Mark O’Flynn

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Mark O’Flynn has published two collections of poems The Too Bright Sun, and The Good Oil with Five Islands Press. A third is forthcoming in 2007. Eleanor & Eve, his seventh play, was produced at Railway Street Theatre in Sydney in 2003. His novel, Grassdogs, was published by HarperCollins in 2006. He lives in the Blue Mountains with his wife, two children and one dog.

Japanese Student

[Language is the house of being – Heidegger]

In the house of doing
the origami crane
or is it a seagull

becomes the residue
which we praise to the limits
of our clumsy grammar.

Pause to collect
all our thoughts about cranes.

We mime abstractions
and screwy semantics,
a tiny trout in its beak.

A paper crane is a door
that stays open too long
on a lake of amputated reflections.

The phrase book a tennis ball between us.

Hilarity is the difference
between pig and fig.
We are learning much.

What she thinks
is etched on her face
like an atrocity,
a sundered morpheme.

Fear has no gender
but its bare bones
and the inability to speak.

We make cruel signs of soothing.

In the house of bumbling
the syllables of my cooking
are the unspoken stuff of nightmares.

Her attitude to lizards tells us apart.

We swap no worries, and good tucker
and konichiwa but this is not enough.
In silence we cannot be silent.

Tears have no culture
beyond the distance
of a loveless boy

with a trout for a heart
who does not understand
the word kindness.

Language is mute
in the house of drowning
where she is lowered into the water

bonsai sprouting in her mouth

tongue’s words pecked
alive from her gills
by an origami crane.

Toh Hsien Min

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Hsien Min Toh has published two collections of poetry, Iambus (1994) and The Enclosure of Love (2001). His work has also been published in periodicals such as Acumen, Atlanta Review, the London Review of Books, Poetry Ireland Review and Poetry Salzburg Review. He is also the founding editor of the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (www.qlrs.com).  

Snake Wine

Not until my second last morning did I break
beyond Pasteur Street to Ben Thanh market,
whose exterior did not hint at the dimensions
of its accepting harvests, and the way I got there
was by braving the Saigon traffic on a pillion seat,
darting in between and around swarms of scooters
and taxis trying to make it through the same junctions
all together, while the wind of my helpless movement
blew the scent of the woman in front of me,
with tickling wisps of her hair, at me; but this is not
about her, or how she would start with lightly humoured
petulance whenever I strode into her room.  Rather,
after twenty minutes of flicking our fingers through
handmade chopsticks with accompanying ivory rests
and miniature dolls selling the fantasy of a Vietnam
subtly curved in áo dài, we came across rows and rows
of violin-case-shaped bottles filled with yellow wine
and a baby king cobra each, glassy eyed, stiff-tongued,
fangs visible as with intent, its patterned grey hood
enriched by a deep orange dot of Chinese wolfsberry.
I wondered if this could be an appropriate gift for you;
you hatched in the Year of the Snake, and you had the bite
of a woman.  We assume these coils are dead,
but I remembered the news report on the Thai bachelor
who had uncorked a bottle only for the cobra
to spring out from organic hibernation to bury those fangs
deep into his knuckles, and I thought that you would
surely never taste the liquor if I told you that story,
which would mean it could rest on your bedside ledge
as a permanently dreamcatching souvenir of me.

Lemons

When life gives me lemons, I make lemonade.
As a boy, I detested the taste of lemons,
that sharp sourness captured in a grimace,
but recently I have had so much citrus fruit
that I’ve adjusted to the attack of the acid.
The other day I found myself biting into
lemon wedges for the juice, as though
they were orange slices.  It made me think
how during our university days we bought
bags of lemons from Sainsbury’s because
they were cheap.  I squeezed yellow halves
till my hands tingled for an hour, while you
turned a heap of sugar into syrup.  No matter
what we felt about that white snowdrift of guilt,
we knew through trying that there was a point
at which a virtuous loss of sweetness
turned to an uncomfortable biting of tongues,
and if we were to let doubt cool all morning
in the fridge we would have the poor choice
of hot syrup or watering down painfully
squeezed lemonade.  We hadn’t learnt, though,
that the same applies to unheaped denials,
that belief sustains the unspoken like a wound,
and that even if the nice thing about lemons
is that unlike blood oranges they don’t stain
no matter how careless you are with them,
their invisible ink shows when you try
suspected surfaces with heat.  I suppose
you can’t compare lemons and oranges,
but if you know the only red nettings to end up
in my fruit compartment hold Valencia oranges,
you’ll understand my surprise, with the wedges,
to have discovered aftertaste, the lingering
in the mouth of a peculiarly silky sweetness
that is inestimable relief after the assault.

