Carol Jenkins is a visual artist, writer and publisher living in Sydney, Australia, you can find bits of her work online on her blog Show Me The Treasure.  Her first book of poetry Fishing in the Devonian was published in 2008 by Puncher & Wattmann. Her publishing company River Road Press produces audio CDs of Australian poetry.

Mulberries

(written on the occasion of seeing dried white mulberries in Shaza’s Persian Groceries.)

 
Somewhere I am in a mulberry tree,
tucked into the green skirt that nearly drapes
the ground. I am wearing blue shorts
and a white top, a two-piece set made
of terry-towelling, and on the top, appliquéd,
are green leaves and under this calyx suspended,
free, are terry towelling strawberries, that are delicious
but inedible and then, to one side, and then another
splatters of dark mulberry juice, indelible.

Spice Trade

Your amalgam, a pestling of hard seeds
and dry leaf, has vanilla moments
not plain but sweet, tempered down with constant
coriandering, enlivened with words of sumac,
heat of chili on the tongue, the sharp
and pungent turns galangal-ish,
and your barberry tang that raises shiver
from the well below my solar plexus,
shakes up taste buds on my torso, before it sinks
into my sub-continent of spice.
 
I offer back a citric acid discipline,
the honey bee’s diasporas, mycelia of salty plums
that spring backwards from the tongue
what you never thought to think, as day dissolves,
about the ragged illegalities of juniper
or might you ask, before all the aromatics
do some limbo in ras el hanout, about the rosehips?

Meena Kandasamy (b.1984) is a Chennai-based writer and activist. Her
debut poetry collection Touch, with a foreword by Kamala Das was
published in 2006 (Peacock Books, Mumbai). Two of her poems have won
first prizes in pan-Indian poetry contests. Her poetry has appeared in
several online and print magazines including The Little Magazine,
Indian Literature, Kavya Bharati, Carapace, QLRS. Her work has also
been featured in the Poetry International Web, and Other Voices
Poetry. She is presently writing her first novel titled, Gypsy Goddess. On the most poetic days, she is a Dalit activist and translator. She blogs at
http://meenu.wordpress.com

Felix Cheong was the recipient of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist of the Year for Literature Award in 2000. He has published three books of poetry, Temptation and Other Poems (1998), I Watch the Stars Go Out (1999) and Broken by the Rain (2003), which was short-listed for the 2004 Singapore Literature Prize. Sudden in Youth: New and Selected Poems will be published in 2009. Felix edited Idea to Ideal: 12 Singapore Poets on the Writing of Their Poetry (2004).  A Bachelor of Arts (honours) graduate from the National University of Singapore, Felix completed his Master of Philosophy in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland in 2002. He is currently a freelance writer and an adjunct lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and Temasek Polytechnic.

In Praise of Sloth

Not writing is a pain

five years in the making,

a knot you choose not

to untie, pact of convenience

with time, vow of silence,

itch at your back, the back

of your voice you can’t reach,

neither pen nor stick.

But how it grows, terrible

territory; you flog dead

lines, sub-verse, start

false and stutter, follow

the lead as it sinks, suspect

animation, play dumb, downplay,

punctuate yourself with commas,

poems in coma, this lull, dull period

when you have nothing to say,

nothing to say it with.

For not writing is a virtue, let

sleeping words lie,

an implosion of sloth

before you find the gift.

Before Reality Shows

It will be, will it to be,

faith that a wall

is your window to morning,

glory, gilt-mounted, coughing out

the sun, sheen and shine

as if no closure, never

foreclosure. Imagine, yes, hold

it together with words or gods,

that into the distance,

doors lead you on,

corridors steep as the steps

you can carry on your feet,

before dead-ends chase you down,

nail your head to your heart,

seal them blinding shut.

There are no alternatives. Nothing

else will alter what is native

inside you: A box

where not even silence escapes. 

Night Calls

Soon, your day will

pass, no matter how fast,

vast, furious, light will run

itself out, like a boy

given legs for a field

or a man, women for a song.

It’ll always be too soon,

like that last kiss,

the lasting kiss, a kiss at last,

at the mercy of needing

too much, saying too little.

