about decor. And how
does light work. The shadows of
the lamps. Static skeet.
/
In the shadows some of the people are small.
/
I’m not great at holding
up this heavy conversation.
This body. A gun.
/
Listen for the violence
of bow to curve.
Shark Eye, February
The way we walk on
ice.
I am an American, but
I still only find empty
shells on the beach
between the edge of ocean
and an auto-lit development.
The way we remember snow.
What it covers.
There are fewer shootings after
summer.
Everyone is well-read and understands danger.
Then a tiny predator
(that’s what we call it)
falls out. Dried out. Dead.
April 15, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Darlene Silva Soberano is a young Filipino poet who immigrated to Australia at an early age. She is currently completing a Bachelor of Arts at Deakin University. This is her first published poem. You can find her on Twitter at @drlnsbrn
You Like The Smiths?
there’s someone in class today who looks like
you / she’s got the hunch of your back / the
spread of your teeth / & your hair when we
were 17 / but she’s not you / & I’m sorry for
that, but I’m glad, & I’m sorry for being glad /
sorry I never called you again / sorry this is
gonna be the year I don’t forget about your
birthday / but won’t send you a text / sorry
about ignoring you at the party last year / you
know which one / sorry you’ll never be a
passenger in my MINI / when we had so many
memories in my mother’s car / the Christmas
lights on that street in Wyndham Vale / & the
time we sat / singing / to die by your side / is
such a heavenly way to die / all the windows
down / a country road / I’m sorry I never
looked over at you like you always wanted
/ sorry we never got the scene in a film right
before the truck hits the car / I swear that was
never about love but about safety / which I
suppose are the same thing anyway / which is
all to say I loved you from our 15-minute
drives / to our 2-hour drives / & to the trip to
Sydney we planned but never went / & I loved
you when we walked / I loved you when we sat
on your bed listening to Stevie Nicks / singing
/ well, here you go again, you say / you want
your freedom / well, I got my freedom now / &
I listen to Stevie Nicks, still / & think of you /
singing / I’ve been afraid of changing / ’cause
I’ve built my life around you / well, I hadn’t
back then & I still haven’t now / & I’m sorry
for that too
April 11, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
R. D. Wood is of Malayalee and Scottish descent and identifies as a person of colour. He has had work published or that is forthcoming from Southerly, Jacket2, Best Australian Poetry, JASAL and Foucault Studies. His most recent collection of poems is Land Fall
Watching the Curry Van at Margaret River Mouth
watchsprings
cleared
the council dousing
the frailty of
cretaceous acne,
the river effervescent
looms, bodies bristle,
defiant
sharp
unwavering
lifting
where our identities pale
April 11, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anne Walsh is a poet and a story writer. Her work has been published widely in print and online. She has been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize twice and for the ACU Prize for Literature. Her first collection of poems, I Love Like a Drunk Does, was published by Ginninderra Press (2009, Australia). Her work has also been published in the U.S., including a short story, ‘The Rickman Digression’, by Glimmer Train. Her second book of poems, Intact, is forthcoming with Flying Island Press.
Depart
Your death is a soft, green wing. Velvet spun by sun.
A parrot’s wing. Just one more thing, one more shade of impossible
for grief to jump into like a souped up car. Electric lime.
Vegas neon of a Lorikeet. Your death dresses old school big time.
Ridiculous feather, the pink paisley of a pimp
in a 1970’s detective show I can’t take my eyes off of
such great clothes, so out there.
Memory is a record breaking blizzard.
Colours all the maps SES blue in the breaking newsroom
of this evacuated body. This weather woman, under paid, caught
for the duration on air in the studio.
Just out of frame, the storage closet it really is.
A stiff mop. A bucket with a bit of throw-up water.
I don’t believe my own predictions.
Hope is the unfillable toothless gas tank
of a Buick iced-in two blocks down.
Oh the belaboured point of her non-existence.
Hope is like god now.
Closures, detours, no through roads.
Slippery roundabout this. Again and again:
once I slowly invaded the privacy
of that part of your neck usually reserved
for your shirt just under your collar.
Oh! I was your shirt briefly so briefly.
And now I kiss your neck under the collar of the world
over and over
I kiss and kiss and kiss you.
I’m so drifted with the feel of you
which didn’t leave with you that nowhere do I belong.
Everywhere I long.
Not being able to talk to you is its own language.
Some kind of sign. A way of not moving. But flowing.
Lake glottal. Snow cuneiform.
I’m walking across the tops of cars.
Some souls that are still here but gone
go to the weigh-station where things already gone go.
And that’s inevitably when they take the picture.
Like of the last Tassie Tiger.
Her back hyper bent, so unlike her living self.
So bent with the lack of bending trees at evening,
those steeples from which everything
called her people to prayer.
She’s not looking at the camera
because it takes everything that isn’t her.
She’s looking at the dead body of her language.
Nothing is able to be said.
I miss your chest. Your Renaissance Jesus chest.
Your El Greco treasure chest a giant firefly
in the backseat of your car lighting up
like a cigarette with wings
when you unbuttoned your shirt.
I took in a lung full of light.
I miss the sky-when-I-was-six colour of your eyes.
The defibrillating blue of when the swing tips up
as much as it can and you become sky.
Now my heart is stopped by hooker boa green everywhere,
the diamantes of summer grass.
Death doesn’t wear mourning clothes.
She’s New York fashion week.
Bright streaks.
Unbelievable heels.
She’s toucan-nosed.
Bright as a fish.
And everything alive dances with her.
Real Rhumba.
Hips pressed together under open fire hydrants
in the middle of the afternoon.
And she doesn’t run when the cops come.
Never before did trees dance salsa or want so badly.
Everything is alive except for the lover whose love has died.
She’s the deadest thing living.