Trench Digging

When our boots hit the beach at Punggol, it was two to a trench
for all except the sick list, but then there was a command post
to be dug in, and so it was like coming on to score an own-goal
when one was supposed to have been on the bench,
because it seemed the sick list could come in handy.
All day we chipped at the sand.  Letting our pride sting us
into motion, ten of us yoked our bad backs and asthma attacks
to the land.  “C’mon there, give us a hand,” we poked out
at the drivers, more from the duty of making their lazy cigarettes
carry an incremental tithe in guilt, as the leftenants were away
poring over their maps, in the shade of a tembusu tree.
Oh, yes, 2LT Lee came around every now and then,
fresh as a temperate daisy, to show us how we could dig
faster than we could, but when his walkie-talkie charged the air
with static it seemed he had to be elsewhere.  It was still us,
after all, who chopped the beach with changkuls, filled
three thousand sandbags, clanged iron pickets into resisting sand
with the monkey ram as though we were ringing the time,
and lined the walls with corrugated iron sheets to hold out
the slow, treacherous crumble.  An hour after dusk, the final
sandbag in place, we squinted at the low prow and the crossbeams
of what we had built, and wished that we could shoot at it.
Then the leftenants moved in.  Set up their signal sets
and the portable radio receiving 98.7FM.  As for us,
we moped about the tonners, between the chilly night
and the stifle under canvas, the pebbles and the deep blue sea.
It seems the CO came round and was rather pleased.
One month on, our leftenants wore fresh bars on their epaulettes.
We knew what we had done, and though we didn’t care
about the trench I didn’t dare say that was good enough,
and what anger this could rouse would not be scattered
like phosphorous-tipped bullets into the invading sea.

Keri Glastonbury

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Keri Glastonbury is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. She completed a Doctorate in Creative Arts at University of Technology, Sydney, in 2005. Her thesis, titled ‘Shut up nobody wants to hear your poems!’, staged a friendly title bout between painter Adam Cullen and poet Ted Nielsen, two male grunge auteurs of her generation. She has published two books of poetry, Hygienic Lily (Five Islands Press, 1999) and super-regional (Vagabond, 2001) and has an unpublished manuscript ‘Grit Salute’ (2004). She is an editor of the small publishing company, Local Consumption Publications (www.localconsumption.com) who are this year releasing the title Strawberry Hills Forever by Vanessa Berry.

                   hygenic italy

‘but are you social nexus or cultural interstice?
that’s the type of question the tour guides
won’t answer’
 
Ted Nielsen, ‘Pax Romana’.                    ( effusive:

you’d like to be differently enculturated, though in the end
there’s a charm in being in relation to yourself, irrespective
like age, that won’t excuse anyone—& yet, tonight
you fell in love with her impeccable rendition of rebellion
so braced, like a sleek carriage with a hybrid accent
acquired abroad. you, all the while, way too verbal
is it really freeform? even the american was grounded, smoothly
modulated, listening to your mental garbage cleansing—as the
roman sky turned cobalt blue against the mustard church
you’re surrounded by new exteriors & too many saints
as suddenly all your tropes seem so maligned—being gentle with
yourself to coax the high down
what a lot of english you can sprout
                                                           ( hygienic italy:

pigeons and satellite dishes occupy the event horizon
across vast condominium rooftops
perhaps fluttering anti-angels leave the basilica
for the smashed terracotta hill of testaccio
or form emergent, from the grunge and gravitas
but are they, even ala
laurie anderson, luce iragary, jorie graham
your ideal intermediatries?
at a point where art & money cleave together
or apart, a plaque on the wall tries to unite
in new ideas and faith in talent
heralding all our smug alterities (eg: poems)
a situated intelligence
which leaves you to gesticulate on the streets
the mastery of repeating language acquisition
something else you always yawned at, until now
a sonorous cipher, you wish—along with a fiat cinque cento
          for hooting around

