April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Nicholas YB Wong is the winner of Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition and a nominee for Best of the Net 2010 and Best of Web 2011 Anthology. His poetry is forthcoming in Assaracus: Journal of Gay Poetry, Prime Number Magazine, San Pedro River Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Third Wednesday and the Sentinel Champion Series. He is currently an MFA Candidate at the City University of Hong Kong. Visit him at http://nicholasybwong.weebly.com
Walk With Words
“I never use despair, since it isn’t really mine, only given to me for safekeeping.”
Wislawa Szymborska
Life at 3 A.M. is an elephant
urging me to make choices –
The night chill challenges my social life.
It asks why I commit myself to words
and turn away from humans,
who often talk too much.
Temperature has no speech – it never knows
the setbacks of language.
I have married words. Every night,
I bang on them, wearing my blood red matador’s cape,
working towards perfect orgasms.
Tonight, I am not writing. I walk
in the bituminous street, feeling bitter
after seeing my friends whose life
is made of unpronounceable stock codes.
My feet go numb; my existence, a walnut wafer,
brittle, belittled.
I search in the sky for the mercurial moon –
Not there.
I look back and ask the street how far I will walk
alone
Mark Twain as an Anti-Anti Smoker
Effective January 1, 2007, the vast majority of indoor areas of workplaces and public places, such as restaurants, offices, schools, hospitals, markets, karaokes and bars which are frequented by people of different ages are required to ban smoking.
Hong Kong Smoking (Public Health) Ordinance, cap. 371.
Mark Twain, a heavy smoker
(and literary
figure) himself,
is going to rule our city. And he,
with his humor and flare,
has decided to set free all
underground smokers.
In his inaugural ceremony, he strides
onto the stage,
his forefinger curling
his moustache
when he speaks:
“I won’t bow my head and
confess like a child. I give you all freedom
in an adult style.
To cease smoking is
the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know
because I’ve done it
a thousand times.”
You, who exterminated
that thing
in the city,
must be dismayed
to know the law
is dead.
That law, an infant, which cries no more,
barely knows how to toddle.
That thing –
as you insist calling it –
has a white sinewy-lean body,
a mini-chimney,
paper-smooth, smell of ancient culture. That thing isn’t wood, but it sometimes crackles when lit
in absolute silence.
I’m warning you! That thing is returning
at full speed. And this time,
you’ll say no euphemism. You’ll speak
of its real name
as you do when you name
Jesus, Kwan Yin and the one
rolling over you naked.
During those bleak days, we felt like
fugitives
in the name of the hoary
addictive.
We hid in the darkest corner
in universities, diners,
at rooftops, anywhere so long as
they were invisible on maps,
puff
ing
and breath
ing
at the same time, degraded like dogs which ransacked for food in trash.
Soon we will hang a Mark Twain
flag outside our windows.
His face
soars in proud smoky air,
when we fondle with
that thing
legitimately inside. Soon we will smoke in buses, in churches, in malls, in the City Hall, in museums, in the Coliseum.
You then will die gradually
of second- and third-hand
smoke, and we,
devoted chain smokers,
will die faster. Don’t worry.
Don’t dissuade –
we are all prepared. Everything dies
on a predetermined date,
including the law
you once embraced.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ashley Capes teaches Media and English in Victoria. His first collection of poetry, pollen and storm, was published with the assistance of Small Change Press in 2008, and his second collection Stepping Over Seasons was released by Interactive Press in 2009. A haiku chapbook Orion Tips the Saucepan was released by Picaro Press in 2010. Recently his work has been awarded a commendation in the Rosemary Dobson Poetry Prize and in 2009 he won the Ipswich Open Poetry Award with the poem ‘shell.’
old green paint
beneath the bridge
where the busker and his flute
compete with
urine and the yarra,
a school girl drops a coin
into his case
and her friends giggle
down from the bridge
boats are lined up
like water-proofed hawkers,
no better at boasting than
old green paint
on the staircase,
or the predictable swish
of a waitress alfresco
and across the bridge
flinders street station
lies sun-bathing,
fake-tan yellow fading
and the rhythmic
click of the train
becomes the wrist-watch
of a patterned vein.
