April 11, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Paul Munden is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Canberra, where he is also Program Manager for the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI). He is General Editor of Writing in Education and Writing in Practice, both published by the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE), of which he is Director. He has worked as conference poet for the British Council and edited Feeling the Pressure: poetry and science of climate change (British Council, 2008). His collections include Analogue/Digital (Smith|Doorstop, 2015) and The Bulmer Murder (Recent Work Press 2017). A new collection, Fugue, will be published by UWAP in October.
Venetian Lullaby
You gaze from your cot at the belltower
of St Mark’s. It seems only yesterday
that your mother was as small
but tonight
she holds the wooden lagoon in her palm—
twists the lumpen metal key, winds it tight
until the miniature gondolier
is released in an operatic mime,
gliding under the Rialto bridge. Our
frail memories are in his custody
like a circling dream
and in the minute
it takes for him to falter, stall,
you fall
for his solid, inscrutable charm,
steer
your own course through our commotions and let
your heavy eyelids close like a secret.
Four Poster
The frame was hung with tapestries. If he lay
on the bed and stretched his arms and legs
towards the corners he could almost imagine
a quartering of himself, a bloody severance
*
and what possessed her ? the time she scattered
rose petals in between the sheets, so that when
they regained their senses they also reeled
from the crimson stains that suggested a gross
*
bereavement, and since none of the four
children could house the legacy whole, the bed
was dismembered, the individual, equal limbs
allotted to separate homes, like orphans,
*
this one drilled for a red and black flex to run
through its hollowed mahogany core
like an artery, powering the electric light
where I sit at night and witness its first flickers.
April 10, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Darren C. Demaree is the author of six poetry collections, most recently
Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly (2016, 8
th House Publishing).
He is the Managing Editor of the Best of th
e Net Anthology and
Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.
Trump As A Fire Without Light #340
The ocean is full of motherfuckers that believed they were the ocean.
Trump As A Fire Without Light #341
Winter beneath my shirt, my nipples have become very political, and the one on the right has refused to acknowledge that winter is here. The wind howls and the fabric I’ve chosen is enough for my right nipple? How could one body swallow a season so completely, and have one nob in one quadrant maintain that this is the summer we’ve been waiting for? I have no desire to lose my own nipple. I am going to cut a hole in my all of my shirts to see how long the right can take this new discomfort the rest of the world is experiencing. I refuse to lose my body because one nipple is unfeeling, but I am willing to give up my whole wardrobe to make this point.
Trump As A Fire Without Light #342
The wind is a wall, and it never marks any territory for long. It will touch your blood to claim your blood. It will dazzle your soul as it changes your name. I don’t think this man understands nature. I know he doesn’t understand how a wall can turn on you at any moment.
March 21, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Owen Bullock is a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Canberra. His publications include urban haiku (Recent Work Press, AU, 2015), A Cornish Story (Palores, UK, 2010) and sometimes the sky isn’t big enough (Steele Roberts, NZ, 2010). He has edited a number of journals and anthologies, including Poetry NZ. He won the Canberra Critics’ Circle Award for Poetry 2015.
Five untitled prose poems
Thoughts bother the night, they’re out of control. He tells himself the thing he’s thinking about, lecture, meeting, poem, have already happened. He stops thinking and sleeps. Next day, on his way to an event he tells himself it’s already happened. It messes with his head, the body feels a kind of loss, a lack of excitement, but it’s useful.
*
Num num, birdy num-nums, nom du nom. Creosote, croeso, welcome, willkommen, Belconnen (Belco-nin). Nom du nom. Nom nom. Numb numb. Umyum. The Republic of Umyum – his fantasy. The pixie forest, pixie-dundle on duty, watching the road for strangers, who seldom come. Dreams of Jodhpur and Miscreant in search of the Sacred Barrel. He shall never realise. Num.
*
He made an inventory of men assassinated by King Edward; gathered stone, beams and thatching to restore the cottage; attended rebels who stormed garrisons, wound and unwound bandages; mended shields, retrieved frightened horses; procured weapons and necessaries, Wallace.
*
You visited, as no one else in the family had; played with the children, knitted toys and folded hankies into mice; let them into the caravan with the password ‘cup of tea’; welcomed my wife; accepted my deviating path; gave me money for gigs and football matches; introduced me to friends, at their level, boasted of my achievements; took me to relatives; knitted jerseys; washed me when I wet myself, yes, screamed, and gave birth to me.
*
The pipe eased his mind. Thoughts of his beloved cat, endless rows with his wife, the garden, human manure. Not having anyone to share his vision with . . . he never had one before . . . when it arrived like a rainy morning and wouldn’t leave it was too late.
