Earl Livings

November 16, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Earl Livings has published poetry around Australia and also in Britain, Canada, the USA, and Germany. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing and coordinates the Professional Writing & Editing course at Box Hill Institute, Victoria. He is also the editor of Divan(www.bhtafe.edu.au/divan), Australia’s first all-Australian online poetry journal. Earl lives in Melbourne with his wife and is currently working on a novel and his next poetry collection.

Naming Instinct
Sligo, Ireland, August 2009

Not knowing its name, my being
On a far-flung island, its creatures
Known only by reputation, 

I have no choice but to listen:
High-pitched chioo, chioo, chioo, or
Queeka, queeka, queeka, almost the sound 

Of worn brakes jabbed to slow down,
Or a thin bronze staff tapped against oak
To call ancestors to dark clearings. 

Not knowing what it looks like—
Midnight, the bird bounding
From one branch to the next, 

Behind a maze of branches, calling
To mate, to mark territory, to state
Its own being-bliss—I imagine it 

Brindled, slim-bodied, tawny-flecked neck,
Oil-gloss eyes that scan always,
Its red beak open, with each note 

Chiming leaves and balmy air, all ears,
Etymologies of breath behind its eyes.
It knows nothing of thresholds. 

Not knowing what to do next, I stop
Wondering, stop straining to charm the bird
And its rustling, moon-riddled tree, 

Open gaze and hearing to whatever waits
Beyond the imprints and echoes of words,
The swing of breath and song, the poise.

Rachael Mead

November 13, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Rachael Mead has been published in literary journals in Australia, Taiwan and Ireland and was shortlisted in this year’s Newcastle Poetry Prize.  She was awarded Varuna’s 2011 Dorothy Hewett Flagship Fellowship for Poetry and her poetry collection, The Sixth Creek, has just been published by Picaro Press.

Driving through the mallee

We burrow beneath the heat blanket
attuned to the air conditioner’s unsteady wheeze
like the final breaths of an terminal friend.

Cupped in the shallow bowl of mallee  
we speed past scraggled trees,
lean and desperate as pioneers.
Cockatoos, Caltex and St. Vinnies
prove the pretension of borders.

We drive the hours, each town
huddled around its silo.
The hay farmers’ vast stubble fields
lay bare the hard years
distilled to monosyllables:
Cut. Rake. Bale.

Muscles’ Song

The river grooves its slow meander
between cliff and forest,
cool and sweet as silty molasses.
Droplets fly in sunlit chandeliers.

We stroke. This is the day;
a meditation of movement,
infinity symbols
traced with every muscle.
The twin blades outline endless double loops
like fingering a string of prayer beads.

I am eye and arm,
falling into rhythms
dictated by the muscles’ song.
It’s a mix of languorous reaches
sculled slowly with a tail wind
or snags dodged with swift arms
aching skin to bone.

And just when you want
to inhale the pain and drown,
it comes.
Limbs click into automatic, pain drifts
disinterested as a pelican.
With each blade-splash
the sound of a soft kiss,
deeper into stillness
we stroke,  we stroke.

Jena Woodhouse

November 13, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Jena Woodhouse’s publications include two poetry collections and a novel, Farming Ghosts (Ginninderra 2009). A collection of short stories, Dreams of Flight, is about to be published by Ginninderra.

Muswell Hill Road, London N10

It was a summer of high hopes –
of what, we weren’t entirely clear;
it was enough to be in London:
theatre, bookshops, pied-a-terre –
a good address to house-sit, owners’
prized possessions stowed upstairs.

We respected privacy
and primacy of others’ chattels,
but our son, who didn’t
understand exclusiveness,
would steal up to the absent
children’s nursery, spend hours there,
a toy he’d found clutched in his hands,
delighting his small grip.

There was a sense of people we
should meet, but somehow never did;
Highgate Cemetery close by –
Karl Marx, angels, Lizzie Siddal,
lately joined by Alexander
Litvinenko’s lead-lined casket.