by the curve
a teacup sits on the sink
shoe-brown
inside, imagined marks
where you held it,
not by the handle
but by the curve, to fit a palm
aching from winter
and the rest of the kitchen
looks a little strained –
ant-killers nest against
the foggy window and
cutlery stands like a palisade
but somehow your teacup
shrugs off pain
with a sweeping shadow
cast low over the dish-rag,
to me it looks like you might
return at any minute.
broom-bristle-dance
beneath sunburnt roof tiles
I try to keep up appearances
broom bristles
dancing on concrete
and scattering leaves
like brown paper bags with legs
my neighbour is doing the same
only he’s hiding an alien family
in the caravan out back too,
I’m sure of it
that, and a wig beneath his fisherman’s
cap, hedge trimmers
and a polite face like a button
or a cuff-link
that night a strange glow
comes from next door, maybe he’s moving them
though it could be just the moon, blazing
away, looking over the shed
in a strangely possessive manner
as if the whole town
were his very own chessboard,
driveways and roads
‘L’ shapes for his knights.
April 20, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Andy Kissane lives in Sydney and writes poetry and fiction. He has published three collections of poetry. Out to Lunch (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009) is shortlisted in the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His first novel, Under the Same Sun (Sceptre, 2000) was shortlisted for the Vision Australia Audio Book of the Year. Poetry prizes include the Red Earth Poetry Award, the Sydney Writers’ Festival Poetry Olympics, the John Shaw Neilson Award, the inaugural Publisher’s Cup Cricket Poetry Award and the BTG-Blue Dog Poetry Reviewing prize. He has taught Creative Writing at four universities, most recently UNSW, (2007-2009). He is currently the recipient of a New Work grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council and is working on a book of short stories and a fourth collection of poetry.
Seeing you again
Driving to your place, I remember
how you said you wanted to carry my hands
around inside your bra. You won’t say that today.
You are married and it’s years since that
dinner dance, foxtrotting under the tablecloth,
my cock wet before I’d eaten the entree.
You said you adored men in dinner suits
and I was eager to strip, loosening
the onyx studs from my ruffle slowly
and carefully, as if they were amulets
with enough power to peel back
my shirt and open up my skin.
You meet me in the driveway, comfortable
in tracksuit and windcheater. Your hair
is not quite the way I remember it.
We don’t have much time alone.
Your husband’s making coffee
in the kitchen as words ripen
on the roof of my mouth like blackberries:
fat icicles ready to fall. My cup wobbles
on its saucer as I recall the last camping trip,
our lilos pushed together, your sleeping bag
zipped into mine, the guttural snores
of lion seals floating up from the beach.
I think of what might have been, waking
to a thousand, thousand dawns, children,
the closeness where you don’t need to speak.
Instead, there’s this afternoon tea, polite
conversation, the way I look at you and wish
I could live more than one life.
Wood becoming Rock
Walking down the steep path to the backyard,
I hold the stump splitter like a baby.
I’m an occasional woodchopper, intent
on clearing the logs left by the previous owners
—an eyesore, abandoned.
One huge tree, an angophora, fell down
of its own accord, unable to get enough purchase
in the rocky hillside, harming neither limb nor property.
I’ve already chopped and moved a mountain
of wood, gradually, like a hot-rodder
restoring a classic car.
But what’s left now is the hard stuff,
wood well on its way to petrification—
green-tinged, adamantine, too heavy
for one man to lift. I swing the axe
up towards the hidden sun and the other bright stars,
then bring it down onto the dumb block.
I make no impression on the weathered wood.
Relentlessly, I search for a fissure in the log,
a crack the width of a hair that I can wedge open.
The longer the search, the greater my enlightenment.
If only I could borrow the Marabunta,
those ferocious army ants from the film,
The Naked Jungle, let them feast on the wood,
then stop right there. But as I remember it,
they don’t stop, eating everything in their path.
I swing and swing until I am a riot of noise, a mob,
a serial woodchopper who won’t cease until he’s felled
the forest. I hack until my shirt sticks to my back.
My shoulders ache, my arms have emigrated,
and I am all axe,
as Gimli is axe to Legolas’s bow.
