January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Carol Chan is Singaporean. Her writing has been performed and published in Singapore, Edinburgh and Melbourne, including Meanjin, WetInk, and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. She’s currently researching her honours thesis in anthropology at the University of Melbourne.
Two Drifters
There is no room for adventure
now, you say. Everything
has been discovered. There is nothing left
that hopes to be found; we were born
too late to be heroes now.
But the British were not the only dreamers
and explorers; only think
what India must have known
before the British claimed this knowledge
as their own. This history was lying
there all along, safe in the precious day.
India was not an imagined country,
nor have we invented the other.
What I’m trying to tell you now, love,
is that there is still room enough
for us to be heroes yet.
Getting to Vienna
The night we missed our flight to Slovakia, we lay
in Edinburgh, thinking of the still pair of empty seats
on the plane that has always been leaving;
those two unslept beds that will never know
the weight of ourselves;
the unwalked streets, unembraced cold of Slovakia
in the morning that will come.
That morning came. We caught another flight to Prague
instead, not to get to Prague, but to find ourselves
on the Vienna-bound train, back on track,
why we meant to go to Slovakia at all.
This wasn’t how things were supposed to be.
It is only now that we remember who creates the world
by the second. This train moves no-one but our bodies
towards a place of our dreaming.
This world, these possible worlds, are in our hands,
at our feet. On the moon. Somewhere,
a phone is ringing, and the news depends
on whoever there is to answer it.
What We Talk About
How to brew coffee. With a kopi-sock,
or a press-pot. What a press-pot is.
In winter, we talk about winter.
Anthropology. Poetry.
Suppressed sentiments in Bedouin desert tribes.
Identify these in our own.
We talk about scientists trying
to make things work, though not so much
the trying. How we brew coffee.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Greg McLaren is a poet, critic, editor and amateur risotto genius who lives in Sydney. His books are Everything falls in, Darkness disguised and The Kurri Kurri Book of the Dead.
After Basho
Kek kek kek kek kek –
startled on the edge of a deep sleep
by panicked plovers.
The commerce student
looks up from his PS2
at the crescent-moon.
Enraged by poetry,
I circumambulate my flat
like Frank Webb in CallanPark.
The raven vanishes
into the under-storey of brush
across the Hawkesbury.
Walking around Petersham
under the full moon –
what? it’s dawn already?
In the thunderstorm,
mid-arvo, currawongs gossip
between the lightning.
Horse and cattle bones
in the overgrown paddock –
the grass and cutting wind.
I walked for miles
and when I stopped,
red frangipani blossoms.
Hugging my knees,
squat on the ground, grieving
for my friend the priest.
The raven on the wire
all day in Petersham,
pining for Petersham.
Chinese poems After Han Shan
(from Burton Watson, 100 Poems by the T’ang poet)
2.
A bedsit is home for this country boy:
cabs and buses rarely drop off passengers:
the street-side trees so still that crows roost here,
the gutter full of cigarette butts and frangers.
I go chocolate shopping on my own,
smoke joints in the park with my girlfriend.
And in this little flat? Books piled high
on my bedside table with the Chinese landscape print.
16.
Fark! Bookshop wages and a constant cough,
stuck alone without friends or family.
There’re hardly any potatoes for the pot
and I boil dust in the Coles brand kettle.
Cracked tiles in the roof drip tumours of rain,
my bed sags in the middle – I can’t sleep.
And you’re surprised I’m so thin?
A mess like this would send anyone spare.
30.
I slaved my arse off over Joyce,
poring stupidly over Finnegan’s Wake.
I’ll be checking bookshop stock figures til I’m 80 –
a mong scribbling away at invoices and returns.
When I ask the I Ching, it says, Look out –
my life’s dictated by bad horoscopes.
If only I was like the river red gums,
a pale shade of green even in drought.
38.
I was born more than forty years ago.
Ten thousand or more miles, I’ve been driven,
alongside rivers thick with willows,
across the reddened border of South Australia.
I drank Jim Beam in hope of acceptance,
read the poets, and Manning Clark’s History.
But now, I’m back here in Kurri, head
on an old pillow, fouling my ears with home.
59.
Last year, when I was so poor,
I counted money for cretinous brothers.
