Gayatri Nair

December 19, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments

Gayatri Nair is an Indian-Australian writer, poet and DJ based on the land of the Wangal people of the Eora nation in Sydney’s inner west. She is a member of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement, has qualifications in Law and Arts, and is working in human rights policy, research and advocacy. She is passionate about pride in cultural identity and using art to affect change. Gayatri has been published in Sweatshop Women Volumes 1 and 2, Red Room Poetry, Mascara Literary Review, The Guardian and Swampland Magazine.

Mystics

Last night you saved my life
There was a fire in the building
and I would have slept through it
But you woke me up and we survived

Earlier that day we had seen the impossible
The unbelievable
Whales breaching out past the rocks
An island which I later looked up, called ‘Rangoon’
‘How racist’ I said, the old term for Yangon
A place I once had a visa to but had never been

And we wouldn’t have seen the whales
But for a lone woman on the beach
who told us to look
No phones no cameras,
nothing to capture it
So I’m writing it down now

You said this is where we would consummate our love
And I said ‘yuck isn’t that like about marriage,’
and ownership of a woman through making an heir

But this morning I googled consummate love
it said it was ‘the complete form of love, representing an ideal relationship which people strive towards… it is the ideal kind of relationship’

I can’t stop laughing at the way
you carried the car keys above your head
swimming with one hand raised through the estuary to the beach
Twice people stopped to ask if you were ok

And I wonder if we can ever go back there?
Like an ending in a Satyajit Ray film
But I don’t think I have a visa to that country anymore.

Vyacheslav Konoval

December 17, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments

Vyacheslav Konoval is a Ukrainian poet and resident of Kyiv. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including Anarchy Anthology Archive, International Poetry Anthology, Literary Waves Publishing, Sparks of Kaliopa, Reach of the Song 2022, Diogenes for Culture Journal, Scars of my heart from the war, Poetry for Ukraine, Norwich University research center, Impakter, The Lit, Allegro, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Fulcrum, Adirondack Center for Writing, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Revista Literaria Taller Igitur, Tarot Poetry Journal, Tiny Seed Literature Journal, Best American Poetry Blog, Appalachian Journal Dark Horse. Vyacheslav’s poems were translated into Spanish, French, Scottish, and Polish languages.

Cold drops of rain

Descending from the roof
the melting handfuls of snow.

Moaning and humming
echoes outside the window
the wind plays with the lonely poplar,
bends thin branches.

In the darkness of the apartment
confusion creeps
how is the Bakhmut city
my frontline friend?

Year of Darkness

A snowflake pinches the cheek,
the frost bites jokingly,
the fog is sliding on the ice.

As thunder tears apart a rocket supply,
the heart in pain, strangulation of the throat,
oh, that black fog covered the country.

There are thousands, tens of thousands of them.
Maybe hundreds of thousands
of worldly souls that flew to heaven,
from the sooty piles of smoke from the huts of towns and villages.

God, why such a punishment?

Lesh Karan

December 15, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments

Lesh Karan is a Naarm/Melbourne-based writer and poet. Her work has been published in Best of Australian Poems 2022, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Island, Mascara Literary Review and Rabbit, amongst others. Lesh is currently completing a Master of Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing at the University of Melbourne. She’s of Fiji Indian heritage.

The Floor

She took off her earth-caked shoes
and put them on the floor. On the floor,
she stacked her old notebooks and red pens
drained of ink. She placed her sweat-drenched
leggings on the floor. On the floor, her heart
still racing, too. She piled the organic produce
from farmers’ markets on the floor, alongside
the key holes, acupuncture and Advil. A stone
statue of Lord Ganesha she placed on the floor.
On the floor, his wordlessness, too. The mango
tree from her childhood home, she gently lay
on the floor and saw an orange dove
flutter off. Friends she let go, the friend who
let her go, all on the floor. The ill-fitting careers
she stacked like witches hats in the furthest corner on the floor.
She took her mirror off the wall and set it
flat on the floor, looked at herself
from the ground up. The dream home
she dismantled and stacked on the floor,
next to all the how-to manuals she had bought.
The question she couldn’t answer, she tore
and scattered like seeds on the floor. When
the floor cracks, she putties it
with moonlight, Fleetwood Mac,
fresh Moleskines—
          and continues stacking.