I can’t work, it seems, without making
some connection to popular culture,
though this is not work, this hefting
is not my bread and butter. Sparks flash
blue and yellow at the moment of impact
and I understand how my ancestors struggled
to make fire. I’m tired, wet, almost done
for the day, but over there,
against the fence lies another
and it will lie there until I come for it—
ageless, slowly rotting, obdurate and silent.
I wield my iron-age tool until the wood wails and shrieks
and when I finally cleave through the stump,
the sound of it splitting fills the cave
of my head with the last rays of sunlight.
April 20, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anis Shivani’s poems appear in Threepenny Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Harvard Review, Poetry Northwest, Fiddlehead, Meanjin, Washington Square, Verse, Stand, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. A debut book of criticism, Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies, will appear in July 2011, and a second collection of short fiction, The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, will appear later in 2011.
The Death of Li Po
Li Yang-ping, preserve my poems. The emperors,
on whose behalf I wandered, are jealous like wives.
To travel a thousand rivers upstream or down, in a
moon’s half cycle, is only to deliver one’s true debts.
In Ch’ang-an, the winehouses gave me a special name
I both abhorred and loved at the same time:
Banished Immortal, meaning he who imagines life
as a continuation of the mountain’s other side.
Long ago, in the gibbons’ shrieks I heard in K’uei-chou,
a passage of sorts was enacted. I lost my strangeness.
Now, on this river that beckons to the civilization
still remnant in the shrunken land, land of half-sight,
I embrace the moon, its diffuse wavy pattern, its
silken bodice, its talkative-silent recital – a poem
inherited among the thousands I most love,
to live through the tough interrogation ahead.
Li Yang-ping, preserve my poems. If I drown,
in the brown depths the poet’s only disguise flutters.
To Orhan Pamuk
You have the hüzün, the melancholy
of undying empires piled on each other,
the intrigue of the word-defying holy,
the torture-games of brother by brother.
You strand the Bosphorus on feet of clay,
an Istanbullu fifty years on the same street,
seeing the Golden Horn as on the first day,
nodding to the names behind the retreat.
We, loud exiles and immigrants, toss-offs
and runaways, our good parents’ heartbreak,
dig for first and last names in the old troughs,
defend to the death our identifying stake.
Your loneliness is spared the daily death.
We, the free, delineate each new breath.
Dear Paul Muldoon
Barricade the America behind the Princeton
oaks, behind the New Yorker’s gates, in a-technical
language of your aged-youth, steeped in the tragedy of
loaves and laughing sciences and lush O’Casey;
barricade it from the striptease of hidden views
familiar from publishing’s megacelebrities touring
the country in birdcages lined with squawk;
barricade America’s broken highways and silenced
cancer wars with ribbons of your faltering
precious dialogue with Heaney and his forefathers
and theirs, buried deep in the potato fields from
whence no man emigrates sans soul in a coffin box;
barricade America whose gift to herself is platitude,
toward blue Eden, soaked with irony,
a flatulent brig staggering onward to foggy coasts
borrowed from other continents, land masses
whose shape resembles fractured skulls.
April 20, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Judith Beveridge is the author of four award-winning books of poetry. Her most recent collection is Storm and Honey published in 2009 and it was awarded the Grace Levin Prize in 2010. She teaches poetry writing at the University of Sydney and is the poetry editor of Meanjin. In 2005 she was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature.
Vulture’s Peak
From Devadatta’s poems
Whenever I come here, I don’t pay much attention
to the lammergeier circling from the peaks overhead,
but I keep an eye out for falling tortoises, elephant’s ribs,
jackal’s jawbones. I stay on the level where the farm
women scythe and rick, scythe and rick, or pick
tithes of yellow samphire near the stones. I don’t
climb to the summit to take in the view of the valley
and the fertile plains; or as the Buddha suggests,
spend time alone in one of the small, damp caves
meditating on suffering and its root causes in desire.
I stay at the base near the talus and inhale the heady
perfume of the lavender and vetch. I watch the farm
women bend and sweat in the sinking madder sun
before they drink and rest near the ponds. I let desire
have its ground. I take my chances under falling bones.
