May 16, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
MTC Cronin has published eighteen books (poetry, prose poems and essays) including a collection jointly written with the Australian poet Peter Boyle. Several of her books have appeared in translation including her 2001 book, Talking to Neruda’s Questions, which has been translated into Spanish, Italian and Swedish. Early 2009 saw the publication of Squeezing Desire Through a Sieve ~ Micro-Essays on Judgement & Justice (Puncher & Wattmann, Sydney) and Irrigations (of the Human Heart) ~ Fictional Essays on the Poetics of Living, Art & Love (Ravenna Press, USA). Her work has won and been shortlisted for many major literary awards, both internationally and in her native Australia. Cronin has studied arts, law, literature and creative writing and after working for the decade of the nineties in law, began teaching writing in primary, secondary and tertiary institutions. She currently lives, with her partner and three daughters, on a biodynamic farm in Conondale in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland of Queensland. Her latest poetry collection, The World Last Night [Metaphors for Death], was published in late 2012 by University of Queensland Press. A new collection – The Law of Poetry – is forthcoming through Puncher & Wattmann.
Lesson
Every day, crucify what you know.
Watch the stone practising what it knows
of bulls and men.
When the dream begins to fall, don’t catch it.
Console the words which have lost other words.
Learn how to wholly speak
for the voice that speaks in shards`
but hints at love.
Move! And then move again!
The distance from your mother’s womb
is measured by adding what is now clear
to a bowl of yellow peaches.
Show me something perfect!
Learn the inside of your heart.
Be shaken by infinity awake.
Break poison like bread.
History Lesson
The cradle of history
is filled with rocks
which were all gathered yesterday.
The tomb of history
is surrounded by mourners whispering
in the ears of tomorrow.
Just what happened is nowhere.
May 16, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Shirani Rajapakse is a Sri Lankan poet and author. She won the Cha “Betrayal” Poetry Contest 2013 and is a finalist in the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Awards 2013. Her collection of short stories, Breaking News (Vijitha Yapa 2011) was shortlisted for the Gratiaen Award. Shirani’s work appears or is forthcoming in, Kitaab, Cyclamens & Swords, Channels, Linnet’s Wings, Spark, Berfrois, Counterpunch, Earthen Lamp Journal, Asian Cha, Dove Tales, Buddhist Poetry Review, About Place Journal, Skylight 47, The Smoking Poet, New Verse News, The Occupy Poetry Project and anthologies, Flash Fiction International, Ballads, Short & Sweet, Poems for Freedom, Voices Israel Poetry Anthology 2012, Song of Sahel, Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology, World Healing World Peace 2012 and Every Child Is Entitled to Innocence. She blogs rather infrequently at http://shiranirajapakse.wordpress.com.
Late Afternoon
The sun’s overhead, I’m melting
like chocolate oozing all
over. Clothes stuck to skin
waiting for rains
that refuse to fall. The grass
cracks underfoot, coarse like old coconut
leaves falling to pieces bruising
my soles. Hot winds hurry
through the garden howling in agony. The cat
looks up and shrugs it
off as crotons, red, orange and yellow
sway flirtatiously.
The sky’s a deep blue
like the skirt you bought from
some faraway
land. I wore it with pink, you
liked the effect, shocking like the sunset,
the colour of my tongue,
lipstick and something else.
There’s no respite today. The weather’s
being cruel again.
Games People Play
Staring at the kettle, steam rising to the
ceiling, she’s sitting in the kitchen in her little
house in London, wondering what he’s doing
so far away from home.
Sun’s setting; she lounges in the verandah in
Colombo, unsure when he’ll leave. Colours
change in the garden, mango
leaves turn golden. She looks at him.
Shadows fall, walls whisper secrets. “Doesn’t
know what he wants, doesn’t know
what he wants.” Pink oleander strains
over the wall from the neighbours garden. Nods
at him sitting silent wondering what to
do. Messages whispered over phone lines,
crumpled in colored papers thrown
into dustbins. Needs more time
to decide. Winter in London,
cold and chill like lilies
adorning a wreath. A strange look in her
eyes, questions demanding to tumble
out. She doesn’t say a word but comes to
him. Sweating it out in the late afternoon heat her
blouse sticking to her like a second skin
dark pink like oleander. Rising from her corner
she pours herself a coffee, staring at the rain
falling, falling through the trees. He pulls
her close to him, desires take over. The game
moves on, decisions fly in the winds.
