Jenny Lewis

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Jenny Lewis is a poet, children’s author, playwright and song writer. Her last collection, Fathom, was published by Oxford Poets/ Carcanet in 2007. She has been commissioned by Pegasus Theatre, Oxford to write a verse drama, After Gilgamesh to be performed in March 2011. She is also working on a linked collection of poetry, Taking Mesopotamia, for which she has received a generous grant from Arts Council South East. She teaches poetry at Oxford University.

                                                                         Photograph by Frances Kiernan   

Maker 

for Pedro Bosch

this is the place where broken
things come to rest from their brokenness

they can’t get the taste of terracotta
out of their mouths

they know they came from mud,
only yesterday

they were a substance
to be walked on
 
now their bridles, palms, trunks,
wings hold unexplained shadows
 
the moon
eyes the world from their jagged holes
 
above them, peacocks roost in the trees –
Neem, Arjuna and the Banyan
 
under which Krishna sat
scooping butter
 
the bark’s twisted textures
are ropes going into the earth
 
resting before the spring burst
of growth, green after green
 
reaching for the sky with its
shattering light.

Silver Oak

Instead of heat and light
grey shrouds:
 
each morning a burial
we fight our way out of
 
grevillea robusta –
a sentinel of stillness
seen through muslin –
 
would look at home
snow-covered
 
among the tundra’s herds
and frozen, sea-lapped edges:
 
yet this is India too,
her private winter face
 
cleansed and secretive  
in her dressing table mirror
 
with thoughts of spring
a world turned away from –
 
the make-up and saris,
the razzmatazz of blossom.

Indran Amirthanayagam

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Indran Amirthanayagam was born in Colombo. He migrated to London and then to Hawaii with his parents.

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 is a poet, essayist and translator in English, Spanish and French. His essays and poems have appeared in The Hindu, The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, 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. Translations of poet Jose Eugenio Sanchez have appeared online. Two other Spanish collections and a collection of poems about Sri Lanka are under preparation.

Bomb Picking

My friend says
that where ashes
fall from the grill
nothing grows,
not even weeds,
for a year. Imagine

recovering land
from artillery
shells, cluster
bombs shattered
and multiplied,
the sheer slow

picking up
of signals
with metal rods,
mistakes,
explosions.
I heard today

that removing
 the world’s
unexploded bombs
would take
five or six or ten
thousand years,

I don’t have
the exact number
–an elusive target–
don’t know how
many more devices
will drop in 2009.

Smoke Signal

The sense
of a life,
dousing body
in gasoline, 
ablaze
before Lake
Geneva,
brought back
to London
for burial,

sacrifice
conducted
in exile,
a funeral,
valued
news item,
drawing
attention
to burning
of family

in Vanni
while
numbed,
comatose,
Tamils
wake up
abroad
to light
stoves
to make

coffee
and read
about
their pyre
burning
crisply
in Swiss
air
outside
UNHCR

The Big Eye

When Orwell wrote that war is peace
literature may have solved hypocrisy
once and for all,  and new generations

of politicians learned his lesson
in their graduate programs, or on the job,
paying heed as a result to eyewitness

accounts of atrocities committed
by the good army liberating
the Vanni from Tiger devils.

The fact that the same eyewitnesses
speak of convoys of wounded
and dying blocked by the devils

gives their accounts an appearance
of impartiality, seriousness,
but as the man in charge

in the capital said, there are only
four of these international observers
and the rest are locals and all

are subject to Tiger pressure.
Locals certainly cannot be trusted.
They speak Tamil and live

in harmony with cousins
in Chennai and are suspicious
of detention camps where

we welcome entire families
to eat and live, watched,
protected, in peace.

Carol Chan

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.

Greg McLaren

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.

Benjamin Dodds

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

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

B N Oakman

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

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

Matt Hetherington

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

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

James Stuart

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

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.

Solrun Hoaas

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

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.

Chris Brown

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

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.  

Jan Dean

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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

Kiyomizu Temple Precinct, Kyoto

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

however inclement the weather. Rain,

may increase your chances of being charmed

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.

Patrick Rosal

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.