Penance
from Devadatta’s poems
Some nights, when all I do is scheme
to give Siddhattha schism, infighting, dissonance,
when I think of what a pleasure it will be
to give him “dissentry” – then I plan some days
of penance: to lie among wood ticks, crickets,
the breaching heads of worms and leeches,
to let the gall borers gnaw my toes;
to offer the soft flanges around the tops
of my ears to the water fleas and wasps.
I’ll let mosquitos gather and fly off pot-bellied
with my blood. I wont apply saliva
or mud, use any unguents, no paste of cloves
and honey, and though the moon will mock me
like a pointed instrument, like a round
and cooling poultice, I wont give comfort
to any part of my body, but cover myself
with nettles, itch-weed, with crow and turkey feathers,
with hen-house refuse so that mites, too,
can leave me scaled and scabbed.
I wont climb away from my skin
even if worms burrow, or web-spinning flies
hang threads in my beard and make slime.
Though my fingernails will have grown so long,
I’ll not scratch a single bite, or strike any insect
down, but I’ll palp them like strange antennae.
Then I’ll lie on the forest floor among the burrows
of roaches and long-horned stag beetles,
and the sound closest to my ears will be the sound
of army ants devouring everything to pieces.
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Adam King grew up in Newcastle, Australia. For the past 15 years he has taught English—a decade or so in Osaka and, more recently, in Guangzhou.
Naaz
the cow likes the music rowing the sun down steps aflame ancient boatload of straw COOL BAR ice cream smile friend one rupee for bananas is it mister I thought and saw 3 boys hand in hand in hand at the flower market mornings evenings walking funny Broadway sweat a reservoir mama baba the onions in her purple bag is there anywhere to park under the water gut he stands over his tiny fire the doors the windows all blues big stitches returning soon too hot to write it down she wears the old chains night of the 10 Kingfishers beating white sheets 2 at a green table bamboo ladder and scaffold day at the races where they burn the bodies ok take the cake Adam’s building 1893 1 for you too on the roof lime and soda pink Ganesh opens all the trick locks welcome HOTEL SEALAND movie star glasses they let the vultures pick them to bits cricket crackling over the radio start at THE NAAZ thanks for that Suhail paper stars hang in dirt houses down by the sewer site CO-OPTEX SARI HALL Preeti the sun goes my eyes close what I’ve forgotten the stone men life on the back of a truck steel dust prize always a Wolfgang loudspeaker glimpse of a song a little love tale what else she can’t sit 12 years rust stand under the gateway my 1st Bristol smoke on a rope how many miles kilometres feet make a grey page on Marine Drive a red double-decker your super fast bus to 100 per cent shakti throwing sparks what time the boat he told me a lighter each year in Sri Lanka slow rosewater cart heat because o I would be a sparrow come here for your crumbs no need for keys cutlet menu bells silver biriyani a bundle of sticks your calling how could he carry that weight over and over where it fits hurts 1 word says it all for the broom prime minister calendar took a week the ferry ride Shiva help him up the bald scabby hill crane tell the 1st word to Mr Xmas on the taxi licence get the nets from last night’s tide remaining 1893 a is for auto rickshaw 1 coconut pink straw drink daughters barefoot bright about her it is not the colour of the bus I sing transport mode bike tyre marks cycling recycling the wheels of the living structure he is trying to shake Sister Hyacinth could she be ready his arm on the hip stance to attention salute the doorboy rice glue to seal this venture of the heart mud and cardboard you knew the whole deal crank getting a cutter fork I thought laughter when Sammy Seven played that wedding if it’s sincerity get the head nod turned off the nose knows no rose balloon in a torn shirt better empty bolted steel door impregnable barbed wire broken bottles reading grey wall scratches perhaps a cheetah fight the last guest I wrote in a notebook champion brand names from the gods anxious about the burns not hurting you run you expect to catch up the song getting lost around scrap corners painted eyes every day a new window blessing the narrative of the bus salesman all your brothers crows flew into my dream what was it just a chassis bubonic thunderstorm whipping tea in an arc dusk dawn daal to cultivate OM GEMS DK TIME LAKSHMI CEMENT the spray cry of a lotus the flies will ignore the circle you drew around your lunch cockroach chalk what is it called when the breath ends ananda you’re after toys the bus leaves a tree waves the cow likes the music
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Among SMS’s books of poems and poetic prose are, most recently, And then something happened (Salt, 2004), Dementia Blog (Singing Horse, 2008), and the forthcomingMemory Cards: 2010-2011 Series. She wrote A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary Poetry (U of Alabama, 2005), and edits Tinfish Press out of her home in Kane`ohe, Hawai`i. She’s taught at the University of Hawai`i-Manoa for over two decades. Her blog can be found at http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com.