                                                ( bella figura:

the driver in pigtails and furs tries ardently
to elicit more than physiognomy’s silent science
the movement of the car naturalising the city streets
to a point of cathexis that never arrives
trouncing your fledgling accretion process
your fringe mown in an attempt at suburban sharp
& more like, a member of hush. you sense
you’re surrounded by voracious readers & translators
not afraid to overshoot the mark.. so, it’s preferable
to internal monologues, or the self-deprecations
of the ‘performative’ you’re used to
 
or cowering in the face of the high femme
once summer breaks out the mini-skirts
followed by a joke about trains full
of perfumed boys playing pocket billiards
                                                                ( 3rd rate hotel:

a sandy rain, born devotional
roughs a sirocco sky like stone wash
while you’re breaking the settee
of arts council fantasy you believe it
when she says rome’s been spoilt
post the 60s but let’s not get glib
there’s always memory studies
and expatriate experts even angels
have right wings as if a counter-reformation
on traffic infringements might start
a spate of double-parking in perth
her sister-in-law as howler monkey
so it bothers us, like passive smoking
the botticelli’s so blanchett
& woo, i’m feeling so bohemian like you
                                            ( justified & ancient:

a slumped angel
           headstone and gramsci’s grave
find you among the conifers
           & a posthumous library
weighted by voluminous spines
     & a short shelf-life
           a shift to the affective level
getting your attention
           like heavy handed art house
 
reading old books
           has you surprised to learn
the dog ‘shat’ in the tucker box
 
though for the most part
           you remain disengaged as a cabby
on imperial administrative interests
           driving home the episteme
                                                     ( carravagio:

a rapid summer downpour, street’s full of motorini
horns and sirens, while you’re buffeted along
plateau upon plateau—jargon relative
as rabbiting on, whatever else concomitant with that
one day molar, next molecular—illuminated manuscript
or subcontracted signwriter, THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT
in 500 point georgia bold—a question of flow
god is a vector monster, remaining beneath, above
& within the product—or just shot through
your spiritual highs make you reach for the love addiction guide
as you will the lines closer together, into a thrumming scaffolding
no grumpy bastard could use to translate or reproduce
later, rain sprinkling in through the roof’s natural shower rose
wandering home from the family palazzo, the etonian accent
of the prince roller-skating round the ballroom
the squeamish pope in red ‘too real’—& st john the baptist
in nomenclature only, a wry tuft of adolescent pubic hair
soft, as upholstered walls in genovese velvets
                                                               ( brava:

infused by gradients of atmosphere, as the city’s spring
makes the laundromat cheery and deferred purchasing
limns the shopfronts, a threshold away from murano glass
and your exquisite ambivalence. the street’s pock marks
the pique arousals. poor pride, as well as prada
street vendors assuming you’re nordic, demure, pure
& full of forgetting in the self-image quiz show
things just playing out, remnants of the
feminine, adjusting your antenna—to appreciate
bras and leather goods in the windows
wondrously—& no magazines have colonised
the space you are in. you won’t enter the stores
and cultural discretion will thrive on these glimpses
the body there, but you’re not in the driver’s seat
perhaps you thought it was the passenger side

Cath Vidler

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Cath Vidler edits Snorkel (http://www.snorkel.org.au) a literary magazine specialising in creative writing by Australians and New Zealanders. Her poems have most recently appeared in Turbine, Trout, Otoliths and Nthposition. Her first chapbook, Cloud Theory, is forthcoming from Puncher and Wattmann (http://www.puncherandwattmann.com).

Five Collaborations with the Google Poetry Robot

1. It’s late

It’s late. I buy DIY bonsai potato home shrines. I wish to see The World on the Internet. I might Cheat if the original painting is not framed by titles like Falcon 4 etc. My favorite food is still more secure than Windows! I hope to spend 2 nights at the Apple Store online or at any site based on Xoops 1. I dream that one day all volcanoes on Earth are shrunk to epigrams that inspire wonder and provoke a buildup of Alternatives.

2. The first person.

The first person is a relative of mine. I think this is FUNNY. My mom Calls me Brenna but my friend Leonard has recently quit using names because he thinks they are flimsy firewalls.

3. Lists.

Lists. I work at Burger King Corporation. Bill Gates was Once Arrested for switching Policies on the Use of Knowledge. I love my Mac because when I’m hungry it says Here you Are and gives me a Link to a story about a Different Kind of Blue. Menus. You never get tired of reading Commercialized Lists. I like to eat ‘Cultured’ items but Vows to stop rubbish-dumping at Multistorey buildings are exempt from nutrition.

4. See you later Alligator

See you later Alligator. It’s still too early to commit. My cat is going into Opposition because many districts base their curriculum on areas of Special Expertise. I hope you have time to Think ahead. My favorite Word often changes depending on current errors. Adios. I enjoy Flying low over farmland in South Georgia and its associated Enterprises in India including Sinde. I learn Greek phrases and indications of Geographical origin. Thank you again for having me in your Language.

