April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Kent MacCarter is a writer and editor in Castlemaine, with his wife and son. He’s the author of three poetry collections – In the Hungry Middle of Here (Transit Lounge, 2009),Ribosome Spreadsheet (Picaro Press, 2011) and Sputnik’s Cousin (Transit Lounge, 2014). He is also editor of Joyful Strains: Making Australia Home (Affirm Press, 2013), a non-fiction collection of diasporic memoir. He is an active member in Melbourne PEN, and was executive treasurer on the board for Small Press Network from 2009-2013.
Jetstar to Rockhampton
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April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Pippa Little was born in Tanzania, raised in Scotland and now lives in Northumberland in the North East of England. She has worked as a university lecturer and tutor, a literacy development worker and as an editorial assistant and staff writer in publishing. In September 2015 she takes up a Royal Literary Fellowship at the University of Newcastle. Her collection Overwintering came out from OxfordPoets/Carcanet in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize.
Moon Watches Earth
She’s a whirl,
a well-head’s
surge of white,
which way
curls her feather-tail of storms?
Which tight twist
pulls clockwise
or wind-borne,
Coriolis to her equator?
How the crystals shiver
in her wedding hat
as she circle dances!
How small and silver-dented
are her sad tarantellas!
I am umbilical and dark.
Energies in me, deep-burned,
thrash unseen, grind themselves in.
I remember everything.
Turn and turn and turn,
snake-tail mouth in a Mobius spiral.
I want wild tides sometimes
to make me simple,
muscle-cut. Yet my nature
loves its treadling, these wonky spirals
almost surfacing beneath the skin.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Benjamin Dodds is the author of Regulator (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014). His work appears in The Best Australian Poems 2014 and was recently performed on Radio National’s Poetica program.
Space Age
My mother’s breasts were astronauts
drawn up close and high
in a latex matrix of Playtex warp and weft.
They manufactured the moon suits
(Playtex, not my mother’s breasts)
to swaddle men against silent death.
Twenty-one layers of failsafe stitching—
cascading redundancy
made vacuum-tight by hand
under the brief
that space is equilibrium.
No blood or breath
or saliva out there;
given the chance
the void takes its share.
I’m told I screamed each time
like depressurisation
at their smothering press
and just like those gods of Apollo
had to be fed powdered milk.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Marjon is a secondary school teacher of English/Literature residing in Melbourne, Victoria. Her poetry has been published in Australian Poetry Journal, Antipodes, Southerly, The Moth Magazine, Island, Gargouille, Blue Dog, and Going Down Swinging, and am forthcoming in Contrappasso magazine and The Australian.
Goodbye To Mother
Wet fog rolls over the city as you roll out,
Upon the water.
We row you out
Over the anchors, into the channel
To scatter flesh preternaturally made dust
Where the dead can finally walk like the miracle.
Which way will you float Mother?
Along which blue corridor shall I lap in the dark
For your hand
When all I am is body,
The heaviness that sinks under the swell?
We are gathered here, the ungathered
Clutching you to our bosom,
Drifting with the tide,
Where once you heaved us out of
And gave us to earth.
Who will name me now that you are everywhere
But silent look on this great parody,
This elemental shadow-world?
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Professor Catherine Cole is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong. She has published novels and two non-fiction books. She is the editor of the anthology, The Perfume River: Writing from Vietnam and co-editor with McNeil and Karaminas of Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television, (Berg UK and USA, May 2009). She also has published poetry, short stories, essays and reviews.
from War Aphorisms
21.
If you fuck in the fields on a summer night the moon will appear at midnight.
Such is the nature of elongated days that when at last you see a face in the enamelled sky you must remind yourself not to be afraid:
it is just the moon, veiled and bursting.
22.
I stand on the edge of a field, on the edge of a trench full of poppies, runaway barley, weeds.
In the trench is all history since 1914.
Isn’t a trench a cruel thing?
23.
Two hares box in the frosty field,
their hind legs turning hoare to crystals.
A halo of frost around their heads, ears long flat ribbons.
Naked fun.
They disappear, white tails the last of them.
24.
Sometimes a horse looms from the mist,
ghost or real, who can tell.
It’s hooves send clods flying.
I know horses.
I know mist.
I know soil.
What truth can be found in that trinity.
25.
An old stone wall with eighteen bullet holes.
Probing fingers enter the wall.
If the souls of the dead need somewhere to go it surely must be holes filled with abandoned swallows’ nests.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Meeta Chatterjee is a lecturer in academic language and literacy in Learning Development, University of Wollongong. Her academic and professional interests lie in the area of doctoral research and writing. She has written about humour in Indian women writing in English for her Masters thesis. She has been writing poems for decades, but has only published occasionally. She enjoys the challenges of creating multisensory images to tell a story.
Erasure
Those who saw her go, deny that she was naked.
She tugged the sky off the clothesline, wrapped it
round herself and walked into the river-they said.
Fourteen days later lamps and rumours flared
on the banks of the Ganges.
Fishermen say that she strides into the village
stark naked, on full moon nights.
She ignores offers of clothes,
ties her wet hair into a bun
and walks past the living.
Some say she visits the temple, clangs
the bells to crescendo and then
dissolves into the flame of an oil lamp.
Others have seen her behind the abandoned house
beckoning drunken gamblers.