So I decided to work for myself
digging out crystals or something.
A smiling foreign critic wrote to me
and wanted to laud me in his Review.
I offered him only what I could,
Mate, you couldn’t afford poems like these.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Benjamin Dodds is a Sydney-based poet whose work has recently appeared in the pages of Southerly, Etchings, Cordite, Harvest and at the brilliantly named Chickenpinata.com. He maintains a weblog at http://benjamindodds.blogspot.com/
Pig
There’s a pig in the grass
and broken bricks
and caked pads of sawdust
piled up behind the gun club’s rifle range.
It’s only slightly buried beneath it all.
The punk-rock haircut of subversive green
is healthier than any lawn in town,
and the white smiling teeth,
top set only—the lower ones lie in soil,
could sell Colgate on TV.
After its rest, it will stand
and shake the turf
and building rubble
from its lightly downed back
and prance down the mound
on pretty, pointed trotters
or so I tell my nephew
who reaches to prod
the balloon of belly
with a bent, spent welding rod.
Wrested
Splayed out like Vitruvian boys
on the concrete cap
of the raised water tank,
they draw a day of hoarded heat
through buttocks and backs.
The rude, familiar honk of an approaching car
and a wholesome hello launched
through the kitchen window below
shatter their world completely.
Screaming drifts of galahs,
as pink and grey as the sky that holds them,
signal the death of this hot-blooded day.
One last protracted clasp of hands,
and two monkeys skim
down the parchment-smooth skin
of a convenient branch.
On the anaemic lawn, two country mothers
smile over a quick cup of tea
at the reluctant arrival
of their perfectly normal sons.
Subcutaneous
since it happened
I have been waiting
for this other event
for the crust to form
for the thin weeping to slow
and for you to move within me
I have seen it in my head
your white fingers fumble
with curve-pointed scissors
as you slip one blade under
and snip the thread at a point
beside the precise black knot
I feel a sudden slackening
just beneath the surface of my flesh
and the anticipated slide
of scrupulous slicing nylon
at a depth whose nerves lie dormant
all times but this
I sit ready tonight
and see you sense a mood in me
that seems incongruous to you
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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B N Oakman writes poetry that has been widely published in magazines, journals and newspapers in Australia, the UK and the USA. An academic economist, he lives in Central Victoria and has taught at universities in Australia and England.
Universal Pictures
Creature From The Black Lagoon hangs
on a wall of the room where I work,
and on the other side of this wall
an analyst swims in unfamiliar waters,
encouraging diffident charges to paddle
in shallows before executing cautious dives
in quest of Auden’s ‘delectable creatures’,1
seeking acquaintance, perhaps tentative union
in depths unplumbed, then cautiously,
when these disavowed beings seem less alien,
stroking closer and closer to the surface.
But my poster displays a misbegotten thing,
a slime-green hybrid of fish and man
grasping a young woman in webbed claws,
oddly careful not to scratch her as he drags her
down to a subterranean lair, deeper, darker,
her soundless screams just little bubbles from red,
wide-open lips while the creature stares into her face
with great limpid eyes, tender almost, watching
her writhe in its scaly embrace, sleek
in a tight white swimsuit, but not doomed,
for in the movie her male friends spear the fish-man
and she surges up to the light in her lover’s arms,
never again to plunge into the black lagoon.
Also in my room is The Invisible Man
who imbibes chemicals to make himself vanish,
becoming discernable only by his garments,
for if he goes naked he seems not to exist,
though he may be present in every other sense,
perhaps even in a room like this, crammed
with paraphernalia, my books, furniture, papers,
posters, pictures – and should the analyst,
glistening from her immersions, decide
to walk through here, she, of all people,
ought not be fooled by such disguises: transparent,
murky or opaque – for these are Universal Pictures;
it even says so on the posters.
1W H Auden, In Memory of Sigmund Freud, stanza 26
Delusional Moments before my Cell Phone
One occurred in Rome, in a small pensione close by
the Campo dei Fiori, when the slumberous morning
was torn by shouts, shrieks of motor scooters, swearing –
a brawl in the laneway two floors down. Alongside me
a woman was asleep, black hair swept across a pillow,
bronzed flesh stark against the white sheet;
and I lay quiet, content to watch the Roman light
infiltrate the wooden shutters and stroke the sparsely
furnished room with bars of black and gold, to listen
to the row subside and wait for Italian commerce
to stir and climb slowly, irresistibly, towards
its daily crescendo. My passport was in order,
I had money, sufficient to last a few days,
and trunk calls were expensive. And I imagined,
I cannot say for how long, that I knew how to live.
