Belle Ling

June 12, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Belle Ling is a university graduate from the University of Hong Kong, and later she has completed a Master of Creative Writing in the University of Sydney. She has a special interest in writing poetry. Her favourite novelist is Haruki Murakami, and her beloved poems are those which can capture insightful images with in-depth philosophical meanings.

A Good Morning in the Crowded Train

Upon the window of the shuffled train, the sunlight eyes are churned white.
Eyes closed, heads grinding in circle, heels tap balance, disturbed by an awkward
halt—then resume their momentum as the train reels, as if smoothing all the angular

shoulders until they are as round as the river-washed pebbles—any uncertain frictions among
shirts, any unnoticed nudges, any sharp pokes of noses are harmonized
in the hypnotic back-and-forth of our heads and our heels. No ruins, no cries, no

surprises intrude when the space between one another is tied by the repetitive
rhythm. Sweat behind my ear, nearly tiptoes onto his shoulder—drops and is swept
by an unbuckled cuff, air-probing, of an unknown face—my vertebrae are chained,

his half-zipped fly slides over my thigh—fingers collide, chime—exchanging unborn rhymes.
His yawn—sour milk and leftover tuna—unsettles my dream of a Sultan’s perfumed verandah.
My forehead, rimmed by his chin, begs his collarbones globe

as a soft-fat pillow, as willows sway across the window—that gradually-eased hiss,
that deep ebb, zips our long-missed dreams rolling in our laces and fabrics. In-depth,
severely-pressed—his shoelaces, etched into my soles, don’t tussle. My jade-rabbit

pendant, that vivid verdant, is unconsciously-locked in his creamy collar,
as a green bean-sprout entwined in cotton. The wheels keep tracking the rail left-and-right, my
eyes trail his ribs, that strain and slack—as aligned handrails

surface and vanish, hardly held. Hot air curls my eyelashes, flicks my mind’s haze—
“Excuse me”, I say. “I’m sorry,” he beams. The door closes—
hard as husk—I look at the train until it’s reduced into a dark dot in the dense green.

Aussie

Dust, grit, ash,
keen sheen in lashes
of weeds;
your sweat appears
as a solid glow.

An eddy of rose
in your fist
draws in the winds
of all directions,
fast, firm, not fierce.

Impression

“Take it back,” I call,   
I recall—petals in the winds. Rippling,
the church bells, remind me
  of the air, the water, the light
and—the blue sky—all the basics
   for a decent day,
for the first day
     a human starts to breathe, or for—

the moment that time
is first numbered as days,
which, unfortunately, can’t outlast
the time of universe in reverse—
my undated calendar,
  and your watch ridded of hands
are the most reliable.

    I haven’t noticed
the tree outside—
    my balcony is Jacaranda until
the sunshine determines to rinse away
  the densely-vivid purple:
         those blurring whites.

    The strong shine on the apex
of the cross—that sharp
 and cold point is hardly tamed, not even
the sisters’ buzzing lips:
   regular amens can’t prop up
       three trampled daisies.  

“Take it back,” I call,
 yes, I recall—the remains in your pocket—
ripped cloths, molten honey and several
unclassified name cards
  plus a familiar scent that’s long
been forgotten, or—
long been hid
   for being forgotten.  

   Red tea and ice, as clouds
pass over, turn dim and gleam again—
   a colour, between cool and warmth,
beyond exact depictions of all kinds,
     doesn’t know how to cheat:

we’re just two ordinary passers-by,
who can’t afford to lie.

Peter Bakowski

June 11, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Melbourne-born poet, Peter Bakowski, keeps in mind the following three quotes when writing poems  ‐ “Use ordinary words to say extraordinary things’–Arthur Schopenhauer, “Writing is painting”– Charles Bukowski, anand “Make your next poems different from your last”–Robert Frost. Visit his blog http://bakowskipoetrynews.blogspot.com

Portrait of Jean Rhys, 1979

I’m too here,
a once exotic specimen,
wings burnt
by your glare. 

I hobble
to my further drowning
in distasteful rooms,
to my further droning
in sympathetic ears,
to view the further sagging
of myself
in every looking-glass. 