May 15, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
B.B.P. Hosmillo is a Filipino poet writing in English. He received the JENESYS Special Invitation for Graduate Student Research Fellowship in 2011 and the National University of Singapore—Asia Research Institute Graduate Student Fellowship in 2012. His poetry was shortlisted for the 2014 VOID poetry competition by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Hong Kong’s premiere literary establishment. Currently, he is based in Rumatá Artspace in South Sulawesi, Indonesia where he is completing a collection of poetry. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kritika Kultura, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Far Enough East Journal, Sundog Lit, Alice Blue Review, Kenning Journal, Nude Bruce Review, Ellipsis…literature & art, and elsewhere.
Old Creases
—for Liêm Vũ Đức
I have already spoken. It was loud. It was clear.
The insipid flesh comes to me with a pregnant ask without any point of return, not even a single
pause:
Was it the color of Mt. Fuji? Was it really a footprint?
Was the moon absent when you departed from the night and the sun nowhere to be found?
Were you, really, alone in the exterior estuarine damp?
The clinking sound of kitchen utensils is always ambitious in the forlorn arena of a bachelor’s
gourmet. His hip-hop metals are frantic against the table’s flat slab. His pointer-finger pokes
each corner of every apathetic wall, waiting. The city is agog for another visitor, humming.
Coins are triggered in a pocket, perhaps the left, of a single man in a walk, bulging. All are
noises of a limp for chaos is a woman; it has torpor of abyss. Departure is a guillemet, just as
inside, just as out. It is the word ‘either.’ Yet places of rest a porcupine to an outsider are a
grammatical relative: where is it that augmented? She takes the receiver of a ringing telephone
just to silent it. She presses the answering machine. A voice-over, recorded from a memorized
script. A repetition, practiced and perpetual. An imaginary friend, one of whom Caliban spoke to
in The Tempest: hast thou not dropp’d from heaven? But the weather is an acid grace. It was
your tongue devoid of sap, limping for an evil trance while my words are never fluid,
always dry, always black. You motioned me with a drunken litany, an accidental violence of husbandry to a
woman now sinful for smiling at her wedding. She is a chaise lounge. A body of another reclines
against her at 3pm while James Joyce is the narrator. She is a house. A son visits her every
summer, every burial.
My Prized Room
—for Liem Vu Duc
Whoever looks seriously at it finds that neither for death,
which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any explanation, any
solution, any hint or way yet been discerned; and for these two
problems that we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening,
it will not be possible to discover any general rule resting in
agreement.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
VIII.
Outside the room there are plenty of noises: crickets whispering, ting-tong of two elevators, scratching of cold neighbor’s bodies, and our feet.
VII.
What keeps me focused is how your eyes as we walk like we always did inspect my doubting iris. I wanted to ask ‘what happened last night?’ but your left hand holding a wilting brownish leaf of a fig made me forget speech.
VI.
There is no silence inside the room: ream of antiquarian papers, bags of tea from the most impoverished cities in Southeast Asia, a bed where two safe pillows aground, and our photograph.
V.
I was told early morning yesterday how you cried heavily after our evening conversation. I had to doubt. I had to search for a graspable reason why you would allow your misfortune be known to other men in the most inconvenient time-a nocturnal call of the one ready to die. I had to see you as if you were a paper that I have to write on; a page’s mystery relies on its ability to obscure the eyes.
IV.
By your right hand, you took a pillow carefully bringing it underneath your head; your left hand still clutches the almost dried leaf. ‘Will this room be forever?’ you said. I touched your head, my hand counting each hair strand. I wrapped myself around you feeling your thighs, your proud chest a delight of the sweetest nipples, your broad shoulders that can be a bridge to troubled arms. Onto your beloved neck, I pinned my warm lips. The sublime electric emptiness was a force to trust you; I let fall my left hand unto your now empty right. Then our eyes conjoined as if by accident: we met again. I gave you the room key I left in my pocket. What we have now is distance: what makes a return that finds nothing, only separation?
III.
