Arlene Ang

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Arlene Ang lives in Spinea, Italy. She is the recipient of The 2006 Frogmore Poetry Prize (UK) and the author of The Desecration of Doves (iUniverse Inc. 2005) She serves as a poetry editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. Her chapbook, “Secret Love Poems” is available from Rubicon Press. More of her writing may be viewed at www.leafscape.org.

Self-Portrait with Umbrella

I am one-third umbrella.
The fakir in my left eye (detail) is a glass
of Bordeaux. Pins and needles
chatter the backwoods.
Maisie’s hands cut my hair.
I wear it like a fishnet. She changes
the appearance of everyone
she meets. Before we make love
I throw up in the bathroom. My necktie
glistens a lunch break.
Under the scissors, my smile
swells a tsunami. I am unemployed
again. I am with the woman
I love. When I grow up,
I tell her, I will be a firefighter.

A Warning about Attachments

You’d think, at first, it’s Ebola.
Or something white that comes through the mail.
A bridal shoe. A bridal cake. The bride—
blindfolded and schmucky (whole package),
or laced with small ransom letters (in parts).
By the time you’d have realized
something’s not quite right, it’s in.
A postal box can swell like your stubbed toe.
And then, you’d admit needing assistance.
The yellow pages are fully infected: Looking for
cheap thread? Come to Marley’s
for a good time. Your pipes are our business.
Turn tables at low, low prices.
You’d think, afterwards, it’s a glitch:
the anti-virus fouled up the way you fouled up
your first date with ketchup. And no, you’d think, no
way. It hasn’t got anything
to do with sex. Length issues, perhaps.
Mostly, spam. Slick girls and gonorrhea in a row.

Wu Jin Contemplates the Tattoo on a Soft Cheek

The medicine pedlar knows
her eyes are veined with red. It is almost
noon. The price on the ointment
for deep burns hangs crooked,
like bamboo in her stepfather’s hands.

She was exiled to Zhangchou
after stealing ten ounces of gold.
When her face was branded,
she didn’t cry. Eventually, she escaped.

The mark on her cheek allows her
favors from passersby. For weeks the wife
of a rich merchant dressed her in silks,
fed her spittle and fish lips from a bowl.

She learned to slip a dagger
from of her sleeve, aim at throats
without regret, share the intimacy
of death from other people’s eye.

Today he offers a salve for pains
that rot through the bone. He asks her
keep one for herself; she walks away.
Tomorrow she will be back, perhaps her fist
opening to take something for herself.

Papa Osmubal

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Papa Osmubal writes from Macau, South China. His works, visual and literary, have appeared in various publications, hardcopy and online. He is contributing writer to Chick Flicks, OOV (Our Own Voice), eK! (Electronic Kabalen), and others. He has work archived in University of Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry.

An Exchange With An American Animal Rights Advocate

In the Philippines, I told my friend,
we feed dogs with swill of fish bones
and rice swimming in plain water.
It is notoriously tasteless,
salt just does the job.
When they are big enough
we stew them with soy sauce and ginger.

Her face mysteriously turned red
and she suddenly rushed into the john
clutching her stomach.

(Her dogs are pampered
with delectable goodies manufactured
by underpaid, overworked Filipino workers
thriving on mere tiny fish and plain rice with salt.)

When she came back out
we were no longer friends:
she flushed our friendship down the gutters
along with her vomits.

In Giza

There is nothing here, absolutely nothing
only a handful of camels and pyramids and sea of dust.

Whoever created these was a real genius, he says.
I nod my head in measured manner.

I am looking at the pyramids.
He is looking at the camel humps.

Rainy Days

The floor is creaking.
It is mom again
emptying those buckets.

I cannot sleep.
Others count the perennial sheep,
I count raindrops dripping in buckets.

The Florist at Hong Kai Si (Red Market) Macau

The inviting smell of food from nearby restaurants
is not enough to suppress the smell of her flowers.

The clothes vendor looks at the flowers
then turns to look at the clothes he sells: what is in his mind?

The florist side-glimpses at a passersby,
crooning a song.

She momentarily interrupts her croon
to pick up the newspaper.

She folds the newspaper to the size of a book
and bashes the flies hovering around.

After putting the newspaper back down, she stares at a bee
that busily does what bees do to flowers.

Listening to the bee’s buzz, she covers her mouth with her palm,
then yawns.

Fragment

Sunday.
And everyone is wearing their haloes.