5. Winter in my Garden

Winter in my Garden is asleep and twitching softly. I saw deserted trenches and the difficult Path. I want One Of Those Days when the blank page fills up with Boeing and applicable privacy Laws are better defined. Why do I Have to make my avatar look like the second most Popular recipe from kelloggs? I never Promised to fix the roof while there’s a galaxy to grow. I might See the Boom shadow falling on the Cedars.

Charles D’Anastasi

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Born in Malta, emigrated to Australia at fifteen, Charles D’Anastasi has had poems published in various publications, anthologies, and on line poetry journals including malleable jangle, wandering dog(UK), Going Down Swinging, and Divan. In 2006 The Melbourne Poets Union published his chapbook The unreliable harbour (Union Poets Series).

Agnes Vong

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Agnes Vong Lai Ieng is a postgraduate student at the University of Macau, currently completing a thesis on Macao poetry. In 2006 Vong had three original poems (as well as some translations) in The Drunken Boat’s Chinese supplement. Vong was the assistant editor and a contributing poet for The University of Macau Poets’ Jubilee Anthology and a translator for a selection of Yao Feng’s poems in his recently published Faraway Song. She has just finished a collaborative project with Christopher Kelen on translations, variations and responses to the poetry of Xin Qiji. The resulting book, Spring Wind Brings the Fireworks – is in press with VAC in Chicago and expected to appear in the coming months. Vong’s own book of Macao poems is currently in preparation.

ying yang hotel

a mixture of water and milk
so the Chinese say

it sprang from a fragrant, milky bath
a white towel wrapped her black body
heat sucked up the water
sweating, gasping

a local paper, with compliments
women from afar
in red and black
smiled sweetly at his Rolex

under the blazing sun
half-naked men covered in mud
scaling bamboo, to and fro
sweating, gasping
falling

lover of fairy tales

evening light
a valley of shadows

secrets between my footsteps and
the tangled bushes

a twig from the first branch
for the ash girl

a red apple
for the snowy white girl

a magic door
for the nosy girl

at the end of the valley
my grandmother’s grave

the composer

incense for Buddha
the only order in this pig sty

drink makes blur of reality
sickness of the heart

light burns brighter
the mountain turning grey

my final symphony
a prayer

my orchestra
carried away by a sparrow

and delivered to Buddha
burning incense for me

Libby Hart

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Libby Hart was a recipient of a D J O’Hearn Memorial Fellowship at The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne in 2003. Her suite of poems, Fresh News from the Arctic won the Somerset National Poetry Prize in 2005. Her first collection of poetry, also titled Fresh News from the Arctic, was published in 2006 by Interactive Press and has just won The Ann Elder Award for poetry.

Light

I see you there, standing in only your legs
and a cloak as dark as winter night;
your one eye gleaming, as if a glass eye.

And true, it is glass. Yes, it be.
For my doctor, with hands dipped by chemical
performs a magic before me.

In focus, I gather its light
and dare not move.
I feel the weight of feathers.

It’s the fallen bird that keeps me grounded
to this chair and to this room.
To the very stillness of things.
 

Note: This poem was written in response to Hugh Welch Diamond’s
photograph, ‘Seated woman with bird’ (c.1855). Diamond was one of the
earliest photographers. A doctor by profession, he decided to specialise
in the treatment of the mentally ill and was appointed to the Surrey
County Lunatic Asylum where he produced numerous photographs of his
patients. Diamond believed that photography could assist in the
treatment of mental disorders.

Your Body Bare

‘According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or
seven souls. The souls [are] scattered throughout the body.’
 − Annie Dillard

Hold your many souls like a juggler, this is Inuit land.
The chest and arms, all Inuit-souled.
Even the eyes have two souled-suns that burn a gleam
through a viewer’s head.

This is the breadth of your many engines:
a hand, a moon-shaped sigh
a cheekbone, rare
a glimpse of finger.
The turning of the body
in graceful-gracelessness.

You are like a horizon
bending and shaping itself at will −
a balloon of escape,
a lung of tree.
The form of things to come.

Flux

Nightfall comes hesitating with light.
It reaches out in short, sharp Morse Code.
Indecipherably lingering, and then it leaves.
All I have are three letters: I.O.U.
Then it’s gone like the wind that’s forgotten its anchor.

Sleepless Dreaming

Curled and weighted like an anchor
you’re as heavy as sympathy
and as warm as December.

Waves roll in from the half-opened door.

