David McCooey is a prize-winning Australian poet and critic. His latest collection of poems, Outside (2011), was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards and was a finalist for the 2012 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award. His first collection, Blister Pack (2005) won the Mary Gilmore Award and was shortlisted for four major national literary awards. McCooey is the deputy general editor of the prize-winning Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009). His album of “poetry soundtracks”, Outside Broadcast, was released in 2013 as a digital download. He is a Professor of Literature and Writing at Deakin University in Geelong, Victoria, where he lives.
‘Whaling Station’ Redux
i)
What trash, that poem of mine about the whaling station
we visited in Albany in the primitive 1970s, those years
when an operational slaughterhouse could be a family
tourist attraction. My late father’s legacy of 35mm slides,
newly digitised, undoes my poem, with three shots—
miraculous and amoral—of butchered whales,
a shock defacement of poetry’s mouthy reckoning.
ii)
In the first capture, there are winches, wire, a stone wheel
(for sharpening things, I imagine), rust-coloured concrete,
a fibro building, and the figures of two blue-singleted men
in gumboots, one bending, both partly obscured by steam rising
from blocks of whale meat. The steam has a pink colouration.
iii)
The second capture suffers from camera shake,
that analogue of nausea, and shows two men with metal bars
prying into the whale’s remains. Above them are
the innocent clouds, a seabird with extended wings.
iv)
In the third capture, two boys are in the frame. They could be,
but are not, my brother and me. They are looking at a single carcass:
headless, flayed, and eviscerated, the mess of it
rendered into dreadful blacks, reds, and whites.
In the centre of the whale the JPEG clips to pure black.
v)
I was five years old when I was taken to witness this industry of men.
When I show my father’s photographs to my six-year-old son,
I skip past these three images, momentarily panicky.
My blonde son, intent on the screen, wants to know what
he’s just seen, but does not argue when I tell him it’s not for him.
We move on to a grainy shot of Uncle Mac—who was no blood relation,
but shared my father’s name—standing before the Arc de Triomphe.
Europe
The grey and the green
under the white of the sky,
and over the black of the earth.
The annual pogrom of Autumn.
Soldiers in the fog;
soldiers marching
in the guiltless dusk.
David Ishaya Osu writes poetry and nonfiction. He is a board member of the Babishai Niwe Poetry Foundation based in Uganda. Among publications, his poetry appears in Chiron Review, The Lampeter Review, CutBank, Vinyl, Transition, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, The Nottingham Review. His works are also published in anthologies including: RædLeaf Poetry: The African Diaspora Folio, A Thousand Voices Rising: An Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry, Maintenant 10: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing & Art. David is a fellow of Ebedi International Writers Residency, and is currently the poetry editor at Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel.
Time in my bread
I will sandwich
time in my bread
and swallow it, then
beg to
return to
my mother’s mode
sorry, womb
where all
the eels and the
snakes and the gas
flames will take me
as their friend
fit to control
cocktails
and sunshine
Death debate
You cannot lock
air in a
casket, or not
expect people to see
the white you wear
or the black
in the eyes;
there is no hope
that the house will grow back, she said
but, there’s wine
in the glass
and the people
will have rains to make
ice of
their burnt bodies
Ben Hession is a Wollongong-based writer. His poetry has appeared in Eureka Street, the International Chinese Language Forum, and Cordite, with work also to appear in the 25th anniversary anthology of Live Poets at the Don Bank Museum, Can I Tell You a Secret? In 2013, his poem “A Song of Numbers” was shortlisted for the Australian Poetry Science Poetry Prize. Ben is also a music journalist and is involved with community broadcasting.
Stuart Park Lagoon
After the storm, the stream breaches
the strand:
racing out skeletal branchlets;
racing out unconscious, plastic fragments
of suburbia.
Ostensibly still stands the lagoon,
the surface, tense with stillness,
a pelican breaks.
You can tell where to fish, watching a pelican —
an Aboriginal man had told me, once.
Where then, are the fishermen today, absent
from the overflowing water?
Andrew Stuckgold is a writer and photographer living in Erskineville, NSW. He has been published in Meanjin, Cordite, and Spineless Wonder’s Writing to the Edge (the 2003 Joanne Burns Award). He is currently working toward completing an MA degree in Creative Writing at Sydney University.
Taken
These eyes that split
from the darkened water
surging upward.
A snapping lunge
armoured in nightmare,
a maw that reeks
like a bone garden, crammed
with punching teeth;
the spike hammer clamp
of shattering leaden jaw.