Opposite, the dim green dolour
known as Highgate Wood
wove its late-Victorian trance,
reeking of untimely ends:
oaks decked with garlands, messages
from friends lamenting early deaths
in this last remnant of the ancient
forest realm of Middlesex.

A melancholy bubble waits to rise,
to take me by surprise;
I think of time’s attrition as a thief
that skulks beneath my bed.
Oh to be in England!
pipes a small voice in my head.
At her third attempt to access
inner elbow, hand, then wrist,
the pathologist draws blood.
The vein resists, then gives its best.

Birds for Evie

Arid spaces in me crave
paint in captivating shades:
saturated saffron, cyclamen,
alizarin; cinnamon and pomegranate,
fresh as cries of morning birds
in ancient lands; Armenia,
Uzbekistan, Iran…

I give Evie a flock of larks,
tinged with bright naïveté,
simple as the day, and artless
as a child who paints for joy;
but they are only semblances
of tin that rattle in the wind,
trinkets looped upon a string
that neither fly nor sing.

Maxine Beneba Clarke

November 10, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Maxine Beneba Clarke is a widely published Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent. Tim Minchin has called her work ‘amazing’. Overland literary journal says she’s ‘one of the most compelling voices in Australian poetry this decade’. Oz Conservative has lamented ‘…unappealing. Clarke’s views are the more dangerous ones’. It’s this last endorsement she wears afro-high. Maxine won the 2013 Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript for her debut short fiction collection Foreign Soil and the 2013 Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize for the poem nothing here needs fixing, the title poem to her forthcoming collection.

let alone

the one thing you never counted on
is how hard it is
to be a woman alone
let alone a black woman
alone with kids

let me alone
and get on with your business

how hard it is
to rent a house
in the neighbourhood of your child’s school
or get a job working
the hours you now need to

for five years you paid off joint plastic
and now that same bank manager
talks right through you
you have no ascertainable steady income
i am very sorry
we just can’t give a credit card to you

how hard it is
to get a break
or a loan
or a smile
or a hearing

or the real estate to repair
what so urgently needs mending

your child is the brightest boy in class
behaves besides
but now
they are always watching
waiting for him to slip

let my child alone
and get on with your business

a woman alone
let alone a black woman
alone with kids

the one thing you never counted on
was how hard
it is

Ann Ang

November 9, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Ann Ang’s poetry, fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Eclectica Magazine, the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS), Poskod, Kartika Review, The Common and elsewhere. Her first collection of short stories, titled Bang My Car (Math Paper Press, 2012), was launched at the Singapore Writers’ Festival 2012. An avid birdwatcher, she is an educator at the Academy of Singapore Teachers.

Sister

Jie, you complain you are sixty,
but I’ll never beat you at being old.
In Primary Four, you were in Sec Two—
Taller, your studious silences like Sumatran haze.
You did my homework because it was right
to prove that my centre parting and fondness for kueh,
were really yours. Mama caned you
for having Pontianak-red nails.
That was a better kind of love.

You got angry, grew up into being beautiful.
Now people call you by your name.
Days pass the way we crack gingko nuts,
chalky cracked shell under bleeding nails:
you leaving the house keys, a new fridge.
My years were kernel and sap;
husband and children. Yours: a Mini Cooper,
a scarf and a tin of biscuits you returned,
dropping by for five minutes. “So much trouble,
give the kids eat. Singapore is so hot.”

“No one asked you, what,” you didn’t say.
So this is how we grow old together:
I’m wondering if you need spring cleaning,
more vitamins. Your left knee is gone;
you’ll die alone from leukaemia.
But I have grand-children.
The days filter through the rain trees,
hot humid light. You do nothing,
so time does not pass.
You say, “Don’t need, don’t bother,”
alone with the stories you believe about yourself.

