December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jennifer Compton lives in Melbourne and is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. Her 11th book of poetry, the moment, taken was published by Recent Work Press in 2021.
An Abandonment
I had done everything I could do within reason
for the ragged rows of broad beans,
their juices were often thick on my fingers
from their first unfurling in mid winter
to the pinching out of the growing tips,
their binding to a stake in late spring.
And then the harvest, soon the harvest done,
and I had brushed through their ranks,
turned hands of leaves upside down,
bent for a better view of their private quarters,
against the sun, the way it is when picking,
nobody likes the low sun full in their eyes.
Their business at an end, I wrenched them from the earth,
laid their lanky stems one upon another,
did not regret their wilting sigh, their quick dying breath.
And clouds and clouds and clouds of ladybirds
crept out from the interstices, showed themselves, and flew.
It was the very opposite of a plague,
because ladybirds do good work, no doubt about it,
but it was very like that sort of thing.
And more and more and more, and then more, a wonder.
They had kept themselves to themselves until
an acrid scent, or an orientation to the sun, or a sudden
knowledge underfoot of sap not rising,
lifted them into an urgency of leaving.
December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Greg Page is a Koori Poet from the La Perouse community at Kamay (Botany Bay). He holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from UTS in Sydney and has been published in the Australian Poetry Journal and the Koori Mail. He lives on unceded Bidjigal land. Dox him at linktr.ee/boypage.
Barbed Wire
Earlier poems on barbed wire have proved unsatisfactory
Not that I know any, but if they were worthwhile I probably would
There’s no bigger symbol of the invasion
And the continent is still covered in the stuff
It might be offensive to talk about barbed wire
Perhaps not as plain rude as asking someone’s salary
A wealthy person’s salary that is
I’ll quite naturally admit my $16k annual jobseeker rate
Rust has a kind of beauty to it
Did they think through what happens to discarded industrial metal items?
‘We all have to go so we may as well go down the gurgler with microplastics’
Perhaps edible plastics might solve all our problems
There’s nothing hidden about the violence of barbed wire
That’s the thing I like most about it
It’s honest truth telling — a voice to Parliament
The ongoing mesh network communicating terror on the frontier
At the speed of light your sadnesses prove ineffective
Good intentions and Koalas are no match for intentional bulldozers
There’s a lot of uncertainty on the land these days
Good labour is so difficult to find even at $16k
December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Debbie Lim lives in Sydney. Her work has appeared in anthologies including regularly in the Best Australian Poems series (Black Inc.) and Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann). Recent work appears in Westerly, Island, Rabbit, Overland and the Willowherb Review (UK). Her chapbook is Beastly Eye (Vagabond Press) and she is working on a full-length collection. She was a Mascara Don Bank Poet-in-Residence in 2020–2021.
Captive
Hapalochlaena lunulata
You are the one who cupped death in the hand.
Watched it writhe in sunlight, tender-faced,
flashing its blue halos, more precise and smaller
than expected. A slow thrall of limbs rippling
away from itself. Everything might have ended
there: a far sea throbbing in your ear as your
own heart slackened, then subsided. Instead,
this sudden act of mercy as you tipped a palm down—
saw a life jettisoned to the shallows.
December 12, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anisha Pillarisetty is a radio producer and presenter at Radio Adelaide and a journalist at On the Record, living on unceded Kaurna Yerta. She is currently in her third year of university studying creative writing and journalism.
Remember to not talk gently when announcing the news, especially if you’re on radio
summers are long and the sky curdles quick
a game:
splashes of cloud or congealing milk left in the bright of the sink
skin circles back into itself
turning the colour of mud flaps on Dad’s old Maruti van bogged after
the first shock of rain
radio says 2020 broke records here
- 1. the third warmest
- 2. the fifth wettest
- 3. the eighth sunniest
- 4. the
radio also says there is a moon wobble
Zoom out to find the Indian Ocean on Google Maps and the searching
blue
is hurled against the window with the moon. The wind is torn between remembering
the kind of rain that disturbs bird calls into static
the kind of rain that is wanting
the Indian Ocean unspools
the tops of the gum trees like a tarp and it sounds like:
- 1. dripping stripes on a gourd sold cheap by the roadside
- 2. your fingers counting the air
- 3. ballooning curtains when my hands
were still small
your freedom – is it mine?
bigger than the cling-clang
at your waist
your laughter is tomatoes in hessian sifted through
1. too soft
2. too green
3. the coins are hesitant to leave the cloth
summer circles
skin.
