April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Alex Skovron was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and came to Australia aged nine. He is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Autographs (prose-poems, 2008), as well as a prose novella, The Poet (2005). Awards for his poetry include the Wesley Michel Wright Prize, the John Shaw Neilson Award, the Australian Book Review Poetry Prize, and for his first book, The Rearrangement (1988), the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore awards. His novella was joint winner of the FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction. He lives in Melbourne and works as a freelance editor. His New & Selected Poems is in preparation.
Citadel
Then one night the books ganged up on him. He was seated at his table in the studio-den, composing a cheque for the recent fence-repair, when an odd rapping, like muffled drummery behind his chair, a kind of tapping, caused him to cock his shoulder. The books were floating off the shelves to the floor, in random order; hundreds had already sorted themselves in steep spires. As he swivelled, stunned, watching the stacks grow higher, the bookcases empty, each steepening tower like a tottering sentry began to flow, a twitching perpendicular river, converging on his patch in the middle. There was no time to unravel the riddle – he was aghast, then horrified, distinctly, for the piles were merging. Some books had their heavy gilded spines towards him thickly, some their grinning edges – surging, swirling backbones bluntly fisted (convex or squared, many jacketed), or concave ledges viciously snapping, swaying as they listed; thousands of covers chaotically flapping, yet no chunk of any teetering creature (each mystically bracketed) likely to collapse. Cowering now, subsiding to the Persian rug, he saw the twisters lapse to a terminal dance, each obelisk in its terrible advance gave a kind of shrug, appeared to shudder forth and back, clearly readying for the final attack. Desperate by now that it must be a dream, he squeezed his eyes shut, breathed deep, then took a chance. Look! Bookcases crammed again, and quiet – no more savage parade! But flickering on the floor, its pages splayed, a single book.
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Maria Takolander’s poetry has been widely published. Her first book of poems, Ghostly Subjects (Salt 2009), was shortlisted for a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2010. She was also winner of the inaugural Australian Book Review Short Story Prize in 2010, and has recently been awarded an Australia Council grant to develop a book of short stories, which will be published by Text. She is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies and Creative Writing at Deakin University in Geelong.
Violence
The goat fished from the old wooden jetty. A hangover, he thought, was a state of mind, like the stench of the slimy pippies on the hook, the pull of the dirty tide on the line. He wiped the residue of the bait onto the tangled fur on his flank and picked up the thermos lid of coffee, cold as the dawn. The sea, he mused, always made him philosophical. A couple of pelicans had settled on the peeling roof of the only boat moored among the mangroves, tucking their beaks into the rancid feathers of their backs. From time to time the goat saw their eyes, rimmed like a drunk’s, move to watch him. It was no use; his bucket was empty. The fish, it seemed, had cleared out of this place. There were mud-crabs, exposed at low tide like rickety bones, and the usual detritus of birds. The landscape, though, had found a way into him. It was something his wife had never understood. Sitting in the deck chair, the goat rested the rod between his pressed legs and poured some more coffee. He heard the sound of the slick water on the hull of the broken-down boat, weighted by the pelicans. He swallowed some of the foul liquid and noted how the mangroves had spread. They were secretly closing the place in. A seagull flew down from the anonymous sky and landed on the boat’s stern. Its orange claws hooked the taffrail, and it began to vomit sound from its neck like something jagged and material. The goat pitched the fishing rod at the bird. The pole landed on the oily water like a praying mantis. The seagull stopped and looked at the goat. Then, with unblinking eyes, it took up the screeching again. The goat, casting his chair and thermos into the sea, began to bleat and bleat in return.
Beauty
She could not be said to think, but standing alone she was bothered by the vast movement and sound of the grass on the plains as the night bloodied the day. When the world yielded and was swallowed, she pressed herself to the hard dust, holed among the rocks with those of her skin and smell and hair and blood, and rubbed herself from fear in the hot place she knew until the wind swept through her. When she opened her eyes she was yet in the ravenous night, among the flesh and sounds of her kin, who were all given to the night within, and far from being riven by the thrill of the wind her body was quiet as a beast with its throat cut.
