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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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 

A poet, fiction writer and translator, Srilata is Associate Professor of English at the Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras. Srilata was a Charles Wallace Writer-in-residence at the University of Stirling, Scotland in 2010. She was also  a Sangam house writer-in-residence. Her debut novel Table for Four, long listed in 2009 for the Man Asian literary prize, was published by Penguin in July 2011. Srilata won the first prize in the All India Poetry competition 1998 organised by the British Council and the Poetry Society, India for her poem “In Santa Cruz, Diagnosed Homesick”, the Gouri Majumdar poetry prize instituted by The Brown Critique in the year 2000 and the Unisun British Council poetry award 2007.  Her work has been featured in The BloodAxe Anthology of Indian Poets, Penguin India’s First Proofs, Fulcrum, The Little Magazine, Kavya Bharati and The Hindu. Writers Workshop, Kolkata recently published her collection of poems titled Arriving Shortly. Her books include The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History (Zubaan/Kali for Women, 2003), Short Fiction from South India (co-edited with Subashree Krishnaswamy and published by OUP in 2007), Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry (co-edited with Lakshmi Holmstrom and Subashree Krishnaswamy and published in 2009 by Penguin/Viking India) and an anthology of poetry titled Seablue Child (Brown Critique, Kolkata, 2000). 

English Sentence

I was drowning
in a river of clichés
when it ran dry,
mid-sentence plunging
abruptly
into the swirling, breathless eddies of a
full stop
that ought to have arrived words ago. 

The same evening, an old fisherman
counted forty dead words
from the preceding stanza and
one reeeely eely long river snake
which, he remarked later,
was the spitting image of those
insolent squiggles
that peered at him
from the pages
of his grandson’s English text book. 

A Pair of Very Flat Feet

I meet them
in a shop selling orthotics,
my future arches,
paid companions to my very flat feet. 

Shuffling backwards
in my pretend feet,
to the days when I had proper ones,
feet with which
to run on grass,
feeling the sharp tang of each blade,
I think
serendipitously
of metrical feet
and scansion
and all the stuff
my poetry teacher threw at me. 

Home,
and the family is watching,
goggle-eyed,
Olympics 2012 live on TV
as beautiful red-lipsticked Russian gymnasts
with perfect arches
twist and fly arcs in the air
with the annoying lightness of robins. 

I swear softly
and go to bed,
where,
pursued by pair upon pair of perfect feet,
I slip into yet another of my pointless dreams.
In this one,
I am a pirouetting ballet dancer
in Pointe shoes.

Stuart Barnes’ poems have been shortlisted for major Australian prizes & published at online & in print journals & newspapers including The Nervous Breakdown, The Warwick Review & The Weekend Australian Review; others are forthcoming at Otoliths, in fourW twenty-three & Blasphemy. ‘Mother and Son’, creative nonfiction about his coming out, can be read at Verity La (http://verityla.com/mother-and-son-stuart-barnes/). He edits PASH capsule (http://www.facebook.com/pashcapsule), a magazine of love poetry, & is working on the manuscript for his first book of poetry. Currently he lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Words witnessed, in traction, on Swanston St.

You fucking Asians
     Stuffing your yellow
faces with 

rice   Picking
     your Chinky noses
Yeah, that’s right, 

get your fingers
     right up there
Go back to China 

I hope you die
     today, bitch: I hope
a tram hits 

you   Thanks, Driver,
    have a great
day

(title an adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Words heard, by accident, over the phone’)

Jacqueline Buswell is a writer and translator, and has worked as a journalist and teacher of English as a second language. She recently completed a Masters of Creative Writing at Sydney University. Speaks Spanish, and is currently studying Italian. Her poems have been published in the Wollongong and Bundanon Poetry Workshop Anthologies, in the journal Five Bells and in other anthologies.

abstract

you are at ease in this landscape
of brown grey lines and twisting bark
gnarled deformities on old trees
all dry and crackling in the heat
fallen branches force you into detours
you get lost in the abstraction
you find a sunken billabong
hear the screech and laughter of the birds 

on a full moon night you watch the heavens
and shadows move around the shining bark
small creatures move in the rustling silence
you hear the plaint of the mopoke voice
a house was lost in a bushfire, you re-created
that destruction on a murky canvas 

dawn light opens on a granite rock and you see
the saltbush plain stretching west below
you realise  you have never seen these distances
and a kangaroo is watching you 

the valley turns with swathes of orange  settles to dun
the bird song ceases and you cast about for shade
you realise you’ll have to build it
you’ve seen the humpies, as a child you used to draw them 

you pull together branches, bark and leaves
brushing away termites and spiders
you lean logs against a tree
you never were a builder  but by midday
you are snoozing under your rustic canopy
inhaling eucalyptus. 