Peter Ramm

November 23, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments

Peter Ramm is a poet and teacher who writes on the Gundungurra lands of the NSW Southern Highlands. His debut poetry collection Waterlines is out now with Vagabond Press. In 2022 he won the prestigious Manchester Poetry Prize. His poems have also won the Harri Jones Memorial Award, The South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Award, The Red Room Poetry Object, and have been shortlisted in the Bridport, ACU, Blake, and the Newcastle Poetry Prizes. His work has appeared in Westerly, Cordite, Plumwood Mountain, The Rialto, Eureka Street, and more.

The Sedulity of Soldier Crabs

Red, red is the sun,
Heartlessly indifferent to time,
The wind knows, however,
The promise of early chill.
—Matsuo Bashō

It’s Boxing Day and the sun climbs a lattice work of cirrus clouds, dripping like treacle in the early afternoon. The sandflats are rinsed with the voices of a hundred children and the air teems with the smell of last week’s storm washing through the estuary after its journey down the Woodstock and Stoney Creeks. The inlet runs emerald green and blue in the deep places and three channel markers meander their way towards the point like a set of mis-thrown darts. 

        Whiting like razors
        In the water; each one cuts
        A new memory.

II.

This is Yuin country, and it remembers a time before its wealth was burnt in the lime pit at Dolphin Point and hauled by the Burrill Lake Timber company to Sydney; its cedar, iron bark and mahogany forests floated out to sea. A plaque on the Princess Highway recounts how the rock shelter on the lake’s edge makes children of the pyramids and the language the king used to claim the geology of the place—the basalt and siltstone forty million years in the making.

        Fourteen cormorants
        Take wing; time written cursive
        In pages of sea grass.

III

Now, my son’s fingers are little clumps of sand in mine and we run ankle deep across the bar—legs lurching like the loose brush strokes of an infant artist. The pools and pockets of water gleam like the scaled side of a great bream for hundreds of yards before us. He says I’m a sea monster; a shark, an octopus, a crab or whatever he wants me to play. All he knows is the next footfall, and more often, the fall of laughter and salt and the cast net of his father’s arms. 

        Onshore, paddle boards
        Consume the car park, staking
        Out their own claim.

IV

I grasp at his arm before he lands on the blue back of a lone soldier crab—an ancient of days, his bone-striped legs the first to walk this water. Sitting. Still. Sifting the sand against the budding toes of my boy. There’s music in the dactyls of his claws, in the iambs of his movement, in the breath of my toddler. Together, they share the notes of time, a semibreve on the boy’s lips—a pause, a new sonata strung in his mind. But he wants to squish it

        —Feel the crush of bone
        And shell in the webs of feet.
        There’s so much to learn.

V

The wind winds us up, it blows purple on our skin and black on the faces of a pair of pied oystercatchers, who pry the sand for the living, weighing the hour like Anubis, with beak and feather. Still, the crab remains. Long after we’ve passed. Out there—a relic of the tides, the small cadences of the cosmos marked in the milky way of its shell. We finish by skimming on the board, the boy riding it like a comet over the water, and I, collapsing Phaethon, at the reins. 

        Coolness in the shade
        Of the wind. Always, the end
        Begs quiet and time.

Stuart Barnes

November 11, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments

Stuart Barnes is the author of Like to the Lark (Upswell Publishing, 2023) and Glasshouses (UQP, 2016), which won the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, was commended for the 2016 Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the 2017 Mary Gilmore Award. His work has been widely anthologised and published, including in Admissions: Voices within Mental Health, The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, Best of Australian Poems 2022, The Moth and POETRY (Chicago). Recently he guest co-edited, with Claire Gaskin, Australian Poetry Journal 11.1 ‘local, attention’. His ’Sestina after B. Carlisle’ won the 2021/22 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. @StuartABarnes
 

Duplex 

                        (Eremophila ‘Blue Horizon’) 

I have always adored the desert,  
its transformative blues and solitude.      

