desh Balasubramaniam

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Anis Shivani

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Anis Shivani’s poems appear in Threepenny Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Harvard Review, Poetry Northwest, Fiddlehead, Meanjin, Washington Square, Verse, Stand, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere.  A debut book of criticism, Against the Workshop:  Provocations, Polemics, Controversies, will appear in July 2011, and a second collection of short fiction, The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, will appear later in 2011.

The Death of Li Po

Li Yang-ping, preserve my poems.  The emperors,

on whose behalf I wandered, are jealous like wives.

To travel a thousand rivers upstream or down, in a

moon’s half cycle, is only to deliver one’s true debts.

In Ch’ang-an, the winehouses gave me a special name

I both abhorred and loved at the same time:

Banished Immortal, meaning he who imagines life

as a continuation of the mountain’s other side.

Long ago, in the gibbons’ shrieks I heard in K’uei-chou,

a passage of sorts was enacted.  I lost my strangeness.

Now, on this river that beckons to the civilization

still remnant in the shrunken land, land of half-sight,

I embrace the moon, its diffuse wavy pattern, its

silken bodice, its talkative-silent recital – a poem

inherited among the thousands I most love,

to live through the tough interrogation ahead.

Li Yang-ping, preserve my poems.  If I drown,

in the brown depths the poet’s only disguise flutters. 

To Orhan Pamuk

You have the hüzün, the melancholy

of undying empires piled on each other,

the intrigue of the word-defying holy,

the torture-games of brother by brother.

You strand the Bosphorus on feet of clay,

an Istanbullu fifty years on the same street,

seeing the Golden Horn as on the first day,

nodding to the names behind the retreat.

We, loud exiles and immigrants, toss-offs

and runaways, our good parents’ heartbreak,

dig for first and last names in the old troughs,

defend to the death our identifying stake.

Your loneliness is spared the daily death.

We, the free, delineate each new breath.

Dear Paul Muldoon

Barricade the America behind the Princeton

oaks, behind the New Yorker’s gates, in a-technical

language of your aged-youth, steeped in the tragedy of

loaves and laughing sciences and lush O’Casey;

barricade it from the striptease of hidden views

familiar from publishing’s megacelebrities touring

the country in birdcages lined with squawk;

barricade America’s broken highways and silenced

cancer wars with ribbons of your faltering

precious dialogue with Heaney and his forefathers

and theirs, buried deep in the potato fields from

whence no man emigrates sans soul in a coffin box;

barricade America whose gift to herself is platitude,

toward blue Eden, soaked with irony,

a flatulent brig staggering onward to foggy coasts

borrowed from other continents, land masses

whose shape resembles fractured skulls.

Michele Leggott

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Michele Leggott is a Professor of English at the University of Auckland and was the Inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate 2008-09. She has published seven books of poetry, including Milk & Honey (2005, 2006), Journey to Portugal (2007) and Mirabile Dictu (2009). She edited Robin Hyde’s long poem The Book of Nadath (1999) and Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde (2003). A major project since 2001 has been the development of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) at the University of Auckland. Michele was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) in the 2009 New Year Honours for services to poetry. See also www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/leggott/index.asp

Andy Kissane

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Andy Kissane lives in Sydney and writes poetry and fiction. He has published three collections of poetry. Out to Lunch (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009) is shortlisted in the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His first novel, Under the Same Sun (Sceptre, 2000) was shortlisted for the Vision Australia Audio Book of the Year. Poetry prizes include the Red Earth Poetry Award, the Sydney Writers’ Festival Poetry Olympics, the John Shaw Neilson Award, the inaugural Publisher’s Cup Cricket Poetry Award and the BTG-Blue Dog Poetry Reviewing prize. He has taught Creative Writing at four universities, most recently UNSW, (2007-2009). He is currently the recipient of a New Work grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council and is working on a book of short stories and a fourth collection of poetry.

Seeing you again

Driving to your place, I remember

how you said you wanted to carry my hands

around inside your bra. You won’t say that today.

You are married and it’s years since that

dinner dance, foxtrotting under the tablecloth,

my cock wet before I’d eaten the entree.

