May 30, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jo Langdon is the author of a poetry chapbook, Snowline (Whitmore Press, 2012). She lives in Geelong and is currently completing postgraduate studies at Deakin University.
Hauptbahnhof
We suck down saltless air and the light’s gone
strange—mountains hiding
their greenery,
swallowing time.
In Vienna it was pigeons, feathers
slate-coloured and your camera full of them.
(Bodies filthy, grained and small
in the instant.)
I want you to see it all,
as I remember: in miniature, like a snow-
glass sequence.
Afterimages curved in crystal
compartments—drift
of snow that does not melt, does not build
in shape or artefact:
not the tilting flowers, starry edelweiss;
not bright air in singing hills,
or the zigzag of ice between us.
Sonnenfeld 17
The kitchen lit with snow light
your first morning here
again
and winter somehow cleaner: air
low and blue on the streets.
Deep in the night, trucks salt
the roadways; mountains lean in
on your sleep.
You wake to find shadows
unpinned and shifting
in barest light—
your face, a quiet hologram,
in looking glass that will not hold
melting garden snow.
May 18, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ranu Uniyal teaches in the English Department at Lucknow University. She received her doctorate from Hull University, UK. Her work has appeared in Sketch Book, Twenty 20, Muse India, Kavya Bharati, Femina, Manushi, Indian Literature, Littlewood Press and other literary journals both in India and abroad. Her poems have been translated in Hindi, Urdu, Uzbek and Malayalam. She has published two poetry collections. Across the Divide was published by Yeti Books in 2006 and December Poems by Writers Workshop in 2012.
Love lies
Smoking veins that run wicked like
An old nanny whose time is running out
Doors have been closed and the moon has little to offer
We get inside as if there is no haste
And we time a plenty I put aside my old grandmother’s earrings
They often get caught when it is just right between us
Such a nuisance it is to unhook all – the buttons on your chest
My shoes and slim garters – they have been there awhile
Off your smelly socks which I pretend to explore
They say nibble his toes and he will come like a flash
We breathe one other as the lights twinkle
In the sitting and I draw you in me afraid
Of the morning that has been set aside.
Love is forever you whisper in my ears
The whole of you is seeped in truth
But for the fingers they find it difficult to lie.
Death of a letter
My dear I have stopped
addressing them to you
words glide swiftly
to the wild contours
of distant shelves
that once belonged to you.
In ink I dip them not
nor do I stamp them
with suave sincerity.
Some unholy passage
lurks out of memory
and hands get still.
The alphabet is cold
and my letter
devoid of warmth
of love, of news
and address
refuses to make amends.
For a Father who taught me to smile
My father’s face
soft and grizzly washes away
clusters of sadness and I get closer
to his smiles soaked in eternal bliss.
They are with me
those scattered shades
of a sunset in childhood
unwilling to disperse.
I find him almost everywhere.
The air is floating with his
morning chants of Durga Saptshati.
The fire groans in my son’s eyes.
The waters mingled with the smoke
while his body crossed the bare sands
and this little earth so moist and green
was loaned to me as his only keepsake.
Durga Saptshati: A collection of chants in Sanskrit in praise of Goddess Durga a symbol of Shakti – female energy and creativity.
May 18, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Andy Jackson’s Among the Regulars (papertiger media, 2010) was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His poems have recently appeared in Meanjin, Cordite, Wordgathering and Medical Journal of Australia. He is currently working on a series of poems exploring medical tourism, and a book of portrait poems of people with Marfan Syndrome. He blogs at amongtheregulars.wordpress.com
Newsprint
The nurse asks again but you haven’t heard.
You are passing the scene in slow motion,
face pressed against the glass of the newspaper,
something unspeakable turning in your bones
like pleasure. Not relief at your safety.
Not homesickness cloaked with sympathy.
Or even some remnant you’d mistakenly
call animal. You don’t know for a long moment
who you are – the young slum-dweller
who ran through the toxic smoke to rescue
patients and now lies in intensive care?
