October 14, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
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.
October 14, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
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.
October 11, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Joanne Burns’ most recent book of poems is amphora. 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.
October 11, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
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?”
October 9, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
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.
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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.
October 8, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Cameron Lowe lives in Geelong, Victoria. His two book-length poetry collections are Porch Music (Whitmore Press, 2010) and Circle Work (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013).
October 8, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
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.
October 8, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
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.
October 8, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jonathan Hadwen is a Brisbane writer whose poetry has been published in Westerly, fourW, and Stand Magazine, as well as other publications in Australia and overseas. In 2013 he was named runner-up in the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for an unpublished manuscript. He recently had a prose poem sequence published in Writing to the Edge, published by Spineless Wonders.
In the neighbourhood
I drive out to see a friend. He lives out west in a suburb that was brand-new about thirty years ago, but is now a bit run-down. I drive through 60 zones, and 80 zones, a school zone, intersections, and roundabouts in the more modern areas. On every side I pass streets lined with houses. I have lived in this city my whole life. There are so many streets I will never drive down.
*
A plane sinks into the suburbs. A cloud reaches out like a great claw.
*
There are more birds around than I ever knew, and they fight all the time, and some of them even sing. Some of the birds are regulars – a pack of noisy miners, a couple of crows – but occasionally there are lorikeets, or rosellas, and even more rarely, a song-bird. I can never see him, only hear him, there in the trees, no matter how long I stare and study each bough and branch. He never sings the same song twice – he is like a composer trying out melodies, a perfectionist, who is never truly satisfied with the tune.
*
I never see the old couple downstairs, except on bin night. They keep their place locked-up tight, and the air-conditioner is always running whether it is hot or otherwise. It is the man who takes the rubbish out. He totters down the few steps from their first floor apartment with his walking stick, and one small bag of trash.
*
The old man is coughing again. It is bad today. My throat catches just listening to it. The sun is out, in its merciless way. The birds are happy – it is early summer – there is always enough to eat.
May 23, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Vesna Goldsworthy (1961, Belgrade) lives in London and writes poetry in English, her third language, as well as her native Serbian, in which her poetry is much-anthologized. Aged twenty-three, she read her poems at a football stadium to an audience of thirty thousand people. She moved to Britain soon afterwards and did not write a line of poetry for over twenty years. Her Crashaw Prize winning debut poetry collection in English, The Angel of Salonika (Salt, 2011) was one of the Times Best Poetry Books of the Year.
Yalta
Everything in the world is really beautiful, everything but our thoughts and actions…
A.P. Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog” (1899)
After they made love that first time
She still felt distant enough to use the formal you
In the first question she posed.
He contemplated the heavy Japanese scent
He helped her choose the day before.
Something less overwhelming, with more zest,
Would have suited Yalta better, now he knew,
Than the red spider lily.
That flower grows, so legend says,
Along the path on which you meet
Someone you will never see again.
He was still naked when he got out of bed
And sat down at the table to cut a slice of watermelon.
His testicles rested on the chair.
The lacquered wood felt pleasantly cool.
They stayed like that for thirty minutes at least.
Her little Pomeranian dog was there too
Watching his mistress, then him,
As he chewed the red flesh in silence.
The two pairs of eyes
Seemed similarly moist in candlelight.
If she were not naked – or not shy –
If she could only fling the window open,
Would they still hear the crashing
Of the waves
In the darkness below,
Like earlier that evening,
A century ago?
Sanssouci
I am old enough to remember
The appearance of Akhmatova’s Requiem,
The ambiguities of Brecht, Brodsky in his prime,
The Wall before it fell, the sound of planes
Taking off and landing. Nearby, another country.
On our long ride to Potsdam
We carved a crescent, a Cyrillic S,
In the first snow of the season,
As we wound our way across
The white spaces on the map,
Along the streets which echoed in Russian
And smelled of coal, cabbage, and wool.
It took years to reassemble
The memory of winter love-making
Undone on the parturition table,
In the encounter of metal and flesh.
The nurse returned with a pack of wadding.
It will cease in a day or two, she said
As though you were, already, absent. Do rest,
Drink some Georgian red, forget.
She straightened the shawl on my shoulders.
Under her uniform, the smell of sweat
Was just like mother’s, the night she was taken.
Our bicycles remained padlocked at the gate.
The brushstrokes of white powder
Emphasised the elegance of bars and chains,
A trail of lines in virgin snow,
To but not from, never returning;
So much blood and nothing
Conceived from so much love.
Of all that betrays us, the gentlest is memory.
Leaving the Party
We walk in silence bearing westwards
Along the towpath, against the current.
The Thames slithers and shimmers
On its slow way to surrender
Exhausted and spread-eagled on the sands of Essex.
Bicycle lights approach and frame us
In milky stills of gelatine silver.
Runners pound by in sweat and lycra,
Their footfall like strange amphibians’ heartbeat,
Mosquito buzz of music rises from their ears.
They give a wide berth to the couple of elderly clowns
In dinner jacket and sequins, carefully treading
With patent leather shoes unsuited to water’s edge.
At one point this evening we seemed unbearably close.
I raised my right hand to touch your temple.
Your hair, your fine hair, your fine white hair
Moved towards my fingers in static electricity.
There again was that question I was about to pose.
Then something behind your unquestionable goodness
Suddenly scared me, like ormolu and woodworm.
The cup of my palm still carries that faint fragrance,
The smoothness of black silk where the hand fell in defeat,
The soft woollen cloth, the white cotton underneath,
All those conspiracies of loom and thread
Expensively constructed to shield and to protect
Your skin, your warm skin, in all its unfamiliar creases.
Mine always feels porous, a layer to be shed,
Though I forever shiver — needing a cover, a shawl, a shelter —
Like some short-lived species of insect, a devil’s darning needle.
The darkness grows. The heat’s abating. I’ll hold myself together.
