April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Shirley Lu is a poet from Sydney, New South Wales. Her work has appeared in Freckled Magazine, Thistle Magazine, A Hundred Gourds, and elsewhere. She is interested in and inspired by the origins of words, the gap between a source and its translation(s), and sunlight.
Buddha’s Hands
Night, wayward. Dreams weave in and out of thunderous minds,
tidal and green. We sway in our sleep. Fruit bats inch towards
the Tropic of Capricorn, towards swirling air. Cats slink, purr, pounce
like clouds. Feet slide along bedsheets covered with imaginary dots
marking base camps. A murmur in the dark. A line of light east of here,
humming. A dull beeping at Bb. Feet fall to bamboo floorboards, heavy
with smog and sunflower seeds. Cats run back to their owners,
who are distracted by coffee makers. Fruit bats hang in casuarina forests.
Day, emergent. We burst out of ourselves like Buddha’s Hands.
April 6, 2015 / 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 first book of poems is due to be released by Hawk Press in September 2015.
Cento from Paul Celan
for Mervyn Morris
White, white, white
The whitest root
Of the whitest
Mime themselves whitegray
Mourning, gone awry
Black
We stand here
Black – a decoy
No admittance! Blacktoll
The disbranched archangels stand here
To stand, in the shadow
Your dream, butting from the watch.
Still songs to sing beyond
Count them, touch them
You – all, all real. I – all delusion.)
Note:
This poem uses whole lines from Pierre Joris’ translations of Paul Celan’s later poetry found in Breathturn Into Timestead (FSG, 2014). A full list of references can be provided.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anne Elvey is author of Kin (Five Islands, 2014) and managing editor of Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics. She holds honorary appointments at Monash University and University of Divinity, and lives on Bunurong/Boon wurrung land in Seaford, Victoria.
Schooldays
My skin is peach and cream with a blue undernote. I learn it is the colour of my soul. A venial sin will mark it with a drop of ink and a mortal stain it entirely. When I am ten my uncle picks up two hitchhikers—a man and a boy—on the Princes Highway. He tells me they are Aboriginal. It is the 1960s. The TV is black and white. I imagine they carry spears. In class, I learn by heart the European explorers’ names, am fond of Leichhardt, who left only a one-way journey to be learned. Bunurong is a name I do not hear. We call the wetlands swamps. I read romances of two thousand year old martyrs in love with a Middle Eastern god, and gag on milk left too long in the sun. I use inkwells and pens with nibs. On my blotting paper the spots spread and join like too many venial sins. I line up for spelling bees, a champion of words caught out by seperation. I think that all the saints are white. A Catherine wheel pinned to the garage wall spins on Guy Fawkes’ night. St Lawrence asks to be turned to roast evenly.
A girl, born within a week of me, is stolen.
October 14, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s latest collection is My Feet Are Hungry (Pitt Street Poetry). His American volume, Afternoon in the Central Nervous System, is due from George Braziller, New York, early in the new year.
Taking No Prisoners
How do you write about the condition of joy? In present
participles, I guess. Not fun, nor merriment, nor a state of
optimism: simple joy, persisting through an afternoon. It
is as though a dusty world has been suddenly cleansed
of all worry, all shadow of pain or loss. In a moment of
benignity or absentmindedness, St Mike has thrown the gates of
Eden wide open. The naughty verbs have no direct objects.
Windows give onto sheer pastoral, onto that soothing excess
of green pigmentation and fretwork foliage. Cumulus and
drizzle cease to be part of our company. Over the dark wine
we laugh like immortals. This tale is Olympus; it has become
the Great Good Place. A condition like this could now be
described as erotic, yet it utterly transcends the sexual. As
an impression, everybody near at hand is suddenly, quietly
laughing. Our smiles are solar. The shiraz winks at us. So
this is joy, nor am I out of it. Even the clock appears to have
forgotten us. And now the sun surveys everything from its
low, picturesque angle. Time out.
October 14, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Alyson Miller teaches literary studies at Deakin University, Geelong. Her short stories and prose poems have appeared in both national and international publications. Her collection of prose poems, Dream Animals, is forthcoming with Dancing Girl Press.
Thief
He watches them sleep, holding his breath before the dead weight of their night
bodies, as though hunting. He scans her face the hardest, notes the shadows that turn
white skin into a horror mask of sunken eyes and wet teeth, the pink tip of tongue,
warm, sour air. An animal face, with its hints of bone and darkness. Against her belly,
the tight ball of a cat, ears twitching with rabbit visions and the minutiae of sounds
only heard in those curious hours before light. He takes a pillow and holds it firm to
her mouth and nose; feels only a single kick of protest before the smell of earth and
ammonia. He drops the cat into a canvas bag and parcels it under his arm, gently
squeezing its soft gut against his ribs. He leaves the room humming, the vibrations
filling his ears and throat with the melody of underwater dreams.
