Gwee Li Sui teaches literature at the National University of Singapore. His graphic novel Myth of the Stone (1993) was published to critical silence; it is out of print today and its publisher has since wound up.Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems? (1998), his volume of humorous poems, was not meant to be published; it was privately circulated before a selection was bravely issued under the same name.

Last Death in Iraq
9 April 2003

Of course, collectively,
It made perfect sense.
The day is glowing,
People cheering,
The old is no more.

So the last man to die
In Saddam’s Iraq
Finds himself thinking
One day like
The men in the
White House
Like the Christians
Like I do
The morning I pick up
My pen to write
Against a war that is
Already over.

[Untitled]

Confucius! Thou shouldst be living at this hour:
Thy folks have need of thee! They have become
All bureaucrats: pens, forms, letters, tiresome
Ping-pong matters − O how our old men cower
To one corner and wet their Eisenhower
Trousers! Are we no more than this feared sum?
Then raise again thy cane and beat us mum;
Teach us good sense, manners not to overpower!
For thou alone art most qualified and smart:
Thou art the poster boy of this strange age
That sees in paperwork a privilege.
So mock us: in the name of Ancient China,
Save us from more red tape and its counterpart—
Even more circulars blowing its tuba!

The Blinding Truth
Christmas 2004    

What I cannot see I cannot see—
Cannot see intelligence in nature, the tree in the bird,
The pattern in the yellow an angsana forms,
The fact that something else thinks in this moment I scruple,
How the world thinks and how I think I think as I watch you think,
The colour of my own brown pupil in yours,
The practice of our faith, a fixing in words,
The shape of each day to be speared through the dark.
When you beam and talk of rooms besieged by many corners,
I cannot find the verbal house in the labyrinth you call home;
And entrepreneurs are not my heroes, nor progress progressive.
When you deem global evil a poor shadow, the trick of subtle good,
I imagine how, on an old bed ten minutes away, the night
Is not the ticking of a grand clock which tallies for dawn.
Your hung Christ brings Sunday peace, mine hysteric living;
Yours knows property prices and backs instinctive wars,
Mine flies into the corridors of discussion where nothing is owned,
Where all weapons shall be beaten into the humanities.
The moving sun, your happy miracle of the same, is still your star:
I cannot see how such occurrences should describe religion at all,
Why I cannot see black, brown, yellow, a tree, a bird, stupid nature—
All else a perilous rupture that connects.

Oedipus Simplex

Who’s the idiot who says
if you meet Buddha on the road
kill him?

If you meet Buddha on the road
leave him alone,
don’t kill anyone,
and don’t listen to stupid advice.

Jan Owen’s fifth book Timedancing  was published by Five Islands Press in 2002. Her Collected Poems is forthcoming with John Leonard Press. 

Listening to Bartok

From a distance, this half breath,
played in hesitation as by a child
tasting tomorrow’s saddest rhyme,
is ‘almost’ posing for ‘enough’.
The girl has learnt how want
elides get: this shuddery slow kiss
over her skin’s moist silk ambivalence.
She casts off doubt like a classic gown
for music’s shift. No moon.

Thyme and oregano crushed as in a book
exhale a double scent like irony
which guarantees nothing,
warning too soon the game is spent.
Lemon verbena is taking their weight,
ants trekking his arm, grit prickling her back.
From the starry overleap of night
only Saturn leans down.

The lines of a face arise within
and travel for a lifetime:
dry riverbeds, cliffs, endless dunes,
valleys of pomegranates and figs.
Swansdown is bringing them home
with ylang-ylang, almonds and apricot wine,
horizon playing horizon out
like a skipping game till extravagance
spills its hoard, all cost deferred.

Must a promise back away from its own mirage?
Dark is no antidote.
The lame night-watchman lurching by
has stroked her thigh three times.
Above: the Horse-head Nebula stretched out easy,
130 million light-years, nose to throat.

He slaps the sweat of his neck,
the tiny intimate bite of an ant,
and the borrowed music slips back into its den.
But the gist of shimmer’s payload
is grist in the mill, Shrove Tuesday:
such small eternities – C sharp, G minor,
quarter notes from the oud.

And the least tlink of a pebble
will swear time’s round.
Left hand plays a sombre tune.
The kernels float in their syrupy wine
like ancient embryos. Or dark souls levitating.
Deliciously bitter, and all they knew of love.

Walking Alone

At night in the jacaranda suburbs,
over the wavy pavers
faking Escher under their purple season,
I pass a lit white wall where shadow and I
make a transient couple. If I say to him
Pattern is also obsession at bay,
he’ll reply: Your habits recrossing
their own predictable paths
are neither a soothing of edge nor a safety net.
I rent upstairs on a street of anti-doubt,
valiantly wrought iron gates, orderly borders,
twin lions and urns. Symmetry rules.

Between the spill of lamps,
crisp footstep-clicks are company
when shadow is cancelled out.
Darkness, like divinity, casts none,
but welcomes in the light:
Damayanta seeking Nala
concealed in the circle of gods
all bearing his face and form
knew him in the blink of an eye
by sweat and dust, and by the shadow he cast.
I meet no camouflaged gods,
but these spent bugles of jacaranda
come from that fading place where gratitude
chooses mortal being over heaven.

Only shadow knows your secret shapes.
To own it well is trust’s defence,
denying it makes massacre:
at best, your unlearnt life is on the line;
at worst, quiet queues are musicked
into the death cathedrals.

And here, for destination, are the roses’
memory scent, four hundred names
gilding the stone arch to the park.
The same two cannons flank the lawn
as when my brother and I played
war on the slippery-dip barrels −
Ack-ack-boom, you’re dead. My turn!
Over the road, the Christmas pine’s decked out,
and St Augustine’s battlements
flash red and green, the season’s spiritual traffic lights.
The cypress mopoke tolls his lugubrious name.

Turning back, I pass three men and a bottle
knocking off work at an outside table.
Further down, on the floor of a closed café,
someone is huddled between two chairs.
Then fashions, skimpy in orange and blue,
the Fairy Boutique and the quilt shop,
antique and liquor store,
Videoland lit up, Mitre 10 dimmed down.
And here’s my street
with its stepping-stones of yellow light.
Past twenty-four’s magnolia
in full flower like a roost of souls,
to the last dark stretch where shadow and I must part,
slipping back easily into our warm shared night.

Ivy Ireland is currently studying an M. Phil in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. Ivy has a penchant for mysticism, cosmology and cabaret performance. In 2006, Ivy worked as a co-cordinator for “The National Young Writer’s Festival”, and has performed her poetry at various events including ” This Is Not Art” and “The Peats Ridge Festival” . Currently, Ivy is a co-director of the performance troupe, “The Lovelorn Living Party”. She is one of the Australian Young Poets Fellows 2007.

Wheel

‘For you yourself have created the karma that binds you.  You are helpless in its power.
 And you will do the very thing which your ignorance seeks to avoid.’ − Bhagavad Gita

1. MULADHARA

Off working for peanuts,
off the books,
off in some country where I was not allowed,
I fell down two flights of stairs
on my base chakra.

