Elif Sezen, born in Melbourne in 1981, grew up both here and in Izmir, Western Turkey. She settled in Melbourne in 2007. Also an interdisciplinary visual artist, she writes original poetry in English and in Turkish. In 2014 she published her Turkish translation of Ilya Kaminsky’s acclaimed book Dancing in Odessa; her own first collection of experimental short stories in Turkish, Gece Düşüşü (‘Fall.Night.’), was published in 2012. Elif’s collection of poems Universal Mother was recently published by Gloria SMH Press, and she also published a chapbook The Dervish with Wings early 2017. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts from Monash University. www.elifsezen.com
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
1 Awareness
Now that I am tired
I must open up inwardly like a lotus blossom
yes, I must open my paper-like lids
towards the benign feature of absence
for I will encounter her, in the very bottom:
that archetypal mystic, resembling my mother
by her glance perforating the silvered smoke
my small self will pass away
because I am tired
because fatigue is a lovely trap made to
save my body from its old cage
I learn to become still, yet
teleport simultaneously everywhere
I get rid of the worldly clock
losing beguiling sleep
I become a voluntary mute
so I can speak for them
They
surrender their souls
wrapped with flesh and blood and breath
back to where they came from
On the lands reigned by power issues
and tasteless hierarchy, they choose
the most desert-like spot
because a desert is a home for
repentance
The anima mundi is saved here
in discovering elements of
water, fire, air, earth and ether
through the heart’s eye,
once again
A lament is sung here,
one which only their forefathers can
hear. So each grief can be freed
like a crumbling piece of bread
for the animal-smile hanging
on the corner of the wall
is my primitive self whom I once
ignored this is a new way of loving one’s self
For I am fatigued
and my fatigue will explode
like fireworks
upon you
2 Swans
Swans were drifting away on the lake
like forgotten desires, and we were
preparing ourselves for an
ordinary day
3 Metaphysics
Who said angels don’t exist?
O angels!
They are hidden in the elixir
of infinity that clears the conscience
of the unspoken
they light the soul-flame in its essence
they secretly orchestrate the flight of
glowworms, electrifying
and dying away towards the East
and towards the West
Whatever East and West means,
this is no secret:
direction does not exist the way we know it
direction is dimensional, not linear
This is no secret:
dying holds you back
not the way you know it
this time keep your angel by your side
and set off on your journey once again
4 The one without an answer
His papyraceous solitude
flows from the tower of innocence
to the lower planes of the cosmos
tickets tucked in the hands of
the one without an answer
5 The phenomenology of chronic pain
This Aria has no beginning, no end
whereas in the beginning there was the sound
the sound of Love dividing into bits
in between the matter and soul
Over time, the sound trans-mutated into
moans, arising from hidden wars
and declared wars
Yet today, right here, it
vibrates through the nerve-ends
of a young body
La Minor impatience
Do black humor
CRESCENDO the pain is so glorious here
First, talk to the pain
Dear pain, what do you want from me?
caress that pain, love it
surrender it to the whole
recycle it
and never forget,
suffering and not becoming monstrous
is a privilege
6 Hope
Close. Close your eyelids
to this landscape
forasmuch as this landscape
— preventing you from being you
once kept you alive
now it rather destroys
You were saying that this is
the memory of the future
you were rambling about a re-birth
in this future
for you were exceedingly dead
nothingness was tinkling after every death
O Rose-faced child,
the eagle
passing by the Pacific tangentially,
pure iron,
O well of meanings!
You must be empty while you hope,
for what already belongs to you is ready
to come back to you
“For to its possessor is all possession well concealed,
and of all treasure– pits one’s own is last excavated
— so causeth the spirit of gravity”
7 Flying
Forgiveness is what’s necessary to fly
also purification.
Even purifying from the desire of flying
yet a pair of wings is enough for most,
to fly.
8 Homecoming
Istanbul Airport is the doorway of my
time tunnel. No talking! Act like nothing happened
hereby I discovered the reason
for the lack of bird-chirp
that others dismiss
because I am a bird too
I too forget the necessity
of flight
in all directions of the
forbidden atmosphere of mystery,
simultaneously
‘We must declare our indestructible
innocence’, grumbles my mum
her eyes staring towards the
beyond-horizons
The birds pollute the new President’s sky.
A deaf child disappears from sight
in the alley, after listening to the song
which only he can hear
I call him from behind, with no luck
and find myself in
Melbourne again, inevitably
I chop and add mangos into
my meals again
I forget the malevolence of a
suppressed father image again
I forget my most favorite scent,
jasmine
how holy this forgetting is, I know
for it will pull me back to that doorway
for I’ll want to go back home again,
home without geography
without footsteps how sweet is my abyss.
No memory of fatigue.
I’ll again make merry.
9 One more century
In every cross-section of the secondary mornings
there lies a magic
the winking sun, resembling archaic
portraits of women
make each body solve one more mystery
so that one more century passes.
REFERENCES
The final three lines of the section ‘Hope’ are from Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common, Wordsworth Editions, 1997, p.188
Roisin Kelly is an Irish writer who was born in Belfast and raised in Leitrim. After a year as a handweaver on a remote island in Mayo and a Masters in Writing at National University of Ireland, Galway, she now calls Cork City home. Her chapbook Rapture (Southword Editions in 2016) was reviewed by The Irish Times as ‘fresh, sensuous and direct,’ while Poetry Ireland Review described her as ‘unafraid of sentiment…a master of endings.’ Publications in which her poetry has appeared include POETRY, The Stinging Fly, Lighthouse, and Winter Papers Volume 3 (ed. Kevin Barry and Olivia Goldsmith). In 2017 she won the Fish Poetry Prize. www.roisinkelly.com
Mar-a-Lago
The water is rising again
though it hasn’t rained here for months.
The bayou is coming to the door
of her house, her white colonial house
where she rocks on the porch.
She welcomes the bayou.
The bayou remembers
in the way all swamps remember:
preserving past centuries
like a jam of clotted green memories.
The woman’s dress is ruffled lemon cloth,
a pale froth at her black throat.
The sight of her would put
a thirst on you, old man, as you work
on the sugar plantation. But you
will not drink: she has a sweet tooth
having known until now only bitter.
The sun climbs higher
and higher, a golden elevator
to heaven, as she rocks
on the distant porch. In her lap,
a cat sleeping like a gun
on which she rests a ringed hand.
Silver gleam on fur. Later,
when the sun burns down to amber,
she walks to the water’s edge
and climbs onto an alligator.
Gliding down the swamp’s slow river,
she has nowhere in particular to go.
The dark braid hanging on her back
reminds you suddenly
of that sycamore with its noosey rope
through which you once saw the low
sun like a ruby, as if the earth
was begging you to marry it.
If only you had accepted then,
promising to love its children
as your own. Now you are the one
who has been made to kneel
and look, your hands are bleeding.
Ophelia
We came to meet you, Ophelia. They said we were reckless, driving down from the city to that little house in the west.
But we were five women who had nothing if not each other, and have faced far worse things than your unrest.
On the way we passed sandbags already slung by the road, long pumps trailing from streams while the radio said status red,
status red, and on our phones all of Ireland a rainbow grid. And us burrowing straight for the dark violet heart
of things, the sky turning green as a bottle. A strange light over the sea. The air like a balm. Water folding itself over, settling to glass.
And in the morning we woke to you everywhere. In the attic, the water tank still gurgled the house’s quiet song
as if a circle of livid trees did not surround us, as if that low growl rising from the earth held no fear for us.
Lighting the fire, lighting a joint. The slither of flames and gentle scrape of the grinder, turning like a wheel.
The lights in the house all dimming and coming back. And coming back, and coming back. As fishing boats drawn up on shingle
would be returned from land, as blue lamps would re-illuminate the virgin’s shrine. We watched leaves swirl
on the patio, until there were no leaves. We watched the trees bend and almost break until the windows were crusted with salt.
Make the world new for us again, Ophelia, who refuse to light cigarettes from a candle for the sake of a sailor’s soul—
despite what we have borne at the hands of sailors. Oh tropical storm. This is no country of palm trees and flower-
filled ditches, but it is the only land we know. Women who dream of the impossible, our roots grow deep.
Cameron Morse taught and studied in China. Diagnosed with Glioblastoma in 2014, he is currently a third-year MFA candidate at the University of Missouri—Kansas City and lives with his wife Lili and newborn son Theodore in Blue Springs, Missouri. His poems have been or will be published in New Letters, Bridge Eight, South Dakota Review, I-70 Review and TYPO. His first collection, Fall Risk, is forthcoming in 2018 from Glass Lyre Press.
Centerpoint
Crossing into the main hospital, I remember
the bruise of my past life, thunderheads
of scar tissue in the crook of my arm, vials
of blood drawn weekly while I ate Temodar.
I remember the red river of platelets, lymphocytes,
and white blood cells that sprang
from my weariest vein. After two years,
I’m returning to Centerpoint Medical Center
as another man, a man accompanying his wife
on the hospital tour that will give them triage,
labor rooms, and the mother-baby unit
where she will rest after giving birth to their firstborn
in October—a man with no bracelet around his wrist,
no name, no date of birth, no questions asked.
Apnea
noun, Pathology.
1.
a temporary suspension
of breathing, occurring in some newborns
in the early morning
dark where I walk. When it sounds
as if the whole world is holding its breath, waiting
for a squirrel to pick itself up
and walk away from its body and brains
dashed along the curb, prostrate,
I-70 murmuring like a lamasery
beyond the rooftops, a road tossing
in its rocky bed, all the contrivances of man.
Beside the squirrel, oak leaves choke
the storm drain. No one is coming
to clean up the mess.
Rebecca Vedavathy is a research scholar studying Francophone Literature in EFLU, Hyderabad. She began writing as a child but only discovered its appreciation when she read a Francophone Literature class many years later. She won the Prakriti Poetry Contest, 2016. She longlisted in English Poetry for the Toto Funds the Arts Awards, 2017 and 2018. She is currently a Shastri Indo-Canadian Research Fellow interning at the University of Quebec, Montreal.