August 21, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anonymous is a POC health worker and poet living in one of the LGAs on unceded Gadigal country. They write on the Covid delta strain crisis.
Let it RIP, Australia
The dawn of a new decade came with a sting
that became an explosion,
a sniff of opportunity.
And the powerful lined up to strut and pose
they got through 2020 by sheer luck, rising,
as they silenced and crushed all opposition!
They spun a smorgasbord of false narratives
to keep the masses asleep.
They reminded us in other countries
women get shot.
December 2020 Israel vaccinates, Australia is silent.
If there’s a goal, it’s secret and hidden.
Inside the dark wooden cabinet of white men
is a vaccination vacuum.
Strut, pose, wait and watch the world. It’s not a race!
Smiling and lying, they squander the gains,
strutting, posing and rewarding the sycophants
Only 4% fully vaccinated when Bondi starts
as it spreads to Walgett, and Victoria,
New Zealand even. A catch-up game
No intention of defeating this plague.
Deliberate, calculated spread
because when it is everywhere
there is nothing to lose in opening the borders. Ha ha!
1200 cases today and we smile and boast
dissonant, cheerful one-liners.
The price is paid in the hospitals of Sydney
by the beaten and battered clinicians,
falling one by one to radio silence.
By patients who came in for gallstones
but never left because of COVID.
In small country towns where there is no hospital
and no prospect of evacuation because Dubbo is falling
in the dark corridors of the prisons
and the forgotten people in Wilcannia
starving and unvaccinated
Is this planned genocide?
While the experts muse about global equit
While Pfizer is fast-tracked to the Eastern suburbs
So they can be free sooner
Strutting. Posing. The strong will survive and the weak….
Well they were unvaccinated. Ha ha!
Let’s go full Great Barrington today, Haha, they laugh.
Live with COVID, haha!
The children are the sacrifice,
held up to the money god.
The ultimate sacrifice in cringing worship of the UK
Desperate doctors whisper about whole wards infected
Hospitals crumbling
Emergency beds prepared in concrete car parks
Hastening death with morphine and midazolam
to allow new admissions.
Live with COVID, they say, as they strut and pose.
We have thousands of ventilators. Haha!
It’s just the Untermensch that are dying
Westies and Muslims.
Not the important people of Mona Vale.
In the rich suburbs a lady browsing in a non-essential shop
was heard saying “That’s not us. It’s just the LGAs”.
The experts who built their careers trumpeting their commitment
to the vulnerable and disadvantaged
are silent, still grovelling for small favours like obedient dogs
Servants to the state with one foot
crushing the heads of the dying, so eager to help
masturbating at the fate of the poor
as the carnage flows
as the merchants of death conduct their deadly orchestra
with glee
The complicit media who fawned and enabled this symphony of sorrow
are starting to fidget and fuss
Some sense belatedly they are stakeholders too.
Their children will be sacrificed. Oh no.
A few speak out and finally ask the right questions
Too little too late.
A small group of besieged warriors
fought for what was right
but were silenced and destroyed
by the despots and their fawning colluders
by laws twisted to punish
those who dared to speak truth
North Korea style.
The righteous painted as bad guys.
Black is white
And white is black.
Some lost their jobs for speaking up.
While the posing pretenders climbed higher
on the bodies of the dead
and the mountains of their profit
shouting out their propaganda
We have to live with COVID!
Death is inevitable!
July 6, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Michael Aiken is a four-time recipient of a unique and delightful child, and the founder, owner and servant-in-chief of Garden Lounge Creative Space, Sydney’s only specialist poetry shop and licenced café. His first poetry collection, A Vicious Example (Grand Parade 2014) was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize, the Mary Gilmore Prize and an Australian Book Design Award. His second book, the verse novel Satan Repentant (UWAP 2018) was commissioned by Australian Book Review for their inaugural Laureate’s Fellowship, as selected and mentored by David Malouf. His most recent poetry collection is The Little Book of Sunlight and Maggots (UWAP 2019).