October 14, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Geoff Page is based in Canberra and has published twenty-one collections of poetry as well as two novels and five verse novels. He’s also won the Grace Leven Prize and the Patrick White Literary Award, among others. His recent books include A Sudden Sentence in the Air: Jazz Poems (Extempore 2011), Coda for Shirley (Interactive Press 2011), Cloudy Nouns (Picaro Press 2012), 1953 (University of Queensland Press 2013), Improving the News (Pitt Street Poetry 2013) and New Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattmann 2013). His Aficionado: A Jazz Memoir is forthcoming from Picaro Press.
The Dolphins
In the night and in the early morning he contemplates the turning
earth — its slice of light, its slice of dark, the strips of dawn and dusk
between. He thinks about the replications. How many others rest like
him for ten spent minutes afterwards? She feels his weight; it’s not
oppressive. There have been others, just a few, allowing some
comparison. How many other women now, she thinks, lie spread
-eagled just like her, exhausted but not satisfied? A new light clarifies
the blind. She takes herself back fifteen minutes; rippled waves of
pleasure, currents lapping at a shore but not quite breaking. Her
feelings, plainly, are unique — and yet she knows it can’t be so. All
up and down that width of light (or light before the light) thousands,
even millions maybe, have had the same euphoria. They share a
longitude. A gratitude as well perhaps — and somewhere, too, a hint
of pain. Returning to flaccidity, he’s thinking now how many men —
their sheets, like these, in disarray — lie between a woman’s legs,
bisecting the same triangle, their minds regaining focus. She, too, is
starting on her day: its obligations flicker — diverging from,
converging with, the thoughts of him whose weight she bears. How
many others now, she thinks, are moving in small increments from
relish to discomfort? How well really does she know him, this man
who any minute now will make his slow withdrawal; turn her gently
on her side; then snuggle in behind. She knows that, maybe in at
work, there’ll be a wash of fantasy; some untried complication of the
limbs, an urgency not felt so far — and knows that even this will not
be hers alone. Elaborations of that kind, she knows, are far from
infinite. It may or may not need this man, his nakedness curved in
behind her, a hand shaped to her further breast. He sees the thoughts
that scatter in her mind as now her breath turns regular and deepens
into sleep — in search of, or resistant to, the morning in her mobile.
Its ring tone will be one of hundreds, available at purchase. But he’s
awake and thinking back to what they’d managed, the clever element
of drama, its narrative momentum, a story that they tell each other,
hardly needing words, a story that is theirs alone — habits, tricks and
sweet agreements arrived at over years — secrets not for counsellors
(and many more, they know, would share the same restraint). The
light continues through the blind. He knows he won’t get back to
sleep and knows by now that she’ll be dreaming. He likes to think
that he can read them. What is it she is seeing now? Porpoises
perhaps? Or dolphins, riding in towards the shore, plunging there in
unison; then turning back as one before they hit the sand? They have
a smoothness he remembers; a rhythm that’s familiar. He knows their
brains might seem to science almost identical. And yet he knows
each one must be a single dot of consciousness which, right down
through the history of the sea, has never been repeated.
October 14, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Subashini Navaratnam lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and has published poetry in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Poetika Malaysia, Aesthetix, and Sein und Werden. Her writings on books have appeared in The Star (Malaysia), Pop Matters and Full Stop and she has published nonfiction in MPH’s anthology, Sini Sana and Buku Fixi’s ebook, Semangkuk INTERLOK. She blogs at disquietblog.wordpress.com
We went to Polonnaruwa to find history
We went to Polonnaruwa to find history. And when we got there we weren’t sure if we had found it, so we stood there, looking around. Around the stupa stood all the tourists, taking pictures. Taking pictures is not my thing and maybe I should have written a blog post, a series of tweets, an essay or a poem or a novel or a play or a philosophical tract or letters like Mary Wollstonecraft to a nonexistent lover. But Buddha was watching and I wanted to capture the essence of an ancient stupa under the searing heat of a February sun in Sri Lanka. The camera is a weapon which you must learn to wield carefully while regarding the pain of others.
But you think I want to undo years of ghostly visits and whispered insinuations by taking the right picture. You think I want to rebuild my memories and construct history from a few ruins and photographs to find out what really happened. I don’t think that’s why I’m here. I think I just want a picture of this stupa in Polonnaruwa. I found my stupa but there is a white man standing right next to it. He’s in my way and I stare at him. He looks at me and smiles, and before I know it I smile back. What are we smiling about? I don’t know. My picture of a stupa in Polonnaruwa will have a white man standing next to it, smiling.
