April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Bella Li is a Melbourne poet and editor. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Meanjin, Cordite and Otoliths.
Voyage
Sullen days. The corsair moves mechanically on its hinges. Beneath our proscenium arch, wily ports ply their trade; measuring out the hours in skeletons and lampshades. The hold littered with props. Flat clouds drifting idly along the cardboard coast. (In the dawn they emerge, pale with grief.) I cannot remember biding time in the shallows with the air so steep. And the space behind the sun growing and growing, the stalls silent and empty on quiet nights. There were months when great shadows fell across the waves. And we moved, so it seemed, through lost oceans; past sunken islands from which the sounds of mourning stole. It is true that the flight was exhausting; my eyes reeked of distance. But when the blackness lifted, the horizon—beyond the dim circle of lights—remained featureless, unaltered. Now the shapes of our desires do not change but mimic, with each curtain fall, the appearance of a predictable set of stars. When evening transpires (at the appointed time, in the appointed place), the tide reverses; our loyal machines rise, assemble themselves across the deck. Wolf-like, sand-like. Waiting for that same, slow mirage: the familiar moon, hung from its lamprey sky. Swinging guilt.
E 44 10 N 33 15
In the year of the Hegira 622, driven from the city and exiled, I arrived at the mountains of the . The journey was arduous. But I was “armed with the terrors of the sword”. And the movement of the heavenly bodies (the western side of the city entirely round) filled the sky. The city was entirely round; the inhabitants remarkable for their treachery. Concerning the treacherous mountains. Concerning the origin of the name “ ” (in the palace, there was a small ). Here the young prince—concealing his deformity with a veil—saw in the heavens the terrible rising. And “the phantom drew back his veil”. Massacred, according to custom, the vast number of the inhabitants. There followed “a grievous famine”. (In the eastern sky I saw the sun.) One morning, according to the vast number of oriental historians, the sun “a little after rising, completely lost its light”. To the great astonishment of the astronomers, this darkness (in the eastern palace persisting). Persisted until noon.
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Michael Farrell has previously published prose poems in a raiders guide (Giramondo 2008). He coedited (with Jill Jones) Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets (Puncher and Wattmann 2009). His latest publication is thempark (Book Thug 2010). Contact: limecha@hotmail.com.
Contretemps
Red wine is certifiably itchy trying to get Linda to splash Sally . When Sally walks in wearing Brad ’s shirt – the one with the heather on it . What isn ’ t a contretemps with those people ? It wasn ’ t my fault I buried the drugs , Sally said , wilting the lettuce with hot oil , Appalachian style . Glenda managed to join the tennis club , only to find that Tony had left , and had taken up croquet – or crochet – or Pinochet – or Pinocchio – or pinochle – or pineapple mastication for his health . Linda blamed everyone . Did you see Hal collapse at the piano , with one of those pussy willow rib – ticklers on ? How much irony did you put in that drink ? he gasped . I am going to get me a slice of Brad ’ s heather shirt — you see if I don ’ t ! A dog is here , with a message for the cows . . . ‘ Drop dead ’ , I think he said , and when Angelo turned up shirtless on his motorbike . . . People started doing a bit of algebra in their front mashed potato ( it was Halloween , after all ) . ( Teenagers panting under the eaves and all that . ) They’ve got Supertramp playing on the green this year ; I don ’ t know what respectable folkies see in ‘ \ ’ ‘ / ’ them myself . They ’ re no Yoko Onos are they ? Angelo turned the heat up by taking a hacksaw to the last baguette – as if there aren ’ t kids to foster in his own village – or whatever they have up in those rainbows he lives in . The bridge fell on Hal ’ s house last night , but no one believed him so his grandmother was stuck there half the night , with a girder holding her scalp in place : you could say . But how the bridge got there is anyone ’ s business .
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Kirby Wright was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is a graduate of Punahou School in Honolulu and the University of California at San Diego. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Wright has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and is a past recipient of the Ann Fields Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Award, The Browning Society Award for Dramatic Monologue, and Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowships in Poetry and The Novel. BEFORE THE CITY, his first book of poetry, took First Place at the 2003 San Diego Book Awards. Wright is also the author of the companion novels PUNAHOU BLUES and MOLOKA’I NUI AHINA, both set in Hawaii. He was a Visiting Writer at the 2009 International Writers Conference in Hong Kong, where he represented the Pacific Rim region of Hawaii and lectured with poet Gary Snyder. He was a Visiting Writer at the 2010 Martha’s Vineyard Writers Residency in Edgartown, Mass., and also the 2011 Artist in Residence at Milkwood International, Czech Republic.