Ankur Betageri

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Ankur Betageri, (18/11/83), is a bilingual writer based in New Delhi. His poetry collection in English is titled The Sea of Silence (2000, C.V.G. Publications.) Two collections in Kannada are titled Hidida Usiru (Breath Caught, 2004, Abhinava Prakashana)and Idara Hesaru (It’s Name, 2006, Abhinava Prakashana) He has also published a collection of Japanese Haiku translations called Haladi Pustaka (The Yellow Book, 2009, Kanva Prakashana). He holds a Masters in Clinical Psychology from Christ College, Bangalore. He co-edits the journal Indian Literature published by Sahitya Akademi and is contributing editor(India) of the Singapore-based ezine writersconnect.org. Recently, he represented India as a Poet at the III International Delphic Games held at Jeju, South Korea.

The quiet and rising tension in the jaw of the common man

You are drinking chai in the office canteen
looking out the window absentmindedly
at the unreal summer shadows of trees
thrown about carelessly
with the occasional bird
lighting the bough
and preening its brilliant wings
when suddenly you hear someone StaMMeRinG!
 
You look around and see
your whole inner self
in all its trembling
irritably burning
nakedness
splayed out in the shuddering body
of the ‘boy’ who serves chai.
Racked by the nervous torment that being here
has become, he is stammering
unable to utter a sensible word,
he is stammering in a terrible frothing anger
at a bully customer
and –  I realize –  at a world that has failed him.

I see chai-drinking chootias around me
smiling; I gulp the chai and unable to make out
what is happening to me,
unable to contain the trembling which is possessing me,
unable to go on sitting at the table, on the chair
in this stable world, in this insanely stable world
which will continue to be stable even after my death,
unable to do anything that could stop
his quaking body from stammering,
unable to do anything about the laughter
which goes on quietly massacring,
I drink chai
chai-drinking, English-speaking, afsar-cunt that I am
I continue to drink chai as if nothing has happened,
as if nothing will ever happen,
as if the trembling within me has
nothing to do with what is outside
as if yoga, meditation, shitty self-help books
are what I require,
as if happy hours at the bar, Sunday-sair with a girl
would instantly restore me to normalcy –
ah happy-cunt of the great Indian middle class!
ah intellectual-cunt debating in news channels!
ah corporate-cunt discussing growth in ac boardrooms!
ah poet-cunt churning out verse for international journals!
ah bollywood-cunt selling flaccid dreams to the poor!
ah cunt on the election poster
ah cunt in the complicit rooms of police stations!
ah cunt selling merchandize and noise on FM channels!
ah cunt running newspaper by splattering naked bodies of women!
ah student-cunt fornicating and agitating in college campuses!
ah actor-cunt asking us to end poverty from your palaces!
ah brand-ambassador-cunt for fair skin, white teeth and slim hips!
ah soulless empire of cunts
looking down from hoardings, ad-widgets and social-networking sites!
I shall exorcise myself of you and your ghosts!
I shall speak now of the wrongs, speak now of the murders
I really have had enough of your chai!
I – the Cunt with a Conscience – shall master this human trembling
I shall rescue from the rot this precious inner feeling
I shall hug the fevered hearts and speak for all those
still
stammering.

The Indian Soul

for Shri Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

The Indian soul is pure
no amount of money, corruption and sophistry in the world of high art
can corrupt its soul
look at the Indian dog licking at the worn out tyres of a Maruti 800
look at its eyes and you know it is sacred
its hungry and cold in the misty Delhi winter
and you can weep out of pity for it
(my head grows soft like a peeled cucumber
as my face weeps inside the cheeks)
but the dog doesn’t need my pity
it feels my love and runs away barking
as if its dangerous to linger in my pity…
 
The Indian women are pure
I loathe them and call them rubbish
and they let me go
yes, they tried to shackle my heart, break my spirit
yes, they enticed me with the dream of babies
BUT when they saw my purpose they let me go
I slept over them like on the warm sunny beaches
and looked at the sun take the sea with it
and when I rose they fell off my body
like so much sand,
they never stuck to me –
(it was I who stuck to them
coming in the way of their life in comfortable cars
bearing sun-faced babies and listening to technicolour songs –
and when they saw that my spirit was getting muddy
in the warm pools of their cosy homes
it was they who kicked me out
complementing me, indirectly:
you are too much for us, too much!)

