Reid Mitchell lives in New Orleans.  Following Hurricane Katrina, he refugeed one crucial year in Hong Kong.  There he and a Hong Kong poet began work on a series of dialogues, some of which have been published in Admit2, Barrow Street, Caffeine Destiny. Poetry Monthly Magazine, and Poetry Superhighway. [http://www.sighming.com/dialogue]  Mitchell has published some short stories as well as the novel  A Man Under Authority.  He has also published several books on nonfiction.

1. Sanctuary

Two and two-thirds red columns, roofless
House left unfinished?
Mansion in ruins?

2. Singapore River
(An answer to Mingh)

A word misconstrued
does not necessarily lose
all value

a path obscured
by leaves and words
may lead somewhere in the end

two people lost
in dark woods
may wander in circles

two lifetimes.

3. When I Imagine Us

When I imagine us
I see you, golden in Italy,
your small face peeking through Umbrian green, Tuscan dust, Sienna sienna, as
in an excited way, excitable you run ahead, one finger pointing.

Didn’t we walk, hot and dry, between blood orange and olive?

Didn’t we look down on the sea blind Homer promised would be wine-dark,
and the beach that slaughtered Athens,
and where we nonetheless smiled and kissed?

You watched me eat artichokes with garlic.
We strolled from ghetto to Pantheon,
past the Mandarin restaurant
and you announced you would kiss no more foul foreign mouths?

No, sad no.

The South China Sea does not lap Sicily
and those fish will not swim to Hong Kong to be sold in Causeway Bay.

And you? You were fighting with your sisters, washing your hair on the street,
finding out that words, even more than boys, could be playthings.

I was by myself, with passport, poetry I forget, and faint, unquenchable hope.

But when I imagine you,
I see us in Italy, between orange and olive,
your head glistening, your feet dusty.
You run with index finger pointing toward a miracle I cannot yet see
just ahead.

4. Ghost Bodies

Seducing a woman twelve time zones ahead
is like bringing a ghost to bed:
a nice thing to write about

I do not want your body without your mind
nor your mind without your body.
But seeing I may have the attention of one

I would like to swap briefly for one night,
seven years,
or most likely one long sunny afternoon
spent in Singapore or other southern port

“Physical intimacy?” you say.

I don’t want an abstraction.

That patch of dry skin,
the crooked toe,
the ears that don’t quite match,
your breath gone sour, hair hot with sweat.

I want to touch you all the places you hope that men don’t notice

in Saigon, Singapore or some other southern port
one long muggy afternoon when sweat refuses to dry.

I want your body,
perfect in its imperfection.

5. In Praise Of Youth

Show her no mercy,
younger children.
She showed no mercy to us

calling this love dry
and another fat.
Pointing out teeth that have yellowed
worse than old photographs.

Let her be humbled before she turns thirty
by teenage girls gawking on the escalators at Kowloon.

Let them say, “What does she mean by wearing that?”
as she passes down with bare midriff and blue velvet cap.

Let young girls’ eyes be her only mirrors.  

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 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’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 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 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 (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 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.

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.

Lou Smith’s poetry has been published in Wasafiri, Overland, Kunapipi, Undergrowth, Mod_Piece and various other journals and anthologies. She is currently re-tracing her maternal Grandmother’s life story – her migration from Jamaica to England to Newcastle, Australia, through narrative poetry. Lou also loves making handmade books.

Remembrance

Over fig-roots from Moreton Bay
cracks in roadways
and cicada shells dropped
crunching under soles
with a shock  
lubb-dupp lubb-dupp
of the heart

the tips of summer grass singe brown

and the cattle in Abermain grow thin to rib

curtains closed halfway
from glare off pane of glass
we squint at the world outside
our island,
red-tiled roofs, and Jacaranda trees
that have lost their leaves

the bush has burnt black, ash
falls like feathers
and green sprouts from crevices
in trunks of Banksia

after dinner we dust fritters with fine castor sugar

yellow-combed cockatoos feed on berries

you bite into pawpaw flesh
the seeds spilling
down
your neck
like strings of black pearls

Setting Sail

Sports on deck
quoits and rounders,
to prepare you for English life,
holidays at Brighton
on pebbled beaches.

and there
next to you
smoking his pipe,
his boater shading the
familiar sun,
stood Grandad
leading you
to your new home.

Columbus sailed this sea,
thinking he was in Japan,
thinking he was in Cathay,
thinking he was anywhere
but here.

And in the sea
you saw the sky,
intense, endless blue
ripples of cloud
skimming the water’s surface,
the sea, where in 1494, mermaids sang
and led sailors astray.

Staff Sergeant Butcher
posted back to London
left Jamaica with you that day,
the year 1930,
the year you married
at the Scots Church in Kingston,
the year before my mother was born
in London, England
and your mother was already in her grave.

The Sadness

It’s in the currawong’s song
dropped bark, groundfall
moist rocky clay soil.
It’s caught in corner
of the eye
between
cilia of leaf
and cicada wing.

And here it is seamed
scars,
raised white
wounds carved in
deep
and bloody

in my palm.
I hold a river stone,
my fingertip rests
in the cool hollow
of remembered  
grooves and ridges.

Maria Freij is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle where she also teaches. Her theoretical work focuses on literary representations of melancholy, place, and identity. She is also interested in translation between English, Swedish, and French, especially of poetry. Maria has presented her work in Australia and Europe and her poems have appeared and are forthcoming in journals and anthologies. Her collection, I Was Here, won the University’s Harri Jones Memorial Prize in 2007.

Kindergarten (I)

The child’s breath appears
and disappears on the window-pane.
Beyond the reflections
of the others playing catch
and the smell of orange and clove
lies the forest with its secrets.

Shadows join deeper shadows,
melt with the tree-trunks,
sweep away the toys left in the playground,
the stray mitten.

The sweet odour of sweat and wool    
blends with the sound of the ticking clock,
the voices of parents collecting their children,
the bitter taste of orange peel on fingertips.

No one notices when the child falls
through the reflection of her own eyes.

She finds herself standing
in the middle of the yard.
All is quiet;
the sky is a black bowl
over her head.

In the air,
snowflakes hang suspended
like promises.

Kindergarten (II)

This is the same spot where, last summer,
you collected tiny frogs in buckets.
Frail lives:
delicate legs and sticky eyes.
This is the same spot
where the girls shrieked in pleasure
when cold little feet touched their palms.

The boys collected more and more
until the sun set behind the pines
and the air turned cool and wet.
This is the same spot
where they sometimes found a toad
and beat it to death with a rock.

The air smells like it is about to snow.

Last year’s air is trapped in the crystals of ice
that form in lumps of moist, aerated earth.
Inside, your history shines in the sharp light.

You look inside:
see yourself walking to kindergarten in the dark,
being collected in the dark,
the soft toy that went missing in the forest,
the silence at the dinner table,
water tracing the outline of an icicle.

The flat rock burns white before you,
its surface smooth like a skull.

Spears of ice whirl through the air
as the other children throw the porous chunks
into the rock face. You, too, lift your hand.

Kindergarten (III)

Monday afternoon: playtime.
    Long johns, socks, trousers,
        shirts, sweaters, scarves,
            mittens, bonnets, jackets.

The sun has already fallen
behind the red shed; the roof’s ridge
is alight for one more minute.
Always this sense of urgency,
of having to savour the light.

Too late.
    The fire goes out;
        the drifts turn blue;
            wind blows the snow into waves.

Under heavy layers of down
the children play hide-and-seek in the half-light,
stand still in the shadows.

            When you turn your back,
            the shadows break free from their objects
            and dance over the snow like birds.

Amber

How many times has she been to this beach? When she was a child, she used to come every day. Countless times she’s walked by the water’s edge trying to find an amber bead lodged in the wrack after a stormy night. She turns the seaweed over with a stick: a cloud of sand flies, some wet feathers, bleached bones. The air fills with the scent of stale water and rotting wrack. No pearls. Every day the newspaper reports findings of large chunks of amber, with mosquitos, bugs, rainbow-coloured beetles trapped inside. The jeweller on the corner polishes the amber into art. The girl presses her face against the window but never steps inside the shop. At night, she is a spider scurrying down a tree-trunk. She cannot seem to move fast enough.The drop of resin, like a ball of lava, catches up with her. She strikes a pose.Today, the ocean is calm. She swims one hundred and eleven breaststrokes just like when she was a child. She spreads her towel, lights a cigarette.On her back in the sand, she closes her eyes. The insides of her eyelids burn like amber.

Mario Licón Cabrera (México, 1949) has lived in Sydney since 1992. His third collection of poetry, La Reverberación de la Ceniza was publshed by Mora & Cantúa Editores in 2005. He was invited to the Spring writers Festival (Sydney) in 1998 and to the Semana de la Poesía Barcelona, 1999, and to The National Poetry Week in 2006. He has translated the poetry of Dorothy Porter, Judith Beveridge, Peter Boyle, J.S. Harry, Robert Adamson, amongst other Australian poets, into Spanish.These poems are part of Yuxtas, a bilingual collection (Spanish/English), written with the assistance of a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts/Literature Board. Read Peter Boyle’s review of Juxtas in our Reviews and Essays section.                                    

                                                                                                                                                    Photographer: David Cahill

Osario

 Will these be  the 206 aristocratic bones of my father?
		R.H
                                                                                             

I
 
Rodolfo Hinostrosa speaks of his father's bones and 
   I think about yours, padre,  
   and suddenly I wanted to see them.  

Will they have survived this quarter of century 
   buried under those drastic, 
   so insolent climate changes?

The scholars in such matters say that one – or better said, 
   our bones – can survive thousands of years 
   buried in the Sahara sands.  

But you are not directly buried in the sand.  
   I don't even know what kind of coffin 
   my brothers had elected for you. 

In any case, I don't believe that you were buried 
   in a dark and fresh clay wombs' pot
   as our ancestors used to do it.  

II

Will they move. Will they change site – 
   skull, humeri and femurs?  A shoulder blade  
   on a fibula or a tíbia?  

Will they seek the trace of the once beloved bones, 
   the bones loved
   beyond the skin?  

Of what will they dream? 
   Which song they will remember?  What name 
   will they want to name – the bones –, in their darkness?  

Perhaps when it rains they are scattered? 

III

Once, as a boy, I saw the relics of some coffins 
   and in them – remains of hair 
   and clothes stuck on some bones.  