I did not see a doctor,
I knew better.

Six months later,
back on a slab in my rightful place,
dissection discovered
I had fractured my coccyx.

That type of thing never heals.

The root:
The grinding bone:
The tail that was:

I began the enquiry:
Injuries to the base chakra,
emotional or physical,
create uncertainty,
birth a wanderlust.

Back in that cold country,
lying prone on my solar plexus,
embalmed in numbing spray Laura’s ma stole
from the Falls Rd hospital,
I planned my escape–

Root cracked and numb,
no personal loophole in spacetime,

no tail to curl around the branches
of my family tree,

no train to wind around my lover as he twitched,
uneasy,
beside my blocked Kundalini.

Him: you’ll be alright,
you don’t need it,
we haven’t had tails for thousands off years,
at least.

Me: we nurse ghosts of all that has come before;
My tail will keep you awake at night
when I am gone.

2. SVADHISTHANA

One red blood rush.

It is correct to say the
sex
chakra contains the obvious pulleys and levers,
our basic understanding of the cycles:

Low heat rising.
The demand.
Whatever comes next.

It is also correct to say it contains all the dead:

The threads are sung back into our bodies,
we fuse them through only to gush them out again.

3. MANIPURA

Sol and Luna got married in my guts.
First flurry was fear,
then undying love,
then temperate flow like the guru said.

For followers of Kali,
union of irreconcilable opposites is All −
wine and illicit sex at night,
yoga and fasting in the morning.

I’m afraid of things that dissipate categories,
that are The Ultimate Aim.

Still, when you caused it,
something snapped in there, like the
corners of my mouth spanning outwards
in cuts.

4. ANAHUNTA

“gone, gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, oh what an awakening”
 – Heart Sutra

don’t for a second think this one’s going to be about St Valentine or this or that fat goblin with a bow or even you
and me or this and that kissing some such under the waterfall or any other veiled reality the Buddhists tell me I
don’t understand or really participate in nor do I wish to

when I felt the invitation unfold from yours I wanted to hide but instead I wrote back

there is debate over the true colour of the heart chakra some say green of all colours it is compassionate green they
say others say rose pink which makes more sense to me though what would I know and anyway I hate rose pink
does that mean I hate hearts my own heart

that’s melodramatic and ridiculous how could I hate my own heart

in yoga meditation she tells me to pluck the twelve-petalled flower she says it’s gold residing there at the pump site
and send it to some significant one but I get scared that if I do that I won’t have any core to go home to when
it gets too rough out here on the sea of televisions so

I keep it for myself then feel selfish then decide to give it out to everyman

there are actually seven heart centres according to this or that holy text my friend Reuben says he’s got heart
centres in his heels they all represent a different love isn’t there a first principle in all this excess I want the right
doctrine to represent everything I want to feel it feel it for all and sundry no differentiation I want it to be atomic
that which can not be broken down

why does it always end up here at integers

5. VISHUDDA

I had a Inanna icon once,
believed in it,
for she is the oldest and the first.

Once, I held her up to my ear,
so she might say ancient things
my bleating throat could not.

She, too, refused to speak.

I got ill,
laryngitis in all this quiet,
moved house or country.
Somewhere in between,
Inanna fell out of the box.

I had thought she was impervious.

They say if you ask and mean it,
she will appear in the sky, the Great Goddess,
bless you with a boon.  Perhaps say something.

There is sky blue where all I can’t say                                                           I wish for
There is the non-verbal                                                                      stored elsewhere
There is the silence held dear                                                      haunting blood later

When they adjust a throat chakra,
they whirl the 16 petals to the left to let the emotions out.
The patient might start muttering things uncontrollably.

the first thing I mutter is Science                                        where my bones are kept
the second thing I mutter is God                                          where the disguise is kept
the third thing hints at Unity                                           since I am now impervious

6. ANJA

there is a superstring
replacing the unbreakable
electron with something that
could be snapped
if we desire it

little threads of sea
connecting the       
                       Oh Svaha
topography of my body
             to its instigator and
back
through the firegate to
O Agni             You

7. SAHASRARA

honey around the outside
inside white

white

like staring at fractals until your brain bursts
sahasrara is the channel vessel

inner lotus of 12 petals
outside honey flower has 960

what’s the meaning of this angel ladder?
why 960?

reclining in a quiet grey bubble
the pineal gland remembers.

Nathan Curnow has recently toured Australia and New Zealand with his first book of poetry No Other Life But This (Five Islands Press). With assistance from the Australia Council he is writing a second collection of poetry based on his experiences staying at ten haunted sites around the country.

Paris dreams

Paris dreams,
draped in satin, her smooth legs
as long as her guest lists. She dreams
and when she does, Paris dreams of Paris
or of Empire unravelling like an asp
beneath the lid. New York, Las Vegas,
London, Tokyo, Hollywood: five parties,
her twenty-first as it struck across the globe.
Wardrobe: current. Wardrobe: currency.
Victims are the boys she knew, the young boys
she’ll know tomorrow. On your knees, Hilton.
His commands are just for fun. She plays the ho,
fingered for a finger to wrap him around.
Dreaming ‘Cleopatra’, Paris wakes in tears,
mistakes the hotel air conditioning for a hiss
inside her jewellery box. Dolce, Sebastian and Prince
lick her face, sensing a shift in zeitgeist as Paris
cries for nothing.

Mark O’Flynn has published two collections of poems The Too Bright Sun, and The Good Oil with Five Islands Press. A third is forthcoming in 2007. Eleanor & Eve, his seventh play, was produced at Railway Street Theatre in Sydney in 2003. His novel, Grassdogs, was published by HarperCollins in 2006. He lives in the Blue Mountains with his wife, two children and one dog.

Japanese Student

[Language is the house of being – Heidegger]

In the house of doing
the origami crane
or is it a seagull

becomes the residue
which we praise to the limits
of our clumsy grammar.

Pause to collect
all our thoughts about cranes.

We mime abstractions
and screwy semantics,
a tiny trout in its beak.

A paper crane is a door
that stays open too long
on a lake of amputated reflections.

The phrase book a tennis ball between us.

Hilarity is the difference
between pig and fig.
We are learning much.

What she thinks
is etched on her face
like an atrocity,
a sundered morpheme.

Fear has no gender
but its bare bones
and the inability to speak.

We make cruel signs of soothing.

In the house of bumbling
the syllables of my cooking
are the unspoken stuff of nightmares.

Her attitude to lizards tells us apart.

We swap no worries, and good tucker
and konichiwa but this is not enough.
In silence we cannot be silent.

Tears have no culture
beyond the distance
of a loveless boy

with a trout for a heart
who does not understand
the word kindness.

Language is mute
in the house of drowning
where she is lowered into the water

bonsai sprouting in her mouth

tongue’s words pecked
alive from her gills
by an origami crane.