March 21, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anita Patel was born in Singapore and lives in Canberra, Australia. She has had work published in the Canberra Times, in Summer Conversations (Pandanus Books, ANU), in Block 9, Burley Journal, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and Demos Journal and by Wombat Books. Her children’s poems have been published in the NSW School Magazine and in an anthology Pardon My Garden edited by Sally Farrell Odgers and published by Harper Collins. She won the ACT Writers Centre Poetry Prize in 2004 for her poem Women’s Talk. She has performed her poetry at many events, including the Canberra Multicultural Festival and the Poetry on the Move Festival (University of Canberra). She was the feature poet for the Mother Tongue Showcase at Belconnen Arts Centre, June 2016.
So Much Fruit…
(for a Malaysian Grandmother in Australia)
You look so odd in this backyard
(for it is a backyard not a garden)
with its dusty lawn and barbeque,
long unused, lurking in the corner.
Surrounded by the splintery teeth
of a paling fence, you pause
under a tree purple heavy
with fruit.
Later in the kitchen your deft fingers
dance like butterflies –
wielding a pair of chopsticks in
a sizzling wok – conjuring the perfume
of a time long gone.
I show up at your door each afternoon
(sticky lipped, licking a banana paddle pop).
We step out among plums
split and syrupy, scattered on dry grass –
What to do with so much fruit?
This question never plagued you
when rambutans clustered,
crimson and fragrant,
in leafy branches on the tree
in your garden at home.
Apples and Chillies
Last night I heard a woman talk about apples.
Her words hung like fragrant orbs in the twilight,
the crunch and tang of apple stories
beguiled us for a while…
But I must admit I do not relish this cold climate fruit –
Fine for fairy tales and picnic baskets –
rosy sweet, neatly sliced, baked in a pie,
delicious, no doubt, but too cosy
for those of us who grew up with the
scarlet spite of chillies on our tongues –
those shiny, pointed (sharp as painted
fingernails) berries spiking our tastebuds
and staining our lips blood bright…
There is no place for crisp and juicy
apple simple syllables in mouths that know
the seductive malevolence of chillies…
March 21, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Angela Serrano is a Filipino-Australian nonfiction writer, art model, and circus beginner. Her work has appeared in The Lifted Brow, Overland, Kill Your Darlings, and elsewhere. She is writing a memoir called “How Not to Jog In Place.”
In Australia, it rotates counter-clockwise
Plok! And a galaxy of yellow brown muck splashed into being. No longer pristine, the water in the toilet bowl had become a kind of primordial soup. And my ass, that shrill sphinx of a sphincter, transformed into went into full-on telenovela. A million minutes later, a clean swipe was nowhere in sight. A full excavation had to commence. Johnson’s Baby Wipes clung to my digits like the memory of a fiancé at home while my point guard, lone infantryman, set out to do his duty. It slipped in so easily it almost felt like nothing had happened, even though the universe had changed; when your own finger deflowers your bumhole in a non-medical situation, that’s the sensation of a new galactic order taking shape in ways your mediocre consciousness can’t even begin to comprehend. In, out, in, out, it looks like fucking – and feels slightly better – except when you fuck, white should be the only colour you see on the wet stuff exiting your orifices.
December 31, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Russell Winfrey studied English at Wabash College and is currently working on an M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. His poem “Saddlesore” appeared in Belleville Park Pages in 2013. He is currently working on a poetry collection titled Changing Quarters. He resides near Charlotte, North Carolina.
sanderling
the bustle of your wind-up legs
entertains
your pizzicato charge
at receding surf
and whitecaps chase you back
such a spot this well-churned earth
spitting ancient critters, knotted wrack
I don’t mean to lighten
your serious business
your clumsy syringe
rooting for sandy noshes:
some spare unseen meat
—ocean-cured
or diminish your noble frame
your little fur coat
perched on spindle galoshes
my god, in this heat!
— surely inured
I’m not.
face burnt and over-exfoliated
my hair crunchy like a beach weed
two days on a towel
and I’m ready to throw it in
much as I might
like to put you in my pocket
this is the place you are
and just a place I’ve been
December 20, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dave Drayton was an amateur banjo player, Vice President of the Australian Sweat Bathing Association, a founding member of the Atterton Academy, and the author of Haiturograms (Stale Objects dePress) and Poetic Pentagons (Spacecraft Press).