when you wake, you begin to paint –
that gold surround of pale blue
the iron red mountain
that mopoke night

                               After an exhibition by Elizabeth Cummings
                               SH Ervin Gallery 2012

Luke Fischer is a poet and scholar. He won the 2012 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize (2012). He is the author of three forthcoming books: a debut collection of poems titled Paths of Flight (Black Pepper), a monograph on Rilke and phenomenology, and a book of children’s stories. His poems and translations have appeared in Australian and international journals, including: Meanjin, Overland, Cordite, Snorkel, Agenda (UK), Antipodes (US), and ISLE (US). He was awarded a PhD in philosophy from the University of Sydney in 2008 and has held academic positions in the US and Germany. Recently he returned to Sydney.

Les Grandes Baigneuses

   Cézanne, 1900-1905

The serious blue of dusk
pervades the forest and figures.
On the further shore a dense cypress
spires. To the left of the group
arranged as a chance constellation,
a woman with a trunk-like frame
trails a river of towel, the source in her hand,
while her head is submerged in blackened foliage.
Two women, kneeling on the bank like deer with
folded legs, watch a naked girl as she slowly leaves the water,
unembarrassed and contained. Her iconic profile,
ringed by a cumulonimbus steeped in twilight. 
To the right a tomato cheeked farmer with ample breasts
relaxes in cushioning arms and a sturdy physique
inclines with a tree. A seated woman between them
is feeling the texture of the earth while a russet head,
still bathing alone, rinses a shoulder, looking on.
Their skins shimmer––a moonlit lake
composed of refracted sky, woods, shore.
Beside the dark cat on a table of grass: 
a cane basket of fruits and a watermelon half.

After days of rain

After days of rain
       I go out for a walk
The air is hazy and bright like the mind of a saint
  coming to her senses after a vision    

   Necklaces
threaded with polished jade and crystal beads
grace   the   breasts   of   trees
  anklets glint in the grass

Three lorikeets pass in a rush––
chirpy green-winged rainbows 

Entering the reserve
only now I realise the path
is a scar on the landscape
Now that the water
has made it a creek bed
and flows like a healing lotion

Downstream a fairy wren
twitches its blue-capped head
flicks droplets off its wings   departs

In my fine leather shoes from Berlin
I slink along the bank, the soles pressing
native grasses and purple stars

Is there no way we can enter a forest
other than by severing it––like drawing
a rusty scalpel across a patient’s skin?

And what about the footpaths and roads,
the byways and freeways, motorways and runways––
all the cauterised wounds scarring her back?

Michael Farrell is the former editor of Xmas poetry zine, elves. His new book is open sesame (Giramondo) which was shortlisted in the Kenneth Slessor Prize; Michael also has a new e-book from Black Rider enjambment sisters present.

A Romantic Woman

Has sewn a bauble on her dress tonight
She thinks about the relation between
natural and artificial light as
she drives through the evening in a taxi
Doubt becomes her. If she were Catholic she
assumes she would’ve toyed with bishops …

agnostic it’s jackaroos that keep her
reading colonial fiction. Danielle
loves being twenty-nine (the pathos of
it) and dreams of an earlier name like
Muriel or Jean. She smooths the violet
sash her mother would say meant ‘die single
The country can be harsh like that. Next year
she might become a novelist, but for
now she’s happy with the magazine world
the hair and makeup boys, donuts on Fridays
She met someone online recently who
carves his own chess pieces and has a sandy
fringe, and she’ll meet Liam in the flesh tonight
Warm and soft, she said to herself warm …

soft. The night is floating with stuff: maybe
organic, but she thinks wearing a veil’s
underrated. I can’t wear a taxi
everywhere, she jokes to the driver who
doesn’t understand why not. Danielle thinks …

her friends, their brutal ways with men and how
successful such ways are. Men are afraid
she isn’t strong: yet she’s been known to eat
tuna from a can (to the right music
They don’t know what it takes to be her! She
wouldn’t be an editor for long …