Autumn blood
Some days I stand in my choicest place: a poem with a leaf I stand and let the tree eat me.
Words hang like apples sewn to a tree – the head of a poet – what was his name? Didn’t the goddess tell you, it’s not safe to let thoughts form words on your lips? They aren’t red like hers – betel leaves don’t work.
Words draw shorelines on a passport – the Syrian baby flattened on a sandy beach. Didn’t the griot tell you, children here don’t build sandcastles, anymore? Lessons on geography and gore.
Words lay battered, dead against graffiti walls – Dalit child and Muslim man. Didn’t the bishop tell you, baby cows are called Meincalves now? No, cow urine isn’t red – enough said.
Words explode on the lazy newspaper – shrapnel and body on boulevard – Paris. Didn’t the ambassadors tell you, you’ll pay for open borders? They probably forgot – Gotham city in rot.
This poem has broken ribs and a lost ear. Where shall I find it? Beirut or Paris? I don’t want to stand here anymore. The autumn leaves are mulched with blood. Veins slit, roots flung. Run. Left I scream.
The nation hears, pretends these are bad words hiding in a pencil box – learnt to be forgotten.
This poem has breath. It shall remember. It shall eat the mud, the blood democracy feeds us and rise into red autumn’s green sister.
how to preserve childhood
red monkey insides part-time job: museum fulltime job: friend
friend because monkey was not alive. he was a he though. i didn’t name him. he was red. velvet. not like cupcakes. i am sure he didn’t taste like cupcakes. that’s because i tasted him. he tasted like fine red threads. touching tongue. tickling. he was as dirty as my feet. my feet went places those days. without chappals. climbed mountains of construction sand. dragged monkey’s curly tail. a cursive ‘g’ with me. fed him sand. ate some. licked deworming syrup from measuring cups. bit around his black button eyes. an attempt to make them look like mine. he still didn’t look like me. no one with three stitches for a nose looks like a little girl. that was the thing. he was a boy. i burrowed my fingers in his torn armpit. he didn’t mind. like i said he was my friend. i told him my secret. pineapples are just big apples, i declared. that’s why they have longer spellings. right? he heard me.
one day before convent school taught me “it is raining”. “rain was coming”. and when it came it came down with hail stones. no one was watching. i picked them up. one by one. silver sharp edges. taste of melting. white glass. tongue curled in cold. upside down camel hump. we didn’t have a fridge. i marched to monkey. stuffed his armpit. he had an armpit full of hail stones. i forgot about. later when i looked for the hail stones. monkey was a soggy mess: a museum.
a year later, we bought a fridge. it came with a fridge box. bubble wrap. a cover. that year i played a fridge for fancy dress. the box was my body. i had lines and all. i licked ice from the freezer. it tasted like fridge. i never saw hail stones again.
Luke Best is from Toowoomba on the Darling Downs where he was born in 1982. He is married with three children. He has been published in Overland and his manuscript Percussion was Highly Commended in the 2017 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize.
The Hoarder’s Rest
It’s been years, though here I am, shivering on the porch, tricking the lock.
My skin is sewn to my clothes and clouds loom in protest. I’ve come to thieve your manuscript
As I enter a stink charges the door. Here in the house we built,
the collectibles: bottles, cans, empty smoke packs. The lino peaks through where it can.
So much shit stacked window-high. The bruise of ink on walls—
a thousand daily rags shed their news. Down the hall to the study
I can almost hear the canter of your pen, feel the thick presence of thought.
Still the tidiest room. The desk shoulders the weight of your words.
On my way out, a trip wire or twine; something in the rubble to let you know I’d snooped here.
At the Dumping Ground
Wind angers the bough
that is trying only to shed debris
and keep its leaves.
What a place in which
to write. The stench
frees all other senses.
We write and the gales
hurl abuse.
Amid waste
we bed down,
tuck each other in
by the recyclables⎯
the poems we forged;
dead weights the wind
will not carry.
Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet. Her first collection, Even in the Dark (University of WA Publishing), won the Mary Gilmore Award in 2014; her second collection was Unexpected Clearing (UWAP, 2016). She is currently working on her next collection At the Point of Seeing. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate Research Centre at Victoria University.
Family Portrait
Van Dyck, c. 1619
In their best Flemish clothes –
lace ruffs and jewelry, brocaded fabric –
this young couple gaze
intense and hopeful
out of the canvas;
they lean toward me as though
all this
were as fast as the shuttering
of a lens;
their bonneted child,
dandled on her mother’s knee,
looks behind and up –
she has no need to look my way;
Her parents are vibrant with
youth and prosperity,
their connection to each other,
their pride in the child;
like every family –
holy in their ordinariness –
they hold the unfolding generations
squirming
in their richly upholstered arms:
Look! we have made this future –
it belongs to us.
Only consider –
(and here the benefit of hindsight)
their willingness to pause,
to sit while a painter
composes
studies
takes their likenesses
in pigment and brushstroke,
placing them
lovingly
within the rushes of time –
Look carefully –
hold fast to the slipperiness of this moment –
it will not always
be like this.
From Mallaig
Heaving out from the harbour,
its narrow lean of wooden houses,
salt-weathered in a cloudy light –
a ferry clanks and judders
picking its way past little boats,
their tangle of nets
and out into the slap and wash of darkening water:
stink of diesel and fish swim
in freshets of air,
rubbing cheeks into ruddiness;
until the hump of island
sails into view –
its possibilities of destination,
palette of smudged greys and greens
flickering through the glass;
the angular spine of the Cuillins
scrapes against
a loamy sky,
writhing in channels of wind;
while, deep in boggy fields,
something
shifts,
restless in peat –
These tannin-soaked fields,
this permeable membrane,
this elongated moment when a boat might
clip and ride,
a shoreline in sight.
Claire Potter ’s most recent poetry publications have appeared in The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry (edited by John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan), Best Australian Poems 2016 (ed. Sarah Holland-Batt), Poetry Chicago (ed. Robert Adamson), and Poetry Review Ireland. She was shortlisted for a 2017 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize UK and she has published three poetry collections, In Front of a Comma (Poets Union 2006), N’ombre (Vagabond 2007) and Swallow (Five Islands 2010). She lives in London.
The Copper Beech
I lie you down, spread your branches wide as wings across the grass
Your leaves flatten like cracked shells, letting the sea out of my ears
Breath has gone out of you
You are at the edge of becoming an object
belonging to the wind
From a distance there is no way of telling your dark fallen leaves
from copper-black feathers––or your red-tongued branches
from a split open nest
I walk amongst purple shadows, I sit within the mess
of leaves
But in writing this I am not unique, nor
are these feelings. This experience cannot be said
to belong to any obstinate sense of me
There are many more who weep when birds and trees are falling, when
the mauve of dusk slowly tapers and pre-emptively disappears
When the bone-heavy moon
carves an ending and turns its back on the sea
and leaves rattle like pewter shells
returning to the beach.
Three Steps Outside the TAB
Pale steps, concrete and absolute
solid and lengthwise between two pillars and a portico
I am waiting on the blue-grey steps
divided into three parts
The first step is physical such that in this heat
my skirt bandages against my thighs
I’ve sat here all afternoon
in this passage of tobacco, jasmine and beer
and I’ve sung, resting my head on my knees
looping prayer with radio
waiting for Grandpa to swing open the doors
scoop my hand into his
and ruminate about the horses
he’s decided not to back
Shiny cars shuffle
across a weft of bitumen and white lines
the rubber tyres wheeze with kids
springing from car doors wanting ice-cream, sherbet
lemonade through a straw
I watch the beetle-tops glistening in the sun––
inside they’re cooking and the steering wheels warp like liquorice
as though I’m Gretel and everything before me
on the steps of this oven, is secretly made for eating
I’m vigilant, too, about Grandpa’s Valiant parked illegally up the kerb
Cabbage-white body, chrome bumper, single front seat, no seatbelts
in the back, two round side mirrors, black
dashboard, chipped, plastic, and a whickering gearbox
Grandpa wears a white shirt––sleeves rolled to the elbows
elbows dry and flaking. Trousers wide
and tall, hoisted with a thin belt
He agrees with everything I say
and these afternoons at the TAB we foist off as dog-walks
Pete in sagging herringbone and rosaceous cheeks
taps my head and comes and goes
through the double glass-doors carrying
a blue plastic shopping bag full of errands and chores
as if it were against his better judgement to be there
I recognise his slippers, Grandpa
wears the same ones, seaweed-brown tartan, thin brown sole
noiseless as he pads across the shopping centre
as if it were his kitchen
and the TAB his blue lagoon
Sunlight passes through an eye of mirror and I squint at it
and begin crying without reason until Grandpa comes out
wipes my eyes with a handkerchief and says he’ll be done soon
The second and third steps are as cold as a whale might be
and beneath my sandals, they’re dimpled with mica and pore
Had I a pocket knife I could chip into them
engrave a heart cordoned with forget-me-nots
or tally-marked with time etched into tiny bales of grey
But I’ll close my eyes against the stone
imagine the rib of steps belongs inside Jonah’s whale
and I’m a barnacle growing there, perchance
or a mermaid in disguise, battering
the hull of this gambling seadog’s skip
with the weight of a huge emerald tail––
but look, he’s smoking at the door with Pete
his spare hand’s outstretched, he wants to go
he’s ready––he heels out his cigarette into a twist of ash
and off the steps, through waves of smoke-blue air
I skip over my tail
Robbie Coburn was born in Melbourne and grew up on his family’s farm in Woodstock, Victoria. His poems have been published in various journals and magazines including Poetry, Cordite, The Canberra Times, Overland and Going Down Swinging, and his poems have been anthologized. His first collection, ‘Rain Season’, was published in 2013 and a second collection titled The Other Flesh is forthcoming. He lives in Melbourne.www.robbiecoburn.com.au
The Nurse
I often ask for the ending.
blood-soaked white sheets you wake to each night
beneath their betrayed minds abandoned to your care.