*
The day disturbed her with hunger like flint, so they trapped a young beast and held it down and razed its neck again and again until it bled and stopped moving. Her teeth were made for tearing. She took rest on the spoiled grass with the blood and flesh of the beast on her hands and tongue and on those to whose blood and flesh she belonged. There were the sky creatures, ragged as the carcass beneath their floating, and behind a strand of thirsty trees the sloping dogs. Then came the rustling night, always wanting more than the light, and as they fled through the gloaming plains it struck her that she was not afraid but whetted by its unending hunger.
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Kate Waterhouse is co-editor of Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986–2008 (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009). Until 2010, she lived in Sydney with her husband and three young daughters. She is currently living in Auckland, working on her accent and two poetry collections—one set in Australia and one in New Zealand, and on a second editing collaboration with Jennifer Harrison.
Cups (what is the sound of a mother breaking?)
all this mothering fills mine up but what about those whose cup got broken / no fault theirs / some damaged / father / mother / uncle / other trusted figure / institution (choose one) / cocking it up before the girl got her own shot at it / who comes in the night when she’s all done with pouring to lift the sob / howl from her throat / let it go like a wing and her baby with it / only a light space left / a feathered echo / where’s the compensation at 2am for theft of a good role model / who turns up in the place of a missing mother / grandmother / sister / functioning family unit / a class action’s clearly needed / think of the damages / diy security’s a difficult business / always demand outstripping supply / there you are carefully filling the cracks/papering over / three coats of the right paint / when the baby arrives in a jugful of milk and under that cup of yours there’s a dark pool and a suitcase waiting / my grandmother gave me a matching cup / saucer / plate set / fine bone china / she knew a thing or two before she laid all thirty of hers out on the stainless steel top / don’t cut on the bench / and fresh lamingtons waiting for the gang to come around before they went out on a boat long sunk / aunts and uncles ought not to fall out at times like that but grandma’s cup had a crack and some of my uncle was lost there in the first few flights of the mothering jug and it went the way of leftover milk at a tea party / I’d rather be the Queen of Hearts than Alice with a broken cup so next time you’re thinking / not thinking of her children / think of the cup and piss off to a cave / choose another portfolio / get some professional help / whatever / she’ll thank you for it
Iron Cove
After the drought, a week of rain and the ground gives up its water. Obviating sleep I run alone through deep pools that bathe the roots of trees. Cloud, close like smoke, amplifies the whine of a 747 hulk ghosting in over Callan Park. Here clouds of leaves lie down on the past but a flaked sign speaks: You are now entering the grounds of an acute psychiatric hospital. This morning troubling no one – runners, cyclists, dogs all absent. Around King George Oval tall turpentines incline towards the north, the queue of planes immune to rain, lantana prettily strangling the undergrowth. Past Leichardt pool where the track breaks out to open ground a Noisy Miner hunches disconsolate in the casuarinas – a grove of them that twins this cove of idle fishing boats to a small Italian town; the rowing club locked, skiffs pulled out like prosthetic limbs, the persistence of water. Red-eyed, a gang of crows shadow a magpie chick abandoned by the path; anxiety, such a human concept, as in: the magpie waited anxiously while the crow looped across the grass sours the world that is, festers in what’s to come. My feet skim sunken ground, overhead another jet engine grinds through the rain, that crushes us with love.
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Nicholas YB Wong is the author of Cities of Sameness (Desperanto, 2012). His poems are forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Gargoyle, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, The Journal, Mead, Nano Fiction, Platte Valley Review, The Portland Review, Quiddity and REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters. He reads poetry for Drunken Boat. Visit him at http://nicholasybwong.weebly.com.
Journey
“Monogamous. I’m interested in monogamous.”