The other, years later, was in Naples, by the docks,
waiting for a bus after a choppy crossing from Capri,
most of the passengers sick. I was standing in the tepid
rain with my arm around a woman, both of us soaked,
drops of rain forming on her face and glistening
in the streetlights like diamonds splashed wantonly
upon her beauty. Nearby a newsstand screamed
of murders and around us cars snarled everywhere,
anywhere, no place safe. My passport was in order,
I had money, sufficient to last a few weeks,
and trunk calls were expensive. And I imagined,
I cannot say for how long, that I knew how to live.
Since then I have never again imagined, even
for a moment, that I knew how to live, although
my passport is still in order, I have money, sufficient
to last several years, and these days I have a cell phone.
Eulogy for a Matriarch
the notices proclaim
you taught us how to live
laud you irrepressible
lament you irreplaceable
but the falling years
have struck you
silent
as when children cried
for you to speak
blind
as when children cried
for you to see
deaf
as when children cried
for you to hear
polished is your casket
a fine veneer
brilliant are your fittings
plastic disguised as silver
consider your lilies
purest of whites
cultivated for show
not perfume
you detested scent
from crushed flowers
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Matt Hetherington is a writer and musician who lives in a flat in Melbourne with a really good bath. His most recent collection is I Think We Have (Small Change Press, 2007) http://www.smallchangepress.com.au/. He is also on the board of the Australian Haiku Society http://www.haikuoz.org/
For Davids
“The cage opens. The canary closes its eyes.”
~ David Stavanger, “Everyday Magician”
the canary sings like a canary.
it dreams of flying through the morning without moving;
its claws clutch at the perch,
but it is the yellow light only that rushes past,
and it sits almost still, tasting nothing.
within the darkness of the everyday coalmine’s heart
it falls into sleep with its black beak open,
seeing only caves of night
which suddenly bloom into fields of yellow air.
it warbles of false dawns in the lives of happy families
which sound like early morning warnings;
it rises like a puff of cigarette smoke,
and drifts over crumpled fields and the need to wake up;
it skims over seas of yellow clouds
inside which perhaps are sleeping the hooded dead.
a drop drips from the ceiling.
a candle flickers in the draught the open door left.
someone has left the gas going.
gravity is holding on.
the canary sings like a canary.
the cage closes.
the canary opens its eyes.
Starving Girl, Calcutta
acting or not, it didn’t matter
she didn’t need
to pretend
to be
desperate or debased or beyond despair
what she was
could not be hidden
i was only trying to leave the country
now trapped in the back of a taxi
in a midday traffic jam
she clutched at me
through the open window
sobbing, chanting, imploring, wailing
not even in english
(why didn’t the driver do like he did with the others
and tell her to go get lost?)
i felt for coins but had none
so (keeping my notes for the next stage to the airport)
as if it could help
i blessed her repeatedly
and for a whole two or three minutes
we stayed there
stuck in the spokes of the hideous, sacred wheel
at last the traffic moved forward
and she returned to her tribe under the plastic sheeting
while we drove upwards
onto the rabindra setu bridge
Lone Bird Collecting Twigs
“ Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me
How good, how good, does it feel to be free?
And I answer them most mysteriously
‘Are birds free from the chains of the skyways?’ ”
~ Bob Dylan, “Ballad in Plain D”
in the middle of anywhere
letting its song waft where it does
the contours of its mouth a tree to climb cliffs of falling from
i frown gratefully into the horizon’s setting
to see a baby looking
like she makes mandalas and angels with her eyelashes
below clouds like the brows of a father who cannot cry
below the moon like a large clump of dirt
below a jet-black eyeball staring through our ashes
yet while i give my own sight to the screen
and it takes it
there is rarely a bad day
i have a craving for earlobes
and want to write a poem without nature
as lazy as the rain as usual
or maybe more like an el salvadorian gentleman
who must eat even when not hungry
and cannot sleep even when he is tired
still through the voice of the indifferent wind
a question comes asking “is it fair to love clouds
more than the sun, but less than sunlight?”