They had removed a cemetery to build a playground in its place.  
   We never played there:  
   It was so much its dryness that we all crossed  in full silence.  

IV

One night, a couple of years ago  
   I passed in front of your last shoe-repair shop, 
   that one near the now extinct creek  of your Villa de Seris.  

The doors were wide open. 
   A dark deep silence inside. And the ruins 
   of the old huge house of Los Gómez more dead than ever.  

Now I think that the ideal place for your bones would be there 
   beside the ghost-creek, near the narrow bridge where all passers-by 
   greeted you with so much respect:  Don Ventura.  
 

Tonight

Tonight  I will not read 
any of my poems.
Tonight I want only to give thanks –
thanks to Poetry and to a bunch of poets.

To Poetry herself, for having given me 
another voice,
another voice with which I can talk
to the trees and stones and birds.

I want to say thanks to the Aztec poet 
Ayocuan Cuetzpatzin for his deep knowledge 
of the human heart. 
To Saint John of the Cross
for his advice on how to make love
to my soul. 

And thanks to Dante Alligieri and Arthur Rimbaud 
for having given me such good instruction 
on how to commute through the Hades.

To poetry for giving me a pair of hands 
with which I can greet  the wind and touch
the faces of my beloved dead-ones. 

To Walt Whitman and Federico García Lorca
for the profound resonance of their cry and for
the great love the second one had for the first one.

To Vicente Huidobro and Nicanor Parra for
taking off the face of to-much-solemnity 
that Pablo Neruda gave to poetry. 
And because the first one showed me how 
to fall from the bottom to the top.

Thanks to Jorge Luis Borges who in his noble blindness  
thought that paradise was a library. 
And thanks  to Cesar Vallejo, for all 
his sorrows, his solitude and his  poet's bravery. 
 

Esta Noche

Esta noche no leeré
ninguno de mis poemas.
Esta noche quiero solamente dar gracias –
gracias a la poesía y a una banda de poetas.

A la Poesía misma porque me a dado
otra voz,
otra voz con la que puedo hablar 
con los árboles y las piedras y los pájaros.

Quiero dar gracias al poeta azteca 
Ayocuan Cuetzpatzin-
por su vasto conocimento del corazón humano. 
A San Juan de la Cruz
por sus consejos de como hacer el amor
con mi alma.

Y gracias a Dante Alligieri y Arthur Rimbaud 
por darme tan buenas instruciones de como entrar y 
salir de los infiernos.

A la poesía por darme unas manos
con la que puedo saludar al viento y tocar
el rostro de mis queridos muertos.

A Walt Whitman Y Federico García Lorca
por la profunda resonancia de sus cantos y por
lo tanto que el segundo amó al primero.

A Vicente Huidobro y Nicanor Parra  por
haberle quitado el rostro tan solemne que Pablo
Neruda le dió a la poesía. Y por que el primero me 
enseño a caer de abajo hacia arriba.

Gracias a Jorge Luis Borges porque en su noble ceguera 
confundió el paraíso con una biblioteca. 
Y gracias a Cesar Vallejo por toda su tristeza 
todas sus soledades y toda su bravura de poeta.

Mark Tredinnick is a poet, essayist and writing teacher; he lives in Burradoo, in the highlands southwest of Sydney in Australia’s southeast. His books include The Little Red Writing Book (published in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2008 as The Cambridge Essential Writing Guide), The Land’s Wild Music and A Place on Earth. His landscape memoir, The Blue Plateau, and The Little Green Grammar Book will appear in 2008. Mark is also at work on a volume of poems and a book about the consolations of literature in a frantic age. Mark’s prizes include The Newcastle Poetry Prize, The Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, The Calibre Essay Prize, The Wildcare Nature Writing Prize and shortlistings in major awards, including The ABR and Broadway Prizes. His writing (poems, essays and criticism) has appeared in many books and anthologies, in Best Australian Essays, and in Australian and overseas journals and newspapers including Island, isotope, Orion, Manoa, PAN, Southerly The Sydney Morning Herald. He has written regularly for The Bulletin.

In recent years, Mark has edited a number of collections of Australian writing, each published as a special issue of a literary journal: Where Waters Meet (Manoa18:2, with Larissa Behrendt and Barry Lopez), Watermarks (Southerly 64:2, with Nicolette Stasko), and Being True to the Earth (PAN 4, with Kate Rigby). He has taught landscape writing, creative non-fiction and poetry at centres in the USA and at The University of Sydney.

Photographer :Tony Sernack

Urban Eclogues

I

Adrift in the middle of my years, I sit in a corner and drink. I eavesdrop
a tableful of girls romancing their cell phones, workshopping
love’s abstract particulars.
            Football plays on the big screen;
I listen like a thief in case the women know the score.
But I never could tell. At fulltime I walk home like a motherless child.

II
    
Witness is a solitary game. There isn’t a thing I have left to say
but back in my room I ring like a singing bowl,
empty and unable to stop.
        You’re in nine kinds of pain, my friend; you know
the twenty-seven strains of despair. And your lovely hair has fallen.
The moon at my window is a rusted shot, caught in its corrupt trajectory down.

III

The world was always someone else’s oyster, a metaphor
I never could prise open.  
All I’m good for tonight
                     is to let the night pass,
while beyond me the world peters and my friend fights beautifully
like a trout on God’s line. The usual idiots are still in power. But they’ll keep.

Two Hens

Make prayer at the concrete trough
beneath the dripping tap. Flush now with summer
the water poplars graze a slow benediction
over the birds, and a miser’s rain falls through the
morning.

From my desk I look out on this
epitome of good fortune and pray for more

rain. The weather has turned. It will do that
if you wait. The wind is in the south
and the leaves of the poplars shiver silver
as though something that was wounded is now healed.

These past days have tried and found me
wanting, and I have almost failed, but here

I am, still who I always was,
only more so. The days you love are not
the days that prove you. Winter is my weather;
I grow by waiting. And there is no end

of the dying one did not know
one had yet to do to one’s self.

But you’ve had days like these. I envy
the hens the steady circle of their days,
but this is not how mine go; I am strung from stars
that once were gods and can’t seem to forget.

Plenty

Dandelions break out like lies in the grass. There’s an election
in the wind and promises on the table beneath the poplars and even the weeds
look good in the spring. But not far west        
                        crops fail in their red fields
and rivers wither into memory. The future fails and the economy blooms
its profuse abstractions. What will the children eat when the wheat no longer rises?

And You

One child learned to walk
                 the day another learned to drive
and in between sixteen years ran before they could crawl
me any closer to who I’m meant to be
by now. November’s fallen back into winter. All day long on the roof
the rain writes the only script there’ll ever be for any of this.

God delivers when you stop
                   praying. The music starts when you stop
playing so hard and listen.
Some good came along today when I was busy hoping
for nothing, sweeping the cowshed instead and putting things off.
Want only the rain to fall and your children to find out for themselves.

Oh, it’s way too late now
                to hope to say anything new.
All the music and all the meaning there ever were
have been here all along, and you may catch some –  
but you mustn’t try too hard – between your child’s first steps, between
downpours, between the sweeping judgments of the broom.    

The way Nan walks the lane
                   morning and evening behind her dog,
each step sounding one year of the ninety
she has seen; the way the black ducks land like tardy extras
on the rainy grass at dusk – enactments that say something I’d like my life
to say. Something the weather says, my children say, and you.

Marcelle Freiman is a Sydney poet who migrated from South Africa to Australia via England in1981. She lectures in creative writing and post-colonial and diaspora literatures at Macquarie University. Her poetry has appeared in a range of literary journals and anthologies. Her first book Monkey’s Wedding (1995) was Highly Commended for the Marjorie Barnard prize.

Yellow

The journalist Nat Gould gazes into a doorway of a Sydney Opium Den 1896.

My pipe is honey, Englishman,
to you I am indolent, yellow
on a low bed in my house of pleasure,
head on a silk cushion, hip rounded.
I see you clearly through the smoke
sweet odour of my O P’Ien,
my slender pipe of bamboo like a flute.
Your slack mouth hangs with lust.
Is it my cheongsam body you desire
or the pagodas, ice and crocodiles,
the Herb of Joy brings,
the fine pitch of taste, the way
my smooth skin lives?   

You at the door, half in half out,
– I am not a woman
but opium and sex. You would steal it
as your country did at Nanking,
pious in your avarice.
My life is nothing to you –
I am dragon-woman
exotic to you as baboons and monkeys.

This is no den, it is your own
dark cell. Your necktie
is choking you. I am bright as fire,
my hands are small.
Yes, drink from your hip-flask, Mister,
shake my gaze from your face
if you can.  

Nat Gould, ‘Eaters of Raw Meat’ (1896), The Birth of Sydney, Ed. Tim Flannery, Melbourne, Text, 1999.

Clown

A smile, crazy with shame,
little lost diamond-eyes,
the clown mask pushed
its face against the glass
days of empty rooms
when we played a mad tune  
flippy with pigtails and mama’s red lipstick
stolen for sheer revenge –

turned itself tight, yes,
little monster found its power
but got trapped in the smile
like a puppet, got locked
in the cold room,
wild at the boar-shaped world –

and elsewhere it knew was sun,
like the ball left in the corner,
yellow as light of windows.

Road

I like streets that go down – Grace Cossington-Smith 1971

It’s a road that ribbons down a hill
and up –  a velocity, a force
more than a road –  

the sky is wide and bright
and the speed of your eye
grabs the horizon –

wanting elsewhere, beyond –  
fast as telegraphed voices in the wire,
fast as the line

of the eucalypt that bends its curve
on the surface of your eye
upwards from the purple gully.

How it fights with the walker, this road,
with the slow horse cart,
its line tense

with trees humming green,
edgy with the speed of sound,
the speed of your eye on the road.

Help

With a little help from a reader
we could crawl up onto the back
of a bicycle & blow. A horn? If
you like. Or a kiss? Maybe, but first
a question –  what
is your aim? To kill
swimming? For a closure to swimming
a kiss won’t do. Better
a horn, its blue. With
a little help from a reader we could wear
the same face for both, for the grown men
asleep in a bucket, for the children snoring
in a thimble & not care which belt
we’ve been trained up to. With
a little help from a reader we could blend
the desire for hearing with the desire
for speaking & come out on top
with meat to burn, your choice
of kangaroo or stork. With
a little help from a reader we could home rule
the market women AND their troublemaking
husbands, them to houses confined until
some progress in basting & roasting. With
a little help from a reader we could insist
that our at-a-crossroads-style becomes us
& everyone after us, even the marchers
as to heaven. With
a little help from a reader we could be joined
by an Alice whose relationship to history
however tenuous is precisely the joinery
that our journey requires. With
a little help from a reader we could swallow
the first & the second & even the third word
& even, if some truth was thereby accomplished,
the whole of the poem.