Hsien Min Toh has published two collections of poetry, Iambus (1994) and The Enclosure of Love (2001). His work has also been published in periodicals such as Acumen, Atlanta Review, the London Review of Books, Poetry Ireland Review and Poetry Salzburg Review. He is also the founding editor of the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (www.qlrs.com).  

Snake Wine

Not until my second last morning did I break
beyond Pasteur Street to Ben Thanh market,
whose exterior did not hint at the dimensions
of its accepting harvests, and the way I got there
was by braving the Saigon traffic on a pillion seat,
darting in between and around swarms of scooters
and taxis trying to make it through the same junctions
all together, while the wind of my helpless movement
blew the scent of the woman in front of me,
with tickling wisps of her hair, at me; but this is not
about her, or how she would start with lightly humoured
petulance whenever I strode into her room.  Rather,
after twenty minutes of flicking our fingers through
handmade chopsticks with accompanying ivory rests
and miniature dolls selling the fantasy of a Vietnam
subtly curved in áo dài, we came across rows and rows
of violin-case-shaped bottles filled with yellow wine
and a baby king cobra each, glassy eyed, stiff-tongued,
fangs visible as with intent, its patterned grey hood
enriched by a deep orange dot of Chinese wolfsberry.
I wondered if this could be an appropriate gift for you;
you hatched in the Year of the Snake, and you had the bite
of a woman.  We assume these coils are dead,
but I remembered the news report on the Thai bachelor
who had uncorked a bottle only for the cobra
to spring out from organic hibernation to bury those fangs
deep into his knuckles, and I thought that you would
surely never taste the liquor if I told you that story,
which would mean it could rest on your bedside ledge
as a permanently dreamcatching souvenir of me.

Lemons

When life gives me lemons, I make lemonade.
As a boy, I detested the taste of lemons,
that sharp sourness captured in a grimace,
but recently I have had so much citrus fruit
that I’ve adjusted to the attack of the acid.
The other day I found myself biting into
lemon wedges for the juice, as though
they were orange slices.  It made me think
how during our university days we bought
bags of lemons from Sainsbury’s because
they were cheap.  I squeezed yellow halves
till my hands tingled for an hour, while you
turned a heap of sugar into syrup.  No matter
what we felt about that white snowdrift of guilt,
we knew through trying that there was a point
at which a virtuous loss of sweetness
turned to an uncomfortable biting of tongues,
and if we were to let doubt cool all morning
in the fridge we would have the poor choice
of hot syrup or watering down painfully
squeezed lemonade.  We hadn’t learnt, though,
that the same applies to unheaped denials,
that belief sustains the unspoken like a wound,
and that even if the nice thing about lemons
is that unlike blood oranges they don’t stain
no matter how careless you are with them,
their invisible ink shows when you try
suspected surfaces with heat.  I suppose
you can’t compare lemons and oranges,
but if you know the only red nettings to end up
in my fruit compartment hold Valencia oranges,
you’ll understand my surprise, with the wedges,
to have discovered aftertaste, the lingering
in the mouth of a peculiarly silky sweetness
that is inestimable relief after the assault.

Trench Digging

When our boots hit the beach at Punggol, it was two to a trench
for all except the sick list, but then there was a command post
to be dug in, and so it was like coming on to score an own-goal
when one was supposed to have been on the bench,
because it seemed the sick list could come in handy.
All day we chipped at the sand.  Letting our pride sting us
into motion, ten of us yoked our bad backs and asthma attacks
to the land.  “C’mon there, give us a hand,” we poked out
at the drivers, more from the duty of making their lazy cigarettes
carry an incremental tithe in guilt, as the leftenants were away
poring over their maps, in the shade of a tembusu tree.
Oh, yes, 2LT Lee came around every now and then,
fresh as a temperate daisy, to show us how we could dig
faster than we could, but when his walkie-talkie charged the air
with static it seemed he had to be elsewhere.  It was still us,
after all, who chopped the beach with changkuls, filled
three thousand sandbags, clanged iron pickets into resisting sand
with the monkey ram as though we were ringing the time,
and lined the walls with corrugated iron sheets to hold out
the slow, treacherous crumble.  An hour after dusk, the final
sandbag in place, we squinted at the low prow and the crossbeams
of what we had built, and wished that we could shoot at it.
Then the leftenants moved in.  Set up their signal sets
and the portable radio receiving 98.7FM.  As for us,
we moped about the tonners, between the chilly night
and the stifle under canvas, the pebbles and the deep blue sea.
It seems the CO came round and was rather pleased.
One month on, our leftenants wore fresh bars on their epaulettes.
We knew what we had done, and though we didn’t care
about the trench I didn’t dare say that was good enough,
and what anger this could rouse would not be scattered
like phosphorous-tipped bullets into the invading sea.

Keri Glastonbury is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. She completed a Doctorate in Creative Arts at University of Technology, Sydney, in 2005. Her thesis, titled ‘Shut up nobody wants to hear your poems!’, staged a friendly title bout between painter Adam Cullen and poet Ted Nielsen, two male grunge auteurs of her generation. She has published two books of poetry, Hygienic Lily (Five Islands Press, 1999) and super-regional (Vagabond, 2001) and has an unpublished manuscript ‘Grit Salute’ (2004). She is an editor of the small publishing company, Local Consumption Publications (www.localconsumption.com) who are this year releasing the title Strawberry Hills Forever by Vanessa Berry.

                   hygenic italy

‘but are you social nexus or cultural interstice?
that’s the type of question the tour guides
won’t answer’
 
Ted Nielsen, ‘Pax Romana’.                    ( effusive:

you’d like to be differently enculturated, though in the end
there’s a charm in being in relation to yourself, irrespective
like age, that won’t excuse anyone—& yet, tonight
you fell in love with her impeccable rendition of rebellion
so braced, like a sleek carriage with a hybrid accent
acquired abroad. you, all the while, way too verbal
is it really freeform? even the american was grounded, smoothly
modulated, listening to your mental garbage cleansing—as the
roman sky turned cobalt blue against the mustard church
you’re surrounded by new exteriors & too many saints
as suddenly all your tropes seem so maligned—being gentle with
yourself to coax the high down
what a lot of english you can sprout
                                                           ( hygienic italy:

pigeons and satellite dishes occupy the event horizon
across vast condominium rooftops
perhaps fluttering anti-angels leave the basilica
for the smashed terracotta hill of testaccio
or form emergent, from the grunge and gravitas
but are they, even ala
laurie anderson, luce iragary, jorie graham
your ideal intermediatries?
at a point where art & money cleave together
or apart, a plaque on the wall tries to unite
in new ideas and faith in talent
heralding all our smug alterities (eg: poems)
a situated intelligence
which leaves you to gesticulate on the streets
the mastery of repeating language acquisition
something else you always yawned at, until now
a sonorous cipher, you wish—along with a fiat cinque cento
          for hooting around