It was too fast. You were at your feet. I find memory in what I have: a room, garbage bin full of torn papers and dirty letters, used tea bags that only bittered my lips, a soiled bed dwelling of a pillow whose color reminds of me of urine, our photograph the object of creative dust.
II.
You left with what you have: a dried leaf that pulverizes each step, the key to my room and your eyes with a promise of return.
I.
I started cleaning my prized room. Since your death, it became an everyday routine; your every faint shadowy appearance is a trace that even my room will soon expire.
May 14, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Nathan Curnow lives in Ballarat and is a past editor of Going Down Swinging. His work features in Best Australian Poems 2008, 2010 and 2013 (Black Inc) and has won a number of awards including the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize. His most recent collection, RADAR, is available through Walleah Press. Nathan has been twice short-listed in the Peter Porter Prize.
The Guru
his rants make sense with ‘listening glue’
he is convinced he can poop a dove
he prophesies that a dragon will shake the building
separating the wheat from the chaff
murderers go to hell and play Cluedo forever
Salvation—harder than pissing on a frog
we dig him a moat and fill it with lions
‘hurple’ is the mantra of the month
he blesses each raid on the cannery outlet
gives us hair bracelets and Kalashnikovs
flexible parentage is the number one doctrine
everything consensual at first
how much sunshine to bleach a camel
tepanyaki is your mum—
his koans are unique and so expensive
they are impossible to forget
passing the time with games of wink murder
while he sleeps in his celestial vault
it is his destiny to ascend in a skybox we bought
with the life savings of non-believers
rejoicing when the famous clown becomes a convert
until we become wary of tricks up the sleeve
we patrol the stockpile and then the orchard
executing the voluntary penance
and when the guru returns trembling on stage
trying hard to poop one with wings
we see it all makes sense in his divine program
on guard for whoever smirks first
Séances
teenagers help their parents conduct them
in exchange for car keys and weed
but if they tire of quizzing the Ouija board
the pointer just keeps on moving
packed away the wooden heart slides faster
knocking against the sides of the box
some wrap it in blankets and stash it in a draw
some submerge it in the tropical fish tank
an anonymous narrator transcribes War and Peace
there comes the back story of the Cheshire Cat
and something is spelling quality mince matters
perhaps a butcher with undying remorse
this last parlour game this after-life rhythm
a constant tapping of fees and charges
Rosabelle-answer-tell-pray—believe believe believe
over and over from beneath the house
wedged in a locker at the Ever Fit gym
abandoned in a food court at an empty mall
the dead metronome counting down
some set it on fire to watch their flaming souls
posting premature messages from the grave
some never tire remaining stuck to the board
for answers that will come soon enough
as the family car pulls out throbbing with bass
denouncing the beats of the Angel of Death
the last players of hip hop middle fingering
the stereo uh yeah uh uh uh
May 13, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jamie King-Holden lives in Melbourne and studies literature at Deakin University. Her first book of poetry, Chemistry, was published by Whitmore Press in 2011. Her poetry has appeared in Antipodes, Capsule, Dotdotdash, Eureka Street, Ekleksographia and Verandah. She was shortlisted for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize in 2010 and was guest emerging writer for the Mildura Writers festival in 2011.
the crux
the first time you have a fever.
Saturday’s dying and you let your
umbrella melt at the door.
we zigzag to shadow, newly drunk.
find the queer wilderness of skin,
kiss and slur.
the clock halts and spills, Daliesque.
on the wall women in frames
glow and look on.
your open mouth’s a small sun
that asks my neck for a poem
over Abbe May.
when you’re inside me, at the crux
I only render this: carnal apple, woman
filled, burning moon.
carnal apple, woman filled,
burning moon.