When dark matters, rises, steadies

itself for the kill,

you’ll not be this weak again

but complete, completed,

taken out of circulation

and buried among stars,

want for nothing.

Emma Carmody is working toward her PhD in creative writing and French at the University of Adelaide. Prior to commencing her doctoral project, she worked as an environmental lawyer in Sydney. She has also worked in a volunteer capacity with several NGOs that provide legal advice and support to asylum seekers. Her poetry, prose and translations have appeared in Australian and foreign journals, including the Australian Book Review and New Translations. She currently lives in the South of France.  

Divinité Khmère, Musée Guimet   

Flank entombed,  

A thew of root around her

Goddess waist,

She meditates on centuries,

Incubates the temple’s

Holocaust.   

There is no modesty

In the jungle:

Insects breed

Between her virgin thighs,

Monkeys take their pleasure

On her naked breasts,

And in a flush of humid green

Bamboo shoots

Quake about her feet 

Like nerve endings of the understory.  

What memories she must hold

Of another world,

Where each dawn was guarded

By the season’s alms, humble

On the altar,

The droning of the sutras –   

Her divine core.

Being so vital,

So sovereign to the shrine, 

She offered up her wisdom

Until suddenly,

Her naked arms severed,

The empire slain:

Rebirth in the wild.

The Ento(M)-uscian

The Shore Line 

Alone on the beach

with the lovely slaughter of evening’s

thrust: puffer fish, a slick of gull,

crushed shells. Between

open ocean and smaller things

I walk North, through fits of rain.

You stay inside.

Three urchins on my mantel now,

vestigial spines worn but keen. 

We grieved our loss on the phone last

week: the garden’s thriving, your brother’s fine,

may I visit? Such responsibility for

chance words, barely meant –

such tenderness, these killing fields

at lowest tide.

Stuart Cooke is a Sydney-based writer but at present he is in Chile undertaking research for a PhD on Australian and Chilean ecopoetics. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in various magazines in Australia, the USA and the UK, including upcoming editions of Overland and Meanjin. In 2007 his translation of Juan Garrido Salgado’s Once Poemas, Septiembre 1973 was published by Picaro Press.

Margaret Bradstock has published four books of poetry. The most recent are The Pomelo Tree (which won the Wesley Michel Wright prize) and Coast (2005). In 2003 she was Asialink writer-in-residence at Peking University. Margaret is co-editor of Five Bells for Poets Union, and Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of NSW.

Recherche Bay

“In wildness is the preservation of the world.” – Thoreau

When Aborigines watched
Abel Tasman beating up the coast
                    (overhangs of cliffs

their camping spots), the great eucalypts,
sclerophyll forests, were already old.
                Green is the colour of renewal,

of wild woodland and cultivated garden,
                    amber the fossilised resin
like tears, or blood on a scimitar’s curve,

the nets and traps of war.
If no-one is there can you still
                    hear the forests screaming?

Bulldozed out of history,
the gestures of reconciliation
                  become sites of mourning,

incendiaries dropped from a helicopter
our defeat, the blackened
                   fern-covered boles.

Pond Life

‘Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become
an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old person,
renewing and moving on. You are not who you were…nor who you will be.’
                                                                          – Sebastien Faulkes, Charlotte Grey.

Your gardens reminding me
     of a different space, penny-frogs
          pulsating in darkness,

tea-lights on water.
     There is
          always water, recurring,

water I dive into, under,
     breathing, floating, drifting
          in tadpole existence,

 my memories fabrications.
     Sometimes the tide rises
          to the head of the cliff

(sighing among grasses),
     green weed tangles like hair.
          Dead fish, two-dimensional,

clutter the shoreline,
     eyes whittled out
          like holes in memory,

moonlight’s abandoned haul.
     Frogmen surface,
          leviathan-like

on the white tide.
     You are insubstantial,
          stitched into the seascape

and the clacking sound of boats.
     There are dwelling places,
          mansions within mansions,

 rooms within rooms,
     a labyrinth of mirrors.
          Waking, I am not here,

my amphibian selves
     spiralling down
          to the sea’s wrack.

 Shadow-puppets rap sound-tracks
     in crazed patois
          on the garden wall.     