Then we went to Jaffna to find history. Do you remember the time they torched the library, they set fire to people, and we waited for the news, I asked no one in particular. When he died from an “aerial bombardment” we cried over the phone and waited for more news. We stayed home in (y)our country. But droves of white men came here to document what went wrong. They love it here and so they stayed. They are driving tuk-tuks down Galle Street as we speak, heads thrown back, laughing, already owning what was never theirs to own. But the proliferation of stupas, you know, performs its own tyranny. Who came first to build the first building? Which building is stated on record as being the first building of the first civilisation?
And that is why we went to war. To find history. Somebody, somewhere, has the facts and then we will tell you what happened. You are still counting the dead but don’t worry, we have the exact number. You say we cut their bodies into pieces, we tossed their rotting corpses into the river, we hung burning tyres around their necks, but you are making it all up. Lies, tears, and propaganda. Anyway, the markets agree that this is the best time to visit Sri Lanka. The beaches are beautiful. The people are friendly. We have some of the best views. Buddha is on every street corner, welcoming you. And look, this is where we killed the terrorists; the guided tour begins at nine. Don’t worry, the soldiers are friendly and speak English. They will explain everything.
October 14, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Simon Anton Nino Diego Baena lives in Bais city, Negros Oriental, Philippines. He spends most of his time on the road. Some of his works have already been published in Red River Review, Eastlit, Dead Snakes, the Philippines Free Press, Philippines Graphic Magazine, ODDproyekto, and Kabisdak.
Sundays
Of course, there is stillness in darkness, for there is
beauty in light. Yesterday, the world showed me
its wound in the chest of a homeless child, drenched
with rain, begging for crumbs outside the door
of the ancient cathedral where we converge
and pray on what can never be whenever we try
to pull the rusty nails from our palms. And there
is grief, for there is always loss, in life. Every morning,
during holy week around 8 am, after a mug of coffee,
the maya birds stop over my balcony to sing a song
I could never ever decipher. And that is a miracle
by itself: of knowing there are limits. Sometimes
there is a sentiment of defeat at the peak of triumph.
Sometimes I seek god in the twirling smoke
of every cigarette I consume while I wait
with awe for the sky to be filled with stars.
October 14, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Winner of the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books for his manuscript entitled The Taxidermistʻs Cut (Spring 2016), Rajiv Mohabir received fellowships from Voices of Our Nationʻs Artist foundation, Kundiman, and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. His poetry is published or forthcoming from journals such as The Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, and Drunken Boat. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from Queens College, CUNY where he was Editor in Chief of the Ozone Park Literary Journal. Currently, he is pursuing his PhD student at the University of Hawai`i.
The Oracle
In the garden you keep a buck skull on a pole. It keeps holes from the squash, you say. The slight
beak marks are prognostications. You shuffled a deck and drew the Five of Cups—what remains
goes unnoticed. Once we drove through the snow in January and you found a Yellow-throated Vireo
on the oak porch with a frosted rostrum, but still forecasting the future. Squeezing your palms
together, its blue arteries erupted from beneath rust and canary feathers. I touched the floor with my
whiskey nose that night. You held my arms behind me. You pulled endless scrolls from my ribs—a
ghazal repeating we are never owned. You write your name in your fingerprints along my back and
swear them a holy scrawl.
October 14, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Heather Taylor Johnson is the Poetry Editor for Transnational Literature – fitting because she is an American-Australian poet. She is also the author of the novel Pursuing Love and Death (HarperCollins) and two collections of poetry, most recently Thirsting for Lemonade.
Kangaroo Island
Green log fence holds bee clover and blowfly thermals; steep earth gives way to rock and
water. I find my hovel after snagging my skirt on dead brambles in a stick basket devoid of
growth but underground, that tiniest rivulet, and the sun finds me. It is enough I am here
while the daily grind grounds the mainland with niggling routines and a section of our lives
newly gutted for renovation. Tonight will be kitchen-mad as the motherless home eats and
does not clean then sleeps deeply unaware of this tiny green island.
The ocean says there is no path home, only direction, and flow being how you ride it. The
wind says of no significance of no significance, home being the ride itself. I say that once you
leave you know its sound: dead of night appliance drone, off kilter whirly whirl, single
coughs and sheet-turns, sudden ohs from the bed and under it, a dog’s deep sigh.
Shirley Lu is a poet from Sydney, New South Wales. Her work has appeared in Freckled Magazine, Thistle Magazine, A Hundred Gourds, and elsewhere. She is interested in and inspired by the origins of words, the gap between a source and its translation(s), and sunlight.