Memory Cards: Oppen Series
The lyric valuables. Your memory will be contained in a cloud. All that’s required is a little bit of feature extraction and data compression to complete the prosthesis. It’s called a “natural language,” this interface between me and my gadget. It does not answer to lament: I have lost my earrings; I have lost my teleprompter; I have lost my mind provokes only information. Unlyric me! I shall be mystic of the Knowing Cloud, on my wrist a gizmo covered by diagrams of slant patterns and draw plays. The poet’s a quarterback; she needs completions. She is only arm, the cloud’s prosthesis. An all-knowing receiver already struts. The only lyric is the lyric of fourth down.
–27 January 2011
There is a simple ego in a lyric, sometimes in a crowd. A man lies on the ground, surrounded by other men. I didn’t mean to shoot you in the face, laughs the boy playing Halo. The man who drowned with his daughter lost his father to drowning. When the guy at Starbucks asked again what I wanted, I said I’m visiting my mother with Alzheimer’s, I’m used to repetition. Two of the mummies were destroyed, to which Bryant said but that’s our future! They found the digital camera; she was smiling, the water was calm. To retrieve the past is not to guarantee it. We used to develop photos, but now they’re downloaded. When memory fails, the eye enlarges to take it in. He said a tourist turned her back on the ocean; a rogue wave threw her on the rocks by the tide pools. Their first aid kit came in handy.
–29 January 2011
I dreamed one night that I was in a hotel room filled with my books. I had a plane to catch, but I couldn’t carry them. Sell them! someone said, but I said I could not. I woke at 3, checked the news of Egypt, then listened to the sound of my own voice cataloguing my mother’s books. To each shelf I said no and no and no. It was as if whatever was contained in them was leaking out, as if memory had less to do with the past than with our attitude toward it, the intonation that covers it like red grease. The tail hook down, cables outstretched, you approach the carrier at a furious speed. Your fighter is but one word scrawled on the deck of a ship whose hold is an ambiguous space, full of men and machines and violence. I was here during the war, he writes, I was / in a house near here tho I cannot find it. The past tense of dreaming becomes the present past: I was. I was here, but now I cannot guide me.
–31 January 2011
This is the sky. This the poem constructed of sky and the children in the square grasping signs, and the parents of the children in the square, and the chanting in the dark space of sky that opens like a lid to its antithesis. The poem never intended to be a dictator, but it insists on form, control, an ordered space. Mine clamps down at the moment of counter-protest; you will not enter this square, it is closed against tomorrow’s sour sunlight, its barricades. The official narrative is of beauty, only. Once upon a time there was a crowd inside a square who sang. Once upon a time the force of their singing dislodged a pharaoh. Once upon a time the unacknowledged were
–3 February 2011
Whether one loves / The world or loves / Shelter / From it it is, if is continues. Tahrir Square is no shelter, though people sleep there. The poem is no shelter, however square. Neither affords protection from a torturer who lived in Texas and Florida. Exported pain is still pain. A man calls out, “Where am I? What is happening to me? Tell me!” No one says, as we did to Sylvia, “you live here; this is your home,” because prison is not home but way station, where way is suffering and station is not shelter. She asked her interrogator where she was: “you are nowhere,” he said. Nowhere is not station or shelter or square; it lacks all geometry. “If you look up you will see something you don’t ever want to see.” The regime demands pre-forgetting. Those you leave behind were blindfolded; you emerge into a part of the city you’ve never seen. It’s outside your history, if not theirs. You can go now.