The hospital directors taken into custody?
The crowd clamouring at the gates for the bodies
of their loved ones? Or the police
resorting to batons to subdue them?
She takes your blood pressure and temperature.
The alarms and sprinklers are switched on
and work. All the emergency exits are unlocked.
No boxes block the stairwells. Only
your fingers are black with newsprint.
Necessary
Mounds of rubbish sifted by goats, dogs,
rag-pickers, collected by trucks
of the mind. Traffic negotiated in the peripheries
of sight and sound. One purple flower
exploding beneath the flyover. The necessary
genius of a bicycle he rides with his hands,
his legs contorted and useless.
The quick blink of a white bullock
as she’s whacked again with a stick.
Six days in, and it’s beginning
to seem like I’m seeing today what I saw yesterday.
A mange-weary dog looks both ways
before crossing the road. A woman
pulls the tarp off her carefully arranged pile
of mouldy textbooks and airport fiction.
An ambulance’s quiet siren swims
through the intersection. It doesn’t matter
what day it is, where I could be. Someone
is carefully repairing a busted umbrella.
May 18, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ken Chau is a poet living in Melbourne, Australia. His poems have been published in Australia, France, Hong Kong, UK and USA, including the anthology Growing Up Asian in Australia, ed. Alice Pung (Black Inc., 2008). He was most recently published in The Best Australian Poems 2012, ed. John Tranter (Black Inc., 2012) with his “Chinese Love Poem”.
Chinese Silence No. 101
after Timothy Yu, “Chinese Silence No. 4”
after Billy Collins, “China”
I am a flattened spider inside a discarded book of Chinese poems
on the drawing board of a curious architect.
Grand designs are being drafted.
Many bottles of champagne await opening day.
But even when he’s mad
and hurls the book across the room,
I stay as silently still as the dead,
unread words on these pages.
Chinese Silence No. 103
after Timothy Yu, “Chinese Silence No. 8
after Billy Collins, “Hangover”
If I were crowned Paramount Leader of China this afternoon
every peasant planting rice in a paddy field
would be re-educated and silenced forever
from uttering the name of Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong Mao Zedong
then would not be required to read The Little Red Book
but my My Book of Thoughts
and learn to spell Chairman Mao’s name in English
in my preferred transliteration of
Mao Tse-tung Mao Tse-tung
after which they would be quizzed
about the spelling of his name then executed by firing squad
regardless of how little they retained
of their thoughts of how
Mao Zedong thought Mao Zedong Thought would be thought of.
May 18, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Marcelle Freiman has published two books of poetry, White Lines (Vertical) (Hybrid Publishers) and Monkey’s Wedding (Island Press). She grew up in South Africa and lived in London before migrating to Sydney, where she has resided since 1981. Much of her poetry emerges from her biography and from a constantly shifting sense of place. She teaches creative writing and literature at Macquarie University and has research interests in creative writing as theory and practice, and in poetry and postcolonial and diaspora literatures.
A Book
I’m leaning towards a book
with pages the colour of honey
and linen – as if clawed
from a desert wadi cave,
preserved by the cold arid nights:
threaded like beads on fibres of jute,
the words in this book
veil a quiet love – hidden
in the traces of names of things
I want to hand to you: feather, wood,
a whitened shard of glass smoothed by tides,
grains of sand sieved fine through my fingers,
the chambers of a nautilus –
can these objects – stone, pebble, driftwood, shell –
echo my body’s sound waves,
transmitting like whale-song
or pulsing satellite arcing across the sky
sudden as a falling star?
A body in feeling is silenced
in the face of wind-tunnels of distance.
Only the emptiness in my hands
is the name my love – a blown
feather, multiplication of cells,
a book without end,
amber pages and caught threads.