Socks

So you really think we’ve established
a case for bliss? Stand up in court
for how long? –  two minutes
if we’re lucky. Which reminds me: some joker

has taken all of the socks from my sock drawer
& filled it with forks with bent tines, all the better
to eat what with? Our last supper for two
was a disaster. Served by nuns

in a forest clearing, we were constantly distracted
by a klatch of monks who insisted that happy slaps
(as per those on London buses) could induce
instant liberation. A kind of pudding? Sue

those slap-happy bastards. For what? Their
bowls? Their beads? Count to ten
while I put this flesh to one side, for
later. Right now there’s work to do. We need

to set up for the next scene – a carriage
at rush hour, Aunt Jane getting on at Redfern
for her morning performance, will squat & pee
as we roll into Central. Watch out

for your shoes. Socks
still missing. Stand up in court
in piss-splashed shoes, no socks, our case
for bliss? Two minutes if we’re lucky.

A Ball

You saw it on NAGS, the scratch channel, how friends
in black can breed with friends in blue & at the end of nine
have a worthwhile product, a ball, say, that you can bounce
wherever you like. Why not

in a casbah? It’s speech as though by magic
translated into Arabic, you’ll break the spell
of Delmonico (the lion tamer ripped apart
by his seven lionesses). These urchins

will love you; they’ll let you live to tell the tale:
how camels, having negotiated the perils of the Pont
Neuf & the cobblestones of Rue Dauphine,

eventually arrived in Oran with three rimes
& a metaphor into which anything, even a recipe
for a homemade bomb, could be stuffed.

rob walker’s first full collection micromacro (Seaview Press) was delivered in 2006 after a twenty year gestation period. He’s published online, onpage, onradio and onCD. His latest chapbook is phobiaphobia – poems of fear and anxiety (Picaro Press). He moved to Himeji, Japan in January 2008.

cello

we drift
into sleep. my hand
an explorer wandering
your familiar valleys and
mountains playing the
xylophone of your
back. you are a cello
my hand languid
draped on
your
waist
for
an
8
bar
rest

Danny in Detention

Dad   works   at   Hills   but   he
hasta  go to  the  physio.  for  his
arm.  whennie   was   a   kid   his bruvva   useta     twist    is   arma
round.  me   bruvva  &  me  fight
all  the  time  he’s  16 I’m 11 but
I  can  bash  im  up.  he’s psycho
he  calls  me  pissweak so I bash
im. dad belted me. I  adta  go  to
bed ungry. me  bruvva works  at
kfc. dozen  gimme  nuffin.  dad’s
got  is  own   playstation   in   the lounge.                             dozen
lettuce     uzit        tho

The koan before the satori
(a long haiku / short tanka)
 
One hand is clapping in a forest,
                                   unseen
 
The other crushed by a falling tree,
presumably
                                       also unseen

Koan: a Zen teaching riddle
Satori: the spiritual goal of Zen Buddhism, roughly translating as individual Enlightenment, or a flash of sudden awareness

Born in Newcastle in 1981, Sam Byfield is the author of From the Middle Kingdom (Pudding House Press). He has been published or is forthcoming in magazines including Heat and LiNQ (Australia), The National Poetry Review, The Cream City Review, Meridian, and Diner (North America), Nimesis (UK) and in many online magazines including The Pedestal Magazine, Foam-e, and Divan. He currently works for a public health/environment NGO in southwest China.

Sapphires

All afternoon panning for sapphires
in eucalypt shadows, hands dry
from rocks and river water,

frost-browned grass burnt back
by the optimistic site owner –
no snakes in that grass now.

Cockatoos make a sound like pure panic
and the dog races off after rabbits
and trouble, but not too much,

while the Milky Way comes out
like it only does in the country,
a massive tangle that seems to float

above the Earth. Way off, the cough
of kangaroos, big rough males
like the one my father told me of

from his childhood, that kept coming
and no amount of .22 slugs
could stop. Another image of him,

out on the Nullarbor hitchhiking dead –
west, nothing but sand and crows
for company, ending up in Esperance

and writing her, saying
it was the most beautiful place he’d seen.
He came back and proposed, straight away.

The Infinite Possibilities of Water

From here I can see the flood; the view is sublime.
Thirty year swell and the beach fills with container ship,
the Pasha Bulker like a boulder resting in a river bed.

            God of such things, remember the anemone fossil
            I discovered high in the mountains, a swirl waiting eons
            to be found? And quickly lost, as such things are.

From here I can smell the salt of the rearranged beach,
and I can see the gulls, watching the ship and thinking
What a strange sight for a Sunday.

            God of such things, remember the salt of her breasts
            three days up the valley, how she felt as insects danced
            like fireworks and the whole place shuddered?

Light funnels away from the ocean, turns red
then white; then, the quiet reconnaissance of the stars.
In the morning the faintest hint of smoke.

            God of such things, have you ever noticed how sometimes
            a woman smells like pine, or pine smells like a woman?
            The streets fill quickly with flood, yet the warmth.

Cures in a Cold Place

Ten minutes off the plane, first snow of the season. It starts as tiny darts, wind-whisked and rapidly dissolving,
then the city fades to white. It seems timed for my arrival.

I left here four months ago, walked straight into trouble. I was hollow, as if some piece of me remained in the city,
some fundamental part. Months later I landed on my feet and the terrain began to look familiar, yet things were
still off kilter, my yin and yang somehow askew.

Spent three days in Beijing, a city that has never been good to me. I had to make things right, settle some scores.
Outside a rowdy nightclub a beggar told me of his sick eight- year-old daughter. They’d come to Beijing to see a
doctor from a city eight hours south, but now had no money to pay and no ticket home. He said a man should
never be this low, begging to save his daughter. Above us, the flicker of coal-stained lights.

Then today, Changchun, the lake, frozen over a month earlier than usual, foot-deep tracks like tears across the face
of an angel. Old people spoke soft, faces lined like willow trees; the young threw snowballs and flirted in that
Chinese way. Street sweepers cracked the ice from roads, danced as if the snow made them warm. I found a piece
of myself, put it in my pocket, whistled a tune.

Sherryl Clark has been writing and publishing poetry for over 20 years. She is a co-editor of Poetrix magazine, and teaches at Victoria University TAFE (Professional Writing & Editing). Her verse novel for upper primary readers, Farm Kid, won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Children’s Writing.

Strategy

Down this back street
where foreigners are like
grains of rice on black cloth

you come to play
your secret game, undressing
with the slow malaise

of heat coating your skin,
ready to haggle with me
over who should spring the trap.

Rank clothes hang from windows
like human curtains,
your hands stroke his hair

you contain pain in your fingers,
strike like a cobra
prodded with a stick.

I see your face twist
in the mirror; from where I hide
it looks like a smile.

O

There are days when I don’t know
how to keep breathing this air;
there is too much of it, or
not enough, it’s too thick or
full of life, too empty of
anything I can use. I look
at clouds and wonder if
they are any better, being
full of water, or if I
should move to the desert,
to an altitude where the air
will whistle in and out of me
in thin, clean streams.
At night, I lie on my back
stare at the blank ceiling,
wait for air to be blameless,
to do its job of pressing
and sucking without my
interference.  Or to just stop
demanding I deal with it.
I try as hard as I can
to resign, abstain, push it away,
but here it comes again,
shuddering, determined to
have its way with me

Sue King-Smith is currently completing a PhD in Creative Arts at Deakin University. For three years, she was the co-editor of The Animist, an electronic arts ezine that has been archived by the National Library as part of the Pandora Project. In the past few years, she has had poems published in various journals including, Famous Reporter, The Paradise Anthology, Tarralla, Blue Giraffe, Woorilla, Pendulum, Oban ‘06 and Tamba and she has had essays published in JASAL and Linq. Her first collection of poetry, An Accumulation of Small Killings, will be published by MPU in early 2008.

Swimming the Unconscious

Before degrees of separation,
we swam the mire, quick-silver dark
with pores as porous
as water. Schools of fish caught us
in collective darting tides,
all of a mind, singular, no beyond
or outside and we rode the sliding
fractals of existence. Opening rice-paper
wings in unison, and rising
into flight we soared the curdling
updrafts and hung like tiny origami
marionettes, guiding strings
unseen. Migrating south we bounded
down a mob of kangaroos, eyes slight
for dangers, our sinewy legs
like springs. Life was a small
f lowered chaos and we duck-dived
kaleidoscopic centres.

Sometimes still, synchronicity swims
through ether, and you send
me an email, and I send you a book,
that cross unlikely paths in
cyberspace. And they speak the
same language, tell the same story,
and we laugh across the coincidence
that is not coincidence at all. (We shared
a primordial womb once.) And at night, still,  
we dive head-first into waters embryonic
and old as time, swimming the
unconscious.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Jal Nicholl lives in Melbourne, where he is a secondary school English and philosophy teacher. His poetry has previously been published in Retort Magazine, Stylus Poetry Journal, Diagram, Famous Reporter, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Shampoo Poetry.

Audit

Subtract the tangible,
these pebbles smoothed unseen
by god, by water,
by machine;
         let mortar
wear away the stone
of prison opened to the public,
and of private home.
                   Sculptor,
split the frozen tun:
release the grapes inside,
imagining
the chisel is your tongue.

The Annunciation

The messenger appears, his face
a bright mask over sleeping darkness,
but hazy, seeming an actor in
the kind of dream you have when you know
you’re dreaming. He reassures her,
in his old-fashioned gold-trimmed livery,
his sanguine complexion, the cool blue
light he casts around him, speaking
tunefully; he has come to tell her
that, suddenly (although it’s hardly news
in heaven) she’s at the centre of
the whole plan of creation. Congratulations!
You have been selected . . . he begins,
ceremoniously reading from the letter
whose seal he’s broken; but at some point
as the speech continues he stops reading,
adopts a more intimate tone, as he folds
and pockets what you’d assume
was meant to be delivered, and concludes:
So don’t you dare tell anyone–
of course they’d never believe you–
but if you do and it gets back to me,
I’ll come back and there’ll really be news. She thinks,
Were I to ask the name of his boss–
let alone for some I.D., who knows
what might happen? Perhaps she screams
beneath the whoosh of dazzling wings and arms
that clasp her as he whispers like
a gale in her ear, the name of the disease
he’s giving her.
                 He’s gone, the light gone
From her blinded eyes–but the street
outside the window he came in is squealing;
revived, she can no more cry than sleep–
it’s the supernatural child who cries, already,
to force her to eat, though she’s not hungry;
and soon she’ll have to talk to it, soothe
it with a song, devise a story
to satisfy the world, and keep it straight.