This green scaled grinder;
meat and sinew torn
from that still half living,
ripped ragged
to the feeding;
consumes its corpsed bride
in a salt red wash:
blood, bile, and faeces
the banquet’s
clawing perfume.
Stuart Barnes was born in Hobart, Tasmania, and educated at Monash University. Since 2013 he has lived in Central Queensland and been poetry editor for Tincture Journal. His manuscript The Staysails won the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, resulting in the publication of his first book, Glasshouses (UQP, August 2016). His website is https://stuartabarnes.wordpress.com/; he tweets as @StuartABarnes.
The Moon and the Mason Jars
for Ruth Whebell
Purified in stainless stockpots
with black Italian cursives and gilt,
stuffed with smashed green cabbage, sea salt,
yoghurt’s
whey; three-quarter revolutions compel
the Latin blanks. From elliptic orbit a well
versed silver tongue assuages the dish rack’s
topsy-turvy characters.
Willo Drummond is a PhD candidate in creative writing at Macquarie University. Recently migrated from the wilds of the NSW Blue Mountains to the shores of Sydney’s Parramatta River, she has weathered previous lives as an actor, singer-songwriter and arts administrator. In 2012 she served on the assessment panel for the Varuna Publisher Fellowships and last year completed a Master of Research thesis examining the ethics of the lyric mode in Australian ecopoetics. Propagules for Drift and Dispersal formed part of this work. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in Cordite, Meniscus and The Quarry.
Cooing to R.A
Mr A, mangrove man Mallarmé of the mud flats
I’ve taken you in to the jelly
of my brain,1 in a kind
of mud-dove dreaming
You’ll fly with me forever
now, we’ve simply no choice
in the matter. Once mud gets in
to mood and memory, life
becomes mangrove in a minor key
Swamp dweller, fisherman
I see you in the eye
of a Bush Stone Curlew; hear you
singing for your love; feel you slip
through the gap
in a waterfall of words,
rooting out
a manhole of meaning
You, of the in-between
place; you, of the feathered
imagination; you, who wrote
yourself into existence, one bird
at a time; I row with you, now, gently, along
the mangrove mile
I dream with you
under moonlight
Fish scales glint
in the tangle of your hair, and
on the breeze, I detect a hint
of ‘no referent’
under moonlight
It comes and goes with the tide
1 “I sing softly/ from the jelly of the stone curlew’s brain”: Robert Adamson, “The Stone Curlew”
Elena Gomez co-hosts the occasional apartment poetry series, CELL, and co-edits SUS press. She is the author of two chapbooks, CHILL FLAKES (SUS press) and PER, a collaborative work with Eddie Hopely (Make Now Books). Her work can also be found online, at The Claudius App and Cordite.
Sweeping leaves is a weekly chore
she liked [found pleasure in it]
to click her tongue and displace
a wire & plastic retainer while
staring into the faces of young
children who turned to seek out
strangers on the south-west bus.
I prefer to describe myself
as plucky rather than as
allergic to scholarship
though it becomes easier
to feign allergy if one embodies
the disease-like components of
it such as limp limbs,
a dim eye
an untended ‘garden’
[to chuckle now would be rude].
the very minute you admit weakness
of literal concepts a fresh spring air
takes hold and carries you forth
to the edge of the football field.
you swoon at the thought of dialectics
not a swoon from desire but from
an overwhelming sense of the walls that
close in you also must perfect the
blank stare, the short-tempered child-like
frustration that occasionally
very occasionally, involves hurling
a remote through a nearby doorway.
would have preferred to be visited
by the ghost of alma mahler.
the beauty of names is they can inspire
thoughts of pleasantness in a woman.
I used to be afraid of long lines, the way
they snaked across a page the way they
furiously eluded my grasp, which already
was a weak sick thing.
K A Nelson studied at the University of New England, and once lived and worked in New Zealand, PNG, and Central Australia. She now lives in Canberra. Since 2010 she has won three poetry prizes, had poems published in The Canberra Times, Award Winning Australian Writing, Australian Poetry and anthologised (Canberra poets). She is working on her first collection.