The Indian women are pure
they mind their business and know
each one has his own destiny to fulfill –
Just look at the beautiful women in the sarees
how graceful their movement and many-splendored their bangled hands!
its just that they are not for me
and they smile at me warmly and let me go
and I smile back at them happily, flapping my wings.
 
The Indian soul, no matter how deep in the muck it gets pushed
is pure and full of joy
look at the Indian cow lying on a bed of its own dung
look at the buffaloes wallowing in their own shit
but still giving – two times a day – pure white milk!
look into the buffalo’s eyes
can anyone be as calm and quietly contented as her?
The Indian soul is pure and joyous and sacred
and no amount of western shit splattered on the shop fronts
hoardings and newspapers can change it –
Half-naked women swing hips to tasteless tunes of bollywood?
Let them! Let the buffoons and jokers pass themselves off as heroes
and once done, let them do netagiri
folding hands, showing teeth and all –
none of it is going to change the Indian soul
it will always be deep and pure and joyous
away from all that is ephemeral!

The Indian soul – no kidding, guys, – is pure
(no, not as pure as the beauty soap just taken out of the box
like they show us in the ads
but pure in a way our drugged imagination cannot even conceive –)
 
Deep in the Delhi night
I breathe the glacier-pure air
it quivers in my nostrils, in my lungs, in my hair
I breathe in the great expanse
and breathe it back in space
 
The Indian soul is us, a will that has found its sap
the Indian soul is us, a light that cannot be stopped
and India is the earth, whose map cannot be drawn.

Rae Desmond Jones

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Rae Desmond Jones is a poet much published in the olden days.  His most recent book was Blow Out (Island Press, 2009). After many years spent in the wilderness of local government, including a period as the Mayor of Ashfield, a tiny Principality near Sydney, he has returned to poetry. He does not fear death half as much as being boring.

                                                             Photograph by John Tranter

The Kindly Ones

Mid Summer in the South

            When ice shelves slide softly

Off the edge of Antarctica

            & start to drift North

In the merciless tides,

Three cracked old women

Nudge each other

            Along the broken brick footpath

To the little table outside

            Michelle’s Patisserie.

There are only two chairs

            So the shortest stands in the sun

Beneath an umbrella hat embossed

            With the Australian flag,

In grimy Koala bear slippers.

            The other two slurp Coca Cola

With ice cream, dabbling their straws greedily

            In the brew while the short one

Plants her arms on her waist

            (wrists folded in) & complains –

The large women smile

            & one rolls a cigarette & lights up,

Allowing the smoke to collide softly & inevitably

Against the frozen glass door.

            Through the cloudless haze

The mad women hear the distant hiss

            Of roiling ice & they nod

As a Southerly wind spins & whirls                     

            Across the burning tarmac

Into the light

Silvio the God

Perhaps there is such a thing as a national psyche,

Even when the world is trussed like a turkey

In satellite bands of electronic steel

But have the Italians never shifted

Their long allegiance to Caesar (every woman’s man

& every man’s woman) or Mussolini,

Incarnated in a tanned old rooster

Crowing while caressing the polished boot of Italy,

Parading his erection as evidence of immortality?

Silvio the God will never die while the riches

Of television & the State pile up to choke the doors

Of the courts & the throats of Judges,

He will live forever with his cloud piercing penis.

If he was a woman he would become invisible

& tough like Angela Merkel –

Not that ordinary woman who grows old

Hiding her need for warmth, who instead will plod

To the Church to perform works & pray

To that beautiful male stretched out on the cross

That he should come down to whisper

Gentle words in Latin but instead she must

Bake sweet cakes for her Grandchildren –

Become the carer of the family history (Because

Nobody desires her unless she is useful, or wealthy)

Then she becomes tight fisted & hard,

Dry as a plaster crucifix.

O great Silvio, count your riches & beware.

You may yet find yourself hanging by the heels

In the breeze beside a row of your pretty girlfriends

Twilight

Three little vampires in blue school uniforms

Sit around a table on the edge of a park

Beneath the trembling leaves of a tree,

Light spattering their lovely hungry faces.

