Debbie Lim

June 12, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments

Debbie Lim was born in Sydney. Her poetry chapbook Beastly Eye was published by Vagabond Press (2012) Her poems have been widely anthologised, including regularly appearing in the Best Australian Poems series (Black Inc.). She was commended in the UK National Poetry Competition in 2013. In 2016 she moved with her family to southern Germany for 2 years where she started to translate from German into English.

The Blind Boy of Hameln                                                       

It’s been quiet since you left, but sometimes
it comes back: that fangled tune you played.

I remember how on a slow June day it crept
between church bells, beneath sunlight,

into the lonely chapel of my ear.
I don’t recall your jigsaw look (how could I?)

but felt the pleasurable dirt give way
to stones beneath my feet. Then the wind

whittled up and tossed away your song.
As usual, I fell back with the crows

at the edge of town. But if I had eyes to hear
I would have followed your stippled notes –

flowing and bidden (like a river, rats or children)
to that place erosion goes.

What it means to sleep

Every night this little death into which
we fall gladly, palms soft and open,
our bodies rolling into the abyss.

Later we might rise above the roofs,
hear the cold crowns of trees breathing,
and hover a while in the chill.

Some nights we barely make it to the ceiling;
gaze down on ourselves as warm artefact,
two victims of Pompeii. But mostly we hope

to lie undisturbed, fully gone from this world
till next morning, when we wake to find
our toenails grown long, our faces suddenly old.

Ailsa Liu

June 12, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments

Ailsa Liu is an artist working across electronic music, performance, installation, fiction and poetry. Her work can be found in UNSWeetened and Westside Jr. She writes strangely humorous uncomfortable stories, on death and semi-autobiographical experiences, of liminal spaces and their feelings of loneliness and anticipation and anxiety as generative spaces. She is a member of Finishing School and All Girl Electronic. She is currently studying Fine Arts/ Arts at UNSW.

Cultural Amnesia

Rapid fire intonation, wishes build to an incessant knock.
Trace symbolic slashes with the knife over
offerings of gluten cake and roast pork.
Melted red wax drips down candles, hardens on white sheets.
She shapes words with her lips and tongue so that the incense might linger a while longer.
There’s always one in the family that keeps to the way.

They don’t accept my whys,
Sidestep with shrugs.
Too shameful to have forgot.
Chatter instead about miles run
and stock market falls.

She tells you,
speaks to you, your chronology so that you can trace yourself back.
Your aunt in eighties fashion denim vests, only remembers that you tried to bite her.
Second aunt, you’ve accidentally written out of history.
She’s here speaking to you, wearing a searching hurt.
You’re not sure how these pieces fit together

Sharp pops, choking smoke.
There lie the men, seven generations removed from you.
Only smirks at the silence for the absent women–at least there’s one or two.
They lie on rented land,
the greenery fence-posted by concrete,
two stairways from the traffic.
Baby roasted pork, skull split
bound with red string woven tightly,
cherries for eyes, crisp to the crackling.
We carry away the offerings in our bellies.

I, point my camera, videoing away from the horseshoe grave mounds
as I direct myself away from red papered explosions.
The corners of the screen warps as if I were walking drunk.
I won’t be able to find my way back.

The river

For tepid colas fizzled flat
the children carried a tree-formed dragon to each entryway.
Hands sticky with fresh sap,
animate the leaping head.
Blessings punctuated with firecrackers,
money offerings held in a jaw of green grasses.

At rest, my cousin proclaimed languorously,
wiping sweat with slender fingers.
Ten dollars for a pleasant evening stroll.
What a steal.

We pitched that tree-formed dragon to a fiery death,
extinguished in the river.
Dad used to swim there, catch shellfish between his toes.
Now ringed by concreted, raindrops fall sideways
to disturb the surface of green scum.

Grace Yee

June 8, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments

Grace Yee was born in Hong Kong and grew up in New Zealand and Australia. Her poetry, short fiction and essays have appeared in various journals, including Meanjin, Southerly, Westerly, Island, Heat, Going Down Swinging and Hecate. She lives in Melbourne, where she teaches creative writing at universities.
 