This is a Woman Who Travels the Land
In the early hours of these bitter mornings
when the fog comes down and stays down;
when the only cars on Commonwealth Avenue
are taxis changing shifts or ministerial staff cars
taking the lackeys home; when flags hang slack
in the dark and stiffen in the cold on their steel poles;
my thoughts fly north to the desert – to a woman
who calls me daughter, who took me to Dinner Camp
told me a story, taught me a song, showed me a dance:
She is a woman who travels the land
Where stories are danced and country is sung
Where magic and myth is retold in the sand
Where kinship and totems are like lines on a hand
This is a woman who travels with women
Whose customs and life move in time with the moon
Whose birth on a songline means obligation
Whose night sky is peopled with ancestral kin
This is a woman who travels with crows
Who glides across country as hunter and healer
Who teaches clanswomen all that she knows
Who carries the lore wherever she goes
This is a woman who travels around
on everywhere roads criss-crossing the land
She knows bitumen highways lead to trouble in town
gridlock the cities; spoil old hunting grounds
In the early hours of these bitter mornings
when the fog comes down and stays down
my thoughts fly north to the desert – to a woman
I call mother, who took me to Dinner Camp
told me a story, taught me a song, showed me a dance.
She is a woman now elder and leader
She is a woman who travels the land
She is a woman who longs for old times –
God love her!
She is a woman, the last of her kind.
* kapirnangku nyanyi: Warpiri farewell: ‘I will see you’
Goirick Brahmachari lives in New Delhi. He hails from Silchar, Assam. His poems and articles have appeared in various journals and magazines.
Evening
An old building near Adchini with a warning sign that reads, “Danger” in black
probably speaks my mind. As the world around counts time, I lick the garbage bin clean
and it rains.
Only sometimes, a lonesome training center for the deaf and dumb
can illuminate a smile through the strangers’ lips and fingers and tongue through the glass windows without a sound and eat magic for lunch.
I see the moving faces of government employees who have always gone back home together, in the same bus, year after year, for all of their lives; starting for office, at the same time, early morning,
with some fried potato and few rotis, packed in their steel lunch boxes, and their sullen faces, each framed within the square glass windows of a bus which overtakes yours.
I see the coaching centers and those spoken English institutes where students are still dreaming. I hear the laughter of young girls carrying document tubes; see a few urban potheads who smoke by the private film school which morphs into a Yoga training center by morning. I pass by the stupid, stupid academic council where, every day, at least a thousand school books are raped and slaughtered.
But when the evening comes, I spread my wings and jump into the well of darkness of my room, in liquid dead hunger, in search of the night.
Candy Royalle is an award-winning performance artist and poet who fuses cinematic storytelling, poetry and unique vocal rhythms with confronting, political and heart thumping content. She tackles topics ranging from sexual obsession to social injustice, illuminating the darker areas of the human psyche for her audiences. Few who see her can forget her intensity, her combustible blend of intellect, imagination and heart. Recent accolades include being awarded the 2014 Marten Bequest Traveling Scholarship for poetry, a highly commended award for the Queensland Poetry Filmakers Challenge, and winner of the 2012 World Performance Poetry Cup as well as the AIPF Excellence in Poetry Award in both 2012 and 2013. She has won numerous competitions and has been nominated and highly commended for a number of awards. Her work has been published and featured both in publications and online including Overland, Australian Love Poems, Radio National’s Poetica, AIPF’s Diversity anthology and many more.
In Australia, Royalle is a festival veteran – from the Woodford Folk Festival to the Tasmanian Poetry Festival, the Sydney Writers Festival to the Adelaide Fringe Festival to name just a small few. Her Butch Priestess Tour sold out in the UK and the USA.
Candy says:
“Through the art of poetry and story telling I have a unique privilege to rehumanise not just my own story, but the story of others.” (ABC Radio Interview)
“I’m very pleased that you would like to run with “Stained”, it’s an important piece for me. I think the theme “Between Black and White” really speaks to me. I have always existed on the fringes – never quite Arab enough, never quite “Australian” enough. It’s like an embraced purgatory because I get to choose the parts I identify with. It also means I am comfortable being critical of both.”
David McCooey is a prize-winning Australian poet and critic. His latest collection of poems, Outside (2011), was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards and was a finalist for the 2012 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award. His first collection, Blister Pack (2005) won the Mary Gilmore Award and was shortlisted for four major national literary awards. McCooey is the deputy general editor of the prize-winning Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009). His album of “poetry soundtracks”, Outside Broadcast, was released in 2013 as a digital download. He is a Professor of Literature and Writing at Deakin University in Geelong, Victoria, where he lives.
Stuart Barnes was born in Hobart, Tasmania, and educated at Monash University. Since 2013 he has lived in Central Queensland and been poetry editor for Tincture Journal. His manuscript The Staysails won the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, resulting in the publication of his first book, Glasshouses (UQP, August 2016). His website is 