Song for the Joy Luck Club Waitress of Kowloon Tong
“Sihk faahn,” you giggled, serving shrimp dim sum with congee porridge. In the restaurant you read my fortune: “Yat geuk dap leung syun,” then scrawled name and email on a paper napkin.
You live off Festival Walk on the 60th floor with your parents. “Lang do pow kang,” boasted your mother. We sit on a bench beside the light rail track. Smog unfurls over the mountain like a bone-white flag as your shiny black hair rivers through me. \ Lips taste of peanuts from dragon beard candy. I summon the boy in me hidden for decades. “Ngoh oi nei,” I stammer. Your eyes say you don’t believe.
I search for our future as my train passes.
Notes:
sihk faahn: bon appetit
yat geuk dap leung syun: 1 foot on 2 boats (beware of cheating in a relationship)
lang do pow kang: so pretty the mirror breaks
ngoh oi neih: I love you
Sound Effects in Vista
Boom-ah-boom-ah-boom-boom. The walls and tables quiver. The F-18s are at it again, practice bombing the Whiskey and Zulu regions of neighboring Camp Pendleton. They carpet bomb while I’m stretched out on the carpet. Fluffy the cat folds her ears, scrambles for cover. They bomb through Letterman’s monologue—I pretend the jerk next door is banging his drums. The windows rattle like hippie tambourines. Newborn hawks in the Torrey Pine scream at the planets and stars.
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jill Jones has published six full-length books of poetry, including Dark Bright Doors, which was shortlisted for the 2011 Kenneth Slessor Prize. She co-edited, with Michael Farrell,Out Of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets. She is a member of the J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide.
Not Far
Is he gauging the distance between the station and the rain, or is it just another exchange? Like the packets these clouds will drop, but not here. I’m just as distant when he goes off smoking. Is there nothing left? Some of us manage to talk but not touch, speaking to air in all the common folly and gist inside us while a cop car circles the block. Whoever believes they’ll find what they’re looking for and how little it matters? Just as someone moves the hands of the clock and wishes maps were bigger. He’s back again, stabbing the phone, edgy keys in pocket. Each time gets more icy. I don’t imagine what he’s saying, please believe me, where’s the money, can’t come.
My excuses are extracted from this body by invisible operations of time that’s been bent, lungs and knapsacks, shallow breathing, all that dumb effort, just to go home again, and too much fun. I haven’t noticed the stones for days and leaves have got dirtier. Still, I never throw anything on the tracks or have crossed. I’m more careful than a tree even in winter, in places I can’t go outside of a time I only imagine but often recall. As so much exists to imagine. And so much gone, only a quarter forgotten. But we speak into the havens, lines of communiqué, blocks with holes. As we express little grunts, packages from the breast, gulping like winners but also spent, as we imagined it, bright and clear, but not far, not that far.
Another Mystery
It’s dawn and you still can’t get across. There’s a rowboat on the lake under moonlight. Behind you is a house full of suspects. Fate and the hangman are making arrangements. It’s good to have company and childish desires. The rain harbours feelings in the nervy night. I’m watching the incriminating clock. Who’s capable of love while we’re looking for motives? I’m guilty telling the truth, it’s what I know.
What’s this coldness? What are these shawls? There are too many men in hats, while we’re blaming ourselves, seeing what we’re not supposed to know, or swallowing pills. Animals are without cash flows or alibis. Birds rise into the light, while you play with money you don’t have, floating another prospectus from the wharf. All the little girls are grown-ups. What has been overlooked? A strange kind of parsimony, “Set your children free!”
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ivy Ireland is a part-time cabaret performer, creative writing tutor, harpist, magician’s assistant, and PhD candidate. Ivy was awarded the 2007 Australian Young Poet Fellowship, and has had her poems published in various literary magazines and anthologies. Ivy’s first solo poetry publication came out in 2007 and is entitled Incidental Complications.