“Very unbecoming of a Brahmin girl-even in death”,
they shake their heads.
Others claim that they have seen her big with child
waving her voice at the wind—
her songs naked too.
In her own home, no one speaks of her.
They’ve blacked out her pictures from family albums
and scrubbed her off collective memories.
But on some cold winter evenings, when the sound of the conch
scatters and scatters
through the incense-filled prayer room
images of my dead eighteen –year old aunt dance
on grandma’s eye-lashes
asking to be grieved.
Landscape: Travelling Through South Australia
The coastline disappears-bewitching in its flouncy, racy skirts and the
promise of bare skin.
The smell of the rainforest and the seeds in the shade is memory.
The sky is a chalice, upturned on land –the last drop gone.
Occasionally the soil desperate for seed and water
parts its itchy legs
stealthily to irrigation and grows guiltily pubic.
But mainly, the land blisters and throws up dead animals on the veins of roads.
Bones jutting, skin broken and broken again, the land endures the sun
roaring its orange pulp of heat.
At nightfall, the sky and land meet like wounded saints- too tired to sleep.
‘Erasure’ and ‘Landscape: Travelling through South Australia’ were published in The Journal of Literature and Aesthetics in 2004.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Elizabeth Burns lives in Lancaster, United Kingdom. Her latest collection of poetry is Held (Polygon) and her pamphlets include winner of the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets, The shortest days (Galdragon), and The scarlet thread (Wayleave), which is currently a Poetry Book Society featured pamphlet.
Swallow
When I was a swallow, I could fly ten thousand miles
without stopping. I could swoop from one side
of the globe to the other, over land, over sea
in one great sweep. When I was a swallow
I knew when to leave the wheeling sky
above that high wall where I nested:
I could feel days shortening, evenings
growing darker. I did not want winter,
I wanted summer always under my wings,
each year I headed southwards, southwards,
as if the south pole pulled me there, as if by this
I could outwit the turning earth, the lowering sun.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Joseph Han was born in Seoul, Korea and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. His fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Bamboo Ridge Press, Word Riot, CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art & Action, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Eclectica Magazine, and Hawaiʻi Pacific Review. As of Fall 2015, he will be a Ph.D. candidate in English at University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa.
Real estate (dream house)
This burning house belongs to my father
waiting for wood to buckle under
the weight of heat. The realtor said
he could keep the land if he remained
standing in the center. Like a good son,
I crawl around beams, past melting
plaster burning ripples, searching
for father through walls. He kneels
in the living room, writing plans with
his finger dipped in soot and saliva
mixed in an empty cup of soju.
We’ll build a hagwon here, father
and son. Next round waiting to boil.
I sit by him and pour in the glass
meant for me, unable to tell sweat from
tears on his face. On my own. They taste
like ocean. He grabs his lower back in pain.
You can teach English, I can drive students,
give a tour. His face melts under eyes,
cheeks sagging. No more taxi cab.
I wrap myself around his legs to hold
him in place, a beggar wondering how
much left of us can burn. Please, no less.
My father stands tall – a faithful candle.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Lachlan Brown is a lecturer in English literature and creative writing at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga. His first volume, Limited Cities, was published by Girmondo in 2012 and was commended for the Mary Gilmore Prize. He has been shortlisted for the Blake Prize and the Newcastle Poetry prize. His poems have appeared in journals including Cordite, Mascara, Antipodes and Rabbit. Lachlan is currently working on a manuscript that explores his Chinese-Australian heritage, his grandmother’s hoarding, and the complex promises of the Asian century.
(self-justification)
Every stupid thing has a story
that ties it back to the house.
Words follow me outside,
threaten quiet atrocities.
But after a while I stop
listening to outro tracks,
the security door locking on its own,
my body leaving to fill the sixth dumpster.
(even chance or, why you find it difficult to speak with people in a lift)
peaceful evil
turbo-dieselling
consumer sentiment
with your dumb tongue
like that folding bicycle
your uncle brought
back from Taiwan
in his decade of tricks and risk
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jessica Yu is the recipient of the 2014 Young Writers Innovation Prize. Her recent/forthcoming fiction, poetry and non-fiction can be read in The Best Australian Poems 2014, The Lifted Brow (online), Kill Your Darlings, The Digital Brow, PITCH, Seizure, the Meanjin blog, Peril, Dialect and Right Now. Her short story, “Keh Kut” won Best Fiction Piece in an Express Media Publication in 2014 and her essay, “Flab and Excess…” was listed as one of the top ten essays published on The Lifted Brow Website in 2014.
durian
beneath that thick skull and
prickly personality
you are softer
and sweeter
than diarrhoea
cockles
your two halves open
like ears to a compliment
I swallow your pearl
it falls apart
on the raw edge of my tooth
Kent MacCarter is a writer and editor in Castlemaine, with his wife and son. He’s the author of three poetry collections – In the Hungry Middle of Here (Transit Lounge, 2009),Ribosome Spreadsheet (Picaro Press, 2011) and Sputnik’s Cousin (Transit Lounge, 2014). He is also editor of Joyful Strains: Making Australia Home (Affirm Press, 2013), a non-fiction collection of diasporic memoir. He is an active member in Melbourne PEN, and was executive treasurer on the board for Small Press Network from 2009-2013.