Artemis, the moon, and a handball: nightscape
Playing with the moon
blue in my shadow
while you, my little guy
smile about slugs, treetops,
old school or new,
proper service during King’s Revenge…
Practicing your Spongebob voice
Schwamkopf,
silberschein
mein kinderlein, lÖcken
running on the field again
in peace
Elegy
There are no accidents
Said the turtle to the panda
Said the panda to the giant panda
Said the child to the man
and the man realises
he is a man
and the child goes on
realising nothing, realising little
of everything.
Nothing will come of nothing
a serpent consuming its tail
like it, a queen
the people talking
the Odyssey on its journey through space
family all put to sleep, the world
all gone to sleep
the world all gone…
blonde god
Steps into water
don’t emerge
There are no accidents
You’re a great dad
I’ll be your mirror
Now the glass is absolute
elegy
July 3, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Nathanael O’Reilly is an Irish-Australian residing in Texas. His books include (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020); BLUE (above/ground press, 2020); Preparations for Departure (UWAP, 2017), named a Book of the Year in Australian Book Review; Cult (Ginninderra Press, 2016); Distance (Ginninderra Press, 2015); Suburban Exile (Picaro Press, 2011); and Symptoms of Homesickness (Picaro Press, 2010). More than 200 of his poems have appeared in journals and anthologies published in thirteen countries, including Antipodes, Anthropocene, Backstory, Cordite, fourW, FourXFour, Headstuff, Marathon, Mascara, Postcolonial Text, Skylight 47, Snorkel, Strukturiss, Transnational Literature, Westerly and The Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2017.
From Ballarat to Brisbane
After Joe Brainard
I remember falling out of a pine tree
at number 2 Waller Avenue in Ballarat
I remember my eyes puffing up
after playing in waist-high grass
on the vacant block down the street
and the pretty nurse sticking
a needle in my bum at the hospital
I remember riding a black horse
sixteen hands high while wearing red
gumboots and red corduroy jeans
I remember burning my tongue
with tomato soup at recess
in the shelter shed
at Redan Primary School
I remember the neighbour’s German Shepherd
nipping at my arse when I scaled the fence
after retrieving a tennis ball from their backyard
I remember riding my red bike
into a puddle beside Lake Wendouree
sinking in mud up to my handlebars
I remember carving my initials
into a branch high up inside
the eucalyptus tree with a pocketknife
I remember breaking my mate’s thumb
while taking a mark playing footy
on the oval at lunchtime in grade one
I remember moving from Ballarat to Brisbane
when I was six – leaving behind my mates
and everything I’d ever known
I remember standing in the dirt driveway
of 50 Larbonya Crescent, Capalaba
on New Year’s Day thinking It’s 1980!
I remember my mate Ian finding a wallet
stuffed with eight fifty-dollar notes
at the shopping centre and buying
a dozen cinnamon doughnuts
I remember playing barefoot
lunchtime rugby and red rover
ripping uniforms and skinning knees
I remember the headmaster
summoning me to his office
giving me six of the best
for playing outside in the rain
July 3, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Paul Dawson’s first book of poems, Imagining Winter (IP, 2006), won the national IP Picks Best Poetry award in 2006, and his work has been anthologised in Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013) and Harbour City Poems: Sydney in Verse 1888-2008 (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009). His poetry and fiction appear in journals such as Meanjin, Southerly, Westerly, Island, Overland, Cordite Poetry Review, Peril Magazine, Australian Poetry Journal and The Sydney Morning Herald. Paul is currently an Associate Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales.
Thanks for the poems, Covid-19
Here’s me, face-masked in a supermarket
swamped by white people, who are
angry all over again about the yellow peril
now an invisible airborne enemy speaking in tongues
through the inscrutable hospital-blue fabric
that obscures my features, that signals its silent intent
while I peer at the shelves, ensconced in the conch-shell
of my mask – until the bald, wobbly-eyed face of a
Woolworth’s worker appears suddenly beside me
and barks: ‘Social distancing still applies in here!’
Oh sorry, what was I doing? SOCIAL DISTANCING
STILL APPLIES IN HERE he repeats, as if I can’t hear
as if English escapes me, as if this is groundhog day
as if his words were a talisman to keep the threat at bay.
Yes, I say, but I don’t know what I was doing?
And then, from behind, a woman’s voice chimes in
to explain that she had complained because I
was blocking her path, now averting her gaze
as she swerves her trolley past, and I am left
with my own trapped breath, watching the worker
move on to stack shelves within hugging distance
of a white couple, within a whisper of their faces
as they contemplate trays of beef mince. I refrain
from repeating his talisman back to him
because really I want to scream it hysterically in his face
because I take it personally, because I’m not from, and have
never been, to China, because I know that’s the wrong response
and maybe this had nothing to do with race anyway
and why the fuck did I wear this mask in the first place?