Magazines were arcades for Danielle, not
stylish training manuals. Cigarettes
or insanity she would quip (before
she quit). Her therapist said she had …
Cinderella complex but Danielle – in
a rare fiery moment – retorted …

you have complexomania! Whereas
she was a deer of the forest …

Harriet Shelley without the river
bit, or the kids. Really, her mind was drifting

into inanity. The Melbourne traffic
wasn’t like a forest; she could surely
find better role models if she needed
them. She would never make anything happen
Danielle imagined Liam was probably
one of those soft, toilet-paper roll kinds …

guys with razor blades attached to the last
sheet. They love you until then. I have …
date with a bottle of gin, she thought …

a man on the side: a moment to cherish
cherish, cherish. She noticed that the clasp
on her handbag resembled a creature
with an unusual nose. She began
to conceive of a feature …

underrated beauty. She sat in the taxi
outside the party with the metre running
scribbling in her notebook while the humming
driver played a samba on the steering-wheel 

Blue Cat Repository

Of everything that goes on in this
small room that is the house. Every feeling
evokes or colours me. Other cats mime
monitors, or speakers. Bread’s being sliced
jam’s being spread. I’m in your lap …

I’m purring. I’m outrageously fluffy
The TV’s on. The emu eggs hang from
the wall. Today I caught a mouse. A lie …

fire burns, the kettle boils. There are stock
anecdotes; there are street anecdotes. There’s
extended family slander, swearing, shushing
Someone’s melting their kidneys, someone’s fleeing
from the room crying. If you listen

you build up a picture of a culture
a kind of play with endless exits …

comebacks. I listen. There are leghorn
chooks pecking at the doorway, there’s …

ineffectual dog, barking …

shaking hands. Someone’s going to get
corn, someone’s getting a boiled lolly or
a hard coin pressed into their palm. Attempts to
reroute the conversation are shouted
down. Margarine’s tolerated. Cake

vanishes. Who has indigestion
Who wants a pink milk drink? Our usually
empty, calm domain has become a place of
noise and tussle. There’s no respect for cat
beds or cat bowls. But I’m not fooled

… distracted: there are determinations
being made. I’m a bank and a banker
I’ve watched card games played on quieter days. Quieter
trades of emotion are made then. I
remember watching a queen fight with

a general. They were lovers. I
was like a weather vane. Lightning struck them
both and they smouldered in cold gold corners while
servants picked up bugs with ancient tweezers. They
would stand on the balcony and throw

cherries at the pigs, who barely cared
No one thought cherries food there or then
certainly not me. Yet here, now, they fight for
a slice of anything with a cherry
in or on it. They sing about them

as if cherries constitute a world

Corey Wakeling lives in Melbourne. His poetry appears in Australian and international journals and anthologies. He is the author of chapbookGargantuan Terrier, Buggy or Dinghy (Vagabond Press, 2012) and Goad Omen (Giramondo, 2013). He is reviews editor of poetry journal Rabbit, and interviews editor of Cordite.

Mute

His hands silenced me, mute the epiglottis
made windowpane from which
and so disturbed by outside mania the hands
about others like dogs on a calf dog us.
More cuneiform plateaux without but
undisturbed since none live there surmounted.
All scrub rustles but binocular O’Casey
and the scramble, drifting lost for voice
but humming like turbines. Laburnum. 

Lantana. Drift, in pools. That was where, intermission
of steady passage to the wax arrangements,
most rent the voice thrown clatters
disturbed by chance from the plainness
of clock face in Carlton,
the plainness of crime at the site of the Russian
juniper. Orthodoxy too, one guesses. Won
garsons. Turnpike to the grotto at estuary’s
diminishment, but surprise reflection
of state Narcissus. 

Yours his hands steady, clockwork. Cur whelp to voice
in the juvenile zeit.

Jan Owen’s most recent book is Poems 1980 – 2008. A selection in Dutch, Der Kus, was published in 2010, and a New and Selected, The Offhand Angel, is forthcoming in the UK with Eyewear Publishing. Several of her Baudelaire translations will be included in a future issue of Modern Poetry in Translation.