You said you adored men in dinner suits

and I was eager to strip, loosening

the onyx studs from my ruffle slowly

and carefully, as if they were amulets

with enough power to peel back

my shirt and open up my skin.

You meet me in the driveway, comfortable

in tracksuit and windcheater. Your hair

is not quite the way I remember it.

We don’t have much time alone.

Your husband’s making coffee

in the kitchen as words ripen

on the roof of my mouth like blackberries:

fat icicles ready to fall. My cup wobbles

on its saucer as I recall the last camping trip,

our lilos pushed together, your sleeping bag

zipped into mine, the guttural snores

of lion seals floating up from the beach.

I think of what might have been, waking

to a thousand, thousand dawns, children,

the closeness where you don’t need to speak.

Instead, there’s this afternoon tea, polite

conversation, the way I look at you and wish

I could live more than one life.

Wood becoming Rock

Walking down the steep path to the backyard,

I hold the stump splitter like a baby.

I’m an occasional woodchopper, intent

on clearing the logs left by the previous owners

—an eyesore, abandoned.

One huge tree, an angophora, fell down

of its own accord, unable to get enough purchase

in the rocky hillside, harming neither limb nor property.

I’ve already chopped and moved a mountain

of wood, gradually, like a hot-rodder

restoring a classic car.

But what’s left now is the hard stuff,

wood well on its way to petrification—

green-tinged, adamantine, too heavy

for one man to lift. I swing the axe

up towards the hidden sun and the other bright stars,

then bring it down onto the dumb block.

I make no impression on the weathered wood.

Relentlessly, I search for a fissure in the log,

a crack the width of a hair that I can wedge open.

The longer the search, the greater my enlightenment.

If only I could borrow the Marabunta,

those ferocious army ants from the film,

The Naked Jungle, let them feast on the wood,

then stop right there. But as I remember it,

they don’t stop, eating everything in their path.

I swing and swing until I am a riot of noise, a mob,

a serial woodchopper who won’t cease until he’s felled

the forest. I hack until my shirt sticks to my back.

My shoulders ache, my arms have emigrated,

and I am all axe,

as Gimli is axe to Legolas’s bow.

I can’t work, it seems, without making

some connection to popular culture,

though this is not work, this hefting

is not my bread and butter. Sparks flash

blue and yellow at the moment of impact

and I understand how my ancestors struggled

to make fire. I’m tired, wet, almost done

for the day, but over there,

against the fence lies another

and it will lie there until I come for it—

ageless, slowly rotting, obdurate and silent.

I wield my iron-age tool until the wood wails and shrieks

and when I finally cleave through the stump,

the sound of it splitting fills the cave

of my head with the last rays of sunlight.

Marlene Marburg

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Marlene Marburg is a PhD candidate at the Melbourne College of Divinity.  Her research is focussed on the relationship of poetry and the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. Marlene is a poet, spiritual director and formator.  She is married with adult children, and lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Moving Images

Wurrunjeri earth,
skin and muscle bulldozed
to raw and slippery flesh.
Deep rivers turned shallow
slush upside down

Water like wind
finds the empty places
It wants to whirl
 
The earth-shapers are stopping erosion;
moving piles of dirt from here to majestic there.
Progress demands intervention, they say.
They erect a good will sign,
Rehabilitation Project,

but many of us are old enough to know
the banks of the local creek
are little changed in thirty years.
 
By October, the stench settles.
Crystals on the banks twitch in the light.
Dust fog begins to rise.

Walkers inhale the disturbance,
coughing debris out and in
Oneness with the earth is closer
than we think

I don’t believe in an interventionist God
Nick Cave sings, and the wind is alive
to his song, and the water
knows to seek its own level

Whorls                                          

The ammonite in my hands, gazes
from a mysterious, soul-breathing centre, 
recognising we are kin in the cosmos, Jurassic heritage,
forming and transforming fossil and flesh, hardened

and polished like marble and slate, cool
spiral labyrinth, narrowing path to the holy of holies,
birthplace outgrown, time and again, the dark place
edging forward into the light.  It is as if she struggles;

albino lashes languishing in her burial rock.
Wine stained strands float from her like mermaids’ hair.
Cavities are filled with coral crystals,
pearls from a stowaway rape.
 