Beside them the concrete path is washed

Clean of all (except a thin crooked line).

It is going to rain soon & the darkness

Teases, as it dances through the weeds.

Eagerly they champ & dribble & clamp

Their jaws, waiting for the starving moon.

Adam Aitken

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Adam Aitken was born in 1960 and spent his early childhood in London,  Thailand and Malaysia. As well as numerous reviews, articles on poetry, and works of creative non-fiction, he is the author of four collections of poetry. Romeo and Juliet in Subtitles (2000) was shortlisted for the Age Poetry Book Award and the John Bray South Australian Writers Festival Award. He has been the recipient of an Asialink residency in Malaysia, an Australian Postgraduate Award and most recently an Australia Council Literature grant for new work on Cambodia. His most recent work includes a Doctorate in Creative Arts thesis on hybridity in Australian literature, and a new book of poems, Eighth Habitation (Giramondo Publishing). He lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Technology, Sydney. Adam is appointed Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai’i for Fall semester 2010.

Eighth Habitation

1

“Went up north for short holidays again last week.

And thankfully missed the floods in KL.

You have to pass Kelly’s (sic) Castle

before reaching

Clearwater Golf Sanctuary, right?”

Appeasing temple, or a Scots-Victorian Taj Mahal

built for the love of Agnes, English heiress by rumour.

Designed with “splendour in mind”

unfinished supplement to 1890s

tin-money, and rubber.

Filmset strangler figs “reclaiming civilisation”.

“While driving to Ipoh for ICT annual dinner (courtesy of zaman), we stopped

by kellie’s castle for a wee bit of look-see.”

“Not a haunted house, a haunted castle”.

Moorish. Built by Hindu stone masons.

Spanish flu killed Kellie,

decimated the master builders

& coolies too.

1926. Died

somewhere between Singapore

                                                & England

(some say Portugal).

Agnes went home to Scotland.

The surviving workers

built their avatar:

pith-helmet deity

in khaki and boots

standing between two fakirs

atop their temple

just behind the scullery.

I’m here for the “pictorial possibilities”, and like a good poem

there’s Juliet balconies

hidden tunnels and

the “doors and windows open and shut

                                                            by themselves”

light and dark.

My eighth habitation?

“Windows open and bang shut by themselves, we’ve been in there …

you can ask Joyce or Loo Hui. We spent only about 45 minutes

in there, and the clouds started to get darker and darker,

and we had to get out of there coz there’s no visibility in there

in case it got too dark. We walked quickly outside

into the open space, and I told the girls I HAD to take this shot

with the dark clouds directly on top of the castle, it’s really

a golden opportunity for a good shot that I think even the locals

find it hard to find! We got on our knees, frame a low angle,

and got these shots.”

2

Capitalist myth No. 357:

the workers deify The Boss

Capitalist myth No 358:

the workers poisoned his cigars.

Eccentricity that becomes the Boss,

for which the locals thank him –

            for Malaya’s first hydraulic lift,

            each room with a view,

the library of hardwood shelves,

much text that

rotted there unread.

Scott’s Waverley novels, Eliot, Dickins.

Now

the attractions are

ghosts, hidden passages,

a class excursion

or a promo

for “Ted Adnan’s Location Portraiture Lighting Technique Workshop”

(code for tropic porn

            among the Gothic moldings

            in the equatorial boudoir

                        for heat-struck Ophelias).

Heritage? Thirty, quite useless, rooms

including indoor tennis court,

            graffiti

                        of graduated offence (from “Abdul 2000” to

the spouting appendage

                                    drawn from hearsay

to “Malaysia 20/20 Vision”)

In guidebook-speak: “a defaced labour of love”?