May 10, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Lia Incognita is a Shanghai-born, Melbourne-based cultural critic, media maker and poet- provocateur whose work has appeared in Peril, Overland, Metro, Going Down Swinging, Social Alternatives and Melbourne Poetry Map. Lia presents radio monthly for Queering the Air on 3CR Community Radio. www.lia-incognita.com
toisan
toisan
the armies and opium cored you
you spat out your children
like fireworks, sparks scampering
they bright and travel far
far enough to fade out of sight
blowfish mouth deflated
spider babies kiting on silk thread
land them softly softly
so they swell & full up
six strange sheets of earth
to the crinkled edge
long there over indigo water
cold roiling broth, the sea
sometimes as heavy
as bolts of dye-dipped cloth
they bright and travel far
mass of black-haired heads
lacquer bleached cliffs
and sallow beaches
they wear pigtails and tax
your boys, left wives and children behind
or were children, ahead of their age
chasing faraway time that can turn
to gold, if it all pans out right
they bright and travel far
tattoo steel scars right across
cut down carved up country
for thieves to ride hoofless
and make more rapid plunder
toisan
call the ocean to you
bid it carry your song
tell them boys, slow slow walk
soft your feet on foreign soil
hold tight to each other and jŭ tóu
hao jiu bu jian jia
they long time no see home
April 27, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Toby Davidson is a West Australian poet, editor and reviewer now living in Sydney where he is an Australian Literature researcher at Macquarie University. He is the editor of Francis Webb Collected Poems (UWA Publishing ) and author of the critical study Christian Mysticism and Australian Poetry (Cambria Press). His debut poetry collection is Beast Language (Five Islands Press).
Scant
She walks barefoot in the cut and rush,
she’s learned to walk, remind
through people, barefoot,
as they walk through people,
bared and fooled behind.
In each case, feet set the story:
riven skin on luckless bone,
she feels each sole in the tug of another,
a dance to the sound
that calls the steps home.
Pivots scum. Staccato, stiletto,
the well-heeled lunch crowd
snakes a cracked whip;
upper crusts scolding, flashing around
her hearing back, tough underneath.
Today is not to be pocket dialled
or tired, touching base in the lifts.
She prays and she presses,
divines the right path.
Serious. Consumed. Everlasting.
Epilogue and Origin
Agate and filmy stellate crusts like the first amphibian
(yours too), speculating itself clear of nightfall’s
pounding ossuary . . . I was or wasn’t around, Half-Planet,
depths and folds we mustn’t know; if the tall are prone
disentangle them completely from each trident-shaped
break from homing. Above the New Hebrides Trench,
wisps less laughable than firmament close out furrowed
roughcut paper in photonegative, grain through the gloom.
Before a Hawai’i I never see, netting or losing a day is direction,
instrumental in a desert of cloud (and deserts of continents
are each a Pacific). Your calendared hermaphrodite rides
sidesaddle crying wingtip light at the wonkiest point
of our tumbling cage; one bar loose to squint again, off,
at the cold diversion of a monocled Greenwich who calls
himself prime down your full turning back.
April 24, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ron Pretty’s eighth book of poetry, What the Afternoon Knows, was published in 2013. An updated edition of Creating Poetry will be published later this year. He spent six months in Rome in 2012, on a residency granted by the Australia Council.
Translation
She could not speak to her mother
when they met. She had just turned
twenty one, but had never seen this
small dark woman until then, except
in photos. Harris sat beside her, his smile
inviting them to break the silence.
He would translate, he said, if only
they had something to say. Mother and
daughter looked at one another, tears
on their cheeks. Tell her, she said to Harris,
tell her I did not know where she’d gone,
which country she went to. I used to
watch the planes fly over, she said,
and wonder where they were going,
and if she was on them. Alana
– for that was the daughter’s name –
reached out to her without a word.
She took her hand. Visanthi,
the mother said, that was your name.
And still it is, the daughter cried.
Tell her, she said through her tears,
tell her that’s what it is. Star sapphires
falling as tears, and a second mother,
in her pale silence watching
Alana Visanthi there in that room,
Sri Lankan sun streaming in where
mother and daughter are holding hands
having no language except its loss.
Dreams
Krystel said, I am happy with my mother,
my family here; I have no need to go
seeking for that distant other on that island
I have no wish to see. You do not feel
there’s something missing, her lover asks,
his pale hand caressing her straight black hair.
A long time ago her infant self was flown
out of penury into suburban class.
She’s never been back to see the village
she was plucked from; she loves her parents
who brought her home, happy they’d never
have to face again the heat, the beggars
on every corner, the guns at every checkpoint.
This is my home, she tells him, I have no other.
She will not tell him how she dreams, some nights,
of elephants wading a stream, a road side stall
selling papaya flecked with lemon, a cripple
begging under a figtree. The dreams recur,
but she has decided her life is here; she wants
only her mother and a lover who holds her
in his strong white arms as he kisses
and kisses again the warm dark skin of her face.