David Gilbey

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David Gilbey is  Senior Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at Charles Sturt University. He is editor of 4W literary journal. Born in London, he migrated to Australia and graduated from the University of Sydney. Involved with a variety of arts groups in the community, he has been known to tread the boards and impersonate well-known public figures. His reviews have been published in Australian Book Review. His first part collection of poetry is Under the Rainbow, FourW press, 1996. He has just completed the manuscript for his first full collection, having travelled to US, UK, France, Japan and China on Study Leave 2006. In 2007 he is teaching English at Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University in Sendai, Japan. David is married to general practitioner Dr Geraldine Duncan and they have four children quickly exiting adolescence.

Pegasus
for Lifen

Outside the Quan Jude Roast Duck Restaurant
a candyman glassblower makes animals, figurines,
from caramelized sugar, smiling at his skill:
brittle brown prawn skins, antennae, mouth and legs,
shining exoskeletons of dog, balloon man, and, for us,
a horse –
distending a head from the soft globe,
pinching a mouth, ears,
stretching a billowing tail
from the soft, streaked sugar sheen
hardening as he works it.

Somehow there is movement in the twist of neck
and leaping haunch, though in what we call reality
impossibly dwarfed back legs could only hobble.
A mystical beast for all that, a windrider
to carry us off to our dining palace
along the freezing street.

In the restaurant I say I’ve brought my horse,
tried to park it outside – couldn’t find the rail.
Luckily the waiter’s Chinese
and doesn’t understand my cowboy joke
but grinned just the same.

David Wood

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David Wood is a writer and musician living at Springbrook in the Gold Coast Hinterland. His writing includes poetry, novels and, more recently, an extended philosophical treatise, Plato’s Cave which draws upon scientific, philosophical and mystical insights. David has recently built an octagonal sandstone dome in which he lives and writes. He has been Principal Piccolist with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and has contributed to many publications including The Canberra Times and The Courier-Mail. David has been a guest writer at the Adelaide Festival of Arts.

Butterflies

Two butterflies
are flying through the orchard,
making love in flight.

I would not have thought
it possible – but there they are,
look,
joined bodies
crisscrossing the budding
branches of the fruit trees
where the wind
has caught your skirt,
lifting it into the air
like butterfly wings.

Who taught you to kiss
like that?

I am coming down the
track between the trees
to the brown dam,
to the grasses
heavy-headed with
spring.

And the day
opens like a palm,
a pianist’s hand
I reach up to and
hold and gently
draw down towards me
into the grasses,
the fruit trees
sweet as the
nectar on your lips
when I taste you

Morning

You woke and turned, your head upon the pillow
sculpted in a silvered cave of air,
naked, lying by the open window,
stars rampant in the tangle of your hair.

Last night we slept upon the drifting waters;
the moon sang like an entering lover
secret songs that lovers’ lips might whisper,
hair falling through the moonlight like a star.

A kiss to brush your eyes into the sunlight,
to gentle you from sleep, a lullaby
of hearts so close that sing upon the waters,
flowers in the iris of an eye.

Kylie Rose

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Kylie Rose is currently studying creative writing at the University of Newcastle. Her suite of poems, Doll Songs was commended in the 2006 Newcastle Poetry Prize and she received second place for her poem Shark Egg in the 2006 Roland Robinson Literary Awards. She lives with her four children in Maitland.

West Annex
Celestial Warehouse
Temple of Heaven

I always see a woman in the moon.
Concubine of solar congress,
frail geisha
undressed in the dark.

I never knew the moon was a man
until I found the closet
where he keeps
his sleeping tablets.

God of Nocturnal Brightness,
you fill and fail,
obedient to the seminal
will of the sun.

You will never look the same.

Summer Palace

Seventeen Arches Bridge.
Afternoon is an oyster,
caesarean opened,
pearly lake and sky
adhered to the luminous womb.

Seventeen Arches Bridge.
Men smoke, giving breath
to marble dragons. They fish
the ox-bronze sky with kites
on rod and reel.

Seventeen Arches Bridge.
Pleasure boats skim the peach
lake, hulls a flurry of bat
wings that fracture
my reflection.

Seventeen Arches Bridge.
I watch willows
defer to the mottled
milk of evening’s dawn.
Their branches lip the sun.

Seventeen Arches Bridge
divides this watery
day like a woman’s mineral
wrist escaping a heavy,
silver sleeve.

Forbidden City

Suited street vendors converge on the bus
carcass of maggot-white spenders.
Welcome swallows and willows
skim the moat like nimble tongues
affixed to no mouth.

The South Gate parts her lips
and admits me into her
illicit stone pipe.
Toward the secret lacquered chambers,
I tread the golden stones.

Women are still locked
up in palanquins and camphor coffers.
They chant
in empty chambers,
let me out.