            Thanks to the haunted Celts

            the rubber boom turns to palm oil and tourism

plus a hundred or so internet plagiarism essays

Kellie   

                        just absent on leave,

one deregulated voice

channelled thru the living

                        on MalaysiaBabe.net:

“it’ll b a cute cute castle

wif lotsa hello! kitty stuff in there..

it shall not b spooky…

it’ll b like every kid’s dream castle… haha…”

Cath Vidler

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Cath Vidler’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various literary magazines including HEAT, Sport, Quadrant, Turbine, Southerly and Cordite. Her first collection of poems is forthcoming from Puncher and Wattmann (www.puncherandwattmann.com) in 2010. Cath is the editor of Snorkel (www.snorkel.org.au), a literary magazine specialising in the publication of creative writing by Australians and New Zealanders.

Counting The Stars

Nothing left to do but count
the stars

(I could be here all night).

*

Like stopped confetti

their utterances
reside, bright-lipped

round the moon’s
pale head

(the abacus has gone to bed).

*

Oh chuckling stars
what can I do

but cut my losses
and count on you.

At the Botanic Gardens, Sydney

i.

Bats hang from branches

like pods of midnight,

asleep in the reek

of restless dreams.

ii.

Grass recollects

night-slitherings of eels,

their sibilant tracks

seeking closure

at the pond’s tepid lip.

iii.

Herbs cluster and build,

a storm-system

of piquancy.

iv.

Somewhere,

a drop of rainforest

falls, spreads

to full capacity.

Desmond Kon

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé divides his time between his art and teaching creative writing. A recipient of the Singapore Internationale Grant and Dr Hiew Siew Nam Academic Award, he has edited more than 10 books and co-produced 3 audio books, several pro bono for non-profit organizations. Trained in publishing, with a theology masters from Harvard University and creative writing masters from the University of Notre Dame, he has recent or forthcoming work in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Cricket Online Review, deadpaper, Dear Sir, Ganymede, Pank, and The Writing Disorder. Also working in clay, Desmond is presently sculpting ceramic pieces to commemorate the birth centennials of Nobel Laureates William Golding and Naguib Mahfouz in 2011. Works from his Potter Poetics Collection have been housed in museums and private collections in India, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.

hsuan tsang before the taklamakan desert

That was a way of putting it – not very satisfactory:

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,

Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle

With words and meanings.

          ~ T. S. Eliot

as lettered as song sparrows, finespun but ambivalent, purling rune, verse-love-elegaic

letters, ringing bells pealing-bowling-tolling, over-diatonic, dropping from belfries

a bunch of letters homophony-unwrapping-polyphonous; more becoming, becalming

as lettered as dash-of-love dreams, the scrunchy unscripted curves of them; they knell

slow, only lettered stubs of permissibility but not clarity, not token, soft-shod monody

as lettered, like someone else and his parcelled ideas about someone-else-especial

as a lettered dõgen inhales carbon-copy scruples, never sound changes, or cedar oil

there are nothing but sutras everywhere in time and space; sometimes sacred letters

are used, sometimes profane letters; sometimes divine letters, sometimes human

letters; sometimes the letters of beasts, sometimes the letters of ashuras; sometimes

the letters of a hundred grasses; sometimes the letters of ten thousand trees*

yet lettered to curatorial people doubled over in tracts, their inscribed, stolid podiums

as pasty; nothing letters what it seems, like rifling-trifling words split into infinitives

and supernal letters; they vacillate themselves, planate-unrest, periphrasis ill-at-ease

as lettered as their flamboyance letting us hide, letting go; we seek iliadic-baneful signs

kernels anew as lettered this vanilla midnote; I am such rest, the painful rest of it too

such serial-story calligraphy finely lettered, like love-in-waiting drawing likes as red

morning of herons as lettered as it is watery, disavowing, surging alkahest in hallways

as lettered, me beyond my own instruction, content as contusion art, euphony combing

still lettered, can’t he see? I don’t instruct my art nor its lost parts and whisper plains

these belles-lettres scarcely ciphers; tidy dais yet ochre-known, conduits so recondite

these belles-lettres unearthed that bless today of our sudden star-turning, terrene days

its letters as wrapt, happy-as-filigree trappings, us in puji si, whetstone and greying

* This verse has been lifted from a citation of Dõgen by J. P. Williams in his book on apophasis. Of Dõgen’s ideas on the use of sutras, Williams writes: “Thus we see that the ineffability of reality is not a question of there being no words we might use to describe it, but rather that there are no words which would describe it completely.”