The Baptist

Light like gauze,
an oasis somewhere before me
or a Messiah descending.

Living on locusts and wild honey
(dreaming of wine, of bread)
I find my chapel in the wilderness.
Caravaggio will paint me
identifiable by my bowl, reed cross
and leather girdle.
Herod Antipas will proffer my head
upon a platter
to please a lissom dancer.

 And I will ask
if what I saw as baptism
was merely death.

 
 – after St John in the desert, by Sidney Nolan

Anuradha Vijayakrishnan was born in Cochin, India. She completed a B.Tech in Chemical Engineering from Calicut University, Kerala and a post graduation in Management from XLRI, Jamshedpur. She writes fiction and poetry while pursuing a full time corporate career. In 2007, the unpublished manuscript of her first novel, Seeing the girl, was long listed for the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize. Her work has appeared or is due to appear in Eclectica, Bare Root Review, Nth Position, Orbis, Desilit, Aesthetica, The Pedestal Magazine, The King’s English, Every Day Poets, Stony Thursday Anthology, Poetry Chain, Indian Literature, Muse India , Asia Literary Review and Magma.

Beads

In her hands they are like dust. Or sun-dried

blood, fine-polished. Glittering, unlike

her eyes that slept through the day and through

the caveman nights that came snaking

out of their den and shed their skin

on hers; on hers, for god’s sake.

With her hands, she unravels them on her

skin; that skin scrubbed twice and raw. The beads

drizzle over, touching off cold sparks, tiny

nerve spots that meet and combust. So there is

life yet, and there is something that lives. Rubies

beneath the damaged soil, secret black emeralds

that laugh at the night, laugh at the scarred day.

On her hands she makes red markings. One cross

for every spent force, one knot for each thing

that was taken. She moves those hands in clenched

circles – willing them to cleanse

and be cleaned.

The beads find their way to her feet. Sunspots fall

into her eyes and she turns them into tears.

Who dances?

When I dance, I am like a rustic. Oily-haired

and round armed. I flap my head and grin

at invisible birds. I rise and fall in the garden

sand, laugh out loud when the rhythm

beats my feet.

So this music suits; this wooden bench

on which I can dance suits too. I can clank

my rings, my beaded chains here. Can imagine

wood drums, swing my bountiful hips, go one-two

with my heels, my shoulders, my chin.

Snake-dance, peacock-dance; dance even

like a happy calf with new milk sloshing

in my mouth. Kick my donkey heels

as if they can’t break.

And then, the neighbours fall off, their pet dogs

and their studio kitchens fall

off. My cellphone shatters against the wall, and the internet

dissolves into unreality. Beetles and moths

gather in the corners to watch.

Green plants in window boxes shiver

at the feet, of this goddess

who dances, like a rustic.

Lorraine Marwood is a Five Islands press poet and has two children’s books of poetry published as well as a verse novel with Walker ‘Ratwhiskers and Me’. Her latest verse novel ‘Star Jumps’ will be released in June 2009.  This novel really encompasses the influences of her poetry, the rural landscape and the surprising detail, all a way to celebrate life in words. Lorraine also writes poetry strategies and is available for workshops across all age levels. www.lorrainemarwood.com

Releasing

Her pelargoniums, her little clucks of treasure

strong square ooze like catspray

fans of flowers like dragon wings

a wintering of wooden shelves

step laddering the back door alcove.

I came into her shuttered world,

I could call her grandmother.

She prodded, poked, admonished, preached

every word a lesson to decipher

a frost crunch world where shyness

was fashioned into stalactites that sharded

straight for heart.

She locked love up like Easter chocolate

turned pale with mothballs-

but here I offer

the sizzle of sausages

the sharing of her soft feathery

double bed, twin trunks up on the wardrobe top

smocked cushions

a cold electric fire

and Grimm’s fairy tales

signed with love from Nanny

bought at EJ Brown’s bookshop.

I have blown to dandelion seed her love of words

not restrained them with dire consequences-

wood smoke and finches

arch over my back door

and a tiny skink lizard

races over the melted frost

mid morning.

I come into her sunlit world.

Salt Desert Donkey