Vivienne Glance

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Vivienne Glance’s poetry and short stories have appeared in journals (incl. indigo, Blue Dog), anthologies (incl. The Weighing of the Heart, Open Boat Barbed Wire Sky, Friday’s Page) and online (Poems Against War 2003) and other publications and she’s won prizes and a commendation in competitions (C J Dennis Literary Award, Split Ink, Southern Cross Literary Award). She is currently working on her first collection of poetry. She runs a performance workshop for writers and was a finalist in the 2007 National Poetry Slam. Her writing for theatre has been performed in Perth, Sydney, Seattle USA, London and Edinburgh UK, and she is a professional actor and theatre director.

Spectrum

There is no real difference between dark and light
though I measure memory and beauty by shades
and love by the umbra of what you said.

Your spectrum ranges far beyond my sight
and as the palette of this landscape fades
I am left with burning visions of infra red.

But still my breath stops suddenly when i see
a crow’s laborious ebony above my head
or water sparkling under broadleaves shade
the gash of black dissecting sterile white –

you asleep upon my bed.

first appeared in Indigo, August 2007

Indian Tea

On tea clinging mountains
my father lived with green
waves filling his vision
monsoon washing his skin

He saw colour-draped women clip verdant tips –
bitter scent seep into brown skin. He stood by  fresh
green spread to ferment and succumb to slippery black

Furnace-breath-dried leaves stuffed
weighed, labeled  in coarse sacks –
a pungent harvest stacked
awaiting English tables

My father inhabited this place between coast
and plain – its contours bowed like the backs of women
and colonised by tea. Born into this place but

serving another place –
foreign stock grafted on
native root belonging

to neither

Bonny Cassidy

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Bonny Cassidy is completing a PhD thesis on the poetry of Jennifer Rankin and Jennifer Maiden at University of Sydney. Her poetry has been published in various journals and anthologies, and her first libretto will be performed as an opera in June. In 2008 Bonny will be undertaking a residency in Japan supported by AsiaLink and the Malcolm Robertson Foundation. Bonny co-edited The Salon Anthology: New Writing + Art (Sydney: non-generic, 2007) and works as Chief Researcher for The Red Room Company.

The mourner

His right foot drags an affected waltz
as if the way back lingers behind –
to a time of still
before he were wiser –
a time that comes after
death, after knowledge.
His legs snap shut. Only
the mules fill the cone of dust
before the next heave forward.
They bungle right through it on the double,
and he imagines animals alone
must own that frosting time,
always between one step and another.

Weight
For Mo Jingjing

A punching bag rises
in the breeze before rain. Above it,
waving, thumbs of mango buds.
She shows me how to pinch
egg wrappers into goldfish;
warm and yellow corners
of mushroom jostling, plashed with flour
to grow clear and tight in soup.
A small and dusty crowd gathers on the tabletop –
leaning one another in stretchy fatigue, pleated tails
skirting the fingerbowl.

The radio jabbers into the trees.
I wonder how many mangoes
will grip the end of winter;
and whether she’ll be here to slice them,
or back in the thick of Hunan, deaf
to that blushing drop of night fruit.
We’ve been hushed by our silent, signing work.
Dumplings bob through plain, hot water
as the storm clouds twist and slow.

Greg McLaren

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Greg McLaren is a Sydney poet and critic. His books are Everything falls in (Vagabond, 2000), Darkness disguised (Sidewalk, 2002) and The Kurri Kurri Book of the Dead (Puncher & Wattmann, 2007). Greg is presently co-editing a collection of essays on Australian poetry, and is poetry editor at Puncher & Wattmann.

Transit Lounge

On the last day
I leave work hours early
and bus in to meet you by the quay,
you nearly drunk
an hour before you reach the ferry

Past the terror-proof windows
everything is busy-ness,
flight preparations are tinted
a pale yellow that in some light    
might seem orange        

I wander through the fluorescent mall
of the airport, wait thirty minutes
for a train and dawdle
in the bookshop underground
until a friend rings my mobile

At cruising altitude
you’re sheeting across the south east
of the continent just short
of the speed of sound
My bus slopes back up Parramatta Road

Your mother the commercial artist
greets you past the gates
with something between coldness
and expectation, and with news
of her latest exploits on e-bay

Somewhere, I’m not sure,
I’ve kept the train ticket,
that emblem of love,
its coded magnetic strip past expiry,
peeling from the backing like a mirror

Retail Therapy

        for R.B.