David Wong Hsien Ming

November 9, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

David Wong Hsien Ming was born in Singapore, discovered poetry as a child at a Sunday lunch and pursued honors in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, reading poetry at Rutgers University New Brunswick along the way. His work has appeared in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Ceriph, Eye to the Telescope, Unshod Quills, Literary Orphans, and earned an Honorable Mention in Singapore’s Golden Point Award 2011.

To take care of your mother

Undo the woman before you—
go back beyond your youth

in fact go back into yourself,
pretend your unbirth

and her unpregnancy;
pretend the unbloom

of every bougain villea
in the family garden

and the unbloom of that first flower,
your father whom she found

half-grown and half-sated;
the first white workshirt

she scrubbed and poured softener over,
unwash that too;

unwash the lies and half-apologies
and the times you attempted

to use barbed words for reconciliation
until a thick stain spreads

to the utmost walls of the home
making it a blackbox

of broken dishes
and set-aside dreams,

of soft bolts of joy
and love so often tasting of pain;

make this blackbox of now, your life
—and meet her in her girlhood.

Chemo

It is night on your skin
where the needles swam.

Your body’s practiced betrayal
halves the venom’s speed today.

We have porridge for dinner again.
The swollen grain like flies’ eggs

hang together as we hang
together. I suppose in an older age

the eggs would have hatched and the maggots
would be weaning gratefully

on you, whom I kiss
with veils about my eyes.

The sheets that hold your sleep
ebb and flow and beg your case

to God who’s just about ready to—
look all I’m saying is

life does all the work
and we let death take all the credit.

Maria Takolander

November 9, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Maria Takolander is the author of a book of short stories, The Double (Text 2013), and two books of poems, Ghostly Subjects (Salt 2009) and The End of the World (Giramondo, forthcoming). She is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies and Creative Writing at Deakin University in Geelong, Victoria.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience

ENTER a man with six fingers on each hand
              and an electric lady,
              her blood bright as the moon’s.

Their son: fretting in a closet,
              turning the psychedelic noise
              of his drunken parents upside down.

1 brother and 2 sisters were born damaged,
             blind and silent, so it is only him
             —and another brother somewhere—

spellbound in the clamour of this hotel room.

ENTER the Sunburst Fender Stratocaster,
              made for his father, with his plentiful digits.
              The boy is lost in its violence.

Watch him: night after night, licking his woman,
              his teeth, like pieces of noise,
              raining onto the stage.

Back at the hotel there is red wine
              and pills, white as amnesia.
              EXIT the boy, into billowing silence,

only the fluorescent lights still brash.

Casino Royale

The sky let loose—not a good omen—when the hare went to visit the polar bears. The bears greeted him, blocking the doorway, their fur bristling, black noses dry and porous like ice. They stank of dead fish and urine. They turned their colossal backs to him, and the hare followed them into the room, shaking his sturdy ears and skittering rain. There was paisley carpet: brown with green eddies. The electric heater was on: a jittery orange glow. As usual there was a game going. At the table, draped with a crocheted cloth, was a horse, her back slumped with the ages, her eyes yellowed. Next to her was a moose with a scrap of fur missing from his snout. His antlers were brittle but intact. The drinking was being done from rank mugs. The ale was poured liberally.

The hare took a seat, picked with his teeth at a knotted mat of fur on his hind leg, and then was dealt in. He sifted through the picture cards in his paws. Table talk was forbidden. In any case the hare was thoroughly preoccupied. He felt a familiar hunger for his own droppings—and something else, he only now began to realise, like a secret longing for his own death.

Flick-snap. He was struck by a jester wielding a witchdoctor’s stick. The hare looked at the polar bear and at the stack on the doilied table. The bear’s eyes were impossibly still and dark. The hare drank and wiped the froth from his mouth. He eyed the hunched paw of the bear as it turned the final card. Flick-snap. A black weapon shaped, it seemed to the hare, just like a scythe. He had lost everything.

The hare turned to the horse, who had closed her eyes. ‘So, how about it?’ he said to her, urgently, quietly. The mare opened her lashed lids and turned her eyes upon him. She looked at him, he thought, with wist. Just then the neighbourhood dogs came careening into the room, wet as the day, carrying on at the world as if something had to be done about it. The game, the hare knew, was over.