the answer is ‘yes’ if you don’t ask the question
but this one
teaching me how to breathe
again
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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James Stuart’s most recent works include: online poem-world The Homeless Gods (www.thehomelessgods.net); Conversions, an exhibition of poetry in translation (Chengdu, Suzhou and Beijing); and, The Material Poem, an e-anthology of text-based art and inter-media writing (www.nongeneric.net). He was a 2008 Asialink Literature Resident in Chengdu, China, supported by the Australia Council and Arts NSW.
Guangdong sidewalk
It’s time to savour your European life. At the airport
she combs her hair back into the Third World War:
Style is effortless the same way it’s easy
to have something unless everyone wants it too.
What emerges from urban pixellation is the greyest
of mysteries, furtive glance down an original side street.
You take each such image & let it vibrate
beneath the weight of two dialects, a single script.
I would join the chorus, though here
we pass only as much as one remains.
Soon the administrator’s garden, meandering,
revelation in the updraught of a smog-free sky.
Unfolding
May 2009 – Chengdu, Sichuan, China
A private celebration: mother
weeps; string of cameras carries
this likeness to row upon row of the remote.
What can you feel when the day turns to stone?
On a white beach south-west of Santiago
they feel it too: goose bumps in the cool sea breeze;
frosted glasses of Piña Colada; space afloat,
emptied. Handfuls of silence that pock-mark the air.
Then the unfolding of tides, lightly creased
linen of a surface which entombs
such reactions: nameless black water
layer upon layer of the stuff.
Skimming back across oceans to where a coordinated
wail rings out, appeasing humiliation
with pronouns & possessives
igniting public squares & campuses,
propane fists, their uranium hearts:
emotions when definite become
sharp, cut through whole crowds. This atonement
for the reckless anarchy of earth.
Against a sunset human shadows are
as paper dolls, barbs of phosphorescent light.
Finally, the arrival of the dead in wave
upon wave of photographs, spliced
narratives: unfurling,
an open wound, its destructive pomp.
Immortal
Dim sum, the city’s great tradition: the captain of the steam cart
makes a beeline for our table across the vulgar carpet
then zig-zags port-side at the last minute.
We conceal disappointment behind the rain checks:
what can’t you find in a supermarket these days!?
In Aisle 4: plantation palm oil & the latest flavonoids.
Aisle 6: a numinous stream of crockery & chopsticks.
Ours was a world less innocent than such winding threads
of fluoro strip-lights & the gradual advent of disposable nappies.
For old times sake, let’s label our prejudices for the sample jars.
We’ll examine them tomorrow, over an ice-cold mango drink
in the laced shade of these hat brims,
though such a colonial taxonomy is sure to kill the mood.
Today remains your day. From his shrine, the North God
delegates aesthetic decisions as to the appearance of his idols –
that old fraudster! When the whistle blows, migrant workers
swim beneath the bridge and back to their dormitories,
a procession of orange hard-hats and flip-flops.
If you have ever seen such a sight
you are either immortal or a liar – for only now,
in the fragrant patio of dusk, do a pride of rosewood lions
pad out from the razed mangroves & prowl the foreshore
pawing at a rattan ball marked Made in Burma.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Solrun Hoaas spent formative years in China and Japan. She discovered theatre as a student in Oslo and Kyoto, where she also trained as a Noh mask maker. An award-winning film-maker, her work was experimental, exploring cross-cultural themes. Her short film At Edge was a discovery of the Australian bush through the eyes and voice of the poet Judith Wright. The film can be purchased from Ronin http://www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/753.html Solrun submitted work to Mascara Literary Review four months before her death in December 2009. This is the bio she submitted to our editors:
Melbourne-based Solrun Hoaas has returned to poetry after years of filmmaking. Her poems appear in Going Down Swinging , Holland 1945, Arabesques Literary Review, Softblow Poetry and Writing Macao.
http://www.innersense.com.au/mif/hoaas.html
The Tailor from Noumea
My favorite winter coat
was made by a tailor from Noumea
at ninety-four, yellow cravat
beret cheekily cocked, crooked smile
wide as a welcome.