                                                ( bella figura:

the driver in pigtails and furs tries ardently
to elicit more than physiognomy’s silent science
the movement of the car naturalising the city streets
to a point of cathexis that never arrives
trouncing your fledgling accretion process
your fringe mown in an attempt at suburban sharp
& more like, a member of hush. you sense
you’re surrounded by voracious readers & translators
not afraid to overshoot the mark.. so, it’s preferable
to internal monologues, or the self-deprecations
of the ‘performative’ you’re used to
 
or cowering in the face of the high femme
once summer breaks out the mini-skirts
followed by a joke about trains full
of perfumed boys playing pocket billiards
                                                                ( 3rd rate hotel:

a sandy rain, born devotional
roughs a sirocco sky like stone wash
while you’re breaking the settee
of arts council fantasy you believe it
when she says rome’s been spoilt
post the 60s but let’s not get glib
there’s always memory studies
and expatriate experts even angels
have right wings as if a counter-reformation
on traffic infringements might start
a spate of double-parking in perth
her sister-in-law as howler monkey
so it bothers us, like passive smoking
the botticelli’s so blanchett
& woo, i’m feeling so bohemian like you
                                            ( justified & ancient:

a slumped angel
           headstone and gramsci’s grave
find you among the conifers
           & a posthumous library
weighted by voluminous spines
     & a short shelf-life
           a shift to the affective level
getting your attention
           like heavy handed art house
 
reading old books
           has you surprised to learn
the dog ‘shat’ in the tucker box
 
though for the most part
           you remain disengaged as a cabby
on imperial administrative interests
           driving home the episteme
                                                     ( carravagio:

a rapid summer downpour, street’s full of motorini
horns and sirens, while you’re buffeted along
plateau upon plateau—jargon relative
as rabbiting on, whatever else concomitant with that
one day molar, next molecular—illuminated manuscript
or subcontracted signwriter, THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT
in 500 point georgia bold—a question of flow
god is a vector monster, remaining beneath, above
& within the product—or just shot through
your spiritual highs make you reach for the love addiction guide
as you will the lines closer together, into a thrumming scaffolding
no grumpy bastard could use to translate or reproduce
later, rain sprinkling in through the roof’s natural shower rose
wandering home from the family palazzo, the etonian accent
of the prince roller-skating round the ballroom
the squeamish pope in red ‘too real’—& st john the baptist
in nomenclature only, a wry tuft of adolescent pubic hair
soft, as upholstered walls in genovese velvets
                                                               ( brava:

infused by gradients of atmosphere, as the city’s spring
makes the laundromat cheery and deferred purchasing
limns the shopfronts, a threshold away from murano glass
and your exquisite ambivalence. the street’s pock marks
the pique arousals. poor pride, as well as prada
street vendors assuming you’re nordic, demure, pure
& full of forgetting in the self-image quiz show
things just playing out, remnants of the
feminine, adjusting your antenna—to appreciate
bras and leather goods in the windows
wondrously—& no magazines have colonised
the space you are in. you won’t enter the stores
and cultural discretion will thrive on these glimpses
the body there, but you’re not in the driver’s seat
perhaps you thought it was the passenger side

Cath Vidler edits Snorkel (http://www.snorkel.org.au) a literary magazine specialising in creative writing by Australians and New Zealanders. Her poems have most recently appeared in Turbine, Trout, Otoliths and Nthposition. Her first chapbook, Cloud Theory, is forthcoming from Puncher and Wattmann (http://www.puncherandwattmann.com).

Five Collaborations with the Google Poetry Robot

1. It’s late

It’s late. I buy DIY bonsai potato home shrines. I wish to see The World on the Internet. I might Cheat if the original painting is not framed by titles like Falcon 4 etc. My favorite food is still more secure than Windows! I hope to spend 2 nights at the Apple Store online or at any site based on Xoops 1. I dream that one day all volcanoes on Earth are shrunk to epigrams that inspire wonder and provoke a buildup of Alternatives.

2. The first person.

The first person is a relative of mine. I think this is FUNNY. My mom Calls me Brenna but my friend Leonard has recently quit using names because he thinks they are flimsy firewalls.

3. Lists.

Lists. I work at Burger King Corporation. Bill Gates was Once Arrested for switching Policies on the Use of Knowledge. I love my Mac because when I’m hungry it says Here you Are and gives me a Link to a story about a Different Kind of Blue. Menus. You never get tired of reading Commercialized Lists. I like to eat ‘Cultured’ items but Vows to stop rubbish-dumping at Multistorey buildings are exempt from nutrition.

4. See you later Alligator

See you later Alligator. It’s still too early to commit. My cat is going into Opposition because many districts base their curriculum on areas of Special Expertise. I hope you have time to Think ahead. My favorite Word often changes depending on current errors. Adios. I enjoy Flying low over farmland in South Georgia and its associated Enterprises in India including Sinde. I learn Greek phrases and indications of Geographical origin. Thank you again for having me in your Language.

5. Winter in my Garden

Winter in my Garden is asleep and twitching softly. I saw deserted trenches and the difficult Path. I want One Of Those Days when the blank page fills up with Boeing and applicable privacy Laws are better defined. Why do I Have to make my avatar look like the second most Popular recipe from kelloggs? I never Promised to fix the roof while there’s a galaxy to grow. I might See the Boom shadow falling on the Cedars.

Born in Malta, emigrated to Australia at fifteen, Charles D’Anastasi has had poems published in various publications, anthologies, and on line poetry journals including malleable jangle, wandering dog(UK), Going Down Swinging, and Divan. In 2006 The Melbourne Poets Union published his chapbook The unreliable harbour (Union Poets Series).

Agnes Vong Lai Ieng is a postgraduate student at the University of Macau, currently completing a thesis on Macao poetry. In 2006 Vong had three original poems (as well as some translations) in The Drunken Boat’s Chinese supplement. Vong was the assistant editor and a contributing poet for The University of Macau Poets’ Jubilee Anthology and a translator for a selection of Yao Feng’s poems in his recently published Faraway Song. She has just finished a collaborative project with Christopher Kelen on translations, variations and responses to the poetry of Xin Qiji. The resulting book, Spring Wind Brings the Fireworks – is in press with VAC in Chicago and expected to appear in the coming months. Vong’s own book of Macao poems is currently in preparation.

ying yang hotel

a mixture of water and milk
so the Chinese say

it sprang from a fragrant, milky bath
a white towel wrapped her black body
heat sucked up the water
sweating, gasping

a local paper, with compliments
women from afar
in red and black
smiled sweetly at his Rolex

under the blazing sun
half-naked men covered in mud
scaling bamboo, to and fro
sweating, gasping
falling

lover of fairy tales

evening light
a valley of shadows

secrets between my footsteps and
the tangled bushes

a twig from the first branch
for the ash girl

a red apple
for the snowy white girl

a magic door
for the nosy girl

at the end of the valley
my grandmother’s grave

the composer

incense for Buddha
the only order in this pig sty

drink makes blur of reality
sickness of the heart

light burns brighter
the mountain turning grey

my final symphony
a prayer

my orchestra
carried away by a sparrow

and delivered to Buddha
burning incense for me

Libby Hart was a recipient of a D J O’Hearn Memorial Fellowship at The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne in 2003. Her suite of poems, Fresh News from the Arctic won the Somerset National Poetry Prize in 2005. Her first collection of poetry, also titled Fresh News from the Arctic, was published in 2006 by Interactive Press and has just won The Ann Elder Award for poetry.