I am sorry the body does not decide when.
and that you see me in the hollowed faces and knife-dreams.
not in your duty, all empathy soon becoming misery —
late one night you called through our silence,
a strange voice that spoke as if crying.
your mother was in another town asleep,
your father away at war, further from you than hours could say. all distance finds loneliness in time.
I often ask for the ending.
no way to reassemble this.
no handbook or tested process written into your tongue.
only this strange voice I still hear
the night shift dragging to dawn
the mercy you breathe.
The Colt’s Grave
I stand at the paddock’s edge
the colt’s grave still visible
where dad has heaped wet dirt.
the ill and lanky body had fallen
several paddocks away, clean wind across the property
drying blood caked to his flanks.
a heartbeat ticking
through the electric fence
that formed a barricade around his small corpse
my father looking on
beyond my interminable confusion
inside my body, something changing
some future trying to enter the landscape.
I walk across the dilapidated horse track
waiting for the rain again.
from the weatherboard house
my breath is carried,
the unmistakable sound of crying.
KateMurphy is a writer based in North America who writes fiction and poetry. She lives full-time in an RV with her husband and two dogs and is currently working on her first novel. While she loves being near her family, it has always been a dream of hers to travel the world and experience different cultures and ways of living in order to gain knowledge and experience that would be invaluable to her writing.
In Mourning
All the stars that fracture the sky –
they look like a splintered mirror
or pixelated static or
withered harebell scattered carelessly by god.
Is it the night that breaks me
or is it this sod, riddled with weeds
when he was four years old and
would bring me dandelion bouquets?
the prettiest I could find
for my pretty mama
The fate of that tender thing –
of gathered flowers and
untrained kisses.
I can almost see him waddling towards me
carrying a freshly picked bouquet
with stems smashed together and
a giddy smile.
But there are no more dandelions.
They’ve faded away;
shrunken petals dust the lawn like dying stars.
All I have left is a crescent moon.
A sliced, sharp white
forced to carve itself down
until it is nothing.
Adam Day is the author of the collection of poetry, Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Emerging Writers Award. My work has appeared in the Boston Review, Kenyon Review, APR, AGNI, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. I also direct the Baltic Writing Residency in Sweden, Scotland, and Blackacre Nature Preserve.
KIRU XXXXIV
Neighbor is lilac white and doesn’t mean
a thing. Life dissuades him with shabby
armchairs, cocked soldiers. Stashed
eyes. First alive fifteen minutes before
his death. Has a bicycle that like his conscience
gives him only a minor pain in the balls,
racks his rectum crossing road bumps, pumping
his legs in escape from the delusional
narcissistic wood fox and the nymphomaniac
nun. Here are his Prussian gray
polyester pants, his cheap mailman’s boots
that march. His ratcheted hand apes a trigger pull.
KIRU XXXXV
Past the skeletons of textile factories
boy with a moth’s mind floats in the cold
shallows, dodging leeches while men
do the wash. Breath and body, waves
and sea, everywhere
currents. Cattle on the sand
beneath the wheeze of seagulls. Mother
checks him – lifts his penis
from the drift-white and tightened
scrotum, an elegant example of free thought.
In the scalp of dark hair one little witch
marooned, slick and sucking. Mother
fumbling at it, a concentration-vein
like a taproot in her forehead, crumbs
of light at the crotch, the smack of spades
in the distance. Out the window, cow drops
green dung wet over a bucket of cherries
left by the spigot – in rain it smokes a little.
Lindsay Tuggle has been widely published in journals and anthologies, including: Cordite, Contrapasso, HEAT, Mascara, Rabbit, and The Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry(2016). She was short-listed for the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, judged by Simon Armitage. Her work has been recognised by major literary awards, including: the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize (shortlisted 2015), the Val Vallis Award for Poetry (second prize 2009, third prize 2014), and the Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s Poetry Prize (shortlisted 2016, longlisted 2014). Her first collection, Calenture, is forthcoming with Cordite Publishing. The manuscript evolved from residential writing fellowships awarded by institutions including the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Library of Congress, and the Mütter Museum of Philadelphia. Tuggle also writes on intersections of poetry and science. The University of Iowa Press’s Whitman Series invited her first book, The Afterlives of Specimens: Science and Mourning in Whitman’s America (forthcoming in 2017). She wrote a chapter on ‘Poetry and Medicine’ for Cambridge University Press’sWhitman in Context (2017). She teaches literary studies at Western Sydney University.
asylum, pageantry
1.
it is best not to dream for long here
medicine disallows her florid stutter
skull calligraphy adorns
the austerity of wounds
a face cut by gravel
the floor observes her fall
cervine lesions embossed
with a queen’s head
siege follows invitation
the graceless mercy
of a master brought low
by his own hand
ungroomed and carnivorous
you dazzle me
if there were amnesty for the dead
we would be strangers still
our tongues bruised by
the flesh of angels
this, my apologia
they only come when you call
2.
her gamine regression
discards once sinewy form
his archival hoard
to loom and seclude
her catalogue of false scars
triptych for an aspirational recluse
it is a problem without a solution
namely, asylum envy
‘for reasons of history
I want bedlam
or to be bedridden
or just to not be looked at like that’
leitmotif: diorama girls in feral dress
(cue dirt eating in hotel)
in their dyadic correspondence
the body is entirely absent
her assassin says
I’d love to work
but there’s no money
in art only death pays
recipient unknown,
in the morning we wear
each other’s faces
3.
she’s prettier now
in coffined silhouette
after these many years
oddly blonder than before
someday soon we will inherit
each other’s faces:
evangelical and unlovely
do I covet her still
diluted by sleep
the concave half of a sister
long unburdened by skin
after her austere conversion
it’s all tithe and ruin
a nest of mouths speak of Jesus
in bandaged tongues
nice work if you can get it
we won’t be sequestered
in post-curatorial syndrome
suppress an exhibitionist’s desire
to salt her own wound, publicly
back at the fallout shelter
all the other feral anorexics
trace coal dust in the genealogy
of chemical squalls and delicate tibias
ascension is just another compulsion
to light and return
Adolfo Aranjuez is editor of Metro, subeditor of Screen Education, and a freelance writer, speaker and dancer. He has edited for Voiceworks and Melbourne Books, and been published in Right Now, The Lifted Brow, The Manila Review, Eureka Street and Peril, among others. Adolfo is one of the Melbourne Writers Festival’s 30 Under 30. http://www.adolfoaranjuez.com
Container
We conquer hearts like climbing
mountains, gamble cliffs
with no bearings. You bring
totems of past lives
inhabited. Homes broken
by tectonic tears. It creeps in
like moss on foliage,
weeks old. I stood in that hallway
for hours, wanted words
to spill from cracks in
your pauses. Tell me again
we fear leaving worlds we know
are safe. The shape of a gum
is unlike any other. Warning
heard through window, solo
magpie yarns of sadness.
I break watches ’cos I’m shit
at being patient. With you
space is finite but between us
distance is immense. We’re migrants
with shared skin. We’re bound
by secrets we keep—saying
our faces are the same
as they used to be
when we were kids building
hills by the shoreline.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly (2016, 8th House Publishing).He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the 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.
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.
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…
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
Michael R. Griffiths is a Lecturer in the English and Writing Discipline at the University of Wollongong. He received his PhD in English from Rice University in 2012 and was INTERACT Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University from 2012 to 2014. As an academic, he has published on topics ranging from settler colonial biopolitics to indigenous life writing to the critical theory of decolonizing poetics, and much besides. He is writing a scholarly book, tentatively entitled The Distribution of Settlement: Indigeneity, Recognition and the Politics of Visibility (under contract, UWAP). His poetry has previously been published in Paper Nautilus.
Sidney Poitier Sighs
Now the green waste truck has gone,
they’re coming to take me away.
Moth-like I sit; Blanche DuBois
not swooning over Stanley,
but broken as the teapot they find
going through my garbage
in the surveillance van.
Sidney Poitier sighs.
Of Cartilage
If there is order to this world,
it is a reckoning of remainders.
With chips of brick on a building site,
bloody wedges, redolent of cartilage,
the earth reminds us of what is stripped away.
Three hundred and sixty five days in a year;
three hundred and sixty degrees of rotation—
those five days hang heavy as lead fishing weights
choking the wire even as they aid the lines passage—
to the depths where the dhufish live.
John Kinsella’s most recent books of poetry are Firebreaks (WW Norton, 2016) and Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (Picador, 2016). His most recent book of short stories is Crow’s Breath (Transit Lounge, 2015). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, a Professorial Research Fellow at UWA, and Professor of Literature and Sustainability at Curtin University.
Australia’s New White Paper on Defence and Blake’s Illustration of Dante’s Inferno, Canto 21: Devils Proffering Protection
Smug as pulling an all-night session cooking the books,
a half a trillion is sucked out of the country over
half a decade, all those zeroes, all that decimation.
A regional power. A projection of force. Consolidation
behind borders. Balance. ‘De-coupling from economy’
so fall or fail, the percentage will stay steady for Defence.
Horns and pointed tails, they get drones. With drones
you can go anywhere through the three worlds. North
or south, east or west. Investment. Capability. Readiness.