The ammonite is clothed in delicate embroidery,
golden imprint of once green clusters flourishing on a sea bed;
We animate them in the theatre of imagining, mirror
the infinite mind giving shape to desire.

Returning the gaze, I bridge the vast gap of time, 
explore her colour and shape as a once-lost sibling. 
Ammonite sister and Abraham’s lost son
see the whorls in my fingers and the mirror of self.

Ashley Capes

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Ali Jane Smith

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Ali Jane Smith’s first poetry collection, Gala was published in 2006 as part of the Five Islands Press New Poets Program. Her work has appeared in journals such as Southerly, Cordite, and Famous Reporter. She has recorded readings for audio Cd and performed in schools, universities, pubs, cafes, shopping malls and festivals.  She is the Director of the South Coast Writers Centre.

Nicholas YB Wong

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Nicholas YB Wong is the winner of Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition and a nominee for Best of the Net 2010 and Best of Web 2011 Anthology. His poetry is forthcoming in Assaracus: Journal of Gay Poetry, Prime Number Magazine, San Pedro River Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Third Wednesday and the Sentinel Champion Series. He is currently an MFA Candidate at the City University of Hong Kong. Visit him at http://nicholasybwong.weebly.com

Walk With Words

“I never use despair, since it isn’t really mine, only given to me for safekeeping.”                                                                                                                          Wislawa Szymborska

Life at 3 A.M. is an elephant

urging me to make choices –

The night chill challenges my social life.

It asks why I commit myself to words

and turn away from humans,

who often talk too much.

Temperature has no speech – it never knows

the setbacks of language.

I have married words. Every night,

I bang on them, wearing my blood red matador’s cape,

working towards perfect orgasms.

Tonight, I am not writing. I walk

in the bituminous street, feeling bitter

after seeing my friends whose life

is made of unpronounceable stock codes.

My feet go numb; my existence, a walnut wafer,

brittle, belittled.

I search in the sky for the mercurial moon –

Not there.

I look back and ask the street how far I will walk

alone

Mark Twain as an Anti-Anti Smoker

Effective January 1, 2007, the vast majority of indoor areas of workplaces and public places, such as restaurants, offices, schools, hospitals, markets, karaokes and bars which are frequented by people of different ages are required to ban smoking.

Hong Kong Smoking (Public Health) Ordinance, cap. 371.

Mark Twain, a heavy smoker

(and literary

            figure) himself,

is going to rule our city. And he,

            with his humor and flare,

has decided to set free all

underground smokers.

In his inaugural ceremony, he strides

            onto the stage,

his forefinger curling

his moustache

when he speaks:

                                    “I won’t bow my head and

confess like a child. I give you all freedom

            in an adult style.

To cease smoking is

the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know

because I’ve done it

a thousand times.”

You, who exterminated

            that thing

in the city,

must be dismayed

to know the law

is dead.

That law, an infant, which cries no more,

                        barely knows how to toddle.

That thing –

            as you insist calling it –

has a white sinewy-lean body,

             a mini-chimney,

paper-smooth, smell of ancient culture. That thing isn’t wood, but it sometimes crackles when lit

                                                            in absolute silence.

I’m warning you! That thing is returning

            at full speed. And this time,

            you’ll say no euphemism. You’ll speak

of its real name

as you do when you name

Jesus, Kwan Yin and the one

rolling over you naked.

During those bleak days, we felt like

fugitives

in the name of the hoary

            addictive.

                                                                                                                                     We hid in the darkest corner

in universities, diners,

at rooftops, anywhere so long as

            they were invisible on maps,

puff

ing

and breath

ing

at the same time, degraded like dogs which ransacked for food in trash.

Soon we will hang a Mark Twain

            flag outside our windows.

                                    His face

soars in proud smoky air,

when we fondle with

that thing

            legitimately inside. Soon we will smoke in buses, in churches, in malls, in the             City Hall, in museums, in the Coliseum.

You then will die gradually

                        of second- and third-hand

smoke, and we,

devoted chain smokers,

will die faster. Don’t worry.

            Don’t dissuade –

we are all prepared. Everything dies

                        on a predetermined date,

            including the law

you once                                                                                              embraced.