Light

I see you there, standing in only your legs
and a cloak as dark as winter night;
your one eye gleaming, as if a glass eye.

And true, it is glass. Yes, it be.
For my doctor, with hands dipped by chemical
performs a magic before me.

In focus, I gather its light
and dare not move.
I feel the weight of feathers.

It’s the fallen bird that keeps me grounded
to this chair and to this room.
To the very stillness of things.
 

Note: This poem was written in response to Hugh Welch Diamond’s
photograph, ‘Seated woman with bird’ (c.1855). Diamond was one of the
earliest photographers. A doctor by profession, he decided to specialise
in the treatment of the mentally ill and was appointed to the Surrey
County Lunatic Asylum where he produced numerous photographs of his
patients. Diamond believed that photography could assist in the
treatment of mental disorders.

Your Body Bare

‘According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or
seven souls. The souls [are] scattered throughout the body.’
 − Annie Dillard

Hold your many souls like a juggler, this is Inuit land.
The chest and arms, all Inuit-souled.
Even the eyes have two souled-suns that burn a gleam
through a viewer’s head.

This is the breadth of your many engines:
a hand, a moon-shaped sigh
a cheekbone, rare
a glimpse of finger.
The turning of the body
in graceful-gracelessness.

You are like a horizon
bending and shaping itself at will −
a balloon of escape,
a lung of tree.
The form of things to come.

Flux

Nightfall comes hesitating with light.
It reaches out in short, sharp Morse Code.
Indecipherably lingering, and then it leaves.
All I have are three letters: I.O.U.
Then it’s gone like the wind that’s forgotten its anchor.

Sleepless Dreaming

Curled and weighted like an anchor
you’re as heavy as sympathy
and as warm as December.

Waves roll in from the half-opened door.

David Gilbey is  Senior Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at Charles Sturt University. He is editor of 4W literary journal. Born in London, he migrated to Australia and graduated from the University of Sydney. Involved with a variety of arts groups in the community, he has been known to tread the boards and impersonate well-known public figures. His reviews have been published in Australian Book Review. His first part collection of poetry is Under the Rainbow, FourW press, 1996. He has just completed the manuscript for his first full collection, having travelled to US, UK, France, Japan and China on Study Leave 2006. In 2007 he is teaching English at Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University in Sendai, Japan. David is married to general practitioner Dr Geraldine Duncan and they have four children quickly exiting adolescence.

Pegasus
for Lifen

Outside the Quan Jude Roast Duck Restaurant
a candyman glassblower makes animals, figurines,
from caramelized sugar, smiling at his skill:
brittle brown prawn skins, antennae, mouth and legs,
shining exoskeletons of dog, balloon man, and, for us,
a horse –
distending a head from the soft globe,
pinching a mouth, ears,
stretching a billowing tail
from the soft, streaked sugar sheen
hardening as he works it.

Somehow there is movement in the twist of neck
and leaping haunch, though in what we call reality
impossibly dwarfed back legs could only hobble.
A mystical beast for all that, a windrider
to carry us off to our dining palace
along the freezing street.

In the restaurant I say I’ve brought my horse,
tried to park it outside – couldn’t find the rail.
Luckily the waiter’s Chinese
and doesn’t understand my cowboy joke
but grinned just the same.

David Wood is a writer and musician living at Springbrook in the Gold Coast Hinterland. His writing includes poetry, novels and, more recently, an extended philosophical treatise, Plato’s Cave which draws upon scientific, philosophical and mystical insights. David has recently built an octagonal sandstone dome in which he lives and writes. He has been Principal Piccolist with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and has contributed to many publications including The Canberra Times and The Courier-Mail. David has been a guest writer at the Adelaide Festival of Arts.

Butterflies

Two butterflies
are flying through the orchard,
making love in flight.

I would not have thought
it possible – but there they are,
look,
joined bodies
crisscrossing the budding
branches of the fruit trees
where the wind
has caught your skirt,
lifting it into the air
like butterfly wings.

Who taught you to kiss
like that?

I am coming down the
track between the trees
to the brown dam,
to the grasses
heavy-headed with
spring.

And the day
opens like a palm,
a pianist’s hand
I reach up to and
hold and gently
draw down towards me
into the grasses,
the fruit trees
sweet as the
nectar on your lips
when I taste you

Morning

You woke and turned, your head upon the pillow
sculpted in a silvered cave of air,
naked, lying by the open window,
stars rampant in the tangle of your hair.

Last night we slept upon the drifting waters;
the moon sang like an entering lover
secret songs that lovers’ lips might whisper,
hair falling through the moonlight like a star.

A kiss to brush your eyes into the sunlight,
to gentle you from sleep, a lullaby
of hearts so close that sing upon the waters,
flowers in the iris of an eye.

Kylie Rose is currently studying creative writing at the University of Newcastle. Her suite of poems, Doll Songs was commended in the 2006 Newcastle Poetry Prize and she received second place for her poem Shark Egg in the 2006 Roland Robinson Literary Awards. She lives with her four children in Maitland.

West Annex
Celestial Warehouse
Temple of Heaven

I always see a woman in the moon.
Concubine of solar congress,
frail geisha
undressed in the dark.

I never knew the moon was a man
until I found the closet
where he keeps
his sleeping tablets.

God of Nocturnal Brightness,
you fill and fail,
obedient to the seminal
will of the sun.

You will never look the same.

Summer Palace

Seventeen Arches Bridge.
Afternoon is an oyster,
caesarean opened,
pearly lake and sky
adhered to the luminous womb.

Seventeen Arches Bridge.
Men smoke, giving breath
to marble dragons. They fish
the ox-bronze sky with kites
on rod and reel.

Seventeen Arches Bridge.
Pleasure boats skim the peach
lake, hulls a flurry of bat
wings that fracture
my reflection.

Seventeen Arches Bridge.
I watch willows
defer to the mottled
milk of evening’s dawn.
Their branches lip the sun.

Seventeen Arches Bridge
divides this watery
day like a woman’s mineral
wrist escaping a heavy,
silver sleeve.

Forbidden City

Suited street vendors converge on the bus
carcass of maggot-white spenders.
Welcome swallows and willows
skim the moat like nimble tongues
affixed to no mouth.

The South Gate parts her lips
and admits me into her
illicit stone pipe.
Toward the secret lacquered chambers,
I tread the golden stones.

Women are still locked
up in palanquins and camphor coffers.
They chant
in empty chambers,
let me out.

Ross Donlon lives in Castlemaine, Victoria. His first collection Tightrope Horizon was published by Five Islands Press in 2003

Black Swans  

Swans go about in pairs,
she says.
They mate for life.
She spied them from the house they leased
to sort out their marriage.
She sees them splash inside the reedy wetland
in overlapping circles.
They flurry and call as they bow to feed,
never far from one another.