This is already less of a poem because it does more than
suggest. It is not allowed to do its own work. Language
is the loser here. The fluted gowns of Dante and Virgil
can’t bring enough solemnity or joie de vivre to this
unique and happy moment. The musculature of devils
is something addictive, awe-inspiring. At first,
they use reasonable language, but if challenged
they smell of burning and so do you. This is the acid
used in manufacture, and it’s the by-products
of Innovation, Industry and Co-operation. No use
resorting to personal insults as the spreadsheets
are filled in. Electronic warfare. Flesh-hooks
new punctuation marks. Think of it this way:
a novelist, one who has no empathy with the bush
in any real way whatsoever, stays for a few weeks
among the parrots and eucalypts, and captures
a bit of the stereotypical for his page. The renditions
of urban culture or colonialism or small towns
need rounding out. He is writing a White Paper
on habitation and nature. The edges where, say, a possum
rubs against the tin roof, or pokes its nose into food stores,
or pisses through the ceiling. Or maybe the essentialism
of parrotology, its scope for global renovation, a redemptive
unleashing on the thinktanks of the world. Policy. Inspiration.
Defending the wealth of words none of us can feel whole.
They are sieved through the orb-weaver’s web, through
Defence Department computers. That not-quite blood
red Blake gets. A watering-down. Sickly. Water spitting
on the barbecue hotplate. Redemption for the Australian
factory floor now home-made cars are gone. Rackety cockatoos.
On Blake’s Illustration for Canto 8 of Dante’s Purgatory: Kammmolch (Great Crested Newt)
The vipers are asleep.
The pond with shadows
cut away on the Spitzberg
is frozen solid, bristling
with sticks poked in to test
viscosity, then locked into place.
This is the breeding
refuge of the Kammmolch,
red list species.
Off their face, young men
and women, boys and girls,
stagger around its bleak eye.
They settle on a fallen conifer,
a bench of moss, and stare.
The Kammmolch awaits
the pond’s release,
unravelling of winter.
Contemporary angels
hover over beech and oak,
seeing through to the forest
floor, the sad youth.
Down in the Neckar
and Ammar valleys,
election posters
are getting workovers.
Citizens are crossing swords.
So many interferences.
The paths through the forest
are bituminised. Once, on terraces,
grapes were grown. Down below,
where the Kammmolch once ranged,
sediment accrues. The fragment
of forest looks to diversity
to absorb the come-down
from methamphetamines, that look:
Kammmolch hoping to breed
where forces have shut them out.
Tread carefully in your withdrawal.
May the pond take eggs and light.
Fresh News from the Arctic (Anne Elder Award), This Floating World (shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and The Age Book of the Year Awards), and Wild (shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards).
Fascinum
We possess nothing in the world,
but I’m listing all I’ve ever wanted.
It’s only one thing,
turning and turning in my mind
like this amulet
in this open palm that knows you.
Knows your mouth sweet, your rough cheek.
It knows well this love comes with hex marks.
With you: letter-burner, light-bearer.
Heart of wildfire, heat of unquenchable prayer.
With you: my soul’s single spark. Foxtrot. India. Romeo. Echo.
My fresh sting. My breath spin,
each time I turn and turn in your hands.
Note: “We possess nothing in the world” is from “The self” by Simone Weil (Simone Weil: an anthology, edited and translated by Siân Miles, Penguin Books, London, 2005).
Linda Ashok has been a guest poet to many literary events in India including The Hindu Lit for Life (Prakriti Foundation, 2014), PEN Prithvi (Mumbai, 2015), The Kala Ghoda Festival of Arts (2016) and others. Her poetry has appeared or forthcoming in various literary journals including the Honest Ulsterman, Friends Journal, The McNeese Review, the Big Bridge Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry and others. She reviews poetry for The Rumpus, Entropy and Stirring – a Sundress Publication. She’s the Founder/President of RædLeaf Foundation for Poetry & Allied Arts, administering the RL Poetry Awards since 2013. Linda tweets at @thebluelimit.
of waters, manners
the waters return home
play with boats, dead sea-men, shells
and when done, they bring back
the toys to where their burial belong
…the way pain returns us our bones
or a gazelle forgives her hunter…
the waters return everything
except time and its own iridescence
Letter to the bunion toed man
a door cut out of fresh morning air/ three poets, a painter, and a hippie gone mellow / In your mind, two boys gathering berries, your twelve-year olds/ a transcriptionist setting dishes out for wash…/ Notwithstanding a few anthills /eavesdropping our silences
“Every time, my hand rose by the side/ the bamboo paused me in bizarre ways/ You stood still at the corner and later, on the beanbag/ with no hunch of attempts”
Two forests meet for a while, sing to each other / exchange birds, chaos, and merge, not forgetting the wood/ they carry back to their idea of homes
We will die in this silence, like the bone / in your toe that never complains, still dying
In 2015, Jena Woodhouse was awarded creative residencies at CAMAC Centre d’Art, Marnay-sur-Seine, France, and at the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens, Greece. She is currently (2016) continuing the latter assignment at the hostel of the British School of Archaeology at Knossos, Crete.
Cassowaries, Etty Bay
They stride out of prehistory.
Their gait is measured, leisurely,
a stately placing of prehensile toes
whose middle claw can kill.
There is a degree of pomp
in panoplies of plumage,
layers of black feathering
enhancing their aplomb,
a living cape from which the lofty
blue and crimson neck protrudes,
the head crowned with a casque of horn
pre-dating Babylon and Rome.
They make their regal way among
chance courtiers, the day-trippers,
posing for a photo shoot,
peering into picnic hampers,
scooping up the offerings of fruit
and choice exotic morsels,
scorning hands that reach to touch
the flounce of elegant black plumes,
slipping into rainforest like shadows
to elude the throng:
primeval apparitions that once
trod the Earth with dinosaurs
and lingered on, imprinting
after-images in sleek iphones,
reminders of the marvellous
that vanishes as we look on,
another species that may not
survive our hegemon.
a.j. carruthers is a contemporary experimental poet and scholar. He is the author of AXIS, a lifelong long poem, the first volume of which, Book 1: Areal, was released by Vagabond in 2014. He is also the author of The Tulip Beds: A Toneme Suite (Vagabond 2013) and two forthcoming books, Opus 16 on Tehching Hsieh and Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, 1961-2011. carruthers edits SOd press and is Essays Editor for Rabbit Poetry Journal.
David Brooks is the author of five collections of poetry, three of short fiction, four highly acclaimed novels, and a major work of Australian literary history, The Sons of Clovis (UQP, 2011). His The Book of Sei (1985) was heralded as the most impressive debut in Australian short fiction since Peter Carey’s, and his second novel, The Fern Tattoo (UQP, 2007), was short-listed for the Miles Franklin award. The Sydney Morning Herald called his previous collection of poetry, The Balcony (UQP, 2008) ‘an electric performance’. Until 2013, he taught Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, where he was also the foundation director of the graduate writing program. He is currently co-editor of literary journal Southerly, lives in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, and spends several months each year in a village on the coast of Slovenia. His most recent collection of poetry is Open House (UQP, 2015).
An Invasion of Clouds
My study has just been invaded by clouds
each smelling vaguely of lanolin and urine,
soft-eyed, wet nosed, curious-tongued,
come to inspect my books and papers,
like tax collectors for the invisible
or auditors from the ineffable earth
trying to determine how I waste my time.
Their leader, the unicorn, wants to taste
the volume of poems in my lap, while another
makes for the unfiled bills, the third
stares at the ancient aquatint
of my great-grandmother in her wedding-dress,
and the fourth, the black one, turning his back,
slowly and sensually rubs his behind
on the literary theory section of the bookshelf.
Following the others out,
he pauses at the door-frame for a final scratch
then pees with pleasure on the just-washed floor.
Midnight
Midnight, and out of nowhere
a giant hornet
worrying the window-frame,
two red moths
dozing under the desklamp-shade
and a bright green scarab
clambering over the stale bread; outside
a purple moon
rising over Nova Vas, the Great
Bear and her cub so
visible last night
now hidden by cloud, or should that be
mist, in the Vast Forest?
Somewhere a priest
worrying a fragment of a leaf.
Somewhere an ant
wrestling with her God.
Somewhere another Earth.
Tracy Ryan is a Western Australian writer whose most recent book of poetry is Hoard (Whitmore Press, 2015), and whose latest novel is Claustrophobia (Transit Lounge, 2014). She is currently a visiting fellow with Literary Cultures of the Global South at the University of Tuebingen, Germany.
Winter: Liebestod
Inured by now to snow
nothing could drag me
away from inwardness
this would-be scraping
and clearing of the mind’s
dark drive with its slick
misnomer “black” ice
to the neuralgic window —
except that queer aria
of howls, falsetto, which now
in counterpoint and now
in unison makes plaint
to a woman who not so much
walks two white dogs as is
herself spurred on by animal pain
and mine, and stops her ears.
Winch-Bird
…haul/ My eyelids up
— Sylvia Plath, “Black Rook in Rainy Weather”
Unseen, and named not by our utterance but by his own,
cranking the day up for me as he cranks your day down,
insistent and regular as the kitchen roller-shutter: creak…
creak… asserting particularity, necessity, marking off time
remaining in this place, staking out hours for work
and hours domestic, that querulous line between Home
and Them. The rest of the process a guessing-game,
if you care to determine who makes that mimic cry
and is endemic and does not leave in winter, allowing that
seasons are now so altered the guides don’t always apply.
If we have to make him real I’ll settle for woodcock,
Waldschnepfe, but in our private bird-world he will not
have to be hunted, only to be what he does, Winch-bird.
John Pavlou is a poet and songwriter from Brisbane who regularly engages in both literary and musical activities around Australia. His passion for literature was evident in his childhood and he first began writing short stories and poems while he was attending primary school. Songwriting was a natural path for Pavlou considering his love of both words and music; however, his affection for poetry, prose and spoken word was reinforced upon taking literature courses at university as well as engaging in local poetry meets hosted by Ruckus Slam. He identifies as a Greek-Australian and maintains that the feeling of belonging to two nations often plays a role in his life and work. The poem “Feral Dogs in Igoumenitsa” refers to an experience he had during his first trip to Greece. John Pavlou currently lives in Brisbane; he practices music and creative writing and is also undertaking study to be an educator.