My coat one of a kind
patchwork of the finest fabrics
remnants from a factory long closed
midnight blue and grey wool blends
mustard suede for rubbing elbows
elegantly tailored, inside pockets
lining stitched with equal care.
The pattern was his own design
fashioned for civilian internees
sent from the northern pearling towns
and scattered Pacific islands
to incarceration at chilly Tatura.
Undaunted, he set up a sowing factory
for women in the camp, and there
the coats were made, all uniform
in maroon-dyed heavy wool,
to keep them warm through five
or more long wartime winters.
The tailor himself, born a Japanese,
was shipped from New Caledonia –
his first involuntary visit to Australia –
as a civilian, but enemy alien.
A lifetime business left behind,
his French no currency here,
he made the best of his confinement.
And when the war was over,
and he was ‘repatriated’ – not home,
but to impoverished Japan, a stranger there,
he started up again, stich by stich,
his handwritten sign in Yokohama,
still there –
‘Murayama, Tailleur Elegant.’
He had retired, but showed me around
the remains of his small factory,
ends of fabric still on the shelves.
One day a heavy coat arrived by mail.
A tailor-made Tatura model, lined and
multicoloured in thirteen different fabrics.
I wear it often, cloaked in memories of
his cheeky smile, wide as a welcome,
and tales of proud resilience
to injustice, his story still untold.
The Key
I am standing at a castle.
There is a map of an archipelago.
This is where I want to go.
The quickest way to get there
is to sail around the world.
I try to open the door of the castle,
but can’t work out which key to use.
There are so many on my key ring.
A Eurasian girl walks past and
opens it for me. Easily.
She has her own key, bent in a V,
and shows me how it fits
in the hole. She hands me
her key and a guidebook.
I step through the door.
I am standing on a cliff
with a steep drop to the sea.
A man and a child were with me
and have gone back down.
They called me. I didn’t answer.
Wonder if the old walls might crumble.
The Platform
I should have been dead at eight
if logic governs destiny.
A heavy wooden platform fell on me
in the camelia garden at Aotani.
But maybe many years ago,
before a war had devastated
a thriving shipping port
and the ruined owners of a
Swiss-style Japanese mansion
were forced to sell my childhood home,
their platform held an orchestra,
violinists, sax and piano players,
as guests flirted and danced.
Why it was propped up outside
along the wall I still don’t know.
Most days it held up God’s word,
sermon, cross and organist.
As often, it was my incurable
curiosity that got me into strife. I pried
a wooden stopper loose at base.
Precarious already, the platform toppled.
I still remember the thud, the cries,
the breath squeezed out of me.
My mother’s amazement that
I was not dead, not even a tiny rib
crushed with the sudden impact.
‘She’s a tough little girl,’ they said.
But even now I hear the gasp,
a moment when breath was suspended
and feel the ponderous weight
of that preacher’s platform
crushing down on me.
What music of ancient delight
was it, that carried and lifted its weight?
My algae
1.
My nights are star sand
sifting too slowly
through the hourglass
of diminishing dreams.
They could cut through
a mangrove forest once,
clearing a path to
a shimmering source.
Now, haunted by hollow accounts
and birds of credit pecking
at each lidless moment,
capturing the pitiful sandman.
Nothing left by morning but
drained waking and
marinated memories,
the shamisen serenades
of a tousle-headed fisherman
with a towel around his head,
who says, ‘You’re hard
to take with chopsticks.’
2.
Peardrops on eyelids
swollen with purple curses
persimmon percussion,
the taste of tart guitarstrings
too taut, snapped
brittle as bone ballads,
a yellow weeping violin
harmonizing with
the azure blue smells
of early morning
synthesis of sleepless nights.
3.
Bones of flimsy fibres,
my algae entwine the body
locking it in a brutal embrace,
every step inviting a bolt
of lightning to strike jolting
flames into tender joints.