— Anne Carson
She pulls the seat belt across her breasts to reach the buckle, a schist in femininity. She looks away. Other cars are arranged in the parking lot neatly like urns. Soon, doors will open, hand-breaks released, people busy getting in and out. She envies those clean and metallic bodies, where a scratch can be covered up by paint. In a car’s life, scars never last long. He turns on the air conditioning, her hands fold on her laps to stop the chill entering her from below the dress. Their car moves, they don’t – first to the bakery, then her office and his. The tires, monogamous to this route, deserve a merit certificate. But when they are about to join the traffic outside, she looks into the rear mirror and finds herself, years younger, in the back seat, where they first made out, where they both thought such desire could last for however long they wanted, where they found nothing in life was monotonous.
Paranormal Panorama
Galicians are proud of their potatoes and watercress; mangosteens and mangoes bear heritage only linguistically. A sheen of shame blows in when the Thai family arrives at the infinity pool with in-room bathrobes and noise. The father nears the sundeck chair whose whole existence is to serve sweaty human bodies. His white sideburns say he is a guru who bareback-rides elephants to his sumptuous poppy fields. His six-year-old bomb-dives, causing ripples that make the water’s face look aged. The mother and daughter are acting maternal at the far end, splashing water onto each other like giant frogs in swamps, ready to lay eggs that look like sago in coconut tapioca. A deserted swing in Argentina sways by itself for ten days, a new tourist attraction. A shark with a snake’s body and toothed gills is found in Japanese waters after earthquakes. More absurd is me closing a book, looking at how they merge joy with travelling. A swimming pool cliché: the father counts from three, his children kicks with skills learned and not learned, departing from the edge of infinity toward me. The clouds are doing their job by hiding the sun, blurbs on the book jacket greased and glazed by tanning oil. This is what the website promised: our resort staff clears floating leaves eight times a day with an extended net, even no one swims there with laughter.
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ivy Alvarez is the author of Mortal (Washington, DC: Red Morning Press, 2006). A recipient of writing residencies from MacDowell Colony (USA), Hawthornden Castle (UK), and Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), her work is published in journals and anthologies in many countries and online, with individual poems translated into Russian, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean. www.ivyalvarez.com.
The secret sister
She appeared in the meadow, two hours after dawn, nightgown fluttering in her wake as the sun gilded the hills, the mist rose pale blue, a scentless smoke. Where she stood, she was a column of white and she herself pale, lips bluing, too, hair a black waterfall. Turning to look at her, the cold grabbed at the skin of my belly, my calves. In a minute, she was younger by a year. You could see it, like taking a watch pin between finger and thumb, and winding it backwards. Shrinking into her clothes, hair rising, skin tightening, smoothing, plumping up, chest-height, waist-height, knee-height, the reeds teasing me with glimpses of her. Then she was a Moses in her swaddling clothes, then the smallest embryo, then a stain. She did not have a name.
The Museum of Inexplicable History
For six months I arranged museum dioramas; in placards explained the scenes; led bewildered tourists through small rooms. The pungent oranges and bright, green wings, ebony mocha okay choking down coffees, teas, distant gazes. Now I am safe in the deep V of a weekday, cradled like a silkworm, suspended, watching the scene below. The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair, green trousers and purple velour sleeves. Queered courtiers, courtesans, slippered feet denting stone steps. When Alice steals away and consoles the Duchess’s baby, it metamorphoses into a pig and runs away from her, runs away. As I would, if I could remember. I do remember. That I, just ten, became the mystery of course, reverse, twitch, emerge. In the distance, a chiming swish of chintz, of pastel polyester: the Avon Lady treks door to door. Pinkness announces itself, calm and self-important. People are sharks, while all the wild protected liminal woods hoist their nets, weighing the harvest. Rough chaff husks falling, blowing away. Something offensive: a revolver is cooked into a codex. I read it closely. It’s January: time to go.