Feral Dogs In Igoumenitsa
A rag-tag gang of teeth and fur approach the work-lights at the Port of Igoumenitsa. Each animal is startling in its own right and each carries robust folksy colours under their paws. City soot jumps off their shoulders as they swagger in the midnight air. Some are wearing collars and I can hear the metal buckles and trinkets jangle, singing with charm – the ghostly remains of a regal past.
The waves lick the jetty posts. I breathe in the green sea and detect a faint scent of burning oil. The feral lot rolls past me without so much as a look in my direction. This haphazard array of shape, size and colour is almost laughable, is laughable. And I do laugh as the sound of their claws hammering the bitumen recedes into silence. I’m left to imagine the richness of their history and wonder about their former glories. They, who know both the craziness of domestication and free winds of urban shabbiness. They, who make blankets out of tatters and houses of rags.
The wind belts across the waters surface and up into my face. I see the sole light of the ferryboat, swinging on the dark horizon.
Prerna Bakshi is a poet, writer and research scholar of Indian origin from Sydney, Australia. Her work has previously been published in over two dozen journals and magazines, most recently in Grey Sparrow Journal, Silver Birch Press, Wilderness House Literary Review, Kabul Press, Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature and South Asian Ensemble: A Canadian Quarterly of Literature, Arts and Culture. Her full-length poetry collection, Burnt Rotis, With Love, is forthcoming from Les Éditions du Zaporogue. She tweets at @bprerna.
The death train
You’re all grown up now. Don’t jump around too much out in the open.
A girl gets told
as she plays hop scotch. You have grown breasts now. They bounce up and down. What if anyone sees?
I’ve been told rubbing this oil helps. It works like magic.
A girl gets told
as she gets used as a guinea pig
for virtually every ‘home remedy’
under the sun. Don’t wear this dress. It will attract the eyes to your weak spot. You have such small breasts. I worry who will marry you?
They are either too large
or too small.
Too saggy
or too perky.
They either bounce too much
or not at all.
Too this, too that — never right.
Never satisfactory enough.
Except on that day when it didn’t matter
how women’s breasts looked.
How big they were
or how small.
They were just right.
Just the right size.
The right shape.
The right shade.
The right kind of breasts
on the right kind of women.
The chosen women.
Women who were handpicked,
lined up,
one by one,
had their breasts chopped off;
blood gushing all over the jam-packed
train carrying refugees;
women bleeding
slowly to death.
Their breasts, finally,
finally — the right size
for being cut into pieces.
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.”
Ivy Alvarez is the author of Disturbance (Seren, 2013) and Mortal (2006). Her latest chapbook is Hollywood Starlet (dancing girl press). Her poems appears in many publications, including Best Australian Poems, with several translated into Russian, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. Born in the Philippines and raised in Australia, she lived many years in the UK before moving to New Zealand. www.ivyalvarez.com
What Clara Bow Stole
Walking through Kowloon Park, I blow
to cool my gai-daan-jai — steamy treats
crunchy-sweet. Ooh, that fool director’s so beastly! Don’t speak, he’d said, look pretty.
Too easy. Winking, I opened wide,
facing his one dark eye. Boop-boop-be-doo!
We knew. I won. Plunge fingers,
twist off pastry pieces and chew. A man,
his wife, sit, leaning on each other in the dark.
It scratches my heart. When I stole
my mother’s coat, after she held the butcher’s
knife to my throat, it scratched like that.
One more bite. Just like her, I’m committed
to my paper bag, my asylum of sweetness.
What Ava Gardner Delivered
Under the bridge, a dim lagoon.
Slow notes from a saxophone
glow in the trees. The pool
becomes a black sky, fallen leaves collapsed stars.
Angel, he calls me. Frankie’s name for me. I remember how he
stroked my skin, his wedding ring scratching my chin
as I stood to deliver us from the second gift
of my belly. Afterwards, he gave me jewellery.
Here I am a raven calling out to borders, guards,
the staring crowds: goodbye.
A soldier looks into my eyes, murmurs
something low and kind to me.
I fold into my dark coat,
say thank you.
Geoff Page’s 1953 (UQP) was shortlisted for the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for poetry. He lives in Canberra and has published 21 poetry collections, as well as novels, memoir and biography. He edited The Best Australian Poems 2014 and 2015 (Black Inc.)
The Back-off
for two good friends
Forty years or so ago
the same straight back of conscience had them
fleeing the police.
The war was wrong. They wouldn’t go
though both had army fathers.
One torched his card in public;
the other did a week in Goulburn
before the draft was dumped.
Today, here in our group of five,
they’re meeting over coffee,
one, flat white, the other, black,
one still fresh from picketing
some notably obnoxious mine,
the other fired with new results
disproving warmist claims
from vaticans of scientists who
will brook no heretics.
Each man is well aware the other
knows his slant on carbon.
Their temperaments are of a kind.
One starts to talk about the forest
his open-cut will tear away.
The other counters ‘Well, you know’
but finds he’s trailing off.
They share a slow, reluctant smile;
we’re all too old for this.
Minds at our age don’t shift much.
They both look round to check the weather:
two of them and three of us.
The argument they’d planned to stage
would probably have proved uncivil.
Seamlessly, without intent,
we move to something different.
Emily Stewart is a poet and book editor based in Sydney. She is the author of Like (Bulky News Press 2015). Some of her recent poems are published or forthcoming in Overland, Cordite and The Age.
Memory palace
Crisis of affection—a tulip, the flower—artificial yellow
composite on weekend. I saw the crush—early stream—
then never without you, on remix, on repeat, this heart.
Midday’s haze worsening into pale linked cubes.
A soft texture resisting folds. Like weekend or song
yellow repeating its shape. No vice in voice alone. Yellow’s
cold clock accenting nude lives—layers heaping
over at lapse—spinning to thread then yawning dot.
Flower—a sunflower—the yellow memory.
Long bright afternoons in afterimage.
Assembled in Singapore with parts from Hong Kong and Malaysia, Tse Hao Guang is interested in form and formation, creativity and quotation, lyrics and line breaks. His chapbook is hyperlinkage (Math Paper Press, 2013). He graduated from the Masters of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago in 2014 with a concentration in poetry and creative writing, and co-edits the cross-genre, collaborative literary journal OF ZOOS, as well as Unfree Verse, an anthology of Singapore poetry in received and nonce forms. His first full-length collection, Deeds of Light, is forthcoming. www.tsehaoguang.com.
Gongs, Alarms
I am from the high rise bomb shelter.
From the Speak Good Singlish Movement, red as plum,
where the joyful grammarian worms. I am from nameless
noodle stalls with frowny uncles, from palm copy-paste
plantations, from the ice-stoking wilds of Torontonian
suburbs. I am from the strut and peck of hao gong ming. I have a badge. I am from the policeman who drove
me to school, from the lawyer’s letter, the leaving.
I am from muddy tea stretched to a metre and a half as we
looked for its heart, from the black nut that oozed and invited
fingers or silver spoons. I am from the are you from China?
I am from the gongs of Imperial China. From each love
letter of the alphabet, crisp, incandescent. I am from
Asian Values. I signed a pledge to outlaw the water vapour
stirring in air. I am from the thing that spits and spits.
I am from the itch to sugar the split.
Toby Fitch is the author of Rawshock (Puncher & Wattmann 2012), which won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, and Jerilderies (Vagabond Press 2014). He lives in Sydney and has a book of poems forthcoming, The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau.
Ordinance
massive black & blue Hoovers
\ suck the tortured moonbeams off Ebony street /
the pitted canopy of night
\ like a coffin amassed with consumables /
this urban pastoral for the kids
\ a twenty car collision of bloomin’ flowers /
amazed at the animals men are
dappled / ungoverned
\ faces download a horse & lead it to the /
caucus drink-tank
\ vicious moons thinking surely the /
lemonade witch is dead
\ a polls charade in the shade of /
purple lizards who
\ frack their way through slippery /
slopes / the right
\ angle for a carpark dawn /
in the vapoury
\ wake of summer’s /
groove
\/
Alex Skovron is the author of six collections of poetry and a prose novella. The many public readings he has given include appearances in China, Serbia, India and Ireland, as well as Norfolk Island. A bilingual selection of his poetry translated into French was published in 2013 under the title The Attic, a volume of Chinese translations is underway, and his novella The Poet has been translated into Czech. His most recent book is Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems (2014), and a collection of his short stories is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann.
Diminished Light
The little girl in the laundromat
is sitting so still
she could be a mirage. What
is she thinking, watching a sky crawl
with purple? Soon its shell
will crack, and rolled umbrellas
under everybody’s arm will billow
into their mushroom shapes,
and her mother watching the porthole
where a world spins will take
her by the arm, and soon she’ll fall
into her usual
late-afternoon haze as they cross
the glistened street, no less
and no more distant than before,
the wind clouding her face
the way the shopfronts suddenly share
diminished light, the way no voice
could say her sadness,
make real the little girl
hopping alongside, hungry bird.
Jill Jones’ book, The Beautiful Anxiety, won the 2015 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. A new book, Breaking the Days, is due from Whitmore Press in late 2015. She is a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, University of Adelaide. Her poems have been translated into Chinese, Dutch, French, Italian, Czech and Spanish. For five months in 2014-15, she was poet-in-residence at Stockholm University.
Bright Yellow Black
The papers are burning.
There are several dialects.
The wind rises with helicopters.
People below accept that now.
How, without precision
things fall apart in the dry.
The black box tells nothing
nor do autopsies.
The recounts tell nothing, again.
There’s shark blood on the shore.
Someone is recycling videos and tears.
Soon there won’t be enough.
Soon there’ll be more replicas.
On bright yellow farms the grain is ticking.
Clouds drop seeds.
People accept that now.
The black box tells nothing.
Omar J Sakr is an Arab Australian poet whose work has appeared in Meanjin, Overland, Cordite Poetry Review, and Tincture Journal, among others. His poems have been translated and published in Arab, and he has been shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize as well as the ACU Poetry Prize.