Better sing for your breakfast
than beat your head
against the bedstead,
waking fibrous with myalgia.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Chris Brown lives in Newcastle. He is writing a collection of poems to be titled hotel universo.
chekhov
the first coffee doesn’t wake you
you sleep in then go out
09:26 and or 28 degrees
but that was minutes ago
cooks hill books every room
in the house its own genre
half of fiction skimread
like a stylus skating dust
in the audible distance
know the song not the title
nor the words no more
than the melody really – the song?
on tiptoes handpicked the lady
and the little dog and other stories
alternate title try future cruelties –
tonight ol’ petrov’ll tell the beggars of Ukleyevo:
god’ll feed yer – at which political point
i’ll say no more or fall out of the poem
Hesitant Apostrophe
Don’t apologise for your ideas –
I actually liked that one, the way
you describe the light, rounding
the corner, the ice only vapour
on the glass. Things this close
to you. The irises and therein
the kind of longevity we quantify
in an afterlife! The early game.
The wind like nothing we’ve ever seen.
And things we know. I like it. I mean it.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jan Dean lives at Cardiff, Lake Macquarie. Her work has been published in newspapers, journals and anthologies including The Australian, Blue Dog, Famous Reporter, Hecate, Quadrant, Southerly, Sunweight (NPP Anthology) 2005); The Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Inc); The Best Australian Poetry 2004 (UQP). Interactive Press published Jan’s poetry collection With One Brush as winner of IP Picks Best First Book in 2007; it was shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Award in 2008.
Cranes fly on my blue and white porcelain brooch
People take several paths and transformations
to find and leave a closer view of the summit.
Some wait until mid-morning. Others
depart with pilgrims and lose themselves
in the mists of dawn. None may go further
than halfway. The summit is simply a frame
for platforms that cling to the slope.
I began at the launch pad and proceeded on foot
up the river of light, reminiscent of a ramp
on the face of a Mayan temple.
Close to the entrance souvenir shops crowd
the road into an avenue, confetti-bright.
Kindly avoid temptation until the return journey.
A few, as feathers floated by a gentle breeze
take the thin path on the left hand side facing the city.
In which case, they choose the time
of ancestor reverence, when final resting spots
marked by tall stones of charcoal flecked with white
diffused over the vast curve, enjoy blessings;
single red roses, mingling with companions
to set the sweep ablaze.
The right path is narrow and steep enough
to persuade a caterpillar persona. It is pleasurable
by sheen on cobblestones, heel-clack & feet-shuffle
or navy & white noren, damp yet aflutter
and the women
who surge into doorways and turn to face you
as parasols collapse into narrow vees
under facades; compact, mature, ghostly.
Back on level ground, you should meander over
to Gion in time for twilight, when lit paper lanterns
proclaim trainee geishas, who perfect their art
of fragility hovering on platform shoes.
Ruby lips and mime-like faces emit no emotion
yet receive the respect reserved for dolls
preserved in museums. They pose then disappear
silk kimonos rustling rainbows, and somewhere
along the way, I found my prize.
Note: A noren is a “doorway curtain” hanging in front of a shop to announce
the specialty within.
The Red Room Nightmare
Somewhere in Europe, 1925
A painting I saw in Paris provoked
this: A stranger persuades me
to strip to the skin, removing
all the protective layers, worn
whenever I venture outdoors
and follow him into his studio
with just a light robe to cover
my innocence.
Inside, I see red on everything;
the carpet, ceiling, tablecloth
and walls, only broken by swirls
of black and blue
which should warn me
what is in store.
The maid arranges food
on the table; a light snack
she says, which consists of fruit
wine and bread rolls, before
she departs and I am left
alone with him.
The man is a BEAST:
He rips off my robe
and tickles my nipples
with a paint brush
which sends me wobbly;
all the easier to bend.
The room is PASSION
but I’ll remember it as BLOOD
on my pale and perfect skin
lost and never restored.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Patrick Rosal is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, which won the Members’ Choice Award from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and most recently My American Kundiman, which won the Association of Asian American Studies 2006 Book Award in Poetry as well as the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award. Awarded a Fulbright grant as a Senior U.S. Scholar to the Philippines in 2009, he has had poems and essays published widely in journals and anthologies, including Harvard Review, Ninth Letter, The Literary Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Non-Fiction, the Beacon Best and Language for a New Century. His work has been honored by the annual Allen Ginsberg Awards, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Arts and Letters Prize, Best of the Net, among others. His chapbook Uncommon Denominators won
the Palanquin Poetry Series Award from the University of South Carolina, Aiken.