With a face like a Castlecrag property deed,
and the spruiker voice you got from your brother,
you interrogate clients and staff alike:
Do you like the new fit-out?, and What
do you think of the chandelier? As if you had

a North Shore mortgage on taste, judgement
or – get this – delicate tact. After the half-
a-mill reno: the cut-back in casuals’ hours.
After the million dollar fit-out in Melbourne:
the nervous house-sale, the knuckle-size mention

in the weekend rag, and, always, the lack even of an
ironic self-awareness. The mission statement is riddled
with typos, and reads like a hippy business plan.
You want to target “the high-end literary market,
or even just general readers”, and to hose them

with “Paris Café Jazz”, that iconic genre. You hire doctors
and pay them peanuts: we fart in your car.
The in-store music? A burnt CD you paid money for,
and could never sell: Roberta Flack, singing “The first time
ever I saw your face”, followed by James Reyne, “Fall of Rome”.

Wangi

Seen from the car, a blurred barcode
of trees against the background of the lake
The lake is a fuzz of smoke. The heavy clang
of cicadas engulfs us, crashing through

the bush and cramming the thin black road
with noise. The car’s metal body keeps out
nothing; heat and noise seep and drip like sweat
on cracked vinyl. Our parents are two heads

bobbing, neither wanting this exchange
of one place for another. They become
bored children again, visiting her mother.

The grey-green racket rolls, sea-sick
in waves as we slide up and down hills.
I think for a moment I ought to be in it.

Ian Irvine

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Ian Irvine (also writing as Ian Hobson) is an Australian-based poet, writer and academic. His work has featured in many publications, both in Australian and overseas, and his poetry has appeared in two national anthologies. He is the author of three books and currently coordinates the Writing and Editing program at BRIT, Bendigo. He has also taught social theory and history at La Trobe University (Bendigo) and in 1999 was awarded his PhD for work on chronic ennui in European literature, philosophy and psychology. He lives with his partner, Sue, and their children on a bush block not far from Bendigo. His poem “If You Eat a Pomegranate” is dedicated to our feature poet Thanh Thao.

Soft Breeze of a Temporal Implosion

After the bus trip:
        light-green peaks, rice
        plateaus and quiet water
        buffalo.

As good a place as any  
        to reconstruct the countries
of the past.

And  there is nothing generalist
        about the H’mong children
        dancing the narrow street below,
or
the German tourists, pleasantly
        drunk on the hotel’s upper
                    floor.

We’re sandwiched,
as always,
        between the present
and the impalpability of memory –
I muse:
        Indonesia 1994:
        3,300 rupee to the dollar.
        Vietnam 2007:
        16,000 dong to the dollar.
This impulse to quantify comforts
                    the illusion of time
        as something solid.

Like the Dao coin I wear as
        a necklace, the seller said ‘1820, Sir.’
Its shape is strange, like
        a man without arms, ‘an ancient
        unit of exchange’ before the
        coming of the French.
The guide whispered:
        ‘A fake.’ But the shape
and the smooth-rust brown surface,
        are all that matter to me
        at four dollars US.

And the practicalities of spirit –
those women at the pagoda.
At the entrance –
        dark rocks and lush
        miniature trees.
Inside –
        incense-drenched fruit,
        a giant cauldron-urn, and
just above the entrance –
        multicoloured lanterns.

They loaded us up with free fruit
        and hugged our children.

Such calmness
        like the men in the white-domed mosques of Java –
        bowing, praying whilst
out on the street,
        similar densities of
        do-it-yourself technology.

I was thirty then, musical, reciprocating
        love – and we’re still together
walking the town of Sapa,
negotiating maps, as always
                   will to will,
appreciating the flower-banked
lake, exchanging gifts, raving
        about the view, caressing  
        and enjoying the local food.

A pleasant time-warp, like a lost map
        to an old intensity of being
Making love in a grass hut in
central Sumatra – her soft
        tanned skin, our
       mutual freedom.

And then the day with icing:
as if outside time, and
        abnegating the difficulties
        of culture shock,
our daughter
        her first poem.

Hospital Cave and the Superpower

The old man is 76 years old
        still wears the khaki hat and shirt
        of the North Vietnamese army.

He lives less than a kilometre
        from the place that defined
        his life. He’s
fit and stout and funny not at all

like the devil promised us by LBJ. Carries a
       flashlight and knows
       every inch of this
underground labyrinth.

During the war hundreds of people –
        soldiers, surgeons and farmers –
took shelter in this cave. These days
it’s deserted, just damp concrete
        floors and walls beneath
        an eroded lime-rock ceiling.

When the Americans bombed and
        bombed the island the locals
        would crowd in here:
what
did it feel like
        waiting for the superpower?

He shows us the ‘reception’
        the doctors’ sleeping quarters
the medical rooms proper to the left and
right of a long corridor, until we arrive
at the ‘lunch-room’. Here
he drops his flashlight, introduces
        himself again in Vietnamese
and asks (commands) us to sing
        “Vietnam-Ho Chi Minh”
        “Vietnam-Ho Chi Minh”

He lets me record the performance
        and suddenly
all the war before me, cold chills.
        Tonnes and tonnes of bombs
Agent Orange, vast networks of tunnels
        in the South, the Tet Offensive, the
        fall of Saigon.

I’ve met some Aussie Vets
seen them join the Anzac day throng
still tentative-as young boys
        they met their reality match
        in quiet Vietnamese determined to
        end colonialism once and for all.

Here, just 70 miles from the Chinese border,
       I begin to understand.

The digital video is blurry in the cave
        (all sorts of shadows)
as the tourists sing and clap (nervously) the echoes
        are immense, like 1969, like 200 people
        singing, like injured farmers, like jets
prowling the paradise skies – and before us
        this old soldier
        like a phantom,
38 years among ghosts.

If You Eat a Pomegranate

For Thanh Thao

If, after eating a pomegranate underground,
        you manage to return to the surface
it is said  that you will have acquired
         the ability to see ghosts.

Perhaps I’ve consumed such a fruit
by accident. Things have been strange
for over a month now – began with my
memories of that sunrise crossing
the DMZ:
        The sun coming up
        and all those people on the roads
        in the rice paddies, or hanging around
        the gravestones or houses.

I’m  no longer certain who was alive
        and who was dead. As though
another layer of memory-repressed
        at the time – has invaded
the ‘realism’ of what I
        thought I remembered.

The problem: supposing all memory
        collapses like this? What
will stop this tendency invading my
        day time consciousness?

And the train,
        as I recall it now, moving slowly,
            far too slowly
along the tracks,
        as though the dead
            had engineered some kind of
deceleration – so I could see them,
        so I could begin to hear them speak.
Though for the moment
        the protection of glass
remains.

Who knows where this is headed.

It is said that a spell three times spoken –
        especially if by the caster, the
recipient, and an unbiased intermediary –
        is certain to work.

Leaning forward across the table
he asked me something in Vietnamese:
        ‘Why do you think I continue
        to write poetry
        at my age?’

Despite clear translation
I had no answer, said:
          ‘I don’t know your work
          well enough to say.’

Eventually he replied in Vietnamese – and
after this was translated, I heard:
        ‘For those who are unable to speak’
But she wished for further clarity, said:
        ‘He says he writes for those
        who have no voice … who are
        no longer with us.’

Startled, I asked –
as though struggling to absorb the future –
        ‘For those who died – for the dead?’
She nodded, said:
        ‘Yes, for the dead.’

the table went
very quiet.

Jill Chan

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Jill Chan was born in Manila, Philippines. She migrated to New Zealand in 1994. She has two books of poetry: Becoming Someone Who Isn’t (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2007), and The Smell of Oranges (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2003). Her work has been published in Poetry New Zealand, JAAM, Trout, Takahe, Brief, Blackmail Press, Deep South, Southern Ocean Review, foam:e, MiPOesias, Tears in the Fence, Blue Fifth Review, Asia and Pacific Writers Network, and many other magazines.

Body

There was a woman who wore nothing but silences. All the men would bring their words to her, make her dream
without sleeping, next to the loudest scream. How each of them would pronounce their words like a body running
into language, full weight of vowels and purse of lips.

And in the farthest hidden corner where not even silences could exist, a rolling of thoughts into flame. A game of
never ever losing, hot rays, and runs always near enough to win. No worms, no forms of death to worship or deny.

Neither the woman nor the men went there to stay. They visited a few times a year or if they could, every second,
but couldn’t stay longer than that. Time lay down to dream in that corner.

They took from there the loud gazes, and went home with their words like a body running out of language.

Places

When we first met,
you were living
in that stone house.

Salt air, strong winds.
You stood afraid of nothing.

Is fear just a turn
towards many destinations,
fulfilling none?

I could just as well stay here
in my house of straw,
drawing near the sky,
filling the ground with feathers
of abandoned flights and starts.

Where you are,
I have no chance of following,
now that the years
have become stone,
heavy, edgy with character.