 
 
 
 
 
the mission: by miss w, fourth generation chinese new zealander

each day it began with the morning poo
baba’s coffee steaming kitchen tiles
greased with the splatter of wok-fried food
baby sister dribbling marmite in her highchair
while burning toast smoked the kitchen sepia
baba would hand out the cadbury’s
after we’d tied our tattered shoes
and slid into the backseat of the rusty fusty toyota
by the time we got to school our eyes were wide as walnuts
stay out of the sun our wan-faced mother would warn
too-dark-like-a-māori
but I knew I had to be brown
it was the colour of everyone-and-everything-in-the-world-that-wasn’t-white

as pretty as miss hong kong

in summer my mother stomped around the house
in bare feet. she didn’t pad, she stomped.
she stomped because she hated the heat, the house
and raising children in the heat in the house.
she stomped because god had given her a gambling man
and a job frying fish six days a week.
        at night when all was done for the day, my mother would sit
on our second-hand hemp sofa, tuck her feet sideways
like a mermaid and watch television.
she liked selwyn toogood’s money or the bag
because she wanted to win the sewing machine, and she loved
the annual miss universe pageant because she wanted to win
that too. she would ask my ogling dad if he thought she
was as pretty as miss hong kong.
        I would be sprawled on the floor with a book
not far below her feet. my mother’s feet were the colour of cooked chicken
(though bonier) and the heels were cracked dry and black.
she never had the urge to moisturise
or to do that thing where you slough off the dead skin:
exfoliate.
        I yearned to pull at the crusty bits myself,
sure that if I could yank the skin off
I would find my real mother underneath.
but we were forbidden to touch any part of her body.
(my little brother stroked a toe one day, and for his trouble
received a kick and a blood nose).
        when my mother dressed up to go out
she would spend hours setting her hair and powdering her face
and she’d put her feet in pretty sandals. that her crusty black heels
were on show didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest.
I think they were her parting shot,
a way of saying as she left a place: ‘yes, I do look nice, don’t I?
but look how hard I have to work for it’

Mary Jean Chan

June 7, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments

Mary Jean Chan is a poet and editor from Hong Kong who currently lives in London. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (UK), and came Second in the 2017 National Poetry Competition. Her debut pamphlet, A Hurry of English, was published in 2018 by ignitionpress (Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre), and was recently selected as the 2018 Poetry Book Society Summer Pamphlet Choice. Mary Jean is a Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critic and an editor of Oxford Poetry. Her debut collection will be published by Faber & Faber in 2019.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Cantonese

Spark of wind, gust of neon. The evening swells with the clamour
of voices. A dialect does not recognize the written word, exists if
uttered aloud, sleeps like an emaciated dog when abandoned, tail
wrapped around itself for comfort. That is what my Cantonese is,
a stray canine: I’ll admit – one I care for sporadically. Whenever
mother calls me on the phone and we speak, the dog is brought in.
 
 
 
 
 
come home to this body, this unhomeliness

as                             portrait / sourdough / bitter gourd

like                          a uniform / a chest-guard / a mask

called                       girl / boy / anything your mother wants

masquerades
under                         a pile of laundry / your own shadow / a sudden mourning

having failed            your mother / your lover / to be its true self

where                        we are meant to survive / my birthmark lingers / joy is more than a crumb

Xia Fang

May 31, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments

Xia Fang, born in 1986, is a bilingual poet and translator. She has published two collections of translated poems and her own poetry has appeared in The Postcolonial Text, Canada Quarterly, Galaxy and Criterion. A View of the Sky Tunnel (ASM) is her first book of poetry. Her early written work was influenced by new life experiences, including the move to a new environment, in Macao. Xia completed her MA in translation studies in 2013. Now she is working towards her PhD degree in literary studies at the University of Macau.  