Father in Heaven

A lookout over wetlands, like
a cattle chute against a closed gate
in an empty paddock–
See how the heron drops a moment from
his equilibrium, how ducks
dive astutely and with open eyes.
Feel the advance of shadows that will
flood the roads tonight like sand
a tussock facing the sea. Thus
speaks the one whose likeness
you are, pointing to fields impenetrable
to a bored child’s imaginary
hide-and-seek. But you’re well
above the horizon here, as never before
those views you used to try to paint,
though you had to lie down in sand
or grass to frame, for example,
a closed street in the pose of a nape and shoulders
turning to follow a face–
their own. This one who made you
ejected you from shelter, or you left
after a certain age, because
that too was nature. The same now turns
his weekend face on you, having found the place
agrees with him as much as he
with it. Ceci n’est pas un oiseau,
you say; but see how the bird goes its way
conducted by his definite finger,
sped by the name this gesture bestows
as the sun strikes its wing like a window, and
past this horizon, unthinking,
as if it really were.

Debbie Lim was born in Sydney where she works as a medical writer. Her poetry has been published in Blue Dog, Quadrant and Poetry Without Borders. She is winner of the 2008 Inverawe Nature Poetry Prize. She was a guest poet at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival.

How To Grow Feet of Golden Lotus

A mother cannot love her daughter and
her daughter’s feet at the same time
                                                      – Old Chinese saying
1.
Begin with a girl of five:
her arches will be firm
but she will not yet know real pain.
Soak feet in warm water and herbs.
Massage. This will be their last
pleasure, though recalled
with bitterness.
 
2.
Curl four toes
under the sole like a row
of sparrows sheltering under a ledge.
Bind with a long strip of cotton
or silk – whichever you can afford.
But leave the big toe free:
this will be her keel,
for balance.

3.
Pull tightly
as on the reigns of a disobedient horse.
Time will break them.
Strive to make toe kiss heel.
 
4.
Every second day
turn your ears to stone.
Unwrap the bandage and ignore
her crying as you rebind them,
each time tighter. Remind yourself,
as your own mother did,
that there is no such thing
as a truly liberated foot.
 
5.
Beware three terrible blooms:
ulcer, gangrene and necrosis.
They are insidious as a woman’s curse.
A toenail can take root in the sole
and left unwatched, the cleft
between ball and heel
nurses all kinds of enemies.

6.
Two years will train them
into pale lotus bulbs
of the most sensual beauty:
iron, silver or gold*
 
7.
When she is older
the mere sight of them
peeping from beneath a gown
will arouse in men
the most powerful kind of desire:
lust combined with pity.
 
She will walk
the walk of a beautiful woman.
 
8.
The smell she might live with
for the rest of her life.
But she will learn the art of beautiful
concealment: washed stockings,
draped hems and hours
stitching shoes
of the most delicate embroidery.

9.
A woman with lotus feet
steps through mirrored days
of privilege. She sits
under willow trees, works
tiny worlds with her thread.
 
A woman with golden lotus feet
will always be waited on.
There are just two things
she must never forget:
                 
                  Always wash the feet in private.
                  Always wear slippers in bed.

* The binding process lasted for approximately 2 years. The lotus or bound foot was classified as gold, silver or iron according to its final size. A golden lotus referred to a foot no more than 7.5 cm long and was considered ideal. A silver lotus measured up to 10 cm, and an iron lotus was anything larger.

Extraction

The worms are shrunk in their tunnels
hiding apologies. The cicadas
are banging out a death trill.
While I sit with this ache in my jaw,
my souvenired pain in a bottle.
 
Up in the gutters, nests are falling
apart into shitty straw and the lawn
is a sea of green tips ripe
for amputation. I am sick of waiting
with this mouthful of gauze.
 
From inside, I watch you mow:
dragging your diesel heart
in crooked rows. You see only
the metre in front of you, trail
a blunted yellow wake. That vein
working in your left ankle
will be the death of you.
 
Summer sours everything too quickly,
especially washed skin. My mother sits
in the air-conditioned lounge
obliterating herself with symphonies.
Her mouth has turned into a violin
string, she can stay still for hours
on the verge of breaking.
 
The sun is an old medal
swung through days like this:
cicadas, heat, deafening afternoons.
This dull socket will keep me
awake tonight. If not,
I’ll pray for dreams of snow.

Girl at 6.20am

An ordinary street, suburban
in flat daylight.

But imagine 6.20 am
when the sky
is pale and slowly leavening
there is something secret happening:
cars parked silently
in driveways and dulled with frost,
and how the cold builds
a second skin
around bushes and letter boxes
so there appears to be
two of everything: one visible,
the other crouched inside, sleeping.
 
I could reach out
and touch a gatepost, turn
and walk up somebody’s driveway
if I wanted to.
 
Halfway down the road
there is a tree
I think is cherry blossom.
It leans over the path,
ignores the fence
of the garden it grows in.
Soon it will be loaded with white petals,
cause a sidewalk snowfall
before turning
into a brown skiddy mess.
But just now, as I’m approaching,
its branches are clean
and so dark they could be
stapled to the sky.

Tenzin Tsundue is a writer and activist in exile. He published his first book of poems Crossing the Border with money begged and borrowed from classmates while undertaking his Masters degree in Literature from Bombay University. His literary skills won him the first ever Outlook-Picador Award for Non-Fiction in 2001. His second book Kora is in its fifth edition having sold more than ten thousand copies. His third book Semshook, is a compilation of essays on the Tibetan freedom movement. In January 2002 Tsundue’s profile peaked when he scaled scaffolding to the 14th floor of the Oberoi Towers in Mumbai to unfurl a Tibetan national flag and a ‘Free Tibet’ banner down the hotel’s facade. China’s Premier Zhu Rongji was inside the hotel at the time. He is also known for his trademark red headband which he has vowed to wear until the day Tibet is free. Tsundue’s poetic voice speaks powerfully of the suffering of Tibetan exiles.

Horizon

From home you have reached
the Horizon here.
From here to another
here you go.

From there to the next
next to the next
horizon to horizon
every step is a horizon.

Count the steps
and keep the number.

Pick the white pebbles
and the funny strange leaves.
Mark the curves
and cliffs around
for you may need
to come home again.

A Personal Reconnaissance

From Ladakh
Tibet is just a gaze away.
They said:
from that black knoll
at Dumtse, it’s Tibet.
For the first time, I saw
my country Tibet.

In a hurried hidden trip,
I was there, at the mound.

I sniffed the soil,
scratched the ground,
listened to the dry wind
and the wild old cranes.

I didn’t see the border,
I swear there wasn’t anything
different, there.

I didn’t know,
if I was there or here.
I didn’t know,
if I was here or there.

They say the kyangs
come here every winter.
They say the kyangs
go there every summer.

Tibetanness

Thirty-nine years in exile.
Yet no nation supports us.
Not a single bloody nation!

We are refugees here.
People of a lost country.
Citizen to no nation.

Tibetans: the world’s sympathy stock.
Serene monks and bubbly traditionalists;
one lakh and several thousand odd,
nicely mixed, steeped
in various assimilating cultural hegemonies.

At every check-post and office,
I am an “Indian-Tibetan”.
My Registration Certificate,
I renew every year, with a salaam.
A foreigner born in India.

I am more of an Indian.
Except for my Chinky Tibetan face.
“Nepali?” “Thai?” “Japanese?”
“Chinese?” “Naga?” “Manipuri?”
but never the question – “Tibetan?”

I am Tibetan.
But I am not from Tibet.
Never been there.
Yet I dream
of dying there.

Space-Bar: A Proposal

pull your ceiling half-way down
and you can create a mezzanine for me

your walls open into cupboards
is there an empty shelf for me

let me grow in your garden
with your roses and prickly pears

i’ll sleep under your bed
and watch TV in the mirror

do you have an ear on your balcony
i am singing from your window

open your door
let me in

i am resting at your doorstep
call me when you are awake

Ashley co-founded Egg(Poetry) in 2002, which sadly ceased publication in 2006. He is currently studying Arts and Education at Monash, while co-editing www.holland1945.net.au and singing for his band. His work has appeared in a range of Australian print and online publications and his poem ‘Ember’ was runner up in the 2007 Monash Poetry Prize. His first collection of poetry pollen and the storm (2008) was published with the assistance of Small Change Press.

endure

like Sophocles inventing
pain
her perfection
is made
knot
by knot

as she rakes the spyglass across the horizon
in one long smudge

as she leads him home
weary of visions
and
of fighting him, placating
his attacks
eating his
blues.

pedestrian

in the possible hush
of 6am the
road is dusted
in pastel-smoke

feet bully the pavement
and cars slip down the highway.

on rubbish bins
crows flick glances
like struck matches

and the wind
squeezes by, rustling
plum blossoms
with clumsy arms.

late night

I know there’s no way to stand out –

and it’s very easy
to make someone’s throat clench
with piano
and a montage or a bit of slow
motion, soundtrack
really makes
up for substance

but what have I got – just lines
on white
envy
and really, why bother when
everything is so obviously impermanent

I guess the great lie of our time is capture –
it’s comforting to believe
everything can be caught, recorded
and remembered
so we don’t have to appreciate
anything in the moment.

april

could we meet
somewhere else
in april
maybe
on stone
with rain beading in your hair

I’d listen for once and you’d be strong
I’d be able to sit still
and you’d be happy
for the first time since april

everything would work
and we’d be able to talk, without
feeling crushed by the weight of stars
their cold light, dry as wind

and the streets, empty at dawn
but full, of yellow leaves
and little hurricanes.

yokan

full moon
splattered on the field

stumps’ moot.

E A Gleeson is a Ballarat based writer and Funeral Director. Earlier this year she featured at the inaugural Australian Poetry Festival in Castlemaine. Her poems have been published and read in Australia, Ireland and the USA. Gleeson was awarded the 2008 Interactive Press Best First Book Award for her poetry manuscript, which will be published later this year.