Later he sees them flying
through the scarlet sun,
steel necks straight against the sky,
wings punching,
bodies packed like jets,
their trajectory flat
like a fresh line drawn on a map.

Adam Aitken is the author of four collections of poetry and a new book is forthcoming from Giramondo Publishing next year. He is currently living in Cambodia. (Photo by Juno Gemes)

Fin de Siècle

Between two climates she’d be waiting, the slender young émigré
so dark and delicate the wind passed right through her,
always there before you, the bright architect of love
who knew her way around the café chairs, the Latin lovers.
How she’d inspired that horizon, the penthouse, the tower.
Greek, French, Ukrainian, all of the above? No-one knew for sure
what drove her south one winter, a whim or a storm?
Her age or why she had promised to see you again,
or why she always promised, sighing, mood wracked,
hat wide-brimmed with daisies and gliding towards you
through the fun palace colonnades before sunset – no one knew
why she always promised to be there
under the whitewash crumbling that left its stain
on your waiter’s apron and in your hair, as if you had emerged
unscathed from its collapse, the blast driving you back,
grasping your last tip.
She would arrive after work (though no-one knew what she did),
complement your menu, then a final swim
before the chill shadows enclosed the beach.
Statues murmured in the dusky shadows, mascara dusk
and in the golden bracelet of a rockpool children sparkled
among their castles, before they flooded at high tide.
Were they her children? If so they could never be too careful
building their moats, before she moved to a bench in the sun.
The Latin lovers waved and she didn’t wave back.
She was the pleasure of the world passing, about to shake
her wings free of the disaster, and take off, and leave you
once again thinking this had been the best century ever
and you were haunted by what she could not forget,
already beyond your knowing, what she is and was.

Fable

That year they rode low in the water
on ballast of oaths and convicted emotions

moved on to springtime ports
past the Pig and Sows reef
and the ridiculously expensive prison
lost steerage in a lull of unconcern
and absent-minded fishing.

In those days an invasion
was a kind of plague jellyfish,
laid back remorae, or cold front
that blew in early, unseasonal.
Everyone was hitching rides.
When someone entered
new seasons of exchange– fluids, fire,
language and metal–
someone else exited.
They were what they made, and what they couldn’t
someone else did.
Another’s lack seemed
no more than their own.
All land codified
as the visible
scoured and clearfelled,
the land
of the forever language.

At Rozelle Hospital

At Rozelle Hospital, his final destination
some quartermaster who’d cracked
drew
on a sandstone pier
a worldly fish, a navy frigate in its port,

a tropic bird of seed.
Full sails, great promise,
a kind of escape
from a madder Captain.

King’s botanist inside
who made the book for all
engraved, exotic
with his names – each new flower and tree

and new stiff Latin, the whole evolutionary kit,
the iron bars of  genealogy.

Doctor, I ask you: what inky blot liberates
or draws together us
between the covers of hand-bound books
when you want your name
a legacy to crown the sky?

Fig trees, for instance, just
appear between the stones, green
as immigrants or refugees
hidden by the dark?

Are they natives now by instant decree?
You wear their leafy heads, and see
yourself once again,
historical footnote, crazed misfit

scattered, afraid, frozen
in unseasonal rain.
Or are we wasted now, due to
lack of name or use: seedy fruit
scattered in the grass,

imports that multiplied?
                    What of the bigger machines, like
                    destiny, meaning, sanity?
The fork and divergences
of who we want to be?
                   The rigging
on that ship
will catch the breeze,
then what?

Ionian

“are war and peace
playing their little game over your dead body?”
Jorie Graham

If, Eastern Asian time, you arrive
at the cove
to begin your holiday,
small figures camp in ruined hills,
waiting to advance.
Luckily we have
a Western point of view:
all timetables and maps: each hill,
the coordinates to fame
the minefield, the track
to that strategically useless
hilltop village, a tour guide,
and parking for buses.

Now, the snipers (retired codgers
your great-great grandpa couldn’t kill)
fish on the quiet beach, sipping
hot mint tea.
The winning cavalry
ride scabrous donkeys
and  for a nominal sum
escort you through the ruins.

Tides regroup like armies
and the opalescent waters
whet your Byronic taste
for filigreed pistols, severed heads,
slavegirls, broken columns. 

Filling the boats with trench-bootie:
proven property, like heritage,
gorgeous sunsets, or the exact
scent of victory –
too subtle for my words.

Judith Beveridge has published three books of poetry all of which have won major prizes: The Domesticity of Giraffes (Black Lighting Press 1987); Accidental Grace, (UQP, 1996) and Wolf Notes (Giramondo Publishing, 2003). She is the poetry editor of Meanjin. In 2005 she was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature. She currentlyteaches poetry at post-graduate level at the University of Sydney and at post-graduate and undergraduate level at the University of Newcastle. She has edited UQP’s The Best Australian Poetry 2006 as well as co-edited anthologies from the Newcastle Poetry Prize, Sunweight (2005) and The Honey Fills the Cone (2006).

The Book

There is a fish called flower of the wave
and a fish called the hardyhead. There is
the parrotfish, the pineapple fish, the boarfish
the bullhead shark. There’s the rough flute
mouth, the toothy flathead, the two spot
bristle tooth and the yellow sabretooth blenny.

At night I study. At night I learn sixty-two
types of wrasse. I learn there’s the glass fish,
the globe fish, the goat fish and an eastern
and southern gobble guts, both left-eyed
and right-eyed flounders, a rhinoceros
file fish, a racoon butterfly fish, a grub fish,

a tear-drop sleeper goby, a robust pygmy
star-gazer and a half and half puller. There’s
a fish called happy moments. But I haven’t
found it yet. I haven’t found the right one.
The name I can throw back at Davey when
in a voice flat as oil, he calls me: “sweetlips”.

Despite

Despite a headache, stationary all day, unable to decay;
despite these reels ticking again into the gradient

of each throb; my eyes feeling as fragile as snow-domes
in the hands of a fractious child; my head grading all

the grains of sand shunted southwards again by a week
of black katabatic winds; despite the yachts tinkling,

calling like knives on goblets for silence as the tide
dumps another load of kelp around my head – I feel

happy, calm; and for a moment I love the feel of hessian
weather on my arms and legs. I love being with Davey

who smells like an old fish trough, stubble on his chin
sharp as wrasse’s teeth. I love the lighthouse on the cliff-top

as it holds the stupefied position of a pocket chesspiece.
I know another distress flare might soon find its passage

through the nerves my head manipulates, that an onshore
of jagged air push isobars back; that lightning’s filamented

pulse rig more cordage for my head. I know the veins
in my head will tighten, distort, bend again like lines

trying to dislodge a snag, that nausea will head for a dry
berth in my throat – but now, I fix my bait, spit out my beer

as if it had become as tasteless as the brackish Baltic
and I reel my line in. I know the creels must come in despite

blood on the charts, the pounding of cruel encephalitic winds.
I drag the rod back, it arcs like a dolphin scudding on its tail,

and I’m happy, calm, fishing again here with Davey.
We’re almost doing the limbo bringing our lines in.