Dear Mama
Don’t preach to me, mama, don’t tell me stories
about some holy book or other, about angels, demons and jinn –
I’ve already learned too well the religion of your fists.
My body has drummed its song, the gospel choir of bruises
so often it knows no other, and at night I still mumble
the chorus: sharp gasps interspersed with bass, with low moans.
Your god is capricious, strikes without reason – some days
(the days you had gear, I later knew) you’d smile and order us pizza
and we’d sit in the smoky temple of the lounge while your silver screen
apostles entertained us, spat & bled & fucked & loved & died
for us. Those days were best. Others were Nails-On-Chalkboard,
a kind of screaming at the edge of hearing – your cheekbones, jaw,
elbow, everything was knife sharp and cut against the air
even though your teeth were set, lips locked prison-tight.
Like tinnitus, I knew only I could hear it but I swear
your body screeched in warning those mornings, and we learned
to read your augurs in cigarette smoke, the signs prophesying pain
if we didn’t become paragons of stillness and silence. Later, you
told me you saw my treacherous father in me even as a boy,
that you hated the sight of my face, the reminder
that his sins were burned too clearly in my skin.
I remember the day the locksmith came, his confusion, then pity,
when he asked ‘you want the lock outside his door?’ He hesitated
but took your petty cash reward to seal my cage. If only
you knew how I made that cell my world, so expansive and free –
hundreds of books, each one a key. How could you think
walls would contain me? I ought to thank you, dear mama,
for the prayers I memorized, for the blessing of hunger, the urge
for independence you sang into my bones, percussion-deep,
and the need to travel, to roam across the lands and seas and discover
all that can be seen. I ought to thank you, dear mama, for your piousness,
for showing me the cruelty and beauty of God and godlessness
all at once, for teaching me that holiness is no more
than moments shared with those you love whether bonded by blood
or not. Especially not. I ought to thank you dear mama, but I can’t.
The mosque is empty, and I’m all outta prayers.
Damen is a Queensland poet, and has been writing for the last 20 years. He is currently working as a Contracts Manager for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle company. Damen has been published in Cordite and The Courier Mail, and has won or been highly commended in the Yeats Poetry Prize, the Nillumbik Ekphrasis Poetry Award, Ipswich Poetry Festival, the Philip Bacon Ekphrasis Prize, and the FAW Tasmania Poetry Prize.
What Poem Would The Mining Companies Tell Lionel Fogarty?
In between howls that could be poems,
Lionel tells us that he is teaching the black kids poetry.
To a bunch of white middle class mainstreamers,
he’s reciting poems in monochrome bullets
about hate, and guilt and history, and we don’t miss the irony.
In between the dressing-down that could be poems,
he asks us what will the mining companies teach
his black kids about themselves? Every other word
is the whip, and the blessing: black. Black, black, black
is the poem Lionel Fogarty tells the mining companies,
and the mining companies who know about holes in the ground
echo it back to him. Black, black, black.
Natalie Rose Dyer is currently completing her PhD in Creative Writing at Melbourne University with an Australian Postgraduate Award. She received a BA with first class Honours in Cinema (2006) and an MCA (2010) from The University of Melbourne. She is currently working on her first book of poetry. The title poem ‘The Butcher’s Daughter’ appeared in 3/2014 Meanjin Literary Journal. Her work is also published in 2014 University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize Anthology. Her first solo art exhibition was at Bokeh Gallery in Daylesford (2014). Her blog can be viewed at www.natalierosedyer.com
Haired
My bestial presence ever-present,
first noticed at primary school.
The other girls had unhaired legs,
mine outpoured like a simian species.
I wanted to run right out of the playground,
but was stuck there in my body
with awareness of myself half-manned.
Not just on my legs, later I discovered
black-weeded death above my lip,
the barnacled beard of stray hairs came later,
shower of dusty dark wired pubic tendrils
in my armpits, though not as thick as
the German girls witnessed in the change room,
shamed her for not shaving it off
to my friends later. But she was just like me,
covered in latticed thread to her mid-thigh,
hiding the underling, centre of blood
unmasked, which we all waited on expectantly.
There was even more hair knitted,
a furry rainbow that arched over my eyes,
fighting for my life against the insults
until I waxed it off, even then –
naked of hair, I hid behind my wintry coat,
an Athenic shield made invisible,
preparing to fight, sharpening, having
torn from myself the bushy blessing
through wanting to fit in, but never quite able
to take it all off, my furry blood
at the hinge of my sex, a creature stirring.
Hessom is an Iranian-born doctor who grew up in Pakistan and the UK before moving to Australia. His itinerant life colours his interest in culture, human rights and awesome Middle Eastern food. He is grateful to his Mum, siblings and partner Megan for keeping him in line.
Kandy dream
Hot quadrangle lined with
neon-yellow bananas,
sunrise papayas, king coconuts;
the din of cleavers,
steaming mutton,
rubble of intestines and
red-eyed crows;
Station Road, Kandy.
‘Halō! Āyubōvan! A salaam aleykum!’
Clamour and pang of
new markets, stall-faces of
cardamom eyes, Aryuvedic oil nostrils,
tea leaf lips: white, cinnamon,
vanilla shoots, taking root after
the weeding.
Tea for Katherine, tea for Mum,
ethnic, clean, gift-shopper’s dream.
News clipping on the tea-shelf
slips, grainy image of a Tamil man.
Naked in handcuffs, blindfold-tie trailing
as he tips into a marsh,
Kalashnikov singing his lullaby.
Hurriedly shuffled away, back to
talk of tea and Kandy.
Rose Hunter is the author of three books of poetry: You As Poetry (Texture Press, Oklahoma), [four paths] (Texture Press), and the river (Artistically Declined Press, Oregon). A chapbook of her poems is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press (Chicago), and she will appear in the anthology Bend River Mountain (Regime Books, Perth). She has been or will soon be published in such journals as Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal, Regime, Geist, New World Writing, DIAGRAM, PANK, The Nervous Breakdown, Verity La, and The Los Angeles Review. She is from Brisbane, spent many years in North America, and is now in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. She also works as a freelance editor. More information about her is available at Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have To Take Me Home (http://rosehunterblog.wordpress.com).
el edén
to strike or dash (esp.) sharp collision
to have an effect; to make an impression to have an effect
or impact (esp.) a negative one, to take a bit of negative out
of that, big shouldered, paredón; to advance, encroach
on an area belonging to (esp.
but you went over into the death world
with those others, so many from the white room, what is it
i asked, something like punishment; impinge also
in the sense of shoulder, never
the bolder the lime green the rarer the bougainvillea
the whiter the surface the dearer the to whomever it may concern
descanso: alonso lopes guardado; same day different year
his birth date and your death date. how
do they do it don’t they know you died here, nearby
bikini sweating on the rocks helicopter mistletoe
skeleton house, lazy dog and palomino
magic wand bridge one eyed fence canyon plunge, buggy
tiny flimsy that killed you
Jake Goetz lives in the southern suburbs of Sydney. He has also lived in Munich, Germany (2011) and Graz, Austria (2013) where he studied on exchange. His poetry has appeared in The Sun Herald, Rabbit,Voiceworks, Jaws (Austria), Tide and Otoliths. He completed a Creative Writing Degree at the University of Wollongong, receiving an Asiabound fellowship to Sun Yat-Sen University in China. He is a fiction editor for Mascara.
Rudimentary sketches
… still dreaming
of Russian Pacific seas
sprouting Swedish palms
and a Peruvian woman
with lorikeet eyes
translating nationalism
as breathing – the morning
like a border-less idea
wie in einem großen kreis angeordnet
aber mit anderen namen
*
wind carries the sound
of a train to my door
and i think of waves forming
only to fold like impatient arms
in the local medical centre
and how unnatural it is
to look at the self
in the mirror
*
tree stump sits on brick ledge
wet from rain, dew hangs
from iron fence, could be watery eyes
peering into the late-morning
but it’s mostly dew and a Cockatoo sounds
cigarette burns, feet rest upon pebbles
as shade separates the yard
and a plane moves like a container
of consciousness, banking left
over the Royal to tip out into the city
Prithvi Varatharajan is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland, and a freelance producer of literature and arts programs for ABC Radio National. He is writing his PhD thesis on the radio program Poetica, which aired on ABC RN from 1997 to 2014. He has published scholarly, critical and creative writing in various Australian and overseas journals and books. His article on a Poetica adaptation of John Forbes’ poetry is forthcoming in a special issue of Adaptation titled ‘Adapting Australia
Ecstasy
the streets are wide open
leading you through a bleak
and beautiful future
rain slakes down,
slashing at the jacket
you hold dearly
by its sleeve, your chin
tucked in
we leg it over the bridge
to a dimly imagined
destination
lights of the park,
brilliant in their unreality
glisten as we pass
their globes hold pure warmth
that ebbs into the night
like a promise of happiness
Country. Car Window.
late afternoon’s
division of road,
its sleek black skin
pared open
by white
the white, a crumb-trail
to a near horizon
the white, the pulse
of something
nearly forgotten
above the road
a kookaburra
shabby in a tree
laughs deliriously
rogue hay bales
roll motionless
on a field
so vast the eye
blurs at its edges
and a fence of slouching steel
lengthens to a darkening
distance, linking
Jordie Albiston’s latest titles are XIII Poems (Rabbit Poet Series, 2013) and The Weekly Poem: 52 exercises in closed & open forms (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014). She lives in Melbourne.