–5 February 2011
It is the air of atrocity that settles onto the tent-city the square has become. Radhika can’t decide why some words end in –ys and others in –ies; the differences between “gurneys” and “families,” between “armies” and “pathways” are rule-bound, abstract. A young poet tortures himself on distinctions between night and Night, between dawn and its opposite. He writes down ideas he cannot explain, and in not explaining, loses them. The police state parses its words less delicately, demands its “children” go home. Torture is clear speech, though what is gleaned from it is not. I was wearing a blood-stained shirt, one says; it marked him as one of them. I heard myself tell the boy to clarify his grammar, glue limbs to his poem’s body. I asked him to construct a box for his cloud. Obama demands Mubarak clarify his language, spell it out. There’s no future in telling; it’s all show.
–10 February 2011
The vocabulary word of the day is euphoria.
–11 February 2011
The shape is a moment is a monument in process no flash no focus but a flag of our disposition winding around the square circle inside of box inside of cloud faces like voices coming and growing louder then quiet when Al-Jazeera turns to sports then back to euphoria in the circled square young woman in a shawl on youtube (this was 25 Jan) exhorts men to be men and old women in the square their mouths wide open and middle-aged men sweeping white dust with huge fronds and the body functions for once as a system blooms like a flow chart needing more space the lines across which are not final but dipped in martyr’s ink no one wants to leave the square or the circle they sleep propped against tanks against pavement against sharp angles violation of geometries of this body working this body with its stark white bandages over noses and cheeks and foreheads this coming into shape which is so beautiful to see
–12 February 2011
Juggler, why need I invent so much as if always in a space where time falls and picks itself up, replacing scratched post-it notes with new names for what is still a bus, a house, a square. He bears a name; she carries hers. It’s a pod lowered in a mine to retrieve lost men, brought out into a new tense, neither past nor present, but intermediate: yesterday I have been myself. The word “gas” was “chaos” misheard. She sent a letter that never arrived, but made sense of the non-response. Meaning is adopted, names a state that refuses to be still, is found beside a tank in Tahrir Square. The cloths are for wounds or warmth.
–13 February 2011
We are troubled by scratched things as by any touched surface. Abstraction abhors all but the vacuum; vog makes breath mean. It’s not to choose between clarity and obscurity, but to use one in the service of the other. The scratch is tracer bullet over an otherwise chaotic square. What happens next is idea more than event, though one comes encased in the latter like an iron lung that’s only a transitional machine. There’s democracy in the breath, but we’re holding ours.
–14 February 2011
Each of these memory cards begins from a sentence or a phrase from George Oppen’s New Collected Poems, edited by Michael Davidson (New Directions, 2002).
The memory card form requires that each prose poem fit on a large index card.
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sampurna Chattarji is a poet, novelist, and translator with eight books to her credit. Born in Ethiopia in November 1970, Sampurna grew up in Darjeeling, graduated from New Delhi, and is now based in Mumbai. Her debut poetry collection, Sight May Strike You Blind, was published by the Sahitya Akademi (Indian Academy of Letters) in 2007 and reprinted in 2008. Sampurna’s poetry has been anthologised in 60 Indian Poets(Penguin); Both Sides of The Sky (NBT); We Speak in Changing Languages (Sahitya Akademi); Interior Decoration: poems by 54 women from 10 languages (Women Unlimited); Fulcrum (Fulcrum Poetry Press, US) and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe, UK). Her 2004 translation of Sukumar Ray’s poetry and prose Abol Tabol: The Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray is now a Puffin Classic titled Wordygurdyboom! Sampurna’s most recent book for children is The Fried Frog and Other Funny Freaky Foodie Feisty Poems (Scholastic 2009). She is the author of two novels, Rupture (2009) and The Land of the Well (forthcoming 2011), both from HarperCollins.Absent Muses (Poetrywala, 2010) is her second poetry book. More about her work can be found athttp://sampurnachattarji.wordpress.com.
Why
Space Gulliver has gone.
I don’t miss her.
Then why does her going make me think of an evening in a hot northern town I erased from my biography, rarely said the name out loud, as if it were a curse, or a dirty family secret, the dust from the afternoon storm everywhere even with the windows barred, the floor a singeing tawa under my bare feet, barely fourteen, having shut myself up in the corner room to study, despite the heat, despite the fact that no one has told me to, despite my brilliant cousin, a scientist, visiting, who calls me, like no one else does, ‘tui’, despite chilled lime juice cordial, despite the fact that all around me cockroaches with enormous wings are flying towards the uncovered bulb above my head, monstrous, evil brown hard undying fear, despite the fact that any minute one of them may land on my back bent over my books in a cringe of revulsion and despair?