He has served as visiting writer at Penn State Altoona, Centre College, and the University of Texas, Austin. He taught creative writing for many years at Bloomfield College and twice served on the faculty of Kundiman’s Summer Retreat for Asian American Poets. He has read his poems and performed around the United States, Argentina, the UK, the Philippines and South Africa. His poems have been featured in film and media projects screened in Germany, Italy, Argentina, New York and Los Angeles.
Boneshepherds’ Lament
A boy who played Chopin for my parents one afternoon
led another boy to the woods and hacked him in the neck
forty-two times with a knife
hoping squirrels would run off with the skull.
He and his buddy went back with slip joint pliers
to twist and yank, but they couldn’t pull out the teeth.
When the fat-fisted teachers of my childhood spoke,
they told us the soul’s ushered finally
to some bright space beyond a grand entry
where anonymity is a kind of wealth.
The sentinels, they said, are neither benevolent
nor cruel, though, as a fee, they take your name
in exchange for spending all of eternity looking at God.
So I aspired to be nameless and eternal
until the day I got enough balls to tell
those nuns and brothers in baggy cassocks
to go to hell, and in doing so, I was really committing them
to perpetual memory, the inferno being a place
where such spirits are never forgotten.
Let me begin again.
In the barrios of Ilocos Norte
there are precisely two words for slaughter.
In some languages, there is only one word for the sound of the tides’
trillion dice set loose on shores. In other languages
it is the sound of smashing chandeliers . My parents were born
on an archipelago where they worship salvation and ruin,
where, even if you can’t see the waves,
you can keep the sound of shattering glass on either side of you
and never be completely lost
though sometimes
you can wake up half way around the world
in the middle of the night, in a barrio of Ilocos Norte where you hear
an infant cry but see instead two men in jeans and flip flops,
hoisting onto their shoulders a 200-pound sow
bound to a spit, which howls all the way from pen to block.
The men, then, laughing, will slay, bloodlet, and gut the hog,
which gurgles, which is the same sound, my cousins say,
that is pressed from a man’s chest
during one drunken night of bad karaoke,
when he is stabbed five times through the armpit
until he’s leaking like a bad jar.
It’s true. You can ask a dead man’s son, watch him sweep
the masonry floor to his father’s crypt,
as he buffs their tiles into the kind of deep
blue that fills up small, unlit rooms by the sea
just before a typhoon starts swinging
its massive hammers down.
You might never get a second chance
to interrogate the accomplice, so ask him too,
and you’ll know the accomplice is telling you the truth
if he hands you by the neck that dead man’s only guitar,
all the bone inlay pried off, the body painted blue.
I know who killed his father. I’ll never say.
Have you ever taken a gun
out of the hands of a murderer
as a gift,
just to shoot a few live rounds into some slapdash target
fashioned from calabash and deadwood?
And in return do your ancestors expect you
to simply shutup and bring to the murderer a bottle of rum
and—god help you—a song?
I don’t remember much about the Chopin that one boy played
or much about the other boy he killed, except
he had brown hair and was the only white kid on the field
during our pick-up football games.
I remember the summer he went missing,
I stopped going to mass. And then I fell in love
with a girl as faithless as me, how she could sing
the devil into a Jersey cathedral choir.
Sometimes I dream of a city inside me, specifically
the edge of one, where a few low-wage grunts marshal
through hip-deep waters of a flooded street
a flock of bobbing carnage, bloated to sea-deep proportions of pink.
No one in the dream asks where they’ve come from.
No one mentions where they’re headed, and the workers,
they’re too exhausted by shift’s end
for more than a crude joke or a six-pack
and a half hour of Chopin on public radio.
I once stood twice that time in front of a Goya painting
in which soldier and civilian alike face off, point-
blank in a skirmish. They shoot and slash one another down,
their eyes wide and juvenile, the tender yowl
of their faces, their soft bodies rallied to battle – they seem boys
of snarling matter. They are men, women too, darkened
under the sky’s forty-day gray. In the far background,
on a hill, a single figure of ash appears to raise
both hands, the human pose of victory and surrender,
and maybe what Goya wants us to see from this distance
aren’t arms flung up — but wings: an angel
waiting to transport the grave bodies off the battlefield,
over the bright hill where he stands,
where no one will see them in good light.