L’escale Restaurant, Greenwich, CT
and it’s not like you have some other place to be. tea, open fire place, open fire on some other space for avoidance. it’s not like you are this ashes urn, portable picnic for later holocausts. or this charred log. you aren’t even the small burning before the final ash out. most other people come here to support themselves in whatever horror seems most appropriate in whichever day dream. of theirs. this day. why not you. this time. possibly they realise you won’t tip well even though lord knows desmond tutu ate here just last week. exclusivity should equal your absence. it’s not as though anyone can shape this differently to how they were born to shape it. there are no other tools, no contrasting fashions, no further instructions. what does equality really signify in any case. an afternoon of missing your morning of the subsequent day means little here. sunlight so new and distant, almost reaching the sand inlet before these clouds join forces to obfuscate it out.
The Gaps
The text has holes in it, little keyholes for the sake of myth-making, and only the one star-gazing out can (im)possibly slip into them. There is a crucial adjustment when “how can I exist?” turns into “how can I be alive in this?” Suddenly those roundabout machines we built to keep ourselves way out of critical theory converge in the centre, provoking and awakening an idea of onwards-and-upwards. This sensation is momentary.
Even if I say to you “you are this if this is life” it won’t matter and we will continue into cake at 3pm, our bodies refusing forever. Even if I sew in to my own skin the text: I do not require anything to continue this remaining, the stitches will only remain until they don’t anymore. And we’ll need them to stay there forever.
To perform becomes the central verb. Like the encroaching of the sea, we now perform this abeyance as though this temporary pause to consider could be stitched into skin, as though that very same skin could push its way through all the gaps the text could (im)possibly hold. As though, at the end, that same stinking vellum could be stretched over contingency like a disappearance-blanket. As though we could then hide away under it, remain in this word: love.
April 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Suneeta Peres da Costa is an award-winning writer whose work includes the bestselling novel Homework (Bloomsbury), stories, essays, and poems in local and international journals and anthologies, as well as numerous productions for ABC Radio. The pieces that appear here are taken from a collection of short, experimental fiction. She currently lives in Sydney.
The Changed Woman
Had she changed, she wondered? For though there were some visible signs of her transformation what was difficult was that the more significant changes had happened inside her and therefore could not really be seen at all. Often she tried to remember and make the gestures of her old self, and while this might have reassured the others, she herself knew this old self was merely a sheath, an elaborate and outmoded disguise. When she discarded it, however, it seemed these people, much beloved by her, could not recognise her and spoke disapprovingly of her new ways. Despite her efforts to win them over, they were unwilling, or else incapable, of understanding her. They went about their lives, faithful to their old habits, while she grew restive and weary of it all, dreaming of circuses and caravans and distant lands. Eventually she devised an escape plan. The heartbreaking thing was she could not say goodbye for if she so much as looked into the eyes of these familiar people, now virtual strangers, she was sure her resolve to leave would itself break forever. So on the appointed day, she rose at dawn, placed a few possessions—heirlooms and relics as she already considered them—in a bag and made her way to the end of the valley and up through the mountain pass. The sky changed, the vegetation changed, but somehow, despite the heavy cloak she wore for protection from the elements, she felt a sure-footed lightheartedness.
The Mirror Man
Was shy, retiring, but his problem was he shone and gave a bad impression despite his every effort to go unremarked. He would try to be still, so as not to upset the careful geometry of others’ existences, but if he was knocked by the smallest force—a gust of wind, say, or a loud noise—he shimmered and glowed and peopled shouted and raised their fists at him. He would have liked to disappear, and yet he was everywhere, or so it seemed, reverberating and reflecting. At other times he would have liked to speak, to recite a poem, whistle, or even sing, but he was alas imprisoned by an intractable muteness. On certain moonlit evenings, if he became tangentially aware of what it might be to know another, to identify, it nevertheless remained a kind of abstract knowledge, unable to be put to good use. The birds would descend from the trees, catching the coquettish reflections of their bright wings in his silvery glass and then fly up to the sky away from him. No one actually touched him, though beautiful women spoke through him, as though to an ancient oracle, of such things as their longings and dreams. Occasionally, overhearing the cries of neighbourhood children, he was so lonely, so envious of their games and easy camaraderie, the Mirror Man would hope that their ball might crash though and even shatter him—as often happened to a local window.