Todd Swift is one of the leading Canadian poets of his generation (those born since 1960), and his poetry was included in two recent major anthologies of Canadian verse, Open Field (Persea, 2005) and The New Canon (Vehicule, 2005).  He is Oxfam GB Poet In Residence and editor of their best-selling poetry CD series, Life Lines and Life Lines 2.  He is poetry editor for Nthposition online magazine.  He lectures in creative writing and English at the graduate and undergraduate levels at Kingston University, and teaches at Birkbeck and The Poetry School, in London.  He has edited many international anthologies, such as Short Fuse (Rattapallax, 2002) and 100 Poets Against The War (Salt, 2003).  His own poetry has been published by DC Books in four collections, most recently Winter Tennis (2007).  He is co-editor of the major new study of contemporary English Quebec poetry, Language Acts (Vehicule, 2007).  His poems have appeared widely in such journals as Agenda, Cimarron Review, The Guardian, Jacket, London Magazine, The Manhattan Review, New American Writing, Poetry Review, and The Wolf.  His reviews appear widely, in places such as Books in Canada, The Globe and Mail, and Poetry London.  He is doing his PhD at the University of East Anglia, where he also took his MA in Creative Writing.

English Words

Badge me and badger me,
Catch me and calliper my skull,
Suck out the phonemes, sip
The allomorphs. Automata, loci,
Imprudent, implants… put me on
Compound parade and glue
My ablative: stick a synthetical vowel
Up the lexical layer with a trowel
But build that system with interplay.
 

The Unidentified Man

So I went down to the fence where the jobs were,
Put my face against the wire, and yowled Hire me
To the boss-men whose job it was to hire two men,
When around me stood maybe two hundred men;

My hands gripped the wire, framing my yowling,
Too clean by half.  I wanted to have something to do,
You see, in your world. The gates parted for no one
I knew.  All I did was have a small way with words,

Of no use to the high chimneys that smoked above us,
To hang on the old tree where language yellowed.
Two men came and lugged me low, inside the gate,
Dropped my body in with the slow horses for meat.

Fado

To sing fado
is to open the barn door
before the horses.

Singing fado is to set water
spinning so it tires the storm.

Fado means teaching fire
to climb itself in flame, a rope.

Fado throws the wind away,
kisses the stars farewell
in night’s lost stairwell.

To sing fado
is knowing love’s torn dress
sold to sailors to buy
back your heart’s secret share.

Fado is leaving
nothing on your nakedness.

Fado is touch singing to skin.

Map Of Love

You are not on my map of love, you said
And I the cartographer of all things lived,

The device so curled and aged it had faded.
Sweep away those pins and flags, heart,

And come here to divide these spoils
On this bed where we surround and fall,

Fighting our way out of poppy fields
Consensual as battle, squabbling over power

Or Nepal.  The answer is we’re artists or lovers
Pursuing night’s cherries in a spring campaign.

Ravi Shankar is Associate Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat. He has published a book of poems, Instrumentality (Cherry Grove), named a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards and co-authored a chapbook with Reb Livingston, Wanton Textiles (No Tell Books). His creative and critical work has previously appeared in such publications as The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, Time Out New York, The Massachusetts Review, Fulcrum, McSweeney’s and the AWP Writer’s Chronicle, among many others. He has taught at Queens College, University of New Haven, and Columbia University, where he received his MFA in Poetry. He has appeared as a commentator on NPR and Wesleyan Radio and read his work in many places, including the Asia Society, St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the National Arts Club. He currently serves on the Advisory Council for the Connecticut Center for the Book and along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, is co-editing an anthology of contemporary South Asian, East Asian Poetry, due out with W.W.Norton & Co. in Spring 2008.

Indian Elephant

Under date palms and a towering gopuram
studded with carvings of deities in acrobatic
sexual congress, it’s almost easy to overlook

the dark, mustached mahout in khaki shorts
leaning against a crooked stick, murmuring
in Malayalam to the ornamented purveyor

of blessings beside him, bedecked in marigolds
spirals of white paint outlining wistful eyes
and plummeting down a trunk that swings

to pluck a rupee from the devout, to bless
the bent-headed. In one practiced motion,
the prodigiuos converted into the propitious.

Box Turtle

Jeweled egg in the middle of a twisting
path tamped down by footfall, darkened
in the shadow of tall pines, I pluck and put

it to my nose. Gradually, like arousal
rousing by degrees, a blunt head extends
from an uncircumcised prepuce to glare

red-eyed at how earth has been removed
from under it, how it flails three-toed
in space, until abruptly, a hinged plastron

snaps shut. Gathering itself in, domed shell
concentrically radiating orange and black
in a mantra: hermetic, tantric, self-reliant.

Jumbo Jet

Such scale manifest in juxtaposition:
like a pod of echolocating whales
fuselages roll, immense, silhouetted

on taxiway tarmac by blue edge lights
and halogen green center reflectors
to aprons serviced by motorised ramps,

fuel trucks, baggage carts, flag wavers,
all turning in synchronicity to words
emitted from the Sphinx-like control

tower. Approaching aircraft moving
from skies through its own length
so progressively, it appears to hover

Jill Jones’s latest books is Broken/Open (Salt, 2005), which was short-listed for The Age Book of the Year 2005, and three chapbooks: Fold Unfold (Vagabond, 2005). In 2003 her fourth book, Screens, Jets, Heaven: New and Selected Poems, won the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize. She has collaborated with photographer Annette Willis on a number of projects. She has been a film reviewer, journalist, book editor and arts administrator.

What Is This?

While we’re talking light passes, though it’s easy to ignore
its radiant shift. We’re neither passengers nor eternal,
though we trip on each other’s recall, there’s another history
being rearranged in shades drawn on ground.
I say, it’s how you think in circles, wanting to merge rather than mark.
(The four corners of a centre tremble as they touch space.)

Our argument may ignite small layers or return to its great elasticity,
it’s no more than extending a mirror into the existence of zero.
But I can do nothing unless I lose my own track in land that made the curve
neither fleeting nor continuing, but always shown on ground.

Here are the difficulties – of clusters, pebbles, mind moon, that great
vacant sign, an eternal jewel, the head’s empty bucket, containing
all things, yet without rearranging itself within clarity’s blue shadow.

The light     of your fingers     skin under sky.

– after Lightpool series, Salvatori Gerardi

Matching Colours In a Flame

Is it the way silence peels away the hours
or light inches too near to death?
(It gets closer to take hold of my hands)

I will not worry over the heat
but go out into the angle of a demand.

How a door shouts or afternoon is lacking
when meanings double and nights increase
or clouds break your face, imperfect and happy.

Bottlebrush

City birds are living on their coast
of roads and industrial cranking
among the blinking dive of motors.
It’s all leaky rather than transparent
like the earth hum’s low and constant herz.

An unknown screech comes
from middle distance
and means little from a window
even if you’re well.