Making a different path

Plunging into the huge pile of rubble, digging through it
she rescued them, whole bricks abandoned for a chipped

edge or a flaw in colour, and then, when it looked as if
there were no more to be had, she went back into that pile

uncovering the halves, throwing them into the barrow and
then thrusting her arms deeper into the broken bricks, each

time going down further, fingers tipping the bricks, sliding
along them, feeling for length and then, gripping fiercely

with her finger tips, she pulled the new found brick through
the pile, setting the others crumbling and tumbling.

With the string lines curving across her block, she placed
the bricks across and down, three by three. She wove

the path across the yard, curving it around the place she’d
marked out for fruit trees, setting it beside the squares

that would become a vege patch. All evening, she carried
aching muscles about the house. Unused to the heft of work,

she filled a bath and eased her body in, stroked the cloth
along each scratched arm, dabbed at each blistered palm

and later, found herself clasping her hands as if she were
holding some hard won precious thing.

Sunday Afternoon Bush Walk

Eucalypts drip amongst the quiet voices
of strangers taking each other’s measure.
Fog clings to the stand of mountain ash.
We step out slowly. Mud sucks our boots
We scramble fallen logs, wade through bracken.
Cautiously, we move to higher ground.

Sliding alongside one another, keeping pace
with bits of chat, we slip in on other conversations:
film reviews, travel stories punctuated
with bird calls, snapping twigs. Paragraphed
by steeper slopes, the talk moves up a notch
hedges on the personal.

You’re telling us about your birth.
Doctors thought you good as dead
offered your mother special care staring
through Plexiglas at your ribs heaving
and sinking.

Rejecting this, she took you home. For fourteen
days and nights, she held you. Snuggled between
her breasts, dribbles of milk, temptation to suckle.

Her heart beating like a metronome.
Her skin.            Your skin.
Her breath.        Your breath.

We tramp along the sodden track.
Bursts of warm sunshine challenge
the winter landscape.

Is this all there is?

i

We spend the whole day together and then the next.  
For me, it’s as if we’ve always had and always will

have a part together. Haio becomes my teacher. I
want to know how to behave in this different country.

I learn that it is not OK to eat a naked banana and eye
contact is not such an important thing, though I notice

that when we are part of the throng of motorbikes
surging along Tran Hung Dao, she turns right round

to talk to me. I am relieved when she leans forward
again, until I realize that she does this to read

the map and answer her mobile phone. I am not sure
of the protocol of gripping her buttocks with my thighs

but as my jeans take the dust from the buses we pass,
I am thinking about other things.

ii

Never have I felt such a part of a people’s movement.
There are more people on motorbikes on either side

of me than could ever fit in a Swanston St. peace march.
Haio weaves her bike through the city traffic as if these

days are all that we have. She wants to show me what I
need to learn. She cuts to the chase. She asks questions

that I never ask before a third date. She points to the people
whose disfigured bodies bend awkwardly along the pavement,

She tosses coins, chats to the locals, coerces the officials.
She takes me to see her friends and the paintings that she loves.

I feel as if I have met someone who might be a Buddhist, well
along the path to enlightenment, or perhaps that rare thing,

a Christian who knows what it is to love one another.

iii

When she is not asking questions, she is my tour guide.
I begin to understand why the figure of Ho Chi Minh

whom I feared in my childhood, will always be Uncle Ho
for her. She shows me what she wants me to understand

and says, “This is what you need to write your poems about”.
I want her to tell me that these huts made from split boards

and bits of tin are summer residences for the rice growers,  
shepherd’s huts for the farmers, that way up in the hills

beyond the paddy fields are cosy cottages all decked out
with woven mats and polished teak and that behind these

are gardens full of vivid vegetables and bunches of bananas
bowing from the trees, but I know before I ask the question

that this is all that there is.

iv

Each time we pass the central Post Office, the man with
the gummy grin is sitting in his cyclo smiling at the tourists

because he does not have the quick repartee of the cyclo
owners with the clean cotton covers and the sunshades,

 “Where you from, Madame?” “Ah my friend in Melbourne.”  
“How can I help you?” “Special price for you, Madame”.

Tell me that last week it was different, that the tourists
hurried to his cyclo like children to a merry-go-round,

that he took them to the mountain statue of Buddha
and the huge church with its concrete Virgin Mary

and said same same but different and laughed at his own
joke and the irony of it all, but I know that when we’ve

ridden past late in the afternoon and he’s sprawled
across the cyclo, that every day, this is how it is.

v

Haio takes me to visit the children whose parents
were hit by the orange bombs. The crazy boy

who is tied to his cot with his skin dropping onto
the linen, yells at me. And the girl who seems to be

all torso and head, reaches out and pulls me towards
her as if to show that for a hug, a neck is not necessary.

There are children who stare blankly from misshapen
bodies and others who grin and giggle and bottom shuffle

towards us clutching at our hands, rolling us the ball,
peeking into our bags. As we walk from the last room

in the Peace Hospital where the children’s heads
are  bigger than any of my questions or answers,

I turn and ask, “Haoi, what do you believe?”
She tells me, ” I don’t believe in anything.

I know that there is nothing but this.”

Jane was born in South Korea, but has grown up in Sydney, Australia. She works at the Museum of Contemporary Art and is inspired by paintings, ceramics and music – a lot of which figures in her poetry. Jane studied a B.A. Communications at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Other End

This is the dream that most people never have
unless you sleep
so little
at 3am.
It might be a wait
too long
till morning
when I am living again
& meant to help men with their desire for a drink
and never ending queries for another
story or reassured lie.
So passion
never comes easy to the men
who sleep sound
after
a terrible day. It doesn’t chase them, this
life and leaves them so free, I’m
constantly stepping over
a gap to make
no
sound – so
my limbs, how young is my heart & how flex, this muscle,
doesn’t keep me up, and waiting for the next day
or the next, or
to be done.

Black

After today, which really is the hardest part, I’ll
say nothing more & wonder
more
whether it was right
to ask him an easy question –
it’s put us back in touch. I’ll slip away
right away again.
I won’t come around
and see we both bought black
jumpers by the same
designer,
the same wool &
machine & make
but different cut, one for a man’s shoulders
and the other for a girl’s waist.
I’m sure another distant friend might buy
a similar garment to wear
while out for a drink &
I’ll think it’s him because I
look for him everywhere, even though
it was decided – the way
we feel
is not enough.

House

I imagine you sitting there on a box

but it’s alright, there are four hideous chairs & perhaps music, lots
of it, stacked,

you know where everything is.

Form:

is the driver to every artwork that you’ve bought

& the posters that you like.

Sometimes, we find another prison to love. Is
freedom an edge that you find on a stage (?)

I’m reminded when you engulf somebody, arms open
and cinch

her wooden waist

lacquered hip

it was always there. A song to grow into & find
amongst others.

Michael Sharkey has worked in publishing and editing, and has taught literature and cultural studies at several universities in Australian and elsewhere. He currently teaches writing, rhetorical analysis and American  literature at the University of New England at Armidale, New South Wales. He has published essays, articles and reviews as well as several collections of poetry, the most recent of which is The Sweeping Plain (Melbourne, Five Islands Press, 2007).

The Demagogue Writes His Program

1

Nothing in writing so hard as the start
unless everything else in the work.

All of that countryside: where to begin?
In the forests he walked as a child

when the first buds appeared and the slow rivers surged
to the sea? Recollect bourgeois rubbing their eyes

at the unlikely sight of the sun, when the clearings were bright
as cathedral naves lit by the saints?

Later things: wandering lonely in crowds
to free libraries, galleries, parks;

all of those flophouse proprietors waiting
for cash that was never in hand?

Lyric fluidity won in the end
and he sang like a magpie in spring.
 

2

He watched the movies in his head
and wrote what the actors should have said;

the headlines’ chatter went in, too,
while cameras clicked and the tourists queued

at the door of his room: a modern mystic in his cell
reciting cures and casting spells,

a secretary taking dictation as fast
as a cobbler hammers a boot on the last.

He thought of the world to come, and smiled:
the final chapter would drive the fans wild.

Nothing To It

This is the place where nothing you’d think of occurs,
and repeatedly.

Visitors go down the stairs
to the valley alone:

there is no space for side-by-side travel
and no place to pause

till they get to the floor of the gorge.
Then they do not go far.

From the floor they cannot see the top.
From the top they could not see the place they are standing in now.

Now they can look at the lichen, the moss,
And the ferns.

Maidenhair’s perfectly still.
There is no breeze down here.

Fiddleheads, supplejack,
Bush-lawyer, past all those visitors:

gorse, angel’s trumpets, lantana, they met on the path.
Then the climb to the top. Till their legs start to ache.

And they say they saw nothing of note,
And they’ll never come back.

The Plaza of Hoon

The hoon is Australia’s gift to the world:
it was spawned at the nation’s creation;
barbecue sites and trolley-strewn malls
are its haunt; it is free of mentation.

Cowboy of cul-de-sacs, clearways and crescents,
it grazes on petrol and chrome;
it disguises itself as a slab of cold beer
that litters the place it calls home.

It travels in groups like a troop of baboons
giving tongue in the language of apes:
it eats and it roots and it shoots and it leaves,
and it comes in all genders and shapes.

Its ancestor spirits are convicts and oafs
from each class and each trade and profession;
it mates with a creature resembling itself,
and so it ensures its succession,

and having done that, it subsides with a grunt
to observe the career of its clone,
a dysfunctional loud simulacrum
without an idea of its own.

It’s a do-it-yourself sheltered workshop
where bigotry’s watered and fed
by talkback noises of overgrown boys
whose morals and ethics are dead.

So think of the people you cannot abide
when the time for gift-giving draws near,
and wrap up a hoon in the national flag
and send it away from here.

Ross Clark teaches part-time at two universities in Brisbane, Australia. Seven volumes of his poetry have been published (Salt Flung into the Sky, Ginninderra, 2007), and two chapbooks of haiku. He has toured his work as writer, performer and workshopper to city and rural Australia, to Japan, and through central Texas. He is currently working on a teenage verse novel trilogy and a DVD of himself in performance (with The Mongreltown Allstars). www.crowsongs.com

Chook, Chook

                   1

they have gone off, they will not lay me eggs. three chooks, and not a single egg produced. i need a china egg to encourage them by fooling them, but all i have is my shaker, my percussion egg, filled with seeds and painted gold, so that will have to do.