            I transform the bluesy solitude    
             of winter—I polish small gold trumpets—  

gold-tinted blue-tongues polish off my trumpets—      
I raise my hands, lanceolate and blue. 

            Lancelot was raised by hands of blue;  
            I improvise—I play blue notes. Roll low

my soul cries. Playing blue notes, rolling low, 
I weave the earth and the atmospheres. 

            I grieve earth’s people, flatten their fears,  
             weather the emu, the stormy blues.

The emu untethers glorious blues.  
I have always adored the desert. 

Sher Ting Chim

November 8, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments

Originally from a sunny island in Southeast Asia, Sher Ting is a Singaporean-Chinese currently residing in Australia. She is a 2021 Writeability Fellow with Writers Victoria and a Pushcart and Best of The Net nominee with work published/forthcoming in Pleiades, Colorado Review, OSU The Journal, The Pinch, Salamander, Chestnut Review, Rust+Moth and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, Bodies of Separation, is forthcoming with Cathexis Northwest Press, and her second chapbook, The Long-Lasting Grief of Foxes, is forthcoming with CLASH! Books in 2023. She tweets at @sherttt and writes at sherting.carrd.co

Bak Kut Teh

肉: You peel the chilli, layer by layer, unearthing a clot of
seeds from its copper pith. The soup simmers on the stove,
frothing sunset gold over the blue-gas flames, drowned out by
radio talk of the day’s weather.

How’s your day at school?

The meat melts off the bones in the pressure cooker, pork fat
dripping from softened limbs like snow from black root on a
winter morning.

It’s fine.

You sift the remaining bone-stock with a colander, flushed
with thyme and aniseed. You tell me to scrape the flesh off the
bones with a knife and laugh when my fingers slip, wrangling
silver against each cord-like sinew.

Honey, there’s more than one way
to get to the heart of things,

You whisper as you pull out a larger knife and, taking the pig
trotter from my hands, whistle each hardened tendon – splitting
the ropes – off of the skeleton flower.

骨: Some nights, snow swathes the streets in silent, sleet-wet
pavements. You call me on the phone while you’re peeling an
orange, and like muscle memory, I say I’m busy, distracted.

Okay then listen to me.

You tell me about the lady who stops by the store every day,
never buys anything, just stares at the row of wooden horses.
You tell me how you walked the extra mile to get your
favourite diner coffee, chortling eggs and beans while watching
the busker ignite one-half of a weary skyline. This way, you
can tell your friends we still talk.

There’s more than one way
to get to the heart of things

茶: You tell me about driftwood, sangria, cherry blossoms and
tea, while splitting an orange down the middle, spooning the
seeds off its insides. I fall asleep, cord entwined around my
finger, having heard all about your day. You listen to the rise
and fall of my breath, dip a slice of orange into your cup of tea,

Long over-steeped, almost bitter to taste, still waiting to hear
mine.

Dean Mokrozhaevy

October 30, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments

Dean Mokrozhaevy moved to Australia in 2008 and grew up reading and writing in various suburbs of Sydney. They use their writing to work through their emotions and make something meaningful out of distress. Outside of their writing endeavours they also enjoy bushwalking, watching moon jellyfish in the Sydney harbour and sewing with their assistant Concrete the cat.

Foundation

Everything’s fixed up.
Everything but the pink stain in the kitchen grout.
I told you I wanted to keep it.

I don’t know what you were preparing for
But I think you’re done now.

I can’t tell what you’re feeling anymore.
Not from your face.
Your hands are still gentle
You still hold the back of my head when we sleep
You still let me sink into your body and cover us with the
blanket.

You say that the paint is peeling

But I like it

You say that you’re scared

But I’m here

You say that you love me and that you’ll always love me and that I’m the best thing that’s
ever happened to you

And I tell you that we still have decades to love
each other

You give a chuckle and change the subject
 
 
 
Note

When I wake up
You aren’t there.
The sunrise paints gold on the sheets
Not on your face.