There’s been turnover since the shooting
the café now sells furniture
and amongst papaya, cardboard boxes
limp greens on pallets, the pickings
are as daily as the leaded and diesel
descending those old forgotten miles
above. In the midst
here’s king pigeon, sparrows, starlings
the old world rubbish sticking
in the claw, buggy feathers and shit splat
dodging all the colour of skies.

And parrots hang from spring
when ancient honey
sings within a callistemon’s
brief and red hours.

Andrew Slattery is a Communications graduate from The University of Newcastle. His poems have appeared in literary journals, newspapers, magazines throughout Australia, Europe, North America and Asia. His awards include the Henry Kendall Poetry Award, the Roland Robinson Literary Award, and the Val Vallis Poetry Award. He lives in Berlin.

The River Winter

It’s no use counting water with time
if it’s going to freeze up every year,
solid from bank to bank, the river set

flush with the surrounding plains
of ground snow. And don’t rely on heat –
the sun is an alloy of silica and static blue.

Floating branches have stilled
and now shadow the surface
like the underveins of a cloud.

The river is an allegory, better than most –
universal and exacting; an ice-tray; die-cast
in element season; depth indeterminate.

A group of deer stroll across the river,
seeming not to raise their knees, but to skate
the surface, to maintain a share of weight.

The river turns like a worn claw.
The river is a box of jammed water;
neither flowing nor permanent.

The babydeer trips on a rift where a stream
moves contra to the main riverline;
where meltwater slows and forms along the pelt

of seamed ice. The deer holds to its hoary legs,
steadies the cardinal point of its mind and shifts
orderly across this neither land nor water.

Blackbirding

Before dawn, little girls play with knives,
walk over the grass still grey with damp
before a sun swells the ground and all

the living in it. Two girls out with paring knives,
at dawn – you’d think a play duel was afoot!
Every Saturday before breakfast, two girls out

with an undertaking to collect the dead,
or those close to it. After Dad sprayed
the night before. “Off me vines yer little bastards!”

He’d long-lobbied to kill them en masse.
“Bloody pests!” as he swivels his bald-mad eyes,
a persistent “pink pink pink…,” a thin “peeeeeeee”

and a low “tuc tuc tuc” send him running
down the grape rows with his rifle
shooting black rocks or any spot on his eye

that puts a blackbird in his mind. So most are dead
by dawn if the spray has got to their hearts.
The girls are civil mystics and farewell

the last star to blip off the sky.
Before dawn it’s as still as a seed;
everything sharp clicks the air. Like the snakes

which have been out all night, slimming along
the trellis channels under the vines, the girls
have exacted their process. They pick off

any beetles around wounds and openings,
lift off the wing bars, the upper-tail covers
and unclip the wishbone from their shoulders.

See the way the tendon lifts like a string
from the underside; the way their thumbs fit
neat in the cupola bone behind the eyes.

In winter, they hear the blackbirds
quietly “singing to themselves.”
This is their sub-song. They marvel

at tinybird architecture and how such quiet things
once made sky circles. The blackbird plays
a boxwood flute. When they find the air sac

it’s better than a boring chicken’s wishbone –
you can push the sac and see
if there’s any song left in it. The stitchbird’s

glomera bone brings luck in fives. They peel back
the duffled barbs, remove the pinions and fold
the wing back under the body, tie it with string

and clean their hands on the dewy watergrass.
They’re planning a whole day for the blacks
nested in the upland mangrove nooks

to listen for tacit coos in cavities and lowed stumps.
They imagine dismantling the head of an owl
and locating the hoots in its standing frame.

Or to the sea – the steep cliff sucks the grey sea
up against its chest, the young nested against the cliffs,
out of reach from the rats. For today, they are done,

they fondle the oddments deep in their pockets
and follow the horse-path home. At night they lie
on the blue grass. Around their ankles

are amulets made from birdfeet tied end to end,
scratching their skin “tuc tuc tuc.” If they hold
the tiny birdskulls up to any-shaped moon, look

through the eye sockets and there’s always
a round moon. The great distance between stars
contains the eye. They will grow up to farm the stars,

not in clean rows but thrown up like random seeds.
You can sharpen a tailbone to its quill-end
to draw a white bird on the night, or hold

longer wingbones up to the stars like a scaffolding
to the spotted flue; join them horizontal
as if collecting the universe in armature.

Yeow Kai Chai is the author of two poetry collections, Pretend I’m Not Here (2006) and Secret Manta (2001).He co-edits the online journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. He is also the deputy editor of the arts and lifestyle section in Singapore’s The Straits Times, where he reviews music and writes pop-culture commentaries.

Red and Blue

The accessory, zipped up,
awaits the blink-off.

Redacted, this could
just end up one jet-lagged lyre.

Keep soul, big stuff in the overhead
administration, says trolley dolly.

Here is what is: a suspicious package
with attendant implications.

It’s none of my personal vertex,
but we’re psyched for another

sexy spin, another hook
to hang civilisation on, like Equator.

Beyond allotted legroom,
degree of reclination and those

damp hot towels, we rise
and fall, aside from such plenitude,

terminal or tarnation.
Gazing out this sentimental window

into pitch dark, yanking soul
out of you . . .  to winnow these aisles

or suffuse every spore . . .
that’s what it should do, shouldn’t it?

If he can’t quite define it,
what hope the rest of us?

It isn’t the blue dress,
which doesn’t lie. It’s in the bag.

It is. Don’t get me wrong –
I like righteous peanuts and hot towels

that come all over my face,
the subject already taxiing

to a softly tick and what’s that slipping
from its side? A whiff? It’s time.

Hold that nip while the gentlest,
quietest one casually pulls a tiny red pin.

Quarterly Report No. 4: Pachinko Parlour Vending Machine
a reggaeton pantoum

Biorhythm pulsate baby crave
Slot plastic token slit
Pop David apple diorama
Tip on Renaissance palindrome

Slot Hoboken plastic slit
Karaoke queen light koan
Spit on Renaissance palindrome
Baby love caw macaw

Karaoke queen light kaftan
Secretary bird wind toy
Baby love paw macaque
Cool duck pop placebo

Secretary dirge toy boy
Work Geylang parlour breeze
Cool duck put Kanebo
Now perfect tongue service

Ice cream parlour breeze
Impostor take on hyperrealist
Now defect Foreign Service
Doppelganger slip crash mirror

Impostor take aurora borealis
Reverse phat spin lips
Doppelgänger slap dash traitor
Ream gleam soda fizz

Reverse fat pink slips
Drink up silver chalice
Ream gleam Lola fizz
Game for it kissogram

Drink up silly heiress
Pop Babel juicy melisma
Dame kiss o Gran
Biorhythm pulsate babbling slave

Gold In Them Trees

Gold my woebegone gill
In rays fill such lustrous haze
Them everything but these
Trees where no human will

Kate Vinen is a writer and director whose most recent short film, ‘Rebecca’, is due for completion in 2007. She is also a singer/songwriter and poet. Her poem ‘The Last Swim of Summer’ was short listed for the 2006 Wet Ink Poetