January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Terry McArthur is a poet, songwriter, and playwright. Terry’s plays include Country Of Tears for The Midnight Sun Theatre and Dance Company which was performed at the inaugural Sydney Arts Festival and Naratic Visions which he co-directed with Chin Kham Yoke. He has written produced and directed multi-media performances including Seeking Knowledge and Casting The Oracle for the Australian Awards For University Teaching, and New Horizons for the opening of the Sydney SuperDome. As a lyricist Terry has co-written hit songs for John Farnham and James Blundell. As one half of the spoken word duo the cube he has released one album Permanent Scars and is now preparing to release Weapons Of Mass Sedition. Terry’s poetry has been published in, Upland (University Of New England Press), Holes In The Evening (Fat Possum Press edited by Michael Sharkey) and The Tin Wash Dish (ABC Books edited by John Tranter), Thylazine, Blue Pepper and Stylus. Terry’s latest collection of poems, Walking Skin is due for publication with Artesian in early 2008.
The Weather Eater’s Lament
Summer swift black sun burns
Dry rivers drink in dread the blaze
Days are dust settled thick and thin over
This track where light and language languish
The tongue no longer speaking
No more speaking
What’s done is done
Who can trace the ember from the fire
Smear ash across the face of our broken land
Or bear our lamentations beneath the dead drought years
Crossing and recrossing this once fertile valley
Hearing the song of the future blow in from the void
More Dirt Music
( for Tim Winton and Audrey Auld Mezera )
South of the dry lands
Between dirt and sea
Moving forward under brazen moon
Crossing the night tracks by foot
There is a moment when your eyes fall upon the gathering gates
A moment like no other
Those ancestral gates desolate and perpetual
Call in the forgotten songs
Cradling the words that sing of love and loss
Each song a code that blisters hearts
For who can bear such words of joy and sorrow
Who will carry such secrets in their marrow
Under the starlight of the gathering gates
There is no tomorrow
Only the songs under the shadow of blood rocks
Only the songs wedged in the red earth
Seeking out the singer
Seeking out the season
South of the dry lands
Between dirt and sea
No Worries
( for David Gulpilil)
He appeared
As if from nowhere sniffing the air
Looking out upon us who watched in the darkness
His darkness
And he spoke
As if his words had always been with us
We listened as if hearing for the first time
His darkness
One leg he said in whitefella world
One leg in his dreaming
His story
Fell upon us like the rain of rains
His coming into the camera lens like a luminous spirit
Bearing the lineage of his people
Holding the lightning in his eyes
We took him in and grappled him to ground
Fed fame and paid pittance
Let him drink and almost drown
Crowned him blackfella king
Deserted him for newer younger kings
Let him drift and ride the roar between twin worlds
He looked at us in our darkness
He smiled the smile of ages
He sang the song of his father
And disappeared
An invisible crocodile beneath the river’s banks
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Andrew Slattery is a Communications graduate from The University of Newcastle. His poems have appeared in literary journals, newspapers, magazines throughout Australia, Europe, North America and Asia. His awards include the Henry Kendall Poetry Award, the Roland Robinson Literary Award, and the Val Vallis Poetry Award. He lives in Berlin.
Bathey Pelagium
Having slid up and below the surface;
urged itself to reach out
and take the moon whole in its eye,
the giant squid goes to depth –
eight arms and two tentacles
swirl the slick, torpedo body
on an imagined course to the ocean floor.
Twin front finlets rudder its frame,
lining through a school of oarfish.
The deeping waters start to cool
its runneled core. The floor
is not subject to the moon’s lug.
Tube worms and giant clams pulse,
but seem motionless in the mudded dark,
like organs under skin.
The sun is cold. There are no tides or years.
Giant squid rests its locomotor,
it’s lurked arms scan the boundary
of its mantle length for food.
The ocean floor is an undulant blank,
with an outline so faint
this whole thing could be myth.
Slow-swimming along conveyor tides,
it takes the ocean with it and keeps the earth
in its spinning. The giant squid
spools along canyons cut from the ice age –
movements aggrandised over time,
its organ pipes roll the sea bed,
with solitary rills, hear its weight
unlying the sea.
Kalle Metro Graveyard
Someone snuck in a cemetery. A break
in the line of sandstone apartments
like a tone blip in the city plan.
Surrounded on all three sides by the high-rise living –
the whole yard the size of a house, but thick
with blooming dark grass and the pale whites
of tree foliage. The centre gate is locked off
and wrangles of weed truss the tall iron fence.
Inside, the gravestones are edged black
with granite moss and hold a calm slant,
they line the ground, side by side, and some
so close they seem to be one split block.
Someone’s decision to bury the coffins
vertically. They said it would triple capacity;
that it was in keeping with the skyscraping
pitch of urban planning (“Drop ’em in
feet first… it’ll save space.”) Those too ‘proper’
to be cremated; too ‘proud’ to end up
on the outskirts in the communal graveyard.
Someone snuck in a cemetery, into the heart
of a city gridded with slender cross-streets
and municipal pressures. Bodies standing up
cool in their boxes. They must’ve slid them in
like a flower stem led down a tall jar. And tall
runs of whiteweed rise up the fence, through
the black, wrought gate latched to a sole iron
pin. The grass is strewn with wraps of strange flowers,
thrown over the fence by a visiting relative, or anyone
whose heart the city has warmed with stone.
The ground holds to the cold like the joining
of bone. At night, the apartment windows flick on
from all three sides, they throw down twisted squares
of light and bring the flora junk and top stones
out of mute dark. In summer, when the green rim
of a moon arcs the night, the tall weeds lean out
from the fence and dip their tips to the warm pavement.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula (1980), received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has published five other volumes of poetry: No Man’s Grove (1985); Modern Secrets (1989); Monsoon History (1994), a retrospective selection of her work; What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say (1998); and Listening to the Singer (2007), a collection of poems out of Malaysia. Bill Moyers featured Lim for a PBS special on American poetry, “Fooling with Words.” She is also the author of three books of short stories; a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (1997 American Book Award for non-fiction); two novels, Joss and Gold (2001) and Sister Swing (2006); and a children’s novel, Princess Shawl (2008). Herfirst novel was welcomed by Rey Chow as an “elegantly crafted tale [that] places Lim among the most imaginative and dexterous storytellers writing in the English language today.” Lim’s co-edited anthology The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology received the 1990 American Book Award. She has published critical studiesandedited/co-edited many volumes and special issues of journals, including recently Transnational Asia Pacific; Power, Race and Gender in Academe; Asian American Literature: An Anthology; Tilting the Continent: An Anthology of South-east Asian American Writing, and special issues of Ariel, Tulsa Studies, Studies in the Literary Imagination, and Concentric. Her work has appeared in journals such as New Literary History, Feminist Studies, Signs, MELUS, ARIEL, New Literatures Review, World Englishes, and American Studies International. Among her honors, Lim received the UCSB Faculty Research Lecture Award (2002), the Chair Professorship of English at the University of Hong Kong (1999 to 2001), University of Western Australia Distinguished Lecturer award, Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer award, and the J.T. Stewart Hedgebrook award. She has served as chair of Women’s Studies and is currently professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Newcastle Beach
(For Kerrie Coles and Brian Joyce)
At 6 a.m. I set off for the Pacific,
her heaving bosom stretched between
rival lovers gazing from opposite beaches.
Silicate, shell and stone roil beneath her touch,
back and forth, groaning, while she slips
away and toward, teases sun rising
and setting, and the surfer men come daily.
I also adore her, threaded to her fine
eyebrow horizons, changeful swells that raise
my thirst no matter how much I swallow.
I can never be a woman like her,
forever wet, incipiently
violent even when calmed. In Newcastle
young boys and older throw their bodies
passionately at her each morning,
naked male skin carried toward dark rock
and cars. By sides of streets they strip,
wriggle into work clothes, as day
collapses into schools, offices, coal-mines
and their women’s arms, awake and sullen
in the world of dry air. They are mermen,
stolen away from their mothers’ hips.
And I? Drawn early down to Bogie Hole,
treading the slippery convict-shattered
stone steps, descend to the maddened
slamming of her spittle against tumbled
boulders, gulp the white and yellow sprays
that break, withdraw and break, in digital
seconds never returning. Like our men
moving on to other bodies, while the Ocean
Woman breathes in, breathes out, breathes in,
cradling her surfers past danger and drowning.
Bogie Hole
Before that old crone curse, arthritis,
comes down on me, I walk up Newcastle
Beach to Bogie Hole, where the governor
had a pool carved out of ancient basalt
by Irish convicts. Surf smashes on the rough
hewn blocks thrice every minute
it seems–and white foam sprays in ceaseless
upsurges of power. What power, I ask,
as I peer over the handrails, studying
sea-moss slime-slippery steps cut
into cliff face steep down to Bogie Hole,
studying as if a curious text
the heart skips over, falling in love
with falling, before backing off
from the savor of salt fatalism.
Not yet, my feet say, stepping away.
Today, for the first time I see
dolphins jumping above the surf line,
black fins racing over the Pacific
natural as my feet walking
in sunshine along Bathers’ Way.
What has brought me to Newcastle
no one knows, least of all me.
Blue skies and Pacific air the same
as home, leaving home is mere
practice for leaving all, all
the leavings learned again and again,
until goodbye becomes
addictive, the last look
behind, the first look forward,
what you carry everywhere
and everyday. Temporary living
is what childhood taught me.
Packing up, sleeping on others’
mattresses, and always hungry
for the new morning, and night
to be endured, supperless,
sharp as a paring knife peeling
another brown spot.
Writing a Poem
(At the Lock Up)
as if they were the sweet nectar of day,
which they are. It is impossible
to think or write. Its buzz takes away
feelings, takes over ears, is drilling a hole
in a loose tooth as you sit in history’s
dental chair, frantic and still, the drill
hammering gums until only
spit oozes, dribbles, spills over, fills
cavities you didn’t know you had,
only the drill lives in your head,
only the sharp dull dizz-dizz-dizz.
This is how the poem ends, dizz-dizz. . . .
Dating
(At the Hunter Street Mall)
I went on another date with my writing today. We’ve been dating for a long time. I don’t know why we keep meeting. It never ends in sex, although sometimes it’s led to my reading a book in bed. Often he does not bother to appear. I wait and wait, throat burning in dread, my tight chest overflowing with aches and burrs of anxiety, until I cannot bear the humiliation, even if no one is there, no one’s watching, and I don’t care, I finally leave, abject and alone, for something else, a nut muffin, or worse, a plate of limp over-salted French fries. I never get really angry. I wish I would, and then maybe I’d say goodbye.
But when he does turn up, I’m fascinated by his blather, it can throw a surprise like an amateur hitting an underhanded blow. Yet I’ve heard most of his stories so many times I can end his lines for him. You could say I find him a bore, so I don’t know why I keep listening.
He’s capable of mumbling. Between duhs and ums he may say something I like, and I carry it back in my mouth, imagining it’s a bit of worm a magpie crams into the hungry crop of its chick, and I take it out when I am alone, greedy, before I actually swallow it.
We’ve been dating like this since I was nine. I wouldn’t call him a pedophile but he’s not a big brother either. No, it’s not a healthy relationship, although it isn’t exactly sick. And, yes, he’s created problems, particularly with girlfriends who get jealous because of his attentions. They don’t see how long-suffering I’ve been. My husband doesn’t care. He understands first love comes first. Besides, he’s my last love, and they don’t offer the same fruit, apples to bananas. I get fed up, today, feeling my age, and want to sit in the shade instead, eavesdropping on busy hummingbirds pillaging fuschias and lilies. They’re attractive even if empty-headed. Still, every April, they lay their eggs, and at least one fledging sticks around till summer ends.
Shark Story
I’ve seen him hobble on one long strong leg,
the other a dangling stump, third a crutch,
in swimming shorts and tee, and sit by Nobby’s Beach,
on the wood-slatted bench near the hot parking lot
and sucking surf tucked distant meters away.
He said this sandy stretch, the boast of Newcastle,
appears like acres of salt tears he hadn’t shed
when they’d lifted him out of Shark Alley
winters ago, after the juvenile gray snagged
the limb from him, harder to cross with hobble
and crutch and one good leg than he’d first imagined.
Most afternoons between lunch and sunset crowds
he sits watching the black-suited amphibian
boys hurry with bee-waxed boards into the waves.
Yes, they do look like elegant seals in and out
of ocean. Ignore his gaze that says nothing
except wonder where among the particles
of the Pacific his flesh and blood now surge
with the spindrift and its tide, sensation
of thigh and calf and foot and toes clasping
like that bite threshing its fish head still
in the surf most afternoons on Nobby’s Beach.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Francesca Haig’s poetry has appeared in Blue Dog, Overland and Famous Reporter and has been featured on Radio National’s Poetica. Her first collection of poetry, Bodies of Water (FIP, 2006) was highly commended in the 2007 Ann Elder Award. She has read her work at the Melbourne Writers Festival and Tasmanian Living Writers Week. She lectures in Creative Writing at The University of Chester, UK.
Dating a poet: a relationship in six stanzas
i.
In making love
we unmake words.
Later, you take out your journal
and reconstruct language
under the strict tuition of your pen,
while I make out the graffiti of your chest hair.
ii.
The naked page.
How the sound of your pen on paper
is more intimate than any of the noises
we made last night.
iii.
You are a virtuoso:
who knew so much could be
done with syllables?
Your daredevil tongue.
iv.
You write only in free verse
but, at night, the perfect pentameter
of your sleeping breath.
v.
I scour your words
as I have read other men’s faces, hands.
In all your poems, as with photos,
I seek myself out first
to see how I look.
vi.
I know your mouth
is a fortune cookie.
After three weeks I crack it open:
on that slip of paper, your tongue,
is her name.
Baghdad
Back in Texas, he understood perfectly
the logic of soil.
No good with letters or numbers,
by nineteen he was fluent in the tangible language of dirt:
planting time, the heavy satisfaction of
a good rain. The places
where clay makes the ground stubborn.
Knots in the earth, snagging the plough’s comb.
In Baghdad it’s the soil that confounds him:
how, west of the Green Zone, you could dig all day
and never strike wet.
How lightly the Tigris carries its silt load,
while the sandstorms make the horizon
sway like a cornfield.
Mud in the water,
sand in the air.
Over here, he’s betrayed by dirt,
and what it grows:
the sudden bloom of an explosion.
The reliable crop of car bodies.
Behind the burnt-out police van
that row of heads,
coming up like pumpkins.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sean Singer’s first book Discography won the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Baby
“There is no solitude greater than a samurai’s, unless it is that
of a tiger in the jungle…perhaps.”–Bushido
She shines like wheels
In the orange overcast.
Alone within and the walls
Hover like fronds.
Pulsing with emerald self-mastery
A door slides open.
She’s alone without language
As a blade…
A paper lantern and a
Lighter’s ornamental pearl.
She’s passing and flying
Like a submarine
But the white heaven belly
Means someday baby you’ll commune
With daylight’s milk.
What do you want me to do?
Encircle the pillow of grass–
Doughy fist in the human grasp.
Fields
Stacks of fields preaching lines
like balls of sheet music singing cusps
of snow, atavistic & keening.
Within each ivory pecan is a faded blond kazoo.
Storefront evangelists gasping proper
& faithful–sock swooping,
seeing the dead end of time:
The field was a lady young and fair
And died just groaning in despair.
Austere zither shadow-paints the mighty & meek,
in a jagged barrel up to the neck in salt.
Let the rains come down hard as a rail.
in their strict declamatory beams.
Let the cotton glomp together as a consolidation
of domination.
Snow launched for eleven fat ensembles.
A floating bridge dying like jasper & sugar.
Lukewarm night and morning appetite.
Radiant, unoccupied, & raspy the field was heard.
The tambourine rattles like a cloven hoof:
Your mother and father, fare you well,
Your wicked daughter is doomed to hell.
Within each white bulb is a white balloon:
sizzling filament clinches a fist of white.
A plant’s imprimatur as the pages unfold their map.
Within each ivory pecan is a faded blond kazoo.
We must love / we must love for the field
to care for us. In the field / in the field
we ought to trust.
Echolocation
Owl
The Devil’s headlamp stalks the red cells
in a mouse miles from itself—the yellow lens
is resinous, fat, dense as pearl firming-up
& renders its beam heavy with currents.
Into a dustbowl of annihilation the rotating head
seizes its empire of blood; a storm collapses each
mouse bone as the threnody of rain crushes the air.
Bat
Their music is a quiet submitted to order by darkness.
To translate their invisible wind is to sculpt a gastronomy
of the eye. They hang with their backs to the cave’s engine.
Each ungodly contralto splits the radio-beam into a blister.
Sucking a berry from its root, they are a single purple wing.
Do not tread in the sweeping arc where this puffing locomotive
swallows the engineered airstream. It is a silent calypso.
Bumblebee
They unfurl their jerseys from Mexico to Miami
in an anatomic miasma darkening their bunker.
They are darts of themselves, swallowing the porchlight
melting in the melon punch & fists of downpour.
Their stuffy plunking ignites a redline to the stucco ceiling.
Curling clockwise like a coaxing faucet
their fronds dust a car horn in a polyp concerto.
Richard Pryor
The healthy flee from the ill,
but the ill also flee from the healthy,
like a wasp dying from the cardboard house,
and this explains perfectly
the tunnel entrance, dripping
with water into the seeping floor.
Hold onto your possessions
with your teeth, said the prophet,
and death with its cherry blossom
and insomnia, will move on.
What is it like to be burned?
Do you simply move toward
pain or cling, with fever,
to your right not to live?
The mayor of Peoria
moaned like a pink cocoon,
the bed did creak,
and the candle’s nude tangoed on the walls.
The fire’s black wings and the yellow
bodies flutter above the filth
and I desire and look no one
in the eye, when I enter.
At the moment one’s torture begins,
one’s covenant
with other human beings is lost forever.
Put On All the Lights
Three of the R&B singers took refuge in the darkest plush of Bamako nightclub. A sound erupted between them. Here the velveteen memory grows weak, so I don’t know if it was a fight or a wakeup call. But I can still see one of the women they had abandoned, standing by the bar, with its ochre padding and brass pins, yelping like a ragga, her hair thrust out like a pool, fighting for supremacy. Her ping-like crystal yells proclaimed above the fizzling light…Was she a victim? I have no idea. The gods of noise—her sisters—had condemned her to the backwoods of AM; but the chandelier above her head, hailed its beams like dust upon her head.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Indran Amirthanayagam is a poet, essayist and translator in English, Spanish and French. His first book The Elephants of Reckoning won the 1994 Paterson Prize in the United States. His poem “Juarez” won the Juegos Florales of Guaymas, Mexico in 2006. Amirthanayagam has written five books thus far: The Splintered Face Tsunami Poems (Hanging Loose Press, March 2008), Ceylon R.I.P. (The International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2001), El Hombre Que Recoge Nidos (Resistencia/CONARTE, Mexico, 2005) El Infierno de los Pajaros (Resistencia, Mexico, 2001), The Elephants of Reckoning (Hanging Loose Press, 1993).
Amirthanayagam’s essays and poems have appeared in The Hindu, The New York Times, El Norte, Reforma, New York/Newsday, The Daily News, The Island, The Daily Mirror, Groundviews (Sri Lanka). Amirthanayagam is a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow and a past recipient of an award from the US/Mexico Fund for Culture for his translations of Mexican poet Manuel Ulacia. Amirthanayagam is working currently on a translation of poet Jose Eugenio Sanchez.
After the Party
— in Memoriam: Anura Bandaranaike
I remember an evening
flavored by my mother’s
cooking, bringing
two smart patriots
together, to speak
about devolution
not yet realized,
accommodate
what makes sense
seeing the island
from afar, the only
way forward,
two dear friends
who met then
for the first time.
Now, one is laid
to rest, and
the other engages
readers still
to think afresh
about slow or fast
bombs, double-speak,
cynical tongues, how
to bring more than
twenty five years
of war to an end
before all our parties
break up and families
gather, with shot-gun
shells and confetti
to scatter, at weddings
held on holy ground
beside gravestones
where fathers and
brothers, mothers
and sisters are buried.
Adjustment
We walk across railroad tracks.
It’s late, the moon full, waves
roaring on the other side
of coconut trees. There
aren’t any goons asking
for id’s. It’s 1980 or some
such year before current
flapping of metal wings, birds
alloyed everywhere dropping
pellets right on our foreheads.
Aiyo, we say, how the hell,
machan, don’t buggers
know how to shoot, and
these poisons flowing
in our blood.
What’s become of older
weapons of war, when
knife pricked or bomb
blew off the head but
left the next man alive
to attend to his family
and the fight? Now
cancer multiplies
his cells and we should
not walk across railroad
tracks or down on
the beach off Galle Face,
which today’s children
know as a high security zone,
and their older siblings
as no-man’s land, lovers’
folly, but we protest
too much, surely
we can carry passports
in our bathing trunks?
Rub
(Berries and Chicken)
There’s a rub in these black
berries on bread with a glass
of milk on a Saturday morning
when rain trickles down
through mist and fitful
cold ‘though not to complain
about weather, this is no
long john winter,
and across the Pacific
an old friend rides bullet
trains and types into his
Blackberry about once
forgotten wheelbarrows
and rain water evenings
we ate steamed chicken
outside the library
at Chatham Square
in Chinatown; meanwhile
the poem will not insist
on personal memories,
wishes to barter in
chinatowns, capture hearts
in Frisco or Vancouver,
or even in the birthing
places, Guangzhou
or Shanghai, or some
Cho Fu Sa, or far northern
village; I have to study
the map and ask the reader
to travel with me into the heart
of this ginger and hot rice
beside a white chicken.
Backwards
Nice to walk
backwards,
to that first
time, spade –
thin, I gathered
my wits
outside
typing class
while a girl,
brown-skinned
like mine,
came up to me
and smiled;
I held her hand
and felt her
hold mine.
—a Friday
in Honolulu,
allowed
to wear sandals
to school,
beaches
beckoning
boogie boards,
yet I admit
I did not
know
what
to do with
that hand –
Come Home
Come home,
now– not just
for kiri bath
or poll sambol,
or a salt slick
on the beach
and a tumble
in the hammock.
Come home,
now– wandering
the planet means
nothing
if you don’t
return for the party
and make
your parents glad.
Come home,
now – though
the parable
does not fit.
Father died
abroad,
and Mother’s
left to keep
their house
running
for another son,
and always
local allegiances,
and church
up the road,
and visitors
from England
and Australia
or the island
once called Ceylon,
where branches
of the family tree
flower still
saying:
Come home,
now– for
a stringhopper
feast,
to remember
childhood
jeeps rolling
over jungle
tracks, or
the name
of some half-
forgotten
agreement
to share
all the loaves
in the basket,
before noting
how singular
the Army
has become,
bereft of
minorities,
its esprit
du corps
changed
utterly
into a
question
of loyalty
and tribal
allegiance,
the island
lost at sea,
and now
the alarm
ringing,
time
come
for my
airport taxi.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Kylie Rose lives in Maitland with her four children. In 2007 she was a resident at the LongLines Poetry Workshop at Varuna, the Writers’ House, and was awarded a retreat fellowship to work on her collection, Sea Level. She is due to return to Varuna as a resident/ consultant for the 2008 LongLines Community Week. Her suite of poems, “Doll Songs” was commended in the 2006 Newcastle Poetry Prize, and an extract of Sea Level was included in the 2007 Newcastle Poetry Prize anthology. She is currently collaborating with poets and composers on a project commissioned by the Hunter Writers’ Centre.
Bees,
Nanjing
In cloisonné fields,
emerald greenhouses cling-wrap the earth
and incubate the foetus grain.
At the toll gates, bees rap and rattle
my face painted on the glass eyes of the coach.
Bees propel themselves
at my steely hive with zeal,
their pharyngeal meal meant to ease
the propolis seal stoppering my throat.
Welcome Queen, incarnate, they hum.
Nanjing––plum blossom city––
opens its fist for you.
Hanshan Temple,
Suzhou
Gilt flames squall.
Incense pours into carved
and fecund air.
From the pagoda,
temple faces squint
with faithful irises of coin.
Three blows, the bell’s belly
induces fortune’s triplets.
A fourth strike
renders me
fortune’s orphan.
I leave, a monk,
robes––dissolved peach––
flirting with fallen
sycamore floss.
One Thousand People Rock,
Suzhou
In the Dynasty of Song,
one thousand men lost their voices
on a stone octave.
Still ringing in the spring rain of peonies,
one thousand voices sink my skin.
White sepulchral birds in unison,
chant through bony, fluted beaks. One
thousand egrets howl a mating dirge,
calling soul from stone
to nest.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Liam Ferney is a Brisbane poet whose work has been published in Australia, New Zealand and North America. His first collection, Popular Mechanics, was published in 2004. It’s follow up the french word for ‘voyage’ should eventually be raised from the depths of the Marianas Trench sometime around 2010.
Kurilpa
for Paul
all those flat whites & what was the name?
shopping for bargain bin westerns
after the donuts
while the day kept it’s blistering silence
like the coal station at black diamond bay
given as a gift to the jungle.
with no where to go i drink beer with fish
& banished cheap music but
i remember you making machiatos
where the cats played sax
before you shopped for kalashnikovs,
gunja by the kilo
at a 3rd world truck stop.
they were beautiful days
tables adorned with tulips and skulls
where renegades retired
& we are ready to assume
the poise of our generation.
common music betrayed by static,
the treachery of an fm ocean.
Iron Lion Scion
As abandoned as drive-in’s, tracer fire
no longer fireworkflecks the six o’clock news
and the friends he made in Barcelona
have all upped stumps, migrated to Angola.
So he spends lunch hour’s lolling at the lights,
the cavalcade of unspecific grooming,
a crimped starter at the boom where we all go bust,
melting figurines of Posh and Becks
puddling on the high table, the slow waltz
with the sticky palms and dystrophic hearts.
You’ve cancelled your appointments
but there’s no point apportioning blame
on the circus tent revivalists preaching at the riverbank
or a hedge fund backed Buddhist retreats.
The aficionados swear by the tune in the tumult
a detached viola, adagio on the kitchen radio.
That’s how Black Tuesday sounds on a website,
there were warnings but they were polite
and for once the phoney doctors are right:
“Coin is clarity, that much is bankable,”
(you’re holding it long until the ever after)
“call our hotline,” that’s what they say
coming down off the millennium
like a bad pill on a good day.
some nights the heat
Coming home
I read the alleyways
like Toohey Forest tracks.
The night is over tropical,
silences and shuffling,
television antennas
and fake iced tea.
Kept awake
by Kinsella’s
anthology aliens
the earth’s thermostat cranks
and I smoke This Plus™
at the top of the stairs.
My accent gets smudged
like important digits
penciled on an ATM receipt
dishwashed against the coins
in your wallet.
Watching the scuffling
drunks at the end
of the street
it’s as though I’m the big prize
on the crooked game show
destined never to go off.
I learned surrealism
from travelling exhibitions
then did my best to forget it
hoping I could come off
easy and casual
like terry towelling hats
or cold beer.
The brave and the free
These are not good days with the Gipper still on TV,
the Kool-Aid sins of the brand new colony;
when the truth is too grotesque to grasp
all we’ve left is a remembrance of things fast.
While the lights go out on Melbourne’s plains
our best friends have all assumed new names.
The things in your cupboard you no longer trust
the graduate scheme analysts are nonplussed.
And like any goomba I’ll extract my vig,
endure the torment when they breach the brig.
It seems like yesterday that Bopper, Bamba and Holly:
the asthmatic engine, the wheeze of Buddy’s Folly.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jessika Tong is twenty six years old. Her work has been published in various national and international literary journals including The Age, Tears in the Fence, The Speed Poet’s Zine, FourW, Stylus, Verandah, Pendulum, Wet Ink, Polestar and The Westerly. She recently performed at the 2008 Queensland Poetry Festival and her first collection of poems The Anatomy of Blue is forthcoming in 2008 with Sunline Press.
Moscow
.1.
How will I describe a man to you?
Stirred from clay
Peeled from the old black bark of German oak
Curled inside my palm, his arms
Tucked back like new, featherless wings.
How will I describe a man to you?
Can words do him justice?
The bones pressed upon like envelopes,
The flesh salted and steamed.
And men, where are the women?
Where are these homes of children and kitchens?
These waist deep cauldrons,
The highways thick with winter lights…
.2.
Thinking that my hands were pearls you took
Them to meet your mother
She sniffed the city lights at my wrist,
Alarmingly red,
As if slit and put us to work like rusted mules
Where they would bloom
Softly and out of place against the cold white steel.
I began to bleed bolts and axe heads.
To eat and live machinery.
Its hissing motor
A heart, my heart that turns over each hour
With a long, desperate cry.
Going home, we share an apple seed.
A chicken bone. We march on.
One red foot in front of the other,
The grinding of metal,
Finally a small child that throws up
Lightening each time I lend my breast to it.
My dear, we are producing terror
In that warehouse.
Do not look so astonished that
We no longer breathe love or its strange pollen.
That the whitewashed tongue of decency
No longer pricks our imaginations
But leaves brick dust on our teeth instead
Of those mythical fires.
.3.
Water froze during the night, closed up its
Clear, consistent arteries.
The war encrusted pipes screamed at our
Tea cups while we danced off death
Before the stove light.
The two of us, great wounds
Refusing to scar, to mend the tortured rhythm
Of arms that no longer hold the other.
The air froze right there.
We could touch it.
Pull it between our teeth like a blackened finger.
That month four people in our street
Killed them-selves just to be warm.
The landlords arrived and threw all of their things
Into the gutters.