April 5, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Brenda Saunders is a Sydney writer and artist of Aboriginal and British descent. She has had work published on the web and in literary journals in Australia and overseas. Her poetry readings have been broadcast on Awaye and Poetica ABCRN. Brenda won the Banjo Patterson Poetry Prize in 2010 and was recently short-listed for the David Unaipon Prize in the 2011 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards.
Fashion statement
I’m a One-off. A Pin-up at the high end of haute. My elan gathers the adventuous, adjusts the unpredictable: that je ne sais quoi! I’m quality svelte, hot off the press. Shaped and swathed, I thread my way with seamless artistry, purring down the catwalk of history. Of course I’m biased! If cut on the cross, I’m bound to unravel. At times I’m taken down a size, let down, stitched up. Still I hold it all together. When pinched and tucked I suffer pins and needles. End up a caste-off on the cutting room floor. Destined for the rack, I’d rather be hung with Armani (He says in five languages how froufrou is my frisson, how chic my couture) than pegged as synthetic Esprit. It’s not that I’ve got tickets on myself, but Label is everything. I could be sized up for Ready to Wear. Phased out in Ping Pong After 8. Still, better a Country Road in beige, than one-size-fits-all in the bargain basement.
Uneasy virtues
Regrets
I find them here at the door, scraping like the cat wanting to get out at night: coming in wild-eyed with a new smell. I can usually brush them aside with those cobwebs in the hall. Leave them under the dusty mat. At the hairdressers regret is everywhere. Before the mirror I sit captive to loss. And they creep up unannounced at someone’s funeral: hit you front on so you’re out of breath. But what can you do? Peggy Lee drowned them in ‘Coffee and cigarettes‛ but that never does it for me. Indecision is a maze leading nowhere; second thoughts are a dead end. Do nothing and regret takes hold. Who needs yesterday’s burden to slow you down? Look ahead. After all the grass is always greener… so they say. Possibilities are said to be limitless.
Patience
Patience is said to be a virtue. But is it always necessary or beneficial? I have neighbours who must have endless patience. They wait until I come home to play their heavy metal collection. In this case impatience can be a positive for change. Just look at queues. People will get in line for anything. In the city they block streets, hold up pedestrians, waiting for a Ready-Teller: sit in cars for hours as the traffic crawls along. (Now who’s ‘moving in the fast lane?) In the 21st century we live in the moment. The ‘imp’ of impatience is like a Fury on speed. Still, if I’m out of range I know there’s no need to react. The touch of a key will send my on-line thoughts flying around the world.
April 5, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jaimie Gusman lives in Honolulu where she is a PhD candidate at the University of Hawaii, teaches creative writing and composition, and runs the M.I.A. Art & Literary Series (http://miahonolulu.wordpress.com/). Her work has been published nationally and internationally by Unshod Quills, Hearing Voices, Hawaii Women’s Journal, Tinfish Press, Spork Press, Shampoo, Anderbo, Juked, Barnwood, DIAGRAM, Dark Sky Magazine, 2 River Review, The Dirty Napkin Review, and others. She has a chapbook coming out from Tinfish Press, as well as a chapbook coming out from Highway 101 press this year.