I’ve memorized English poems,
the songs chambermaids and chorus girls sing
when they are too alone,
what men say to convince you
up a creaking flight
of boarding-house stairs. 

I know the difference between
flattery and fawning,
loneliness and solitude,
the cost of each kiss given,
each cheque cashed. 

I’ve travelled,
left many places
ahead of the landlord’s footfall,
the crucifying wife. 

I’ve known rooms,
their tapestry-hung walls
flecked by the light from chandeliers.
Other rooms too
of hard chairs
and the eating of gritty porridge,
each incomplete winter window
stuffed with newspaper. 

I’m a chore to nurses,
muttering in my dressing gown,
smeared with lipstick,
stained with rouge,
propped up with a cane,
assisted to the toilet. 

Only writing is important.
But truth and fiction
are too late for some. 

I didn’t change the world
or myself.
London fog, personal fog,
I glimpsed something necessary in both. 

What is life? A holding on and a letting go.
Some trip from dignity to despair
with more than a little
dancing and drinking in between. 

I haven’t any conclusions,
only the books I wrote.
The nib of my pen
scratching for vermin,
preening my ruffled feathers,
fending off attackers,
including myself. 

Now I dictate words
to last visitors—
David, Sonia.
It’s the blind throwing of coins
at a dented cup.
Some fall to the carpet. 

I’m nearly dust.
Open the window.
Let the curtain
be my sieve. 

Portrait of Erik Satie, Paris, October, 1899

Granted these days, my number of tomorrows unknown, I resist
Rushing. Leave me to stroll through Paris, which enchants
And confounds me, as would an octopus with feathers. 
The way sunlight falls through the horizontal slats of a park bench
Interests me more than many paintings in the Louvre. Most art is      
Too polite. It needs to poke its tongue out, pull its pants down. Children                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
Understand my music. Their ears are not full of hair, politics and
Dinner party gossip. Meanwhile I stroll, pause at a favoured café,   
Eavesdrop, watch the ballet of waiters gliding from kitchen to table.

Visiting my mother

Your confined self,
your hallucinating self,
your blanket-clenching self,
pulse beneath your hosting skin.
 
You’re angry, marathon runner,
that the finishing line has been moved.
The way you lived,
the way you didn’t live,
each has exacted their price.
 
I move nearer to your bedside
but the syllable you strain
to shape, crumbles.

I look through family photo albums—
evidence of all your capable years. 

Each dutiful visitor soon quietens.
Their platitudes have little use
in this disinfected room. 

Sister Anneliese reads you a card
from a German friend
who no longer visits.
She pauses to wipe
the sweat from your brow.
Your former neighbour Jean
looks up at the wall clock,
rubs at a buckle on the strap
of her handbag.

I walk with her
away from your
diminished self,
along the long corridor
of the nursing home
and down the lift
into the vital world.

Kirun Kapur

June 10, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Kirun Kapur grew up in Hawaii and has since lived and worked in North America and South Asia. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, Crab Orchard Review, FIELD, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, Manushi and other journals and news outlets. She has been a poetry fellow at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center and McDowell Colony. In 2012, she was awarded The Rumi Prize for Poetry from Arts &Letters. Currently, she lives in Newburyport, MA, where she is the creative director of The Tannery Series.

My Father’s Hopscotch, 1942

In August of 1942, the All India Congress Committee adopts the “Quit India Resolution,” calling for complete independence from Britain. The British government responds by incarcerating all the committee leaders, including Mohandas K. Gandhi. Strikes and protests sweep the country as over 100,000 are arrested.

Five rooftops—wide and flat— lie shining
between his father’s and his uncle’s house.
Five rivers in Punjab. His path spools out,
a conqueror, marching through the Khyber Pass.

First jump: Auntie Shara’s wicked chilies
smirking in the sun. Second: Rana Bhai’s old goat,
who gives no milk and bites a younger brother’s ass.
On Naana’s roof, a locked-up room, a sharp-nosed girl

whose only word is snakes. At his command:
a village burns, troops swim the Jhelum in the night.
Midway, my father stops, salaams
the black-draped Begums who come up to take the air.

They praise him as their naughty one, feed him
chunks of jaggery, never exposing their hands.
Who are you today, little son? Alexander? Shah Jahan?
Don’t tell us you’re an Englishman!