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Misbah Khokhar was born in Karachi-Pakistan, with both European and Indian ancestry. She currently lives in Melbourne. She holds a Masters in Philosophy in Creative Writing from the University of Queensland. Her work appears in Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Contemporary Asian Australian Poets and Peril. She has been featured on ABC Radio’s Poetica, and has performed at the Queensland Poetry Festival. She was highly commended by Thomas Shapcott, Brownyn Lea and John Kinsella, and mentioned as a ‘standout’ in Lea’s essay ‘Australian Poetry Now’ (Poetry Magazine, May 2016, Ed. Robert Adamson). Her debut collection Rooftops in Karachi is published with Vagabond deciBels3.
Rooftops in Karachi
My cousin has named all of his homing pigeons. He takes them in his soft hands and feeds them, but I have a feeling he could just as easily use those hands to snap their thin necks. My other cousin, who lives in the same house, goes around shooting cats. Since I arrived I have been putting out bowls of milk each night. Another cousin has an imaginary lover who she has introduced me to. She makes him out to be so real that I believe he is. But I can never seem to see him, which is not due to him being imaginary, but because he is shy and agile. She describes the way he kisses her, and the conversations they have, and to this day I remember his name. I know it’s been said that falconers feel their hearts soar with their falcons, but I don’t think it’s just a feeling.
I’m Going to Give You a Photograph
And when I take the photograph you will be saved. From what I don’t know. I’ve given you a photograph where you can store your grief: let it leave your face, ignite and fade. I’ve given you a photograph, your spectral resin will have no copies. It will be your canoptic surface, a scale of the immensity of your beauty. The flash will burn away your fate, will make you momentarily famous. I will give you a photograph that will be your golden fleece, a replica that answers you in time with a little betrayal.
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Adam Aitken’s fourth major book is Eighth Habitation. In 2010 he was Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai’i Manoa. His work has appeared in The Australian’s Review of Books, Southerly, Heat, Poetry (Chicago), Jacket, Cha, and Drunken Boat. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Imperial Days
‘ a sort of
irksome Larkin-land’
– Pam Brown
My father’s imperial days, he remembers those, the better hours. To be born British. How coloured/ful was that? Spring 1961, a run on galoshes. Naipaul’s grumpy prose: and there is only one course: flight. Flight to the greater disorder, the final emptiness. Wot, Balham? Let us say that he’s forgotten the episode with the sleeping pills. I am glad my mother was no Sylvia Plath. He forgot the presents and gifts not reciprocated (a pair of black French knickers). He can’t recall the affairs and counter affairs, the improbable survival of beauty, art, the house which leaked and the stink of my sour nappies. The boredom of housebound employment and unemployment. My mother reminds me. The well-wishers arriving, drenched at the door during a bus strike. Her favourite story: an Australian novelist who couldn’t light the boiler in a miners strike. Stuffed it with too much newspaper she said. I’ve read about the white-out of 1963, the killer fog of ’64. My father’s letters and nightmares of the dead and the imminence of mutually assured destruction. The scarce tropical flowers and fresh fruit. The deadliness of the chill and the butcher’s queue for the last pot roast. I remember the sawdust on the floor. She remembers the drunken au pair with the French lover. Or was it the French au pair with the drunk lover? The cardigan poets who ate her out of house and home. The unending party. My father dreamt of a pottery in Wales. My mother refused. The boredom of 65, the plaster-eating mould. The summer of love, they missed it.
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Brendan Ryan has had three collections of poetry published, the most recent being A Tight Circle, Whitmore Press, in 2008. His next collection of poetry, Travelling Through the Family, will be published by Hunter Publishers in 2012.