Rubidium
Rb– Woodward was obsessed with blue tie office ceiling parking space all painted blue perhaps he did not know love love is there in the flame emission spectrum a brightness of
rubidus love-ly dark red & tomorrow evening just before 9 she will wind her way up to
Paisley Park for the Lebanese fireworks & hold to her lover & enjoy the burst of atomic time
shower the end-of-year sky love is forever almost his half-life thrice the age of the universe
scientia vincere tenebras
the storm last night was large & morning’s sea is Shut like a jaw
it leaves not even the heel of a shoe of anyone gone “home” for
some while we walk chaotica strewn all over the shore & scores
& scores of miniscule beings bereft of kith & kin a shag protects
what is left of a jut a bit of rock thrown up like joy from the very
floor of the world you know my emotions before I feel them you
know my definitions & gulls fly sullenly through the sky mirror-
ed there in the continental drift of your vapoury silvery eyes if I
break you open you will catch fire if I say the wrong thing say
it wronger if I just say nought nought nought but I don’t pick up
I don’t know the signs & where was I when all this was taught we
turn ourselves toward the wetlands & for some while we walk I
keep half an eye for a Lewin’s Rail in the tangled lignum & sea club-
rush but nothing nothing nothing no Baillon’s Crake working the
reeds or glasswort sedge or grass the storm last night was large
o where do they go when the wind blows faster than time? the
word is — & I like how it sounds but I don’t know what it means
don’t know if I know if it matters this morning & this is no time
for being a poet the pieces are here but nowhere to put them the
word is here — the kisses are here — but no mouths
Alan Botsford serves as editor of Poetry Kanto, Japan’s oldest bi-lingual poetry journal. Author of the essay-dialogue-poetry collection Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore (Sage Hill Press 2010) as well as two poetry collections, mamaist: learning a new language (Minato no Hito 2002) and A Book of Shadows (Katydid Press 2003), he teaches at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan, and lives with his wife and son in Kamakura.
a mamaist heat
i was thrown into the white heat, the tumult and trial,
the ferment and turmoil, the flurry and disorder.
i was convulsed by and floundered in
the shivering and shuddering,
i ebbed and flowed, i waxed and waned,
i pumped in the swinging and fluctuating
to quiver in the sway
and flit in the pulse.
i pitched and plunged, i bobbed and weaved,
i tossed and tumbled from pillar to post,
side to side, round and round, in and out, up and down,
and now the ardor of the cheerful fire has me crackling,
thermally loose in the burning and fully alive in the blooming,
the blush of dawn, the glisten of night
gleaming and blazing in my blood,
gossamer and solid are the circuits of my heart.
a mamaist shot
The brain shot through
With Eros
Has a mind of its own
Were it opened for business
Where the heart shot through
With Eros
Is the lion among us
Alive and well
Fiercely loyal to
No bottom line but its own
Mystery
Like
The stomach shot through
With Eros
Hungry for Otherness while
The intestine shot through
With Eros
Absorbs the lessons
Vinita, author of Words Not Spoken, is a Mumbai based, award winning poet and writer. Her poems have appeared in Asian Cha, Constellations, The Fox Chase Review, Pea River Journal, Open Road Review, Stockholm Literary Review, Poetry Pacific among others. She was nominated for the Best of the Net Awards 2011, awarded first prize in the Wordweavers Contest 2014, commendation prize in the All India Poetry Competition 2014 and won the 2014 Hour of Writes Contest twice. Her poem is one of the prize wining entries to be published in the British Council’s Museum Anthology 2014. Her current manuscript of poems has been accepted by the Finishing Line Press, Kentucky, USA and is due to be published this year. She has been widely interviewed by national and international journals. She can be reached at www.vinitawords.com
Raw Silk
When at last we meet
do not say hello
That greeting for strangers…
We’ve shared too many moons on the palettes of our nights
Mary Branley is a poet, writer, musician and teacher based in Sligo, Ireland. She has two collections of poetry: A foot on the tide (Summer Palace Press, 2002) and Martin let me go (Summer Palace Press, 2009). She is also a recipient of a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship and bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland and Sligo County Council
Rūmī’s Letters to Shams
i
Shams, we have yet to meet
but I check the temperature daily
in Tabriz wondering
if it is the cold or the heat
that will send you to me
the dark season or the light?
Perhaps the fluctuations of the dollar
will have a bearing
as on the flow of oil.
Every night the angels whisper
sweetly in my ear, saying
soon your love will come
through the open window,
the smell of night rain in her hair,
dew of morning kiss on her lips,
a full moon language
in each moon eye. Oh Shams
my heart is ready for your hands.
ii
How unexpected it was
When the windows of the heart
Opened from the back like patio doors
And I entered the garden alone
Dazzled in sunlight, thick with birdsong
And the deafening fragrance of Shams
Whispers from everywhere Stay in the garden, love from here. Who knew the heart held such a secret?
iii
Let me make a bed of words for you
with sheets as light as the fall of dew
on the curve of your breast
and rest your head on a swan’s wing.
When you burrow in
the mattress whispers back
a silken phrase, the scent of your name
in honey suckle breath.
Let me tattoo my love all over you
with the nib of June’s new moon
indelible ink of midnight’s summer blue
crazy words you’ve never heard before.
Let me wrap your sleep
in the mandolin trills of dawn
and you can fold your dreams up small
and slip them in loose change.
Rachael is a multifaceted artist engaged in writing, performance making and visual art. As a performer and vocalist, she has featured in major festivals across Australia and overseas. She has created puppet-based visual theatre for adults. Most recently she collaborated with poet Andy Jackson on Ambiguous Mirrors, a poetry/puppetry piece that toured Ireland in 2013. Rachael recently completed a Masters Degree in Theatre Performance examining anthropomorphism, transgression and puppetry. Her writing has appeared in Overland and Sleepers.
Supatra Walker was born in Thailand, attended school in New Zealand and has lived in the Northern Territory. She recently graduated with a BA in English and Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle and is now a full-time student in their BA (Hon) in English and Creative Writing. She writes poetry, short stories, memoir and essays. She owns 3 guitars and 4 ukuleles and plays them all enthusiastically. She is the proud mother of two gorgeous young women and a passionate Greenie. She has recently moved to the Hunter Valley to build a north facing house that will eventually overlook a thriving permaculture garden.
Gai Kiah
I begin pre-dawn, before
the sun’s alchemy transforms the Morton Bay figs
into giant feng shui money trees of gold and citrine. An uncommon feeling
had stolen into my dreams.
I want to be at my desk, pencil in hand to capture the images
the metered words whispering and coiling beyond my tongue.
Pen won’t do.
Computer won’t do.
There is something that keystrokes can’t capture.
I sharpen my pencil and begin to write.
My hand is doula and letter
by letter
words are birthed naked defenceless like wild things caught
in a snare in the glare of scrutiny they string out
or jam up struggling
for a place on the page
for space in a line
for the chance to become part
of a whole
something
much bigger than themselves something
more metered than syllables something
as round as vowels
something more
percussive than consonants, the something
on the landscape of my page that is something
more meaningful than nouns and something
more cohesive than syntax and so
so
much more than mere conjunctions but
the shuffling and writing and erasing reminds me instead that
my handwriting is gai kiah: the indecipherable scratching
of a chicken.
There is no beauty in gai kiah. This is not the hand that writes thank you
letters or the inscription in birthday cards.
I study the geography of my sentences,
the mountains and valleys between the letters,
the tails and rivers and streams that hook and bend
or simply
end and
then I am reminded of a story my Thai kindergarten teacher
read to us about
the seven chickens who had flung themselves into a fire
in grief when their mother was killed and
fed to a wandering monk. Their souls cast out
onto the night sky became a cluster of stars. I cried.
When asked why I was crying I lied
and said I had a dog that died.
I didn’t know the Thai word for sad, you see.
I didn’t have a dog either.
But here’s the thing: I remember
this story because ก (gaaw) is the first letter in the Thai alphabet
and ก is for gai as
a is for apple.
I formed ก on the lines of my exercise book.
I erased my mistakes but
the eraser caught the edge of the paper.
Then I knew that the crumpled and corrugated ravines
of my page are testament to my farang-ness.
And so the ungainly row of กs
big, and small some missing their beaks legs splayed, stiff
ungainly and culturally crippled march
lost, jammed and shambling up and down
the papery spurs, through the miserable smears and over
the rubbery charcoal worms
of the erased dead and into
the history of me.
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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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 LiftedBrow (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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 holesfrom 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.
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.
Sharon Kernot is an Adelaide writer. Her first novel, Underground Road, was published by Wakefield Press in 2013. Her poetry collections include Washday Pockets (Ginninderra Press, 2010) and Fishing (Garron Publishing, 2012). She currently teaches part-time at Flinders University.
Reinventing
I am trying to change my style, rewrite my own history. I have a habit of short punchy lines
where what is not said trembles quietly beneath. The clip of those lines represents the cutting
down, the chipping away over a life-time and the tremor is the burying of history. So I decide
to reinvent myself through poetry. I decide to stretch the lines so that they can gallop with a
rhythm or amble along, meander, rather than slice through to the instant gratification of the
final line. There have been times when I have had to speak with the precision of a scalpel,
cutting straight to the point. If I did not manage to speak my jumbled thoughts, my counter-
argument, within the space of a haiku or a tanka, within the space of someone’s need to draw
a hasty breath, the words remained trapped along with so many others, unspoken. So my
words became arrows and darts seeking a bullseye. But now I am trying to untie my lines, let
my words sprout tendrils. I’m attempting to allow the elongated, the rambling, the multi-
syllabic, the lengthy line, the prose poem because I know you can do brevity to death.
Bronwyn Lang is currently residing in Tasmania and has had her poetry published in several print and online journals
The heat of the taxi and this particularly hazed morning is one in which circumstance invites confession. We are on our way to see a gynaecologist. I am still high and not yet sober.
My eyes feel discombobulated, set loose and ragged in their sockets.
Silences are fattened with words, fill mouths like fists.
Things we never think of telling are told.
The red dust on our skin streaks with sweat, into watercolours on canvas. We have wound down the windows but the air that enters the car is foetid and tropic. There is dried blood on my heels. I am not wearing underwear.
Tara says now is the right time for stories.
Once she was an actress and met a lover on a game show. Her affairs have ended online or in obsessive analysis. She wants to predict next season’s narrative.