How
Rubidium is a woman she might have liked being.
Odd how the women from the poems keep chasing her through the gullies. Has she let them down? Acrostic, she called across to the long red hair, didn’t you like it? Intuition sucks, and who sees hyacinths anymore. She feels it is futile to argue. Which year do you live in, nineteen twenty-two? A little more spite and she will throw them off her tail. Rooms, rooms of her own. Virginia, Jacob, James. Why so Western? Why the men? Shuck it off. Live, leechlike. Here, take this sentence. A snake, a mongoose and a peacock. Happy? All true, even if it makes you laugh. She is covering up for covering up. One morning a baby monkey had tugged her shoelaces at the bus stop. She spoke to it calmly, it went away.
The house was open to the rain. No one thought of covering the stairs. The house saw a bent back moving backwards down the stairs, rag slowly moving. The house was a man standing at the top of the stairs, confusing morning for night. Eunuchs against the glass. Slippery yellow edible root. The house was new when they moved in. Limewashed walls shedding gently. It was better than the one before but worse than the next. Last riot, they burned it down.
Where
Behind the breeze the bonfire blazed. No time for tongue-twisters.
Grandfathers have a way of finding where the fish-shops are, even in a strange town, crossing fields, asking strangers, returning triumphant, the fish oil wobbling separately in a little plastic pouch.
Grandmothers have a way of knowing you are awake, of cooking strange flowers.
On no particular day, a line of vultures arrived to sit on the compound wall. Smokie was a band we listened to. All was not unbeautiful.
What
Miss Popular in a homemade frock. Clingfilming, jaywalking. So what if the ringers aren’t dead! Small meridian, the put-put-puttering squeal. Hail, tempo. Squeeze elbow knee and back into elbow back and knee. Not fit for goats. Last time she rode a rodeo was in a tea-truck. Try to imagine you are a picked, curled, fried and fermented leaf. Ignominious patri. Bookworm, fattening slowly, thickening out the world. The mut-mut-muttering formula that sees her through another test. Star pupil in the teacher’s eye. Fall, wish, shoot. These are the ways a girl survives. Nun in a dun sari. Grotto, gay. Carry in a sealed envelope the weal of trust. Amaretto, acerbic. Call nobody home. The tempo, the Matador. Skin a rotten place to hide in. A fist in the breast from a passing cyclist. Scar from the too-tight tie-ups. Lipserving, daydreaming.
What saved her?
When
Your sky travels towards me
I have been trying to outrun it, shifting location rapidly, bell-tower, syringe, locomotive, landfill, a vanished Syrian Christian eatery, Lebanon, cedar pencils, sackfuls of rice. Sometimes I trip in my eagerness to get away, Salamun, Sam Pitroda, sapodilla. If I travel fast enough from the detectives, savage, to the amulet, unread, I might have time to catch the next and the next, Hadron Collider, Right to Education, gas leak, hung parliament, sabotage, the Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Jia Zhang-Ke, exactly my age, not a wrinkle or a grey hair, says: I feel time is a tragic thing. I feel it too, compatriot, smoke rising in the public bath. In a Brooklyn flat a Chinese-American poet puts her baby to sleep. The Chinatown bus to Boston might take me far enough, to clam chowder, mussels steamed in milk. Oh but this is slowing me down, I can feel again the taste of it, this lingering will not do. I have been trying to translate two words for a month now, drunken god, Shiva’s Stupor, should I say blue-god, or just say Krishna, how will I ever get across the story of the snake goddess in the chamber of the new bride? Meanwhile, the clouds are coming, they have the same shape, texture, colour, terror is a cumulus, run.
When the landmass broke away from what would be India and travelled toward what would become Madagascar the small blind snakes went along.
That is the only explanation.
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Tim Wright lives in Melbourne in a house backing onto a train line. The poems for this issue were written in the south west of Western Australia and are part of a longer series.