Flittermouse

Elusive as Derrida
at the eastern edge of absence,
the tiny beast came through more slant
than Emily D in Sunday black –
a slashed-off scrap of dusk,
Venetian appliqué round a mask
glimpsed at a window over the Grand Canal,
Vivaldi played two rooms away. 

Lobbed from nowhere onto the desk
in a shocking slippage of air,
grief’s gift paper sleeked its own dark nub,
a grinning foetus between the books and the cup,
myopically pulling itself together,
eerily looming, flumping towards me twice.
Then off to the frame of the Japanese print
to hang like disshevelled sci fi, gravity’s womb
or a scatological statement on art. 

I let it be all night through chittering dreams
but woke round dawn as out to the square world’s
inconvenient corners it veered,
tracking its own grace notes to where
at last out the fast thrown-open door
it took my breath away
like an exorcism,
that most intimate loss.

Outside the Museum

Against the traffic’s roar
some small pipsqueak was giving
its territory away
with five clear-glass notes here
and five more there
like memory echoes in
the stripped trees’ mid-December air
so twig by twig by twig
one naked plane was hung
with limpid silver baubles of sound
like a boutique musical pine 

with the unseen wren
so much ahead of itself
so much a sprung intention
it seemed the tree was plucking
the bird from note to note
from now to now
playing its flight in silver palindromes. 

Passing below
our trivial quarrel held its ground
with words like dead bells
melted down for guns
till aptly we went underground at Iéna
parting finally at a corridor junction
grey as a tunnel in purgatory
no buskers at any coordinate
of space or time.  

Terry Jones’ debut short collection, Furious Resonance, was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2011. That same year he was the winner of the Bridport Prize. His work has also appeared in magazines including Poetry Review, The New Statesman, Agenda, Ambit, The London Magazine, Magma, Iota, Communist Review, The North.

                  Sun 

Let X be the sun:
between number and number the rage star burning; Xanthic helllight, Sunflower atom-pisser, imaginary
ghost flower.

                                                                    Starts with clot of ochre
     Impasto sun-mould the ur-text in outline paradigm mud-pat
                                                   A child’s sun isotope of yellow wax its surface storms 

Upstroke the sun’s sign
On papyrus whirlpool of x-rays

                         a violent flower at zero
                                                 Furious stalk the inferno uncodes and black it is black a black funeral

feather World-black negative dark flower Gamma plant blazer Anarchist icon
O common star Sulphur flower the light star’s dark grammar

                         Is hossanah breath and bone  swastika Solomon’s Seal

At heart it reads off Signifier Sigma
Sonne sunne A sol-fa
its energy a base petal pions’ spore Morpheme it flashes out

Struck flint Mi
Mi
        Mi

 The dawn flower Alpha Aaron’s Rod Gospel gold-leaf
To liquid sets elixir the dusk rose Giaconda Will-o-wisp light text

Glows oil out plumes out

Marigold Madonna Yellow ink on paper

Its syntax figured
complex Flowering Kells Book wrought Of roots enchanted Carnival chromosome

Writhing writing Rag-and-bone strange rose Torch of anti-matter Old rope manuscript

Ultra-violet hieroglyph
but penned

Coded.

Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer and critic. He is currently editor of Rochford Street Review and P76 magazine. He was widely published in Australian literary magazines and journals during the 1980s and 90s and has recently emerged from a long hibernation. His book Stepping Out of Line was published in 1985.

Martyrs’ beach

the seaweed was blood red
we stood on the sand
and watched waves
hurl bleeding clumps
at the regenerating dunes 

at the local museum
we find  buried at the back
of a yellowing scrapbook
a reference to a seaside massacre
of aboriginals who had
‘trespassed on prime grazing land’

near the front door
a hand written label
in a wooden showcase
full of spear fragments
announces
“little is known  of the way of life
of the original inhabitants of the area”

After arrival – storm at sea

running like children
past the old midden,
protected by a rusty sign,
we burst onto the beach to be confronted
by the stench of dead mutton birds.
they stretch in a decaying black line
along the high water mark.
others lie rotting, caught on the rocks
at each end of the beach.
we climb over the headland
to the next beach
to find the carnage even greater
a wall of feathers bones and maggots
piled high. 

in the general store
the talk is of pollution –
oil spills up the coast
or poison feed.
But in the bottle shop
an old woman
tells us of a storm at sea,
of birds dropping
exhausted into the waves.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.