bleachers on beaches
events transcribed in keyboard hiss
the therapist’s arena confiscates organisms
happenstance
happens here
at the corner store now is all for none
a price on fun rises the thirteenth chore is unforgettable
alongside the cost
of a Callipo
beneath the stands what resembles soreness
bleachers on beaches resembles shock
sandpits’
subscript
details time that doesn’t fall
from glass bell
to glass bell
but scatters
is built and thrown and urine soaked and flicked in
eyes
white meat
you are in no state to learn
to differentiate between
panic or heart attacks
while experiencing either
this turns out was the former
found in deep sweat
an auntie’s Christmas kitchen
while your vegan partner senses
something wrong so tries
to guide you through the carving
of flesh and of breast
a turkey that can only
be foreign in this heat
to a person who won’t eat
whatever’s got the
ability to smile produces
bite me, it seems you can
merry Christmas, you filthy animal
September 11, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Robbie Coburn was born in June 1994 in Melbourne and grew up in the rural district of Woodstock, Victoria. He has published a collection, Rain Season (Picaro Press, 2013), as well as several chapbooks and pamphlets. His latest chapbook is Mad Songs (Blank Rune Press, 2015).A new collection of poetry The Other Flesh and a novel Conversation with Skin, are forthcoming. He currently resides in Melbourne. www.robbiecoburn.com.au
Anorexia in Autumn
image of autumn breaking against the trees
the vast expanses of light forming on the lands surface
fragments of this, and still, no substantial change.
a vision of physicality placed on the grasses.
no reason for this starving feeling but control.
you are young. your body withstands deprivation.
sectioning off the skin, the carrion-lined flesh that hungers
the hanging of clouds decorating the sky carefully.
moving towards an ideal disappearance, even out here.
I like to touch your bones.
I like to watch you shrinking.
your figure is perfect
when you lie back in the dark and no longer
belong anywhere.
A Waking Farm
We will never know what they are barking at.
piercing the air at dawn
steadily they continue against the wind,
the persistent thread of breath
through wire.
September 7, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Frank Russo’s poetry collection In the Museum of Creation was published by Five Islands Press in 2015. His writing has been published in journals such as Southerly, Contrappasso, Copperfield Review, Cactus Heart, Pacific Review and in anthologies in Australia, the United States and Canada. His is completing a doctorate at the University of Sydney.
The dogs
One month after Senor Flores’ death, his widow, Dona Carlinda, arranged a Mind Mass in the Church of Christ Saviour. Father Alonso donned a purple chasuble over his alb. Dona Carlinda sat in the front pew, flanked by her children, facing her husband’s photograph, placed where his bier had lain.
As the sacraments of the Eucharist were taken to the altar, a dog appeared at the church’s vestibule. It watched as Father Alonso blessed the wafers and wine, and as he offered Dona Carlinda and her children each a host, the dog made its way down the aisle as if also wanting to receive benediction.
*
Word grew of how Senor Flores had attended his own Mind Mass in the form of a dog.
Word grew of how his widow saw his form in all the animals that approached her.
How she saw Senor Flores in the gecko that clicked to her each night outside her bathroom window.
How she saw him in the iguana that visited her yard each morning to spit salt.
How she saw him in the rock dove which she threw barley seeds to each afternoon.
*
On Sundays Dona Carlinda walked to the cemetery with her daughter, Pilar, to lay flowers on Senor Flores’ grave. The day she cut a bouquet of trumpet flowers from her garden, a jackal-like dog appeared behind the cemetery and headed towards her. Dona Carlinda and Pilar turned and walked back towards the town.
As they passed the tombs along the roadside a second dog appeared. They hurried their pace. Nearing the lagoon, they turned and saw four dogs following them. They ran, wishing the city of tombs had walls high enough to trap its spirits.
September 7, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sukhmani Khorana is Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Wollongong. Her ivory tower is akin to a mother of pearl art studio, where she practices multicultural ethnography across writing and photography. Sukhmani’s creative work and commentary has appeared in Overland, Crikey, Kill Your Darlings, Peril, and The Conversation.
Under my feet
For those of us with wheels under our feet
The only moments that ground us are
When the earth under our soles is moving too
Like on a train
Thirroul, Helensburgh, Sutherland, Hurstville
Each repetition is like a recitation
Invoking the cult of new rhymes, every time
And on a plane
When one is amongst the ephemera of clouds
Yet tethered to seats and screens
Because one really doesn’t know clouds at all
Except through the names we imagine for them
You see routes and maps, and dots and lines
All these trajectories just under your feet
Beckoning you to places you might belong
But you keep moving
Sometimes with a ragged guidebook tucked under your arm
And I join the ride
When you ask me to take your picture in front of the van
You see me again
In the city we both inhabit on our habitual return
Where I bike to the train station
While you walk with a swagger as you get off the bus
And we both queue for coffee
Our commutes and routines and jobs stay stubbornly constant
As we move through, and roll around them
Hoping the wheels under our feet will bind us to everywhere