The killing work
The Hereford steer from wild country that charged our Valiant as we tried to shift it into a fresh paddock. Herd leader, cantankerous, fearless; a beast we couldn’t trust. Dents in the quarter panels, tongue swipes on the bumper. Pushed deeper into the paddock, we reverse away from the lowered horns, my father swearing, wrenching the steering wheel left, right, wheels skidding over cape weed. My brother and I in the back seat look away from what we know is not quite right. Not a time to speak with a beast on the loose, tearing through a barbed wire fence, flipping over, an apparent heart attack. We stare at the frothing mouth. My father silenced. The Hereford steer from wild country left on the track for the knackery truck.
scrubbed concrete floors
latex gloves, Muslim slaughtermen
rows of carcasses slide towards you
Returning from away, I ask about our pet cow Beefy – a cross-bred black dairy cow. The only cow we could hug, nuzzle, who would amble up to us, raise her head to sniff, rub against us. Not a productive milker, the type of cow who recognizes her own presence, unafraid of dogs, almost personable. You’re eating her, came the reply. Cut down, packed into plastic bags, steaks and ribs piled high in the Deep Freeze. A family has to eat. We ate steaks for breakfast, dinner and tea yet rarely butchered our own. Deaths in the paddock were acceptable, regrettable, something to rise from while talking around the red laminex table, those heifers that need to be ear-tagged.
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jen Crawford is a New Zealander living in Singapore. Her poetry collections include Bad Appendix (Titus Books), Napoleon Swings (Soapbox Press) and most recently, Pop Riveter, a set of factory poems available in limited edition from Pania Press. She teaches creative writing at Nanyang Technological University.
clear days giant sacra
this is for. it is not about or to, but I wish it was with. or it is with, about, for, to. it will be with. it will be with. it is not it is with.
with a walking, a donkey alongside. the gravel releases dust and the dust takes up the sun, dumping it across the valley. it is now 22 degrees and 6pm. the decline is fitted with small mauve wildflowers. we can look at them fined in the light and dark, narrow for pleasure. with that I have an excellent headache, from the tightening of the sun’s plates against the hills. while the dog and the donkey chase each other through the discards we stand here cantering our trebuchets, in arms. there’s nowhere to set the baby down. when I had this pain before I didn’t consider my hip considering a weight. when I saw the gravel I didn’t know you would be with me, to hold and cantering.
it will be. a strong lower back and rain or light as circular breathing. it will be with me your cream-covered book. a mouth full of simple exercises in shaded awnings. let no more than a lungful. need it be one after another, in and out, left and right? only without clarinets, and so far these continue, in will be with me. I am still walking. at times it has been said that the problem is exacerbated by the fact that even dictating physicians frequently have difficulty with plurals and that this pushes the burden straight back on the transcriptionist. but this is a curfew from when. in will be with me it will be with me, this alongside and with pains. this in between fingers and around fingers, the gravel light. this donkey I am conscious, and child.
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Julie Chevalier’s short-story collection, Permission to Lie, was published by Spineless Wonders in 2011. Two poetry collections are forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann: linen tough as history, and Darger: his girls.
haunted girl lines my pocket with headlines
girl sends me off forever but to sing novena sends me girl sends me off forever girl
sends me to hospital girl reveals the clinic girl sends me spelling didn’t send the
question girls sends off clouds from the window sends me off forever the ward where I
was washing a girl but washing the floor wanted girl sends me a blossom on a lunch
tray girl sends dead bouquet in the rubbish a pissing patient girl gave newspapers send
me off girls forever sang about girl forever off girls but moving girls send girls away
forever snow didn’t girl didn’t sends me axe to shave stopped broke the food trolley
coming girl sends me off
& dribbled catsup on his clean shirt april 12, 1972
as soon as mr darger left for mass yeah, four times a day i sneaked into his room & grabbed the clothes off
his chair really hot water & extra scoops of lux out of the bendix & pegged to the line david suggested the
goofy old coot take a bath no siree we brazillians don’t like to bathe in winter april 12, hardly of course
he’s not brazillian i ironed the clothes dry while he was in the tub the old man grimaced when we yelled
surprise happy birthday just us lodgers & the landlords in the yard he bent down to pick up a rusty bottle
cap & could hardly stand up again leaned on a chair & stared at the clouds he fed hot dog sandwiches to the
landlord’s dog the only thing he said was the good lord always claps thunder on my birthday i wouldn’t say
grateful for the angel cake, no three pieces my seven minute icing the new tube pan didn’t stick the dog
followed him halfway up the stairs to his room