Jordie Albiston

November 9, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Jordie Albiston has published seven poetry collections.  Two of her books have been adapted for music-theatre, both enjoying seasons at the Sydney Opera House.  Jordie’s work has won many awards, including the 2010 NSW Premier’s Prize.  She lives in Melbourne.  



I went to the shooter’s house    pled shoot me
shoot me    open my chest like an unread
book    blast my colophon    break my spine    let
all my pages fly out    look    recto    vers-
o    I am a box    & aimed a finger
right here at my heart    there are poems in
there    you can hear their din    each tiny word
weighs a ton    I-am-out-of-everything    
baby needs air    but don’t mind me    reload
your gun    your bullets will taste just like love

    it is cold    she walks to the corner    vers-
    o recto left right left    turns the corner    
    thinks about karma    wonders exactly
    which stars are extinct    she steps    stops    forgets   
    remembers the whole world is dead as a
    door-nail    shot while it blinked someone said



a white car has had all its windows smashed
in    it wasn’t there yesterday    marry
me? is written high in the sky    lucky
I went out the back for a bit before
the words passed away    today is Thursday
it is seven past three    a warm wind moves
through the trees    someone is crying    I am
pleased to report the results of such del-
icate signs    the driver may be dead    the
girl say no    but I think yes! & alive

    the day peeked in    I wasn’t home    flying
    with fishes swimming with birds driving my
    car upside down    tomorrow is coming
    it says on the news    I may or may not
    be in it    time is gone still    it’s tricky
    to tell    this day is made up of minutes    

Eileen Chong

November 9, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Eileen Chong is a Sydney poet who was born in Singapore. In 2010 she won the Poets Union Youth Fellowship and was the Australian Poetry Fellow for 2011-2012. Her first collection of poems, Burning Rice, was published in the New Voices Series 2012 by Australian Poetry. The book was highly commended in the Anne Elder Award 2012 and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2013.

Noodles in Hong Kong

We’d walked downhill along Star Street
and emerged onto a version of Hong Kong
I finally remembered. Traffic, neon signs
and shopfronts like those from my childhood.

We squeezed into the single narrow aisle
of the tea room, locals staring at us outsized
outlanders. No one would share our table.
I had no Cantonese beside the usual ‘please’,

‘thank you’ and ‘I’m ok’. There were no pictures,
which meant we were in the right place.
Wonton mein, swallowing cloud noodles?
Brusque understanding. Two bowls slammed down,

steam rising from soup like early morning fog.
These were the best dumplings we’d had so far:
silken pastry encasing sweet prawns and crunchy
water chestnuts. Each mouthful of noodles

had just the right elasticity. The workmen had stopped
watching us; the news was on the TV in the corner.
We squinted and tried to make sense of the images:
a nuclear warhead, the Chinese flag, marching armies…

Three painters spilled through the door and sat
at our table. They looked hard at us and I smiled.
We finished our tea and paid for our meal. HKD110 –
a small price for perfect clouds with a hint of sesame.

Musician

The god of musicians has been trying
to get my attention. Last month, a man
on a street corner in Chinatown stopped me
with his playing. When he finished the song

I uttered a name: Ah Bing. He asked me where
I was from. How does a girl from Singapore know this?
In the Utzon annex of the Opera House
the cellist Wang Jian played Bach solos.

When the audience wanted more he spoke
of a blind street musician and played The Moon
Reflected in the Second Spring. That was the first time
I heard it. In the tunnel at Central Station

it surfaced again. The old man bowed away
at his two-stringed erhu and China swelled
like a mirage: bridges, moon gates, willows.
I emerged into the light and put on my sunglasses

to hide my moist eyes. Immortal Han, I thought,
don’t you only watch over flautists? There is no
Chinese god of writers, so I think of the Kitchen God
when I work. Sticky New Year cake. Sweet words.