No way for him to guess the rumors in the street.
Some rumbling, a mutiny: the East is lost,
turn back, return to Greece. Roof to roof,
he leaps, he presses on across the map.

Under the Bed

I didn’t need monsters, I had
history. Didn’t want history,
I wanted crime—though I had

a girl’s body and the wind
in the palms outside cried steadily,
sounding like rain. I didn’t

need heaven or sin or punishment.
I had a mother. I had a father.
A fine gold sand blew across my face

and the shoreline I stood on changed.
The god who ruled our house
ruled patiently. The god of my heart

devoured me. I didn’t need a heart,
I had a family. A sea pumped that vast
salty love through its chambers.

When I looked under the bed,
I discovered emptiness. Discovering
my emptiness, I sang.

Sarah Stanton

June 9, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Sarah Stanton grew up in Perth, Western Australia. Halfway through university, she abandoned a promising career in not having much of a career when she transferred from an opera performance course into a Chinese language major, having fallen for the Middle Kingdom more or less overnight. Three years, two exchange programs and one potential firework accident later, she has settled in Beijing as a freelance translator and editor specialising in contemporary literature. As a writer, she has been published in a variety of magazines and indie projects, including Clarkesworld, Voiceworks, Hunger Mountain, Cha and Conte. She is a recipient of the Talus Prize and was recently shortlisted for the James White Award. She blogs at theduckopera.com and tweets @theduckopera.

Midnight, Minus Three

Winter comes to Beijing like an old coat,
or perhaps a threadbare tide;
not a hurried cold—no, not yet so old
as an angry man—but careful, slow, and weaving herself from wind after wind,
snow after snow

            like a shroud for a warm corpse
            laying itself out on the street
            at last to rest, and breathe—

then, tugging like a baby at her own sleeve
she sees to them, the hot potato women,
the quiet men crying corn,

            to the dusty coats and supplications
            and the sparrows blown like buttons
            in a storm.

Harvest Festival

mulberrying by moonlight, out
in the sun’s full fruit and the sick,
glazed expression of desire;
out in the ripe clinic of collecting,
of undressing trees. alone is best

for this: one tremor, one kiss,
and the berries will fall—

scatter from pale to violet,
from the twitching green
of the newly born
to the final purple of food.

mulberrying by moonlight, burying
each arm in a thousand leaves:
juice hunting, the sweet cemetery
of bulbs at your feet, the curt wind
pressing nothings to your ear,
the bullying breath gathering up
its solo and shaking the berries,

their parted lips away
until each pail is full,
starbitten, stalk-yearning,
and you gather home,

steadied on the ready moment,
your skirt bullied up to the moon.

Susan Fealy

June 4, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Susan Fealy is a Melbourne-based poet and clinical psychologist who began writing poetry regularly in 2007. She is the winner of the 2010 Henry Kendall Poetry Award and her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Best Australian Poems 2009 and Best Australian Poems 2010. She is developing  her first  full-length collection.

Made in Delft

After The Milkmaid
by Johannes Vermeer

White walls melken the daylight.
In this plain room,
The map of the world
Has been painted over:
Only a woman, blond
Light from the window,
Her wide-mouthed jug,
And bread on the table.
Vision slows at her wrist,
Travels along her forearm. 
Her apron cascades
Lapis lazuli.
One can almost touch her thick
Waist, her generous shoulders,
Her crisp linen cap.
One can almost taste the milk
Escaping her jug.

The Striped Moth

(In the Melbourne Museum)           

At 5pm your wings will hang with shadow.
Now, they feed on light. Do you remember
tapping at the window, frantic as a tiny bell?
Or is your soul composed—a forest of shadows?
                
A tiger is latched in you: those eyes crouch
like stars and your pelt is soft as a tinderbox.
A tree expands in the veins of your wings––
counts one night and half a dawn––signs off.

Catherine Cole

June 3, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

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.

Looking for Serge Gainsbourg

Lying
           on one of the graves
                    you kiss
                                the day-moon
(fading above bare branches).
Lover don’t catch a cold.
Don’t scandalise the tourists.
Don’t upset the cemetry attendants,
the grieving relatives.
This hunt
for Serge
is no laughing matter
I laugh
at the moon
           at your lips
           at the cemetry’s cats
           making a wide 
                        arc around
          a crazy man
in a bright red scarf
a woman in stitches.