April 19, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
William Byrne is a South Australian poet in his twenties. He has always lived in rural and coastal townships, excluding an urban interlude for university study for degrees in architecture and design.
Aspergers
Water dries so fast
on my fore and index fingers
once I leave the chiesa,
that foreign place of incensed marble.
It evaporates
as soon as I see the sun
and basking in it, the smooth shoulders
of the lane’s cobblestones. I trip
in my penance, later, while seated
in the brassed café
as my lips part for vermouth.
Again I see Rome’s dark shoulders
then her leather heels and passing souls,
then half smoked cicca,
their pale ghosts hanging in the streets,
then smooth, tanned Roman fingers.
Chiesa water dries so fast on my fingers.
The vermouth is also dry.
Wheat
In my old car, tyres wet, we spoke
black over green like a Rothko painting,
the young crops startled in our headlamps,
their fronds thrashing in the yellow glow.
You too were startled when I turned the headlamps off,
even though we had pulled up aside the field.
The lamps were deadened, yet the radio hailed
in a distant AM. Ice crystals formed on the window,
shading thinly the edge of the screen.
Beyond the glass, grey clouds brushed past the moon
rising on the curved horizon beyond
wheat past further than sight from two sets of eyes could see.
Afterwards, we drove to a town
at the edge of the wheat, leaving the earth
on the side of the road where we parked
a dry-ish print framed in rain craters
and shallow puddles bleeding into its soft sides.
We laughed so hard that night as we spoke and tried to see.
April 17, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Hazel Smith is a research professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney. She is author of The Writing Experiment: strategies for innovative creative writing, Allen and Unwin, 2005 and Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara: difference, homosexuality, topography, Liverpool University Press, 2000. She is co-author of Improvisation, Hypermedia And The Arts Since 1945, Harwood Academic, 1997 and co-editor with Roger Dean of Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, Edinburgh University Press, 2009. She is co-editor with Roger Dean of soundsRite, a journal of new media writing and sound, based at the University of Western Sydney.
Hazel is a poet, performer and new media artist, and has published three volumes of poetry, three CDs of performance work and numerous multimedia works. Her latest volume of poetry, with accompanying CD Rom, is The Erotics of Geography: poetry, performance texts, new media works, Tinfish Press, Kaneohe, Hawaii, 2008. She is a member of austraLYSIS, the sound and intermedia arts group, and has performed her work extensively in US, Europe, UK and Australasia. She also had a previous career as a professional violinist. Her website is at www.australysis.com
Smoked mirrors
AJP Taylor thought Dylan Thomas was a charlatan because he replaced simpler
words with obscure ones. But then Dylan was his wife’s lover.
Technique, like misunderstanding, holds it head high, accused of decapitation.
Just as I think I will never hook an idea, that I will have to give the commission
money back, just as I have signed off, I know I will never write again, the surrender
of hope flames the messenger.
My father was a chain smoker and would light one cigarette with another. But he had
a cacophonous smoker’s cough. Its assault began in the morning, once he
started he couldn’t stop. Then one day he decides he’s giving up. Just like that. He never
smokes another cigarette again but the cough remains, every day that demented coughing.
Who is that young man my mother says, pointing to my father in a photograph. He’s
very handsome, as if adjudicating a stranger.
Perhaps she is slowly passing away the doctor says in her hearing. She is asleep but
her ears are twitching.
Meanwhile I decisively hit the keys and dispose of an ailing poem. But
the dead persist in listening, sometimes more carefully than the living.
Afterwards I spoke to my sister, who said that the doctor seemed a bit of an idiot.
SnowTalk
the seasons are talking to each other
we pick orchids in the snow
as if the world’s thermostat
was programmed for cross-weathering
fairylights frame the Hindu temple
shops sell gift-wrapped buddhas
they gorge themselves on Christmas day
then purge at Ramadan
did you know that snowflakes are irregular?
that words shiver when they boil?
as the white wind fills its tiny lungs
it hears black trumpets blowing
shall we rewrite the brothers Grimm
so Snow White is mottle-skinned?
the reindeer is exhausted
the sun burns up the sludge