Lovely in life
Now they are turned in leaves
Ferried from the canopy to the earth
With no right to privacy
The kind that we share in this room,
On this bed, across this kitchen table.
I ask you,
Has enough been sacrificed for you to be a whole and I a half?
.4.
When I first came to you long nights of whisky were the rage.
We sat up reading Chaucer by a kerosene lamp
Fingers melted to the orange bone of light,
Tingling with alcohol.
I got pregnant, what a disaster you said,
But it was an accident.
Buttoning your heart, scrounging for an axe in the empty pantry.
‘We can’t afford an abortionist. You will have to kill it yourself’.
Biting on a cloth, gas flooded the womb, ate out
The bonneted Eve that slept upon my wish bone.
The old woman from next door
Bent above me and I sunk into her arms
This old mother who smelled so much like my own.
She took it out, that sobbing seed
And feed it to the cat. Then
Knotted a yellow ribbon onto the door handle.
The deed is done!
She told me to get up, get up and dust your-self off.
Put on your best dirtiest dress, scrape mud onto your cheeks.
Trick yourself with perfume and bread my lovely thing.
Do you really want to be all alone in this old country?
You will die out there for sure if he does not come back.
.5.
A little Stalin
You are fat and clean while the
Rest of us are filthy.
We are plucking at the greased bones of God
Starving and sickly as he points us away
From his door.
One night you return to me
Rich with stories of your other wife.
Of how she soaked you with pig fat before
Taking you into her mouth.
You wear
The robes of a Cleric convincing us all of
Your sainthood.
Unfortunately for me,
I curtsey
I fill you with apologetic kisses.
Who is this woman before you with the pomegranate seeds
Crushed between her teeth?
For six long months I dwelled at this doorway
Between these four walls eating rat poison,
Wailing in my widow’s armour.
At this flickering apple tree that I have sat beneath
With blue copies of myself
Hot against your cheek.
I pasted that
Long four letter word to your crutch
In hope that it will seed and give off a
Sweet fruit.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Peter has been HIV positive since he was 19 years old (since 1988). In 2008, Peter has decided to cease mainstream media. He is launching in March 2008 at radio 3CR in Melbourne a weekly program called ‘Radio for Kids’, which will present kids speaking about their world as they see it. Peter lives in a small town in Victoria; a place where he can walk a few minutes down the road and be in a bit of forest.
Peter Davis has been a freelance writer and radio documentary maker. He won the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia award in 1995 for best Information documentary for ‘The Joan Golding Story’. In 2006 he won the Judy Duffy award at RMIT given to one writer each year in the RMIT writing and editing course. He has produced regularly as a freelancer for ABC Radio National including Poetica, Radio Eye and Hindsight. He has written six feature articles for The Age.
when i die let my dog serenade me
thanks for your card from India: a lot of animal activity around Baba’s resting place
like many I am also somewhere in between drug addiction and a Ph.D perhaps
learning how to recognise the jewelled mystery that falls from the neck of self
my son told me he dreamt about a land of small noises and imagined Shiva yawning
he also saw how Buddha’s shadow continues to meditate with no body under the tree
I spit against the wind, a desire for afterlife, hands at the surface while the table tilts
yes I believe in life after death, of course I believe that life will continue without me
we can learn to support the sky with dust, singing of faith like crickets in chorus
death is a serenade by a dog licking a busker’s watch and leaving three whiskers
a journey for tranquil moments (lines written whilst hitch-hiking)
in my own private Idaho
standing or laying beside a sealed or unmade road
whilst eternity lays across my homeless soul
its thin blanket of dust
my skin slowly turning blue in the predawn
when the trees won’t speak above a whisper
just so the first birds can be clearly heard
and the orange glow of the sun beneath the horizon
reminds me of a glow from an orchestra pit
then curling-up on the road’s edge
shivering with my eyes closed and one thumb still out
in my other hand a cigarette lighter that hovers
like a firefly for the motorists to see
asleep after entering a car before the driver could ask three questions
his or her face floating upwards inside my first dream
asleep yet listening to the colours inside their voice
a yellowed or reddened or brown leaf
filled with fresh waste from the tree
I wake and a driver is smoking my joints and talking to my puppy dog
a dog that I dressed in a nappy in case he pisses or shits
“Just 120 clicks to we arrive at Goulbourn and the big sheep, little mate”
and the dog is ignoring the driver and mumbling in my ear again
its winter of meditations
a thick snow upon the past