From a tank of water to a cup of coffee. ‘Mistral duet’ (toaster). Panasonic. A group called Save Our Suburbs: ‘I think we need to work to address the main concerns.’ An elderly couple at the door with copies of Watchtower, husband and wife, more or less out for a chat. Do I believe that science and the Bible are compatible? The different light of a Saturday. Phana-sonic? Turn the radio down too low to understand.
Nationalism is always bubbling away somewhere. That which is of academic interest. Acts of language. Electronic grizzle, ‘dubby’. Increasing the value of the easily available. Apparently what it’s all about. Black pencil. Turn on water and wonder. Printed out poems now Things to Do lists. Inside a house in Australia, learning the language of France. Cough with confidence and continue speaking. Cracking cans on the porch. Those interesting times of sobriety, like a metallic token collected in the tray of a machine. Stretch your legs.
Boxes in the landscape. The assumptions of architecture. A different beach. The longer a trend takes to reach one. The grimy inner city becomes an idea. Patterns of light through the curtains. The Bolaño effect. Packets of mud. The relatively recent feels distant, yesterday six months. Amnesty. Lines from The Simpsons. Flip book. Guy Maddin’s ‘My Winnipeg’. A Grammarian could be an alien. ‘I can’t even begin to think of that yet’. A missing bracket, bed made of earth.
~ ~ ~
Compression: the shape of an animal running. ‘My mind was elsewhere’. Some thing, with other things pressed into it. A warehouse. Crushed leaves and bad posture. Or reaching between leaves to take something back. Respiration: an engine turning over. Next door, not communicated. A temporary cenotaph. I had never seen a swarm of bees before, pouring into itself like that. And the sky incites an exclamation. Browsing as methodology. Cable car.
Toxic green. The sense of expectation, when walking very early in the morning, that one is always just about to encounter a body. Inhale through a turbine. A senile blue. The dream washes over the framework. Bend over backwards. Catch the train somewhere new. A place one was once questioned. Heavy ankle length skirt. Manufactured reply. Dessicated branch, place it in the freezer. Dramatic postcard. Not the work but what the work implies.
Bust wrapped in cellophane; diaphanous transcript. Are we becoming a nation of wimps? A jug of beer carried carefully across a room. Luminous sweepings, staple remover. Drumming on gathered materials. A casual eclipse, seen from behind. Opinion columnist; common irritant. Chain of Ponds Road, western New South Wales. Let the nostalgia run its course. ‘Chromatose’. Having driven through applause. A book, a beam. A drinking song, not easily brushed off. Walking on forest floor. Rushed through a hospital. Darkish glint.
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Geoff Page is an Australian poet who has published eighteen collections of poetry as well as two novels, four verse novels and several other works including anthologies, translations and a biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann. He retired at the end of 2001 from being in charge of the English Department at Narrabundah College in the ACT, a position he had held since 1974. He has won several awards, including the ACT Poetry Award, the Grace Leven Prize, the Christopher Brennan Award, the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Poetry and the 2001 Patrick White Literary Award. Selections from his work have been translated into Chinese, German, Serbian, Slovenian and Greek. He has also read his work and talked on Australian poetry in throughout Europe as well as in India, Singapore, China, Korea, the United States and New Zealand.
The Class
After forty years of fiction, he dreams he’s in a class again, back at the beginning. The tutor doesn‘t show herself, as is the way with dreams. All of them must read a story, a classic that they’ve loved for years: Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, Frank O’Connor, Alice Munro. They read them carefully and well, one by one, and then as if at her instruction, and almost ceremonially, strip the words away like washing and throw them in a corner. The idea hangs there, newly naked, a yard or so above the desk they find they have in common. The dream goes on. He does not wake. It’s not quite his turn yet.
Nicholas YB Wong is the winner of Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition and a nominee for Best of the Net 2010 and Best of Web 2011 Anthology. His poetry is forthcoming in Assaracus: Journal of Gay Poetry, Prime Number Magazine, San Pedro River Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Third Wednesday and the Sentinel Champion Series. He is currently an MFA Candidate at the City University of Hong Kong. Visit him at http://nicholasybwong.weebly.com