Everything is For Seen
Perhaps I will jump from the roof she says. I imagine she won’t go and even if she does she can’t break like the precious bowls like the ceramic platters on our heads. No one wants me as in desires me goes fang-thirsty to the hole in the ground. She removes her dress. Look at me. Look at my scars. I am not worship not even a moment of it. I bend down so that heels are under thighs and I get close to her feet. She wiggles her toes arches her masses with tongue-strength with the energy of wood. I am her bale of rope I am what she will go on hanging herself with. Get up she says get close to my mouth. I can smell her throat but I am not sure how I know this how I know anything about her body. Put your head between my teeth she says and I do like this when I get inside the throat stench becomes stronger like cow stomach like goat brain like the desire of it. Do you see them she asks. I see six eggs pale as soap little cracks in their shells red rivers she said these are the blood lines and I need them out (with tears I think) please would you like to hold one would you like to go to the roof and have a throw
Education
Master is a silly word because what it means is that there are two. One is the master and one is not. This is the first lesson the Shekhinah tells us. We are told and we are given quizzes on this idea, which we fill out by coloring inside the lines of a bubble and when we fail with the idea we are to take the quizzes again. I raise my hand and say I am a student. She looks at me for the first time I am wise and I know this as a student should always be of an owl’s mind. I think this and she beats her chest and growls as a beast of the wood. I cannot see her eyes as they are not broken but sealed. She has been standing upright since she arrived and now she gets down to her knees and digs them into the ground which is not soft as it is from pebble and sand. Beneath her is the pool of blood which she bends down to and cups in her hands. I’m sorry she says again and again and she tells us to cup our hands too so that she might pour herself into our palms
January 2, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Fatima Bhutto was born in Kabul in 1982. Her father Murtaza Bhutto, son of Pakistan’s former President and Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and an elected member of parliament, was killed by the police in 1996 in Karachi during the premiership of his sister, Benazir Bhutto. Fatima graduated from Columbia University in 2004, majoring in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 2005 with a Masters in South Asian Government and Politics. She is the author of two books: Whispers of the Desert, a volume of poetry, which was published in 1997 by Oxford University Press, Pakistan when Fatima was 15 years old. 8.50 a.m. 8 October 2005, a collection of first-hand accounts from survivors of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, was published by OUP in 2006. Her third book, Songs of Blood and Sword, will be published around the world in 2010. Fatima wrote a weekly column for Jang – Pakistan’s largest Urdu newspaper and its English sister publication The News – for two years. She covered the Israeli Invasion and war with Lebanon from Lebanon in the summer of 2006 and also reported from Iran in January 2007 and Cuba in April 2008. Fatima’s work has appeared in the New Statesman, Daily Beast, Guardian, and The Caravan Magazine. Her latest book, Songs of Blood and Sword, will be published by Jonathan Cape in Australia this spring.
Photograph: Benjamin Loyseau
Karachi air
Breathed in through the lungs
Is sickly sweet
Like honeycomb left out to rot
In the warm, unrepentant heat.
Or else,
It is thick, smoky
Like mesquite
The evening scent of garbarge burning
At the first break of dusk’s early light.
Mynah birds and ravens caw
A jealous chord
Singing to the street.
At midnight
I can hear the poor sweeper man
Sweep sweeping
The moonlit littered roads.
I sleep in bed
Covered in a sheet of sweat.
There is no electricity now
In this deadened August night
I trawl
Middle Eastern airlines, terminals and luggage belts
Stuck alongside students,
Honeymooners in black robes and white thobes
And slave labour, working through the night.
Hiding my name on my boarding passes,
A thumb obscuring the sight of letters, destinations and foreign nights
And inventing new fictions,
Identities
And family trees.
My legs are close to clotting
And my bags unnecessarily heavy.
Qatar, Etihad and Emirates
I count them off as lovers
I use in desperate times of need.,
Flying out every month
Pretending that I’m free,
Subsisting on airline meals.
Parting from Karachi
At departure gates
And onwards worldwide.
I wish it well
My love unkind.
Good riddance,
Farewell.
Memories are dulled as the pilot starts the plane
Nostalgia side swept as stewardesses buckle belts and enquire about meal time.
Nauseated
Goodbye.
From above,
Even our city’s lights
Look bright.
Even the noisy traffic
Seems mild,
The congestion meek,
The airwaves clear.
From the sky,
From a passenger plane,
Filled with labourers
Dressed in January sandals
And drinking whisky
They’d never get otherwise,
Neat
And singing ghazals
To lull them to sleep,
This mangled city,
This wretched, wretched home
Loses so much heart.
But,
Three days later
My chest hurts for a sound
Of something familiar
An exhaust broken on a motorcycle.
The smell of the salty, smoky air.
The taste off a broken beetel nut
I’d never eat at home
And I imagine
It’s worth
Love
Some of the time.
He moved my body
continents,
Pressing gently
On the underside of my knee.
It was winter
When he sold me,
Seventy five degrees
I sleep on tarmacs
Eyes half closed.
I have become an exile
With an open home.