Our skulls are hollowed and sit gaunt above our spines. She speaks of struggling.
Going in and out of frame.
Off set. Everything is echolalic.
Her hair is still damp. She has recently showered. We share a preference for drying our skin in draught. Today she has chosen a yellow dress from the many that feature in her bedroom, hooked on doors and shelves as if she lived in a boutique.
This morning there was a rape.
I notice that our hands flutter between our laps and mouths as if we are drawing from imaginary Marlboro lights.
Joanne Burns’ most recent book of poems isamphora. Giramondo Publishing 2011. A new poetry collection brush will be published by Giramondo later in 2014. She is currently assembling poems for a selected volume of her work, spanning over four decades.
John Carey is an ex-teacher of French and Latin and a former part-time actor. The latest of his four poetry collections is One Lip Smacking (Picaro Press 2013)
From the security cameras…
Some footage of the Mardi Gras and bummage and plumage: a corps de danse-sirs
in a ballet sequins; a security cordon of muscled jocks in frocks but non-threatening…
a mini sleeper-hold perhaps then let you down gently with a bedtime story; a dozen
Julie Bishops put the Medusa stare on each other on the back of a trailer; a Sophie
Mirabella look-alike sinks her teeth into a rubber snake. It’s all rather jolly really,
nothing for Jehovah to get his robes in a knot over.
Two men in a lifeboat perched on the top of the hill, link arms. The taller,
in a blue suit and tie, wiggles his wing-nut ears. The second, in a fur-collared
parka, with narrow eyes in a sinister riverbank face, croaks through thin lips:
“ Turn back the floats !”. “Turn back the floats !” shouts his comrade-in-arms.
In a joint press release, they affirm their belief in a pluralist society:
“ What else is an oligarchy? Can’t you count? It’s not the unnatural things they do,
it’s the propaganda!”
“ What do you mean?” says his partner, “ ‘unlikely bedfellows’? Are you from the ABC?”
Lillian Kwok is originally from Philadelphia and now lives and studies in Sweden. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Hawaii Pacific Review, Off the Coast, burntdistrict and other journals. She holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
.
Hunger
We spend that summer with our dad in Hainan. My sister is nine and wants to spend
all her time with me, but I want to bike along the water alone, look for seaglass and
dead sea animals without her. So she cries and dad becomes cross. My sister gets
Saturday candy but not me. To punish him I refuse to eat lunch and dinner. But my
father, the oldest of nine brothers and sisters, knows a thing or two about hunger and
is not afraid of me. Whenever I want to starve, he lets me starve.
Cameron Lowe lives in Geelong, Victoria. His two book-length poetry collections are Porch Music (Whitmore Press, 2010) and Circle Work (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013).
Louise Nicholas is a South Australian teacher and poet. WomanSpeak, co-written with Jude Aquilina, was published by Wakefield Press in 2009, and a chapbook, Large, in 2013. Her collection, The List of Last Remaining, was short-listed for the Adelaide Festival Unpublished Manuscript award.
S. J. J. F. Rutherford is a pen name of Simon Patton’s. He lives with his partner, two cats and Sealyham the Terrier near Chinaman Creek in Central Victoria, and translates Chinese poetry. He spent five months working in Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong last year, and lived near the Tai Hang Tung and Nam Shan Housing Estates.
Cafe (Tai Hang Tung Estate大坑東邨)
Ice in the tall glass cloaked with cola jostles bubbles of fizz, and
I feel this heat tell only the hard wood under my tail-bone. The
TV is mute: it addresses the room graphically, in fluent Chinese
characters, beneath perfectly made-up faces lip-reading “news”.
The kitchen, for its few orders, roars industrially out of the
wok, while — in the centre of his Imaginary Loungeroom — a
man chats through a smart hair-cut deeper into his mirror.
Elif Sezen, born in Melbourne in 1981, grew up both here and in Izmir, Western Turkey. She settled in Melbourne in 2007. Also an interdisciplinary visual artist, she writes original poetry in English and in Turkish. In 2014 she published her Turkish translation of Ilya Kaminsky’s acclaimed book Dancing in Odessa; her own first collection of experimental short stories in Turkish, Gece Düşüşü (‘Fall.Night.’), was published in 2012. Elif’s collection of poems Universal Mother was recently published by Gloria SMH Press, and she also published a chapbook The Dervish with Wings early 2017. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts from Monash University. www.elifsezen.com
Roisin Kelly is an Irish writer who was born in Belfast and raised in Leitrim. After a year as a handweaver on a remote island in Mayo and a Masters in Writing at National University of Ireland, Galway, she now calls Cork City home. Her chapbook Rapture (Southword Editions in 2016) was reviewed by The Irish Times as ‘fresh, sensuous and direct,’ while Poetry Ireland Review described her as ‘unafraid of sentiment…a master of endings.’ Publications in which her poetry has appeared include POETRY, The Stinging Fly, Lighthouse, and Winter Papers Volume 3 (ed. Kevin Barry and Olivia Goldsmith). In 2017 she won the Fish Poetry Prize. www.roisinkelly.com
Cameron Morse taught and studied in China. Diagnosed with Glioblastoma in 2014, he is currently a third-year MFA candidate at the University of Missouri—Kansas City and lives with his wife Lili and newborn son Theodore in Blue Springs, Missouri. His poems have been or will be published in New Letters, Bridge Eight, South Dakota Review, I-70 Review and TYPO. His first collection, Fall Risk, is forthcoming in 2018 from Glass Lyre Press.
Rebecca Vedavathy is a research scholar studying Francophone Literature in EFLU, Hyderabad. She began writing as a child but only discovered its appreciation when she read a Francophone Literature class many years later. She won the Prakriti Poetry Contest, 2016. She longlisted in English Poetry for the Toto Funds the Arts Awards, 2017 and 2018. She is currently a Shastri Indo-Canadian Research Fellow interning at the University of Quebec, Montreal.
Luke Best is from Toowoomba on the Darling Downs where he was born in 1982. He is married with three children. He has been published in Overland and his manuscript Percussion was Highly Commended in the 2017 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize.
Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet. Her first collection, Even in the Dark (University of WA Publishing), won the Mary Gilmore Award in 2014; her second collection was Unexpected Clearing (UWAP, 2016). She is currently working on her next collection At the Point of Seeing. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate Research Centre at Victoria University.
Claire Potter ’s most recent poetry publications have appeared in The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry (edited by John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan), Best Australian Poems 2016 (ed. Sarah Holland-Batt), Poetry Chicago (ed. Robert Adamson), and Poetry Review Ireland. She was shortlisted for a 2017 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize UK and she has published three poetry collections, In Front of a Comma (Poets Union 2006), N’ombre (Vagabond 2007) and Swallow (Five Islands 2010). She lives in London.
Robbie Coburn was born in Melbourne and grew up on his family’s farm in Woodstock, Victoria. His poems have been published in various journals and magazines including Poetry, Cordite, The Canberra Times, Overland and Going Down Swinging, and his poems have been anthologized. His first collection, ‘Rain Season’, was published in 2013 and a second collection titled The Other Flesh is forthcoming. He lives in Melbourne.www.robbiecoburn.com.au
Kate
Adam Day is the author of the collection of poetry, 
Lindsay Tuggle has been widely published in journals and anthologies, including: Cordite, Contrapasso, HEAT, Mascara, Rabbit, and The Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry(2016). She was short-listed for the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, judged by Simon Armitage. Her work has been recognised by major literary awards, including: the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize (shortlisted 2015), the Val Vallis Award for Poetry (second prize 2009, third prize 2014), and the Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s Poetry Prize (shortlisted 2016, longlisted 2014). Her first collection, Calenture, is forthcoming with Cordite Publishing. The manuscript evolved from residential writing fellowships awarded by institutions including the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Library of Congress, and the Mütter Museum of Philadelphia. Tuggle also writes on intersections of poetry and science. The University of Iowa Press’s Whitman Series invited her first book, The Afterlives of Specimens: Science and Mourning in Whitman’s America (forthcoming in 2017). She wrote a chapter on ‘Poetry and Medicine’ for Cambridge University Press’sWhitman in Context (2017). She teaches literary studies at Western Sydney University.
Adolfo Aranjuez is editor of Metro, subeditor of Screen Education, and a freelance writer, speaker and dancer. He has edited for Voiceworks and Melbourne Books, and been published in Right Now, The Lifted Brow, The Manila Review, Eureka Street and Peril, among others. Adolfo is one of the Melbourne Writers Festival’s 30 Under 30. http://www.adolfoaranjuez.com
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly (2016, 8th House Publishing).
Owen Bullock is a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Canberra. His publications include 
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.
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.”
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.
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).
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
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 ethnog
Michael R. Griffiths is a Lecturer in the English and Writing Discipline at the University of Wollongong. He received his PhD in English from Rice University in 2012 and was INTERACT Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University from 2012 to 2014. As an academic, he has published on topics ranging from settler colonial biopolitics to indigenous life writing to the critical theory of decolonizing poetics, and much besides. He is writing a scholarly book, tentatively entitled The Distribution of Settlement: Indigeneity, Recognition and the Politics of Visibility (under contract, UWAP). His poetry has previously been published in Paper Nautilus.
John Kinsella’s most recent books of poetry are Firebreaks (WW Norton, 2016) and Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (Picador, 2016). His most recent book of short stories is Crow’s Breath (Transit Lounge, 2015). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, a Professorial Research Fellow at UWA, and Professor of Literature and Sustainability at Curtin University.
Fresh News from the Arctic (Anne Elder Award), This Floating World (shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and The Age Book of the Year Awards), and Wild (shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards).
Tracy Ryan is a Western Australian writer whose most recent book of poetry is Hoard (Whitmore Press, 2015), and whose latest novel is Claustrophobia (Transit Lounge, 2014). She is currently a visiting fellow with Literary Cultures of the Global South at the University of Tuebingen, Germany.
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 