蘑菇

細長的枝幹伏下身子，聆聽他的影子
暗淡的光線中，稀疏的草地
在棕色的土壤上，滿足於現狀

露珠在草葉上閃著晶瑩的光
蘑菇破土而出
草葉擠出行列

如牛奶一樣的煙升起來
在半空中凝結
記住，這個下午

mushroom

a slimy trunk leans out towards its shadow
in the bleak air, the loosening grass that was bright
— now tanwood-flooring — is content with its scale

among the glistening dewed grass
the mushroom breaks the soil and parts
green grass down to its brown skin

a milky grey smoke rears up
and freezes in mid-air
remember, this afternoon

 
 
 
世界便是舞臺

這個沒有果實的夏天
樹上結滿了知了

荷花在瓦罐中伸長脖子
如同舞臺上站滿了女人
有的側耳旁聽，有的八卦

白色柵欄那邊
黃色水牛蹄子淹沒在瓦罐中
瓷器店裏闖入的公牛

青蛙叫聲此起彼伏
藏在哪個瓦罐中還是個迷

 
 
the world’s a stage

it’s a fruitless season
except that some tree is rich with cicadas

the potted lotuses stick their necks out
straight or slant
like a stage with women actors
who like eavesdropping, or gossiping

on the other side of the white fence
a yellow cow/bull dips its hooves into the large pot
reminding you of a bull in a china shop

the frogs call
you can’t tell from which pot

Cyril Wong

May 30, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments

Cyril Wong has been called a confessional poet, according to The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, based on his ‘anxiety over the fragility of human connection and a relentless self-querying’. He is the Singapore Literature Prize-winning author of poetry collections such as Unmarked Treasure and The Lover’s Inventory. A past recipient of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award for Literature, he completed his doctoral degree in English Literature at the National University of Singapore in 2012.
 
 
 
 
False Labours: Eight Immortals Passing Through

Knuckles on chest, leg under heftier leg:
how we get trapped under and cannot move.

I seem to weigh less every morning.
My tibia is Han Xiangzi’s flute

whittled from golden bamboo
and played with a broken heart; his lover

imprisoned by her father at the bottom
of an ocean. My bones are hollow music.

That owl-hoot of an old woman
breathing beats during qigong

is He Xiangu between gulps of vomit
discharged by mendicants; suffering

without suffering at the hands of her mistress.
A meme of a baby swaddled by a mother’s shirt

and calming down mightn’t be about love
but about the bliss of repetition:

tenderness for what feels like nothing new.
Lan Caihe floats between genders over a basket

of flowers down a river of flux, a shoe
fallen off. Neither young nor old. Perpetual

child on the inside. Spirituality is a state
of mind as timeless, selfless affection.

You tell me how Sufis danced, rooted to the source.
My fingers do the flamenco across your waist.

After riding for a thousand li, Zhang Guolao
folds his donkey into a box or one of his pockets.

He declined invitations from emperors. I sit
all day at home beside you, staring into space.

Han Zhongli is like Budai with a fan,
fanning stones into gold and into stones again.

I imagine poems are pebbles in my skull
unloaded onto these pages, where they become

pebbles of gold. Lü Dongbin, multi-hyphenate—
poet-drinker-swordsman-seducer—could be

Guanyin re-animated, re-emanated. I’m not
handsome like him, but I’m your baby in the dark.

Together, dim shape our bodies make is protean:
bag of rocks, mountainous terrain, discrete forms again.

In daylight, I remember you as ex-civil servant
but with only a towel to wrap your nakedness

before your gods on the altar, rudraksh beads
dripping from your wrist; covert prayers

chasing each other across your lips. What you
remind me of on a dry-iced stage inside my head:

Cao Guojiu in officious robes, even as an immortal;
after handing his riches to the poor for a brother’s sins.

Giving everything and gaining more than everything
in return. The stories the same: everyone flew

post-hermitage and upon private cultivation;
once realising that what they had to give up

was nothing at all. Truth as practice as awareness
as heavenward departure from cloudy conditioning.

I’m keen to fly beyond flying, like Tieguai Li;
suffering temptation, reborn disabled, a tramp.