Naima
Mothers,
a sudden fog of honeysuckle
will guarantee you
no sadness
you can deny your children.
Let me tell you a story.
If you know how the A train gores
the dark with a steady hum,
perhaps you’ve come across
an old Caribbean man
patting his ass, his lapels,
first his front pockets
then again the back, looking
apparently, for a wad of bills.
He mumbles inward,
then reports to you,
Three hundred dollars.
I had three hundred dollars.
He looks you in the eye to assure you
he’s known crueler losses,
and even though heaven likes to bore us,
a woman dressed in tattered
black makes her entrance
as the old Caribbean leaves, and
at the same time
a trio of gradeschool boys
(the first chaos of spring in them
about to erupt)
fling down
a canvas sack
foaming with fresh-cut honeysuckle.
They place, too,
on the subway car’s floor
a radio. They bounce
on their toes
with a kind of pre-fight
jitter. The woman in black, in fact,
has a boxer’s under-bite
and announces herself
like this: Ladies and Gentleman, please
find it in your hearts to help a starving artist.
So you can’t blame the biggest boy
for slapping the middle boy
on the back of the neck
when the younger one reaches
for the radio’s play button,
can’t blame the older one
who sucks his teeth
at the younger one
as if to say: Let her sing.
By now,
you’ve almost completely forgotten
the Caribbean man,
when this woman eases out
her first, perfect, raspy sob;
there are only a few of us who don’t
recognize the tune,
and since we think we can own
what’s beautiful
by disdaining it,
we try to pretend we can’t hear
the city’s legacies of misery
trembling the tunnel walls.
How explain you’re watching
a stranger hobble by
and that you have to lift
your eyes twice
to make sure it isn’t
someone you love?
I’m old enough now to understand
every silence is remarkable
not the least of which
is the silence of boys
swaying side by side
as a woman in black
walks the length of a train
with each crystalline note
poised in the air that trails her
and there isn’t a scowl among us
when, behind her, the end-doors
gently smash,
signaling the boys
to blast the train with a backbeat,
then throw their bodies
down
in dance
as if to translate everything
we’ve lost today
into a joy
we can finally comprehend.
The boys shut off their radio,
gather their capful of dollars
and rabble of white blossoms
and pounce out at the next stop
in single file, but not —
I swear to you–
without unfurling
the first four notes
to Coltrane’s gorgeous groan.
The subway doors close.
This is the end of the story.
We ascend one by one from the dark
and beneath us
Harlem’s steady moan resumes.
Finding Water
That was the year I cursed my father
for wanting to be alone
his entire life
and for falling into my arms so suddenly
one afternoon I felt the full brunt of a grown man’s weight
once he no longer breathed for himself,
but for the crowds of ghosts whose misfortunes
he’s pressed into the service of his name and mine,
phantoms who’ve abandoned love
the way one gives up salt or laughter
or the mad thrash of the heart
which is a fish
in a bucket of stones.
I too have given up on love
forty times
in the last week —
once when I saw myself in the breach between
the cupped hands of a beggar
and I dropped what I could into that empty space
to rid myself of that nothing,
as if a gesture could make me simply
disappear, as if I were nothing.
There are species of quiet I choose not to love,
the hesitation, for example, with which
a man will harvest berries he’ll feed his brother
in order to kill him
or bring him back from a long sleep,
or the way such berries sit
on countless tables of countless people
who can be blamed for the kinds of things
that merit punishment
far kinder than poisoning.
That my father’s brothers dug
their own graves is not a myth.
When people ask if
the imagination can return us to the scene
of its own crimes, I’ll say
I once walked with a woman toward water
without knowing where the water was.
I’ll say, the two of us turned around
without finding it,
and we sat together on a stoop
until it rained
and the fragrance of the bay
fell through a city whose sky
turns the color of berries
at dusk. I’ll tell them
I’ve walked since then with no one
but the ghosts of my forefathers.
I found the water.
And I wept for everything.
And I learned to tell the world
how gorgeous it is to be alone.