                                                 in the morning, they have laid their clutch of warm eggs; all of them brown, but i can celebrate my brilliant husbandry, golden as a percussionist’s egg, with a little jig, unaccompanied and careful, up the stairs to the kitchen.

                  2

from childhood practice, back when we sold eggs direct from our farm, we still date them all by hand, the phone-message pencil just right for the four or so our chooks produce each day. we give them to neighbours, visitors, eat plenty ourselves, always from the earliest date. whenever and however i cook them, i will be eating yesterday, swallowing the past, enjoying.

For the Next Seven Days …

i want to write a poem
    so tough that
    it hurls Uluru back into space
    and dives down into the crater
        singing

i want to write a poem
    so revelatory that
    God weeps with shock

i want to write a poem
    so complete that
    dictionaries illustrate every word
    with a quotation from it

i want to write a poem
    so minimalist that
    when i open the page
    to read it aloud   (but
    before i say anything)
    everybody thinks of you

i want to write a poem
    so lyrical that
    the Amazon   the Nile
    the Yang-Tze    
    the Mississippi-Missouri
    and the Murray-Darling
    will flow symphony after symphony
        forever

i want to write a poem
    so soft that
    when i read it aloud
    my breath shivers on your nipples

i want to write a poem

David Gilbey is Senior Lecturer in English at Charles Sturt University  (where he teaches Australian Literature, Children’s Literature and Creative Writing) and President of Wagga Wagga Writers Writers. His new collection of poems is Death and the Motorway, (Interactive Press, 2008). In September 2008 David is writer-in-residence at Bundanon. He  is currently editing fourW nineteen, to be published in November 2008.

Izakaya

My former students take me downtown
for Japanese food and drink
through  postmodern fashions of Kokubuncho,
the entertainment district.

Hisae is suffering a post-Hawaii virus
after her sister’s wedding.
Bikini flu? I ask, after the swimsuit photos –
then I have to explain the joke.

Chiharu shows phone pics of her new budgie.
Call him Red, I say,
you know how Australians like opposite nicknames –
It’s because they live upside-down. Antipodeans.
I can’t stop being the English teacher,
even after eleven years.

Akane comes late, orders beer and hoya,
daring me to try this Sendai specialty: ‘sea pineapple’
a soft shellfish whose orange flesh
you eat with vinegar, a dash of soy and ginger to taste.
‘Sea mango’ would be better: more accurate for size
and flesh colour, more palatably oxymoronic.

I want sashimi and order tarakiku,
the soft, whitish, brain-textured convolvulus
of the male codfish genitals. Oishi.

Yuko settles for maguro – burgundy tuna –
with aromatic shiso leaves, and only pretends to choke
when I hail it as ‘marijuana tempura’

Akane asks me for some words for this month’s
food ‘n fashion mag’s slogan ‘Exeo’  –
Japanese latin wanting a youthful urgency.
I suggest ‘break out’.

Haiku Hike

I write in my shadow
a fool in nature.

Curves flatten to lines.
What’s a good word?

She’d climbed a eucalyptus fork
over a dead stump,
stretched her arms along the ghost gum’s
psoriatic bark,
half a world away
from the snows of Japan.

That was summer –
dryer, browner, greyer.

Now, in winter’s nervous sunlight
a single green blade splits a crack
in the lichened rock.
Crowshit olives.

We stand on the hill
like silent haiku: strange
birds in dead branches.

Writing Class Sonnet

One day I was watching TV
suddenly I saw a illustration of a biscuits.
I married a rich man. And my friend won a billion yen in the lottery.
So I plan to go to Australia.
And I am without passport. So I need to obtain it.
The hotel there was more beautiful than our imagination.
At the lunch I eat crocodile and lasagne.
I go to sea and swim enough with a shoal of fishes.
We saw many famous animals.
If I have a driver’s licence I drive Ayers Rock,
Great Barrier Reef, desert, and so on.
Finally I would like to play the star watching.
Of course I buy souvenirs for my family and friends.
Maybe one day I become English teacher.

Tang Yi was born in Shanghai in 1983 and graduated from Xiamen University with a BA of Chinese Language and Literature. She is currently completing her MA in Creative Writing at the School of Culture and Communication, Department of English, University of Melbourne. She writes poetry bilingually and her poems have been published in Australia, Hong Kong and Mainland China.

Lake

Before my departure,
so much has not been said:
look after the lake for me,
which we discovered five years ago.
Watch the frolicking ducks −
be sure not to disturb them.

The trees’ old skins will soon begin to flake,
wait for their buds to emerge.
Throw a pebble into the water,
hear a cloud pass you by.

In the dawn the lake will absorb all the light
(You have noticed that too).
One day if I come back,
show me all your sketches of silent mornings.

Envision

Flowers in their spring profusion
will weigh the branches down.

Herb pickers will return to their huts
with the crisp voices of children spread around.

Blue haze will rise from the chimneys
conveying the fragrance of rice to the afterglow.

How I wish to enter this picture alone
letting my wine cup float freely along the stream.

Bridge

When I went down the little stone bridge,
I could easily touch the surface of the water.
My toes were submerged in the pond;
I collected the duckweeds for my fishes.

The little stone bridge was so intricately carved
for the days to hide in.
In the night it was decorated by
the red lanterns, like a shy bride.

There was tinkling music
from passing cyclists.
The bridge was captivated −
something unspoken was connected.

Zenobia Frost is a creative writing adventurer at Queensland University of Technology whose work has appeared in Going Down Swinging, The Definite Article and LOTL magazine. In 2007, she collaborated with musician Timothy Tate at the Queensland Poetry Festival as Colouring by Numbers. She keeps a photograph of Oscar Wilde beside her bed and takes particular interest in children’s literature.

A Poem Finds its Twin
 ~  for JH ~

Perhaps they were conceived
in one sanguine swell of thought,

and were somehow later
drawn apart, adopted out,

such that the words

took on different meanings,
wore different haircuts

and forgot.

They met years later, hanging about
at a reading in clusters of old poems,

printed and permanent,
freckled with commas but

still alive with shifting intonations.
There was confusion

but also calm.

It was as though one’s reflection
had reached out from the mirror

to take the other’s hand
and say, “I know, brother; I know,”

and nothing more.

Hands
with thanks to mr cummings

Not even the rain has such small hands as I.
These wrists might snap as soon as bend,
with batwing bones extending to the fingers.

A dainty hand that cannot open jars,
a girlish hand, with soft pink fingerprints
and wrists that might just snap as soon as bend.

But fingernails bitten to the quick:
a ragged end to all that charm,
that girlish hand, with soft pink fingertips.

Chaos-lined palms: what fate lies there?
A heart-on-sleeve adventure or perhaps
a ragged end to all that charm.

I hope it is the former they shall weave:
these hands brimful of curiosity.
A heart-on-sleeve adventure would be grand.

Yes, I think they were designed for impishness;
not even the rain has such small hands as I,
nor so restless, compelled by curiosity,
with batwing bones extending to the fingers.

My mouth is burning

You kissed me
with raw chillies
on your lips. You knew

revenge was best served
directly – forget plates
and forks and all that

coy formality. Just
feed it to me; I deserve
to eat my words.

Cicada Duet

1. Cicada escapes her shell.

How does she undress herself?
Dried upon my hand her castoffs seem
an armoured corset, and that zipper
down the back doesn’t really give.

She must squeeze out like a newborn,
skin moistened with morning dew.

2. Cicada courts the night.

He is but a shell already –
no former self to speak of:
a resonance chamber whose quest
has become him. When he calls to her,

he must deafen himself, so as
not to hear his loneliness.

Note: The male cicada disables his tympana (membranous structures used to detect sounds) when calling so that he does not damage them.

Kristine Ong Muslim lives in The Phillipines. More than six hundred poems and stories by  her have been published or are forthcoming in over two hundred journals and magazines worldwide. Her work has appeared in Dog Versus Sandwich, Foliate Oak, GlassFire Magazine, GUD Magazine, Iota, Noneuclidean Café, and Slow Trains, Cordite, Boxcar Poetry Review, Nth Position.

City People

This is how we bloom: a dance of petals–
each one whiter than the other, each one
glances at another’s husband, another’s wife.

We follow the white line on the road. We let
the turning wheels desecrate the graves
of forgotten roadkill. The black dust-wind

hurtles beside us, a windshield’s width away.
There are urban cathedrals, sixty-four floors
of stacked cubes made from glass, marble,

reinforced concrete. We spend two strokes
of summers assembling corners out of round
objects until there is nothing left to stretch,

nothing left to pave. Drawn to the colors
of the maps, we mark the wrong turns
of the city streets before they disappear.

Small Town Rain

The elders insisted that our small town was built
by their hands alone and that the rain always came
on time for the planting season.
We were seven then, and we believed them.

Ten years ago, frogs rained down from the skies as well.
They were still alive when they hit the ground. Their eyes
had a quiet dignity in them; they were the eyes of creatures
who had seen too much. Their limbs cushioned their fall
from the sky. Not heavy enough, the frogs took gravity
for granted.  

But the town folks stomped on them,
declared that they were the enemies.
We were seven then, and we believed them.
So we joined in the rampage.

Ten years later, we drove towards the city,
and lost our names, faces, memories.
Perhaps, there were times when we dreamed
about the frogs and what they represented.
Some of us ended up living with the homeless.
Some of us wore suits and traded stocks for a living.
Some of us learned the language, gnawed at the edges
as the city swallowed in satiation day after day.
Some of us gave up and went home,
told lies about being bored with city life.
The town elders always believed our contrived success tales.

Every morning, all of us saw our eyes in the mirrors.
We did not know what they had become and what they had seen,
but the look was familiar. We did not want to recognize it.

The Shack

When my little brother found the shack last summer,
it was already decaying so it had to be alive once.

He savored that moment until there was no need
to ever look back. It was, would always be, his shack.

The field of wild grass supported the abandoned
hut’s impending collapse. Behind it was a cypress,

where owls spent two winters sharing their kill.
Rodents foraged from mound to mound, still looking

for the right place to die. Wind rattled the wooden
boards, and my little brother gasped–half in fear,

half in anger–knowing that the shack would not
last. That day, he went home with the clump of moss

he had scraped from the side of the shack. His shack.
He reveled on the moss’s instinct for regeneration.