(Are you surprised I relate to him most of all?)
Squatting quietly, irascible, mincing feelings

under a tree (I assume) before this recognition:
“All is farce, fuss-free, appearances, nothing

more.” Your stomach as resting gourd—replete
with medicinal serenity. Our life together

an iron clutch or vaulting pole I employed for lift-
off from shaky ground; hobbling free

of freedom, self, emotional fixities. Eight
immortals as eight-for-infinity; perhaps, Sufi-like

circularity. No more effort beyond love
without labour. How far from you I’ve been taken

towards Elysium without ever having moved at all.

Feng Shui

How beauty, as we come to know it, is shaped by our circumstances is something men (gay men even more so, I’d argue) are more likely to forget than women. What does this mean for our sense of self? Self-belief is so overrated we don’t register that what we feel we feel against our will when we desire or love. Even as we recognise the cliché in this, we remain subjugated by circumstance nonetheless. Knowing or seeing clearly is not freedom, not at first.

Other things shape us—our moods, our capacity for intelligent thought, our actions—and not as a result of when we perceive ourselves as pilots in cockpits, calling every shot. Move a chair here, unfold a screen there, paint three lines overhead, wear more blues or reds, remove plants, place a bowl of water in the corner: create the conditions for a better life, a more beautiful mind. Not that there is no autonomy whatsoever, but where does it end and the pinball machinations of circumstance begin?

Then even when we’re happy, is it our happiness (neural alignments, dopamine production, serotonin levels) that speaks or is it us? Since nothing we feel or do may be because of us, then everything can be manipulated to grant us what we need. So call our feng shui specialist today, so we can be cleverer, happier, more in love, healthier, etc. Or do nothing and just watch as everything falls apart or comes together—watch without judging ourselves or the circumstances that will ultimately pack our bodies into neat little boxes and tilt us into the crematory fire.

Wing Yau

May 30, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments

Wing Yau was born and raised in Hong Kong and has lived in Australia since 2008. She enjoys re-discovering beauty and small things in life when she is not at work. Her writings have appeared in  Life Writing and 2412 Digital Chapbook, Peril and Gargouille.

Rooftop Chicken

My grandma said in the fiction of flying
everyone knows about the rooftop chicken,
who used to live on the top floor of buildings
in a place known as the Pearl of the Orient,
before its beauty was pilfered
by the Symphony of Light –

or so it’s called. Each time the chicken hopped
from one building to the next, their wings spread,
such is the pretext of flying on rooftop.
A mottled feather floated like an aria flowed
out of the prostitute’s window – a reward for us
who worked hard and dreamed with our heads low.
“It’s a symbol of good luck, if the feather got stuck
to your back on your way home.” But

Someone bridged the gaps between buildings
with power and concrete. The chicken now walked
from one roof to the next. Down in the wet alley
we still worked hard – washing dishes with sweat
and digging endless holes on dead-end roads .

Half intoxicated in the sunless heat
I asked my grandma about the chicken.
“They were chased away by the pheasants.
One by one they plunged off the concrete heaven,
eaten and forgotten.”  But how did the other
birds got up there in the first place?
Even my grandma did not know.

Hard to Think

Sweaty hair stuck on his forehead
as he sings with the muted tune on TV.
His lips do not sync with the screaming next door —
a human soundscape in Tagalog.
It is hard to think here – what he has
left behind: a room on Queen’s Road,
slithers of Victoria Harbour
between high-rises. Immigrants always
say they come here for a better life.

The corniced ceiling incongruent
with its unrelenting peeling plaster –
a fungal disease at the centre.
Underneath, the square holes for air
spotted with dead insects. When strong wind
blows, how many upturned bodies
it will take to make a chorus for the home-
coming concert? It’s hard to think.

Taped on the wall,
above where his head lies every night
a poster of an Asian woman –
Her naked honeyed back smooth
like a tune he hums in the shower.
Her face half-turned,
seducing no one in particular.
He spends more time studying
the trapped spider somewhere at the corner
of the wall than missing the women at home.
He finds it hard to think back –

To his left, the heel of yesterday barely scuffs
the wooden floorboard as it makes its way
to the backdoor. It sounds, he thinks,
like a yawn of a polite host.