Chinese Box in Hong Kong
Roots of a banyan have taken the stone wall,
this street is uneven, like an ankle-twist
the air thick with heat, humid with fumes,
bloomers and t-shirts hang above the canopy
of a restaurant, modern food in lacquer bowls,
shiny shops, heavy jade buddhas, money runs
in the veins of this city, the drains of wet markets
and fancy boys in pants cut for tight hips
and haircut perfection queue for noodles, the best in Soho
where sidewalks slide down hills, the escalator clacks
up to Mid-levels. I buy red happiness candles
and an antique box of leather, also red,
its dark metal ying-yang clasp a promise
one day I will learn this too is home,
that you thrive like scarlet bauhinia
growing on rocky peaks of this city
with its dumpling stalls and teeming streets –
its speed the energy in the tips of your newest roots.
May 17, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
William Byrne is an emerging South Australian poet in his mid twenties. He has always lived in rural and coastal townships, excluding an urban interlude for university study for degrees in architecture and design. He has recently had work published in Westerly (Univeristy of Western Australia) and The Disappearing (Red Room Company).
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.
December 10, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
B. R. Dionysius was founding Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival. His poetry has been widely published in literary journals, anthologies, newspapers and online. He is the author of six collections of poetry and won the 2009 Max Harris Poetry Award. He recently was a joint winner of the 2011 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize and will have a new book, ‘Bowra’ released in 2013. He lives in Ipswich, Queensland where he teaches English and writes sonnets.
Christmas Island Rat
Rattus macleari
We were worried about what you would bring
Into our country of nests & dark burrows, intrigues
You could only guess at. A nation of rodents brawling
All night, we encouraged high-pitched wars & rapid
Coupling, but kept those red land crabs in check.
It was the vanguard you sent ahead that finished us.
Not our black brethren who swarmed new continents
Walking planks to explore the world through a rat’s
Tunnel vision. But the other refugees they carried.
Diseases that pushed like railroads through virgin
Bloodstreams. If only you could have been processed
Offshore on some other ocean rock & kept at claws
Length in mandatory detention. Not perfect, but it
Would’ve given us time to think up a (s)pacific solution.
Elephant Bird
Aepyornis maximus
We came from the largest single cells ever to be thought
Into existence, larger than dinosaur eggs our shells cracked
Open your legends, your mouthwatering myths imagined us
Hauling off elephants; heavy-lift choppers, the East named
Us – Roc; who messed about with Sinbad & we probably
Were a little imposing for you standing at a little over 10ft,
Weighing in at half a tonne. Big Bird’s streetwise prototype.
Then Marco Polo, that intrepid reporter of misquoted facts
Named us Elephant Bird, now that hurt, how would he have
Liked us to call him ‘lemur-man’. Coastline huggers came next,
French too scared to pick through our deepest secrets, gave us
Pirates’ status – a lost treasure by the 16th century. Voromapatra
In the Malagasy tongue – ‘marsh bird’, fitting really for we sought
The most lonely places of all; at least your imagination took flight.
December 10, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Paul Kane has published five collections of poems, including A Slant of Light (Whitmore) and Work Life (Turtle Point), and is the author of Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity (Cambridge). He serves as poetry editor of Antipodes, artistic director of the Mildura Writers Festival, and general editor of The Braziller Series of Australian Poets. He teaches as Vassar, and divides his time between New York and rural Victoria.
~Photograph by William Clift ~
The Fire Sermon
Here in the Drowned Lands
the black dirt is the blackest
black I know—give it
time and it’s oil, to blacken
earth, air and water with fire.
In winter, without
snow cover or a crop, winds
insinuate fine
granules under windows
and doors. That’s our peck of dirt.
Ironbark forests—
a world away—are fire tough,
their carbon footprint
black trunks, seared soil, and fresh green—
the Aboriginal park.
Last year we fled floods,
this year a grass fire near Clunes—
one wind shift away.
The Fire Sermon gets into
your blood: the black days ahead.
But let’s not leave it
at that. Winter played possum,
then ambled off—now
we’re marching towards spring—Daylight
Saving all the grace we need.