And I can’t help but think of Pauline Hanson, circa the turn of the millennium
and all the incidents like this, which I thought had been eradicated
as if the trope of Asian contagion that lay dormant
while Islamic terrorism helped fashion Hanson’s comeback
has now been revived in a virulent new strain
that cannot be warded off by hoarding toilet paper
for this behaviour is every bit as Australian
as our coming together to battle the bushfires
that tear across the nation, and to be Asian-Australian
in a pandemic is – like hoarding – to be suddenly
un-Australian, where one minor encounter can unmask
the searing loss of belonging, the sense of
impotence, the persistent second-guessing
of one’s own thoughts, that typically present
as asymptomatic on all those inscrutable faces.
July 3, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Vasilka Pateras is a Melbourne-based poet and emerging writer whose work is published in n-SCRIBE, Mediterranean Poetry, The Blue Nib and Poetry on the Move. She regularly reads as part of the Melbourne Spoken Word community.
Pusteno oro1
The curve of my spine
I sway
with the clarinet’s call
I am in its grip
pure majestic phrasing
scattered gradations
time signature
12/8
3+2+2+3+2
a gentle hop step of feet
if there was a verse this would be it
if there was a curse it would be my love
for the life of notes that gather as we gather
in the oro
3+2+2+3+2
a step in unison
in memory
a circle’s embrace
this is our protest
of release in the rattle and clack of
the drum
catching me
I wipe the sweat from my brow
the clarinet’s hold
into the unknown
people unstitched
frayed across new and old worlds
trying to pick up the lost stitch
in this I am found
3+2+2+3+2
Melbourne how do I love you?
Wominjeka
at Tullamarine
blazing glass
industry, billboards stream
flat grey basalt plains of the west
into freeway channels
of fast fast fast
how do I love you
true wog wogness of north
Veni vidi vici
market square of Preston
multi-language
multi-faith
multi–tribe
an escape
from the ravages of war
to tamed lions, eagles
white balustrades
lemon trees lemon scented
bitter sweet
fruit of dislocation
how do I love you
endless endless suburbs of east
Metricon, Glenville and anon
faux Provincial, Federation, Bungalow Californian
the home beautiful of
low maintenance thinking
to the row row of hedge groves
how do I love you
southern white-burbs
foreign beige of aspen
dales and vales
that sonorous
lap of bay
against the hush hush hush
away
how do I love you
oh Yarra, smell of brown
waste replete
the glass sheen of Maribyrnong,
canals of Elwood
concreted Moonee Ponds creek
do I dare dip my feet?
how do I love you
oh big city heart
Victorian genteel
Paris end
playground of successive elites
huddled laneways of mystery
artisanal, literary, labyrinths
cannibalised by capital
that cannot been seen
once crane adorned
now pandemic forlorn
oh Kulin Nation
of Naarm
people, country, language
with stories of legend and lore
I hail the cries for restitution
of what was
and is yours yours yours
FOOTNOTES
1. Translations from Macedonian:
pusteno – to release/let go/set free
oro – folk dance
July 2, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Gemma Parker is a poet and a teacher at the University of Adelaide. Her poems and essays have been published in Transnational Literature, Award Winning Australian Writing, Writ Poetry Review and the Tokyo Poetry Journal. She was the 2016 winner of the Shoalhaven Literary Award for Poetry. She is a PhD Candidate at the University of Adelaide as part of the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. She is one of the project managers of the Raining Poetry in Adelaide festival for 2021. She lives in Adelaide with her husband Guillaume and their two children.
Studies in Moonlight
The sparkle on hickory or white-oak leaves seemingly wet with
moonlight strikes one to the heart. One suddenly misses the capital,
longing for a friend who could share the moment.
– Yoshida Kenkō (c.1283-1350)
I don’t even know
what a hickory leaf
looks like. I yearn
to write poems about moonlight,
the wet darkness, solitude.
Far from the light-noise of cities,
to write in a place of true night,
in the medicinal north.
To compose more
than opportunistic poems
about the marginalia of life.
Doesn’t one also miss
the rush of loneliness,
and long for distance
from every capital?