Fiona Wright is a Sydney writer, whose poetry has been published in a  variety of journals and anothologies in Australia, Asia and the USA. In 2007, she was resident at the Tasmanian Writers Centre, developing a series of poems about Australian soldiers in Sri Lanka, and in 2008 she was runner-up in the John Marsden National Young Writers Award. Fiona works as an editor for Giramondo Publishing and HEAT Magazine, and a Project Assistant for the Red Room Company. 

The Driver

Belinda Lopez is a young Australian journalist working in Jakarta, Indonesia. Between writing stories and editing for an English-language newspaper in the capital, she has been hiking her way around the many islands of the country, jotting down poetry as she goes.

To Philip Larkin, from Singapore

With the promise of clean,
I was morally confronted
by sex shops, and fingers
entwined on trains.
Even still, sterility ran me inside-
a blessing I was alone,
I dived into solitude
like a finely sculpted boy,
I lunged in a store
where books are hailed the profit,
pushed past a muddled mess of man
who’d found solace in little words
strung together,
and I searched for you,
L, L, L,
tongue flicking my palette fast.
Found an anthology from home
unknowns- even for poets-
that doesn’t matter,
they wrote of Glebe
and left-wing smells
you would have found it bum
so I didn’t buy it.
Oh God, I wanted to feel
Sappho Cafe and messy dusk
tuned to the love songs of
social invalids.
But you weren’t there.
So I left with E. E. Cummings
feeling like I’d taken home the wrong man.

Ibu

Morning calls draw her up from bed
an icy splash to shock her into life
she refuses the hot water in the house.
And Allah takes in prayer as
cracked barefeet genuflect,
soles up to the unrisen sun.

Underneath her head scarf
her hair is black silk,
She removes the tattered cloth
and it falls around her like in the movies

and a woman of 40 is 18 again
dark eyes and cheekbones to the stars,
is this what he sees in crossed pictures,
before he delivers blue circles,
despair for emptiness and poverty,
sweat and truth:
that he is nothing, and she has the strength
he can only dream of in bubbly visions?

The source

At parties I know politics like table manners
Our egos are champagne glasses
drink up, name drop
and see who’ll gulp it down.
The secret is subtlety
never mind that I tally up the
mentions in the rags.
Now at night I hold a pillow, not a
a spouse with good connections.
20 years ago I would be lapping up the
giggles, her watching me wriggle
like a worm between the sheets
I would have stopped for a blue
sky and wondered if something
bigger made it and smelt a beggar’s
musty breathe and felt my stomach sink
in love for him.
Now ecstasy is musty paper
with rows of little lines.

A recipient of Sahitya Akademi Award and Commonwealth Poetry Award, Keki N. Daruwalla has so far published about 12 books, consisting of mostly poems and a couple of fictional works. Some of his important works are Under Orion, The Keeper of the Dead, Landscapes, A Summer of Tigers and The Minister for Permanent Unrest & other stories. He also edited Two Decades of Indian Poetry. The Library of Congress has all his books. His most recent collection is The Glass Blower. His novel For Pepper and Christ was published this year by Penguin, India.

the tribal goddess

there may or may not be a tribal goddess
but I salute her in absentia,
this goddess of the tribals of the forest
of shadows scrimmaging
on the fern floor of the forest
not just the goddess of the dark heart of the forest
but of the forest-fringe
who extends her hand
to meet the vegetal goddess,
protector of those who limp into the forest
trailing a thread of blood,
the ones who subsist on a diet of nettles,
protector against the lords of the buckshot
and the iron trap, hide-robbers, horn bandits
and the ivory thieves
 
the rational ones continue to despise you
as do the monotheists
who think no end of themselves
who think they are very advanced
and aeons ahead of the polytheists
and the pantheists and solar theists
and lunar- and-planet theists
 
but as the concrete forests rise
on concrete plinths and smoke belches forth
coating the sky’s lung
we’ll be migrating to you
in barefoot trickles at night—always night
in silence or with din
the goddess of nocturnal silence
and the nocturnal howl are the same,
one eye Capricorn and the other Cancer
you’ll shortly be in demand
for moss-masked as you are
you are the mother of secrets
goddess of the water springs
still hidden in the earth

A Dam in the Himalayas

Valley floor and  flanking hills have gone under.
Roof-tiles are paved flagstones now
and shimmer and refract as they never did
whenever a light breeze smears the waters.
The blur that is the temple spire is washed and warped;
it trembles when the waters move.
The palace too has gone down with its veined marble,
— colour of sunsets, burnt sienna–
though its pillars still hold the ceiling
 Atlas-like, each pillar
erupting from a carved lotus.
 
If an underwater flute were activated
its Garhwali melody would gurgle up
in a string of bubbles; and carp and mullet
would scuttle away thinking some water mammoth
on the lake-floor was breathing down their fins.
 
These are enchanted waters now, mermaid
and water-nymphs, all breast and sinuous waist
move here; flowering trees still drop petals;
kingfisher and  blue-jay
sit on an underwater branch looking for prey.
 
These are not waters, they are mist, memory
I look for your face, your shadow here,
your body and your bier wrapped in water-weed,
but loved one, the waters close in upon
the outlines of your face, now beyond recall,
and mist and vapour rub your smile away.

Before the Word

Corn is great, on the cob or otherwise,
but before corn in the ear there was life.
Fire is holy especially for Zoroastrians,
but before fire too there was life.
Before the bowstring and the flint arrow sang,
there was life.

The word is great,
yet there was life before the word.
We can’t turn romantic and say
we were into bird speech or river-roar then,
into the silence of frost
or the language of rain.
But forest speech and swamp speech
came through easier to us.
When lightning crashed,
the cry of the marsh bird was our cry,
and we flung ourselves to the other branch
like any other baboon.

As winter whined on windy cliff,
we shivered with the yellow grass.
In winter-dark a hundred eyes
flared yellow in the jungle scrub.
When seasons changed, blood coursed with sap
and flowered in meadows. We were at home.
Nor eyes nor bat cries bothered us.
What if we didn’t know
a bat assessed reality
from the ricochet of its cry?

Though there were no words,
fear had a voice with many echoes.
Worship was quieter, adoration
spoke only through the eyes or knees.

What was it like before language dropped like dew,
covering the scuffed grass of our lives?

Fish

The sea came in with her and her curved snout
and her tin coloured barnacles
and long threaded rose moles
patterned on her body.
 
The sea brought her and her curved snout
and her rose moles and her eyes still translucent
as if half aware and half unaware
of the state of her body.
 
The sea came in with her and her scimitar snout
and her translucent eyes
graying into stone.
 
The sea brought her in,
wrapped in seaweed
and slapped her on the sand,
all five feet of her
with the armour of her scales
and the filigree of her rose moles.
 
The tide kept coming in
but couldn’t disturb her
or her resting place—
she was so heavy.
 
The sea fell back, but even
as the thin-edged foam line receded,
it went to her once more with a supreme effort,
rummaged among her barnacles
and left.

Lorca

Dawn will come as it always has,
               escorted with pearls,
the earth-chalice
                spiked with frost.
Sandwiched between your rivers
‘one lament and the other blood’,
the land will flame like a tongue
               of fiery green
threading the Sierras.
The bullring will pulse with blood;
the red dust will still whirl
              and eddy across the road;
evenings will be as they were before—
light-rose or mauve-shadow
or smeared with iodine,
and chalked with the flight of cranes.
Nightscapes will still be the same:
bars of flamenco carried by the wind
goatherds round a fire
and sheepdogs barking
at the rustle of dry oak leaves.
Only you will not be there.

“Before the Word”, “Fish”, and “Lorca” first appeared in Collected Poems 1970-2005 (Penguin, 2006)

Geoff Page is an Australian poet who has published eighteen collections of poetry as well as two novels, four verse novels and several other works including anthologies, translations and a biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann. He retired at the end of 2001 from being in charge of the English Department at Narrabundah College in the ACT, a position he had held since 1974. He has won several awards, including the ACT Poetry Award, the Grace Leven Prize, the Christopher Brennan Award, the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Poetry and the 2001 Patrick White Literary Award. Selections from his work have been translated into Chinese, German, Serbian, Slovenian and Greek. He has also read his work and talked on Australian poetry in throughout Europe as well as in India, Singapore, China, Korea, the United States and New Zealand.

Ruminations

for Marie Dacke

1.

Though not a happy clapper, I
still praise the filigree of things,
those traceries of fine connections,
the way my friend in Lund
established in her PhD
that certain clever beetles here
(and all about the globe)
employ the moon to navigate,
rolling out their spheres of dung
in straight lines from the mother lode
to feast on unopposed.

 2.

I praise how they’ve ensured that I,
surrounded by the wide Monaro
(its slownesses of sheep and cattle),
can sit here in a coffee bar,
enveloped by the summer air
and, toying with my cappuccino,
measure out these lines for you
untroubled by a fly.

3.

But, then again, I have to think
about those pesky flies,
classified by Carl Linnaeus
(1758),
a genus that’s done 65
million circuits round the sun —
and so to those Monaro cattle,
obliging both the fly and beetle
(the Musca and its moonshine rival)
with all the manna of their dung,
those cattle with their destinations …
protein with a price per kilo.

4.

Not a simple story really —
but let’s not spoil a cappuccino.
We tinker with our tinkering,
horologists at work (with eyepiece)
and smile at how we do not hear
the hoofprints in the room.

Allegro

We are gathered in a room
for violin and piano:
two young female Swiss musicians

and fifty-five or so of us
convened by invitation,
waiting for the strings

to variously be bowed and struck.
I let my eye run down the program:
dates of birth and dates of death;

that hyphen in between.
So much a small mark may reveal
expanded on the stave.

Outside, through the picture window,
a last sun shows the rhododendrons
as, suddenly, in this still moment

I see the room fill up with death:
the slowness of a lifetime’s cancer;
a final swearword on the freeway;

the cloudy whirling of a sky
around the heart attack.
The options ramify like roots

out into the room,
fingers thinning into nothing.
Conceivably, we’ll go together,

one death wrought from light and sound,
a man quite suddenly among us,
his coat too heavy for the weather.

The first piece starts; they’re blonde and gifted —
and not without some humour.
Conducting us by choice and voice

across two centuries of Europe,
they’re celebrating all those hyphens
between the bookends birth and death.

We know, of course, the one date only —
although a few are stooped perhaps
with what their doctor’s said already.

Those last four digits grow remote,
as if immeasurably deferred
by what we’re hearing in the strings.

Struck or bowed, each note sustains us
even as it shouts or whispers
rumours of the end.

The Swoop

Every day
it has to happen.
Why is it that with
so much ease
a magpie sweeps
in front of you
as if connecting
up two trees?

You’re doing 60
kph;
it makes its long low
easy swoop
as if to laz-
ily complete
some half-arsed sort of
loop the loop.

It’s graceful, yes,
but snooty, too;
you hear a brain of
thimble size
declaring in a
quiet hauteur,
You’re much too easy
to despise,

you shadow in your
shiny car.
Can you hope to
equal this?
Whether you
speed up or brake,
your bumper bar
will always miss.

joanne burns is a writer of poetry, including prose poems; short fictions; and monologues. Over a dozen collections of her work have been published. Her most recent poetry collection an illustrated history of dairies Giramondo Publishing 2007 was shortlisted for the 2008 NSW Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize. kept busy, a cd recording of joanne burns reading a selection of her work, was produced by River Road Press, also in 2007. A new collection of her work ‘amphora’ will be published by Giramondo Publishing in 2010. She lives in Sydney.

answer                for Tatjana Lukic 

                     death

a fine gold corridor

you float down on an

early sunday morning –                           

your big day out – then lift

to somewhere like a butterfly

that’s shed her latinations,

into the hums, the whirrings,

sussurations, drifts of astral

air

         you will appear and reappear

         i hear the rhythms of your

         words as you disappear into

         the here and there and every

         where, new breaths streaming

         with the shimmer of your colours,

         no ‘little silly things’, you wear

         the big things now [with flair]

         thought waves its love in every

         colour  

                                                                             August 13th 2008

note: ‘little silly things’ was Tatjana’s description of artworks she was making, mentioned in an email on July 30th 2008

                                         ladoo                          

                                 could this be a poem

                                 of four hands like ganesha

                                 the hindu god who has that

                                 many [or even fourteen]

                                 ganesh ganapati elephant

                                 god of good fortune wisdom

                                 removal of obstacles sweet god of

                                 writers, a kind of spiritual teddy

                                 bear though never close enough for

                                 a hug; he has his hands full with serious

                                 things eyes black pools of a potent mind,

                                 an elephant buddha not snuggleup bear

                                 remover of obstacles desire & pain, one hand

                                 holds an axe the next a whip; one hand for a blessing,

                                 that lotus in the other realising itself: he’s a handy man

                                 no nails required, a bundle of gifts with a generous belly         

                                 that absorbs protects, a mini-phleroma a gnostic ganesh

                                 riding his mouse, this tiny mooshikam, what does it 

                                 mean: smart rodent assistant sniffing cryptic gems,   

                                 a too proud egomind needing gee’s stewardship – 

                                 a pantry of meaning, in the mythopoeisis nook;

                                 from all accounts gee likes a ladoo or four, something

                                 sweet to suck on as he listens for clues with those

                                 capacious ears, vivekananda [before there were two]

                                 i like ganesh best when he stands, one foot raised

                                 above the ground, a fuller measure of his grace; my

                                 unopened ganesh jigsaw puzzle gave me no obstacles

                                 when it sat for two years below three brass figures of   

                                 his dancing self, the pieces slipped together quicker

                                 than the washing up; he reclines on the table lit

                                 by the shine of five ghee lamps; if you used his image

                                 as a coaster or a placemat would he stop you eating or       

                                 drinking too much, would he take you to task –                 

                                 what a task he completed with his missing tusk,

                                 as scribe of vyasa’s vast mahabharata, in his rush

                                 to get started snapping a tusk off to use as a pen, he 

                                 never paused for a break – a true ur god

                                 no seventh day of rest

Anne Elvey’s poems have appeared in Antipodes, Cordite, Eureka Street, Eremos, Meanjin, PAN, and Salt Lick Quarterly. In 2008, her work was placed first in the page seventeen poetry competition and highly commended in the Max Harris Poetry Award. Her research in ecocriticism and biblical studies is supported by Melbourne College of Divinity and the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University. Anne lives in Coburg, Victoria.

Love’s ghost

The egret’s poised

on a platform

of silt. While it seems

she walks on water,

she wades knee

deep, with grace to

impale the soul.

She is the sign

for a clef

between treble and bass –

not yet invented –

or perhaps above,

a body that is reeds’

song, that

when she alights is

more than air. She

hangs her plumes

on sky’s stave:

score for the orches-

tra between us. And

she breathes there,

knows other

things, but

(like you and me)

does not know

what takes flight

when you raise your

hand for silence.

Paperbark, Ashgrove

Dense with tenderness your layered skin is ragged

as if torn by an ancestral scribe

and laid tuck against tuck against trunk,

the innocent flesh shed and held –

like a word you might say about yourself –

as wind breathes against your weeping delicate leaves

that eat the light.

Your body drinks

and deep inside remakes the soil and sun.

So two crows call that you have called them here

and your wood’s joy

at their impertinence

erupts

in peels of flesh.

Is it strip me you say?

Or do colonial eyes see paper where flesh is?

Did your shedding call older hands to ochre?

What is this breath that lifts like a curtain

your lanceolate leaves

where each one’s caress

pierces the space it defines?

Graham Nunn is a Brisbane based writer, co-founder of Small Change Press and a founding member of Brisbane’s longest running poetry event, SpeedPoets (www.speedpoets.org). He is the current QLD editor of Blue Dog: Australian Poetry Journal and is the Secretary of the Australian Haiku Society (www.haikuoz.org). He has published 4 collections of poetry. His latest collection, Ruined Man is now available from www.smallchangepress.com.au

 Hide

among cheap thin-walled rooms
stuffed full of sweating fat men
trying to remember old dreams
the rain all afternoon all evening
its quiet rhythmic sound
before it grew too dark I watched
pigeons drink their own reflection
the room elongated the fourth wall
too distant or too dark to see
no moths at the window
only a swaying power line
raindrops dripping from it
one red spot fading on my thigh
where a flea from the mattress
shared my warmth my loneliness
and returned into the weave

Break Away

i.
This landscape folds in on itself. Everything that
moves – wind, dust, laughter – changes. Streets
soften. Sunlight plays across glass, but windows
appear blank unless viewed from within. Walls
begin to sweat & sour. We give it up & go.
 
ii.
You’ve put on your Marilyn perfume. Our old
letters have never smelled so sweet, our
memories seemed so true. I’ve plotted our escape
to the island – dawn light breaking in the window
salt breeze carrying the ocean’s secrets.
 
iii.
It’s past noon and the weather can’t hold. Take off
your silence and your coat. Let’s chance it – throw
ourselves to the season. There’s a cold that starts
in certainty. You see? There’s only one thing
left to do. Sweep you off your feet.
 
iv.
Here’s a necklace of water, of awe. A puzzle
that began the night your mother walked
along the shore and took the ocean by its lapels.
Empty your basket of black stones. When we
arrive, sunlight will follow, the waters will calm.

Sukrita Paul Kumar was born and brought up in Kenya and at present she lives in Delhi, writing poetry, researching and teaching literature. An Honorary Fellow of International Writing Programme, University of Iowa (USA) and a former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, she was also an invited poet in residence at Hong Kong Baptist University. She has published five collections of poems in English including Rowing Together, Without Margins and Folds of Silence.

Sukrita’s major critical works include Narrating Partition, Conversations on Modernism, The New Story and Man, Woman and Androgyny. Some of her co-edited books are Ismat, Her Life, Her Times, Interpreting Homes in South Asian Literature and Women’s Studies in India: Contours of Change. As Director of a UNESCO project on “The Culture of Peace”, she edited Mapping Memories, a volume of Urdu short stories from India and Pakistan. She has two books of translations, Stories of Joginder Paul and the novel Sleepwalkers. She is the chief editor of the book on Cultural Diversity in India published by Macmillan India and prescribed by the University of Delhi.

A recipient of many prestigious fellowships and residencies, Sukrita has lectured at many universities in India and abroad. A solo exhibition of her paintings was held at AIFACS, Delhi. A number of Sukrita’s poems have emerged from her experience of working with homeless people.

A Tale Untold

(Dedicated to Sadhna Naithani)

This way or that way

Whichever way

Chaubeji looked

Tales spilled over

Tales told and retold

Squirrels scurrying out of

his eyes, his ears

Baby hedgehogs stumbling from

his hairy nostrils

Stories climbing up his legs

Nawabs and begums

Rajas and ranis crawling all

Over him as red ants

Their pinpricks and bites

Traveling from Gopalpur

To London and back

In English

the spice and sting

softened on entering

the white ears

of William Crooke

Ladoos became chocolates

mogra turned bluebells

The many tongues of

Pandit Ramgharib Chaube

Flapped smartly,

From Avadhi, Braj, Khadi boli

Bhojpuri and even Sanskrit

And Persian

To the language of Englishsthan

Fanning people’s imagination

from the times of creation

in the United Provinces

More and even more

Stories surfaced

from deep tunnels of memories

and poured into the

already full cauldron of

Chaube’s mind

The mind that swung

into swirls

and circles of insanity;

Invisible to history

a whole century deaf

He lay mummified

Packed between the covers

Of his handwritten book of tales

Until stirred by the smell of

Ink in the pen of a fellow traveler

Once again

The squirrels came scurrying

out of his eyes

And the pigeons flew from his ears

In the Folklore Society of London.

Memories

Your shriveled

Winter bark

Is a mere mask over

Those chirpy moments, tunnels of

Dense exchanges, breezy quarrels

Those hours of snow meditations

We soared through the skies

To the sounds of

The universe

The autumnal fall

cannot shed them all

Remember,

I am not the summer green of your

Leaves that comes, teasing you

Again and yet again

On this wakeful

winter morning

I see it all

You are in fact

Empty of your ghost…

I see it all

Today too

Wrapped in that same

green shawl

That ageless spirit

Emerges from the nowhere

Of tall keekers of

Jehanpanah,

Gently stepping

through rows of shadowy trees

as on other mornings

tiptoeing

thief-like

in search for another form

an oak, a chinar or

perhaps a peepal

The birds twitter

on my branches

As the mountains slide

into the jungles

on the plains.

To You, Whoever

I hear you in the

Veins of the peepal leaf

Loud and clear

Lit up in the grains of sand

in the afternoon sun

blinding.

I see you appear

In the ripple of the

Baby’s giggle

When you slither back into

the snake hole

I know

the world will end.

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.