Worlds Apart
The bottom fell out
and it was a long way down.
He surfaced once,
saying he was back, but then
we lost him, and now he’s gone.
You could say he killed
himself with drinking, or drink
took him out at last,
but his ex-wife’s suicide
was murder on him, poor man.
Poor woman! And now,
poor daughters to sift the ash.
I cannot shake it.
Not a close friend, but friend still
in a world growing friendless.
The circle closes,
tightening like a rope loop,
or, rather, it breaks
open, with each loss gaping,
until it’s all detritus.
That’s the view inside,
but when I walk out midday,
nothing is natural
because it’s all what it is,
soft air, clouds, wood thrush, the grass.
I could describe it,
but to what purpose? We all
live in the same world,
though world’s apart, and never
to meet—except life to life.
November 23, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Christine Ratnasingham is a Sydney based writer and poet, who was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in England and Australia. She has had her poetry published in conversations, Extempore and Hypallage, and was awarded the HB Higgins Scholarship for Poetry from the University of Melbourne.
The Foreigner
Like a little bird, one you’ve never
seen before, who appears to have accidentally
flown in
through a slightly open window
and into an enclosed installation, enlarged
with people busily pecking at their own
and other people’s lives – flocking, talking, necking
laughing
oblivious to what has just
happened. You’ve seen it, but you’re
paralysed with hopelessness. What can you
do? She’s too fast to catch, filled with
moments
of panic, then stillness. And you watch
her, realising that now, only seconds later
this furiously flapping bird
once frightened, now seems … okay, quite happy
in fact
exploring her surrounds, making the most
of the situation – nibbling at crumbs
jumping around feet, moving along with the crowd
blending in, and it seems that even if you
wanted
to help her back outside, you may
frighten her more, and perhaps
even be going against her will, and so
all you can now do is simply watch, slightly
amused
who’s to say she doesn’t belong
We all do
don’t we?
Dark skin
I forget I have it, until I remember my childhood
when nearly every student felt they needed
to remind me that I was not of their whiteness
I forget it clothes me, until I leave home
and catch photographic glimpses in bus windows
and ad hoc reflections, reminding me
I forget it owns me, until I’m asked where
I’m from, for I can’t be from here?
But from somewhere else, a place I don’t really
know and that has forever branded me
I forget its beauty, until I see it on other
bodies that carry it with dignity
or when they are clothed to celebrate
their difference
Only one of my many parts, yet mostly, the first
one you’ll see when you look at me
I forget, then remember
I own my
dark skin
November 23, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Diane Fahey’s The Wing Collection: New & Selected Poems
was published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2011, and was short-listed for
the John Bray Poetry Prize in the Adelaide Festival of Arts Awards,
2012.
Diane has been selected for Australian Poetry’s Tour of Ireland in 2013.
Four Black-Winged Stilts
At the Barwon Estuary
As if linked by elastic thread, they lift,
trace a soundless arc across the river–
botanical, somehow, with their tapering
leaf-wings, their stem-legs. They forage
then rise as one again, drift through adverse
winds back to their spot in the shallows,
touching down at the same instant.
Stilt hatchlings – brown-flecked heads and wings
sturdy legs half their height, fine bills a pointer
of things to come – are most easily found
in field guides, a dab of light in each inky eye.
Their future is to frequent marshlands,
make brisk forays across the water –
sometimes, with soul mates in triplicate.
Eastern Rosellas
In a troupe they arrive one misty day
to give a musical tirade upon
the cherry plum’s bare boughs.
The lilt of their speech evokes the cries
of children at play – piercing, tremulous
– and those of ancient scolds shrilling
what’s what in no uncertain terms.
The primary force of yellow and red
is finessed by the gold-edged black lace
down their backs: such solid apparitions
they leave after-images in the air;
their speech, as I later recall it,
marked by swoops and lifts so giddily swift
they could only be voiced by those who fly.