‘Go,’
        you say
        ‘Allez trouvez l’homme.’
        So I go
                    with my map
                                 my gloved hands
                                              dusted with snow
Je t’aime. 

‘Serge?’ I ask an old man
                  watering,
                             ‘Où et Serge?’
‘Tout près.’   
             He is close
(a little stream of water, a bare shrub, surely not lilac)
‘Y’a pas de soleil sous la terre,’ the man sings
                             Everyone’s a fan.

Près
And on Serge’s grave I find:
a love letter,
four metro tickets
and scrawled on the back of a café tab,
moi je ne tiens a rien
plus que toi.
manque de toi
je suis la moitié fou
and a
small smooth grey pebble

to take back to you.

Carlton

A late dark comes down
Cardigan Street
crows call from London planes.
By now you will be chopping at the sink
cat at your ankle,
pestering
ABC news
bushfires and floods.

Our friends live in separate cities too
we talk distance
of soldiers sent to war,
migrant workers
Stapleton in the Antartic, five years between letters.
Too tired by the time we call
to describe the crows’ black flash against red walls,

or how the drought has turned
all the grass
brown.

When next you come here
I will walk you past these trees
past the crows gnawing at plane tree pods
past the promise of Florence in the south.
I will sing sailor’s songs
Compose letters from the trenches of my heart
and hide them in your luggage
to read when you get home.

And while I wait
I walk past Victoria Street
past walls red radiant with heat.
I look a starling in its cruel eye,
step over the bleached bones of dead flowers.
And on Exhibition Building’s dome
a crow,
my heart in its beak.

Jen Webb

June 2, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Jen Webb is the author of a poetry collection, Proverbs from Sierra Leone (Five Islands, 2004), a short story collection Ways of Getting By (Ginninderra, 2006), and a dozen scholarly books. She edits the scholarly journal Axon: Creative Explorations, and the new literary journal Meniscus. Jen has lived in Canberra for twelve years, and is an inaugural member of the International Poetry Studies Institute at the University of Canberra.

Four cities

1. On Brighton beach

Three a.m. The sea is black against the black sky,
but light hints along the tacked horizon line.
Yesterday the air was full of sound – the outrage
shrieked by gulls as they sailed
on spinnaker wings – the irritable sea
flinging itself on me. Now only small waves
shift on the stones; the only sounds now
are the cries of sleepless gulls. 

Yesterday the carousel’s hurdy gurdy played
while dogs barked in syncopated time and
the painted horses galloped up and down.
They are still now, shut down,
the beach is asleep, the party done.
I am wasting my life. I am wasting your time.

2. In Christchurch

Stand under the doorframe, brace yourself
the way that we were taught
the floor rolls under your feet
the skin of the world is water
its bones twist and crack. 

Don’t think those worst fears:
the earth has been closing over you
for days. Earth? or its fault lines,
they’re viscous, honey or jam lines—
oh and here come the ants. 

Take heart, sweetheart, something
sweet is in the air, it’s the scent
of honeysuckle, it’s the idea
of tomorrow, it’s the promise of calm.
All we need do is wait. 

3. On George Street

The red lotus
at the edge of the road
softens the traffic 

at the heart of Haymarket
between the gutter and the sky 

the bus driver coughs,
turns right into Bourke,
takes the airport road 

I will leave where I should not be
I’ll fly home, meditating on 

wrong love, on that red lotus
in the wrong place that
says it’s time to repent. 

4. Collins Street, autumn

The rain is staining the pavement
rendering it black on grey
You have left your umbrella at home, again;
that meeting will have started
and you late, again. It can’t go on 

The sudden crowd surge takes you
unaware: three pregnant girls bump by
and then the mob is on you,
the lights turn green. You step
between the pavement and the road 

Do you turn left here, or right? Is that
your phone ringing? North has blurred
with south, all the buildings look the same
you’re late again
and you can’t recall the way 

Between the traffic and the crowd
you have lost your way
And how do you cope? You run;
between the people and the trams,
you run; you hope you will not fall