My valise holds all my shirts
And coats
I’m packed for winter
Wearing summer clothes.
I left behind a country once,
I can’t remember when.
Underneath it all
I’m bare boned
Afraid
Very simply alone.
On white ironed sheets
I wait,
Cold.
A knock on the ceiling
A boot against the floor
Sticky remote control at the foot of the bed
I cower
Concierge
Bellhop
Fire escapes winding under my window
And an alarm reminds me
I ordered room service way too long ago.
In nine years
I hardly wrote a red line
The crawl inside me subsided.
In the car,
Sunday, past noon,
The freeway pulled me down
And drudged up my lines.
I spoke for him,
For his embrace,
Coated with warm sweat
In a parking lot,
For the kiss,
And the scrape of his beard
As I breathed him in
One more hurried time.
So, I wrote him these lines,
Meaningless,
But mine
I go,
Leaving him,
My only memories
Inside a kiss,
Held in by his lips
In a claustrophobic garage
In which our farewells were disguised.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Cyril Wong won the Singapore Literature Prize for his fourth collection of poetry, unmarked treasure (firstfruits, 2004) and his fifth collection, like a seed with its singular purpose (firstfruits, 2006), was launched in Singapore. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Poetry International, Fulcrum and online at The Cortland Review and Cordite. His books are available online at http://www.firstfruitspublications.com
Night Bus
Awake, I strike a word against the dark
like a match. This could be the past
we are leaving. Buses on high beams;
wild eyes that ride down the road’s
unpromising narrative. The sky at a loss
for stars, thick as a foreign tongue.
Shadows bleed and every tree, thought
or breath is black. God is here
and not here, his retreat or restraint
everywhere around us, filling us
like cooling lead. Between nowhere
and everywhere, this is no hegira.
Where do we end up but at another
interchange? Sobering light gives us
pause, night pooling into memory.
The future takes its time to get here.
The Promise
The morning drizzle
fails to perform
its threat of a downpour;
the sun only returns,
blunted, flexing its light
for the long haul.
You said we’d make love
upon waking−
some appointments
are still kept,
the future made real
by the promises we fulfil.
Otherwise, maps
lose their meaning−
the school you were told
would be there
has become a reservoir.
All I know about me
is what I once promised
myself, and you,
to believe.
And when everything fails,
there is always that song
on the radio, news
of something heroic,
another long walk
in the park, another cigarette,
a sudden prayer.
Mirror
The portrait you see remains unfinished. The mirror pounces like a single headlight.
Eyes deduce what its glass mouth devours. Some days you come back a distorted echo.
But no artist may ever know you better. But no artist may ever know you better.
Some days you come back a distorted echo. Eyes deduce what its glass mouth devours.
The mirror pounces like a single headlight. The portrait you see remains unfinished.
The Apples
The apples wait in a bowl. Pick one.
The apples tug at the hem of my hunger − the love of apples.
The apples appear in a poem about a bowl of apples.
The apples are as serene as monks.
The apples cannot know the colour of the bowl they are in.
The apples in the poem are not edible. Neither is the bowl.
The apples fight for my attention. In fact, this happens very slowly.
The apples revel in their nudity and know nothing about sin.
The apples genuinely believe they are the original fruit.
The apples sometimes wish they were more than themselves.
The apples have heard of apples larger than themselves.
The apples deny any relationship to pears.
The apples wonder if it is true, that green apples exist.
The apples riot in the dark, but they cannot win. Still, they try.
The apples are a reminder that time is never still.
The apples fear what awaits them after they have been eaten.
The apples would like to be reborn with legs.
The apples are too restless to meditate.
The apples were communist, but they soon converted to capitalism.
The apples knock each other off the top of the bowl − the politics of apples.
The apples curse quietly when one of them is chosen.
The apples dream of orchards, the generosity of rain and sunlight.
The apples remember suspension, gravity, then falling −
The apples mourn when none of them is chosen.
The apples concede to my teeth, filling my mouth with their insides.
The apples, unlike us, would prefer time to hurry.
The apples at the bottom admire the apples at the top.
The apples wait to steal my life and turn it into an apple.
The apples cannot think beyond the bowl's bright rim, the open window.
The apples are still waiting.