The Poet

You are always the poet
with no ending,
with an ever-present way
of continuing,
looking a little shy, perhaps,
about making too much sense
with too vast a purpose,
how we try to remember
every beginning
that dares to become another,
a suddenness
beyond quickening,
to arrive like the many shapes
it makes of appearances –
your word calling to be written.

Lorne Johnson

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

I was born in Sydney in 1972. I currently teach English in a Loreto Sisters secondary school in Sydney. My work has appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, Eclogues (The 2007 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology), The Big Issue, Spinach 7 (online), Vegan Voice, The Drum Media, The Brag and 3D World. My poetry was highly commended in The Broadway Poetry Prize 2004 and The Inverawe Poetry Prize 2007. I am passionate about bird watching, traveling about Australia and the electro-reggae band Dreadzone. I am married and have a baby boy.

Trolley Man

For over twenty years you pushed your trolley between Sydney’s glass and chrome
with a red crash helmet protecting your imagination from having a head on with reality.
Hunched like Atlas during his nursing home years, villagers who worship rice,
you were this bitumen Bedouin who’d arrived from the far corners of abstraction,
never the Central Business District’s central business, but always mine.

Your ambiguity unhinged me; your tongue carried the weight of Bedlam’s flare; your
ubiquitous presence provided this surrogate backbone through my edgy Marist
testosterone years. Along with the Monorail’s click-clack glide-hum, Club 77’s pop arc,
the hanging whale geometry in the Australian Museum foyer, neon-smacked vegetable
boxes in Dixon Street and whispers within St. Mary’s Gothic skin, you were my Sydney.

Your origins and the contents of your trolley were the stuff of Holt’s conclusion.
The dove-hearted who fed the wandering bed cravers said you were a shipwright and a
knife-sharpener. Homeless men with ashy cigar toes and Orc profiles said your trolley
contained old letters and photos from a frozen bullet space you’d fled. To open truth, one
would have to make a point of cross-questioning the pointers of The Southern Cross.

The only certainty is that in nineteen ninety-four, you pushed your fading street-life
into the gardens between The Domain and the cool jade lapping that defines us. Amidst
weaves of lush multicultural foliage, under a sweaty scarlet sky cooled by the wing flap
of fruit bats, you sat facing The Bridge’s inverted robot-smile, shut your eyes and waited
for the long golden afternoon to cave in on you and your bright dancing secrecy.

Sixteen Pieces from the Forty Weeks of Pregnancy

On Christmas morning, after months of hollow days, you whisper, “There’s someone
who wants to meet you”.

Praline butterflies, chocolate bilbies, Iranian floss-candy; sweeter than all these Easter
gifts, the knowledge that our child blooms within its rich, dark egg.

My ear on the side of the most buoyant balloon… under nine layers of skin, the magic
mammalian swish cycle.

Off Mistral Point, in splattering skua weather, a humpback spy hops. If it were to dive
after drifting unicellular snacks, perhaps their breech baby would finally face downwards.

At the ultrasound checkup, a midwife uses her Christ-pen to find the beating bubble, and
next to it, the blackest of holes from which fragile primal light tried to escape.

For that divine moment of release, you will concentrate on peony roses opening in
spring-shine; I will recall fluid falcon flight through The Valley of The Winds.

From the neighbour who talks to The Southern Cross at four a.m., barks at laughing
children and fears visiting her letterbox, an article under our door on raising healthy
infants.

At the antenatal class, the kebab king said his wife would have to work in their restaurant
up until the birth, so they’d reserved table nine for the delivery.

Tunes by Mahler, Ravel, Sigur Ros: daily aural Valium for delaying the inevitable, acute
extremities.

In the private Royal Prince Alfred room, a melting mother cradles her hour-old twins in
the half-light of late dusk. By the bedside, her husband, in a Wallabies jersey, gives in to
the heaviness of it all.

During the Calmbirth sessions on Merrigang Street, Bowral, a merry gang of expectant
couples learned to breathe for the first time.

With her three-year-old on her lap, the Newtown back street soprano says, “Before I gave
birth for the second time I ate chilli chips, drank Cascade and went on the swings at
Enmore Park for half the day.”

How there must always be poetry within the delirium of sleeplessness.

Whilst watching Desperate Housewives, you hum private melodies and your hands move
slowly over your swelling belly, as if God conjuring Earth-stillness.

Between every layer of tiredness, the dramatic acrobatics of our weightless little
astronaut, rocketing towards his or her new sun.

This never-ending heady longing to meet our child’s midnight banshee guise and that
first ever smile that has the potency to soften extremists and inject this fearful age with
the sugar-stuff of afterlife.