I get out of the gold.
It’s not mine.
It’s yours.

The shower’s off.
The living room is empty.
There’s no one in the kitchen.

There’s a note on our shoe cabinet.
Your keys are the paperweight.

I love you.
I’m sorry.

Craig Santos Perez

December 15, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Craig Santos Perez is an indigenous Pacific Islander poet from Guåhan (Guam). He is the author of five books of poetry and the co-editor of five anthologies. He teaches at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.

Rings of Fire Sonnet During the Pandemic
(September 2020) 

We celebrate our daughter’s third birthday
during the hottest September in history.
My parents Facetime from California,
where fire is harvesting four million acres
of ash. “I visited grandma today,”
my mom says. “The orange sky scared her.”
Flames flood brazil’s wetlands
as europe’s largest refugee camp smolders,
granting the charred asylum.
“We might have to evacuate tomorrow,”
my mom says, but tonight we open gifts, sing
& blow out the candles together.
Smoke trembles, as if we all exhaled
the same combustible wish.

Echolocation Sonnet During the Pandemic
(September 2020)

                        for the orca, J35, and her child, J57

Today, you birthed another calf. I imagine
you both swimming a thousand nautical miles
until every wave becomes an ode, until the sea
is a wet nursery. How do you translate
“congratulations” in your dialect of whistles?
What is joy but our shared echolocation?
My second daughter was born three years ago,
premature, but now chubby & strong.
I cook salmon for our dinner and pray
that your pod has enough to eat.
We haven’t been to the beach in months
due to quarantine, but you remind us:
hope is our most buoyant
oceanic muscle.

Chris Armstrong

December 14, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Chris Armstrong’s poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, most recently The Suburban Review, K’in and Backstory as well as Griffith Review and regularly in Cordite. Armstrong was runner up in the Judith Wright Overland Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Writers in 2015 and received an ASA Emerging Writers Mentorship for her poetry manuscript The Watershed, which was published as a chapbook in 2017. Armstrong is currently involved as poet for The White Bluff Project (https://www.thewhitebluffproject.co/) a collaborative art, science and community project exploring ‘place’ with particular reference to the effects of climate and urbanisation on a coastal ecosystem. Armstrong was raised on the invaded lands of the Gumbaynggir people on the east coast of Australia but currently resides in lutriwita (Tasmania).

Manggaarla 

maana ngawaa muniimbugany muniim nyamigundi maarlala
ngawaa muniimbugany words live beyond our needy tongues to
affirm what is you call me to come see the classic smooth and
creamy shapes of stone wash’d in dreamy waves beneath the
white bluff where language too is a sedimentary thing lithified
into the first song within and where after and before daalgiya
ngaanyaw nguuralami giduurr wiigurr nyan muniim nyamigundi
maarlala ngawaabugany muniim maana muniimbugany ngawa
weigh it feel it roll it on that needy tongue feed it to your
children waagay fire yamaarr fish gaagal ocean language that
made me unmade you first manggaarla remaking what was you
juna junaa gayi wear lexis like necklaces of sophora tomentosa
ngayinggi yarrang listen niirum maanyung carrying the sound of
two whales breathing as they rise arc dive into the dark sea
ngayinggi yarrang beneath hooped pines beside cuttlefish
flotsam streaked with copper based blood jarlarrla gagalngay
how is the wind not called a living thing and a breath not thought
a word

Endnotes
Manggaarla is ‘first’ in Gumbaynggir language. Thank you to Gumbaynggir artist Tori Ann Donnelly, with assistance from Kal Morris, for the translations to Gumbaynggir in the poem Manggarla. The poem is part of a collaborative artwork with artists Tori Donnelly and Sarah Mufford for The White Bluff Project at Coffs Harbour Regional Art Gallery from 31 October 2021 to 15 January 2022. See https://www.thewhitebluffproject.co/. It is also available as an image of the final artwork. The poem also acknowledges influences from Gwen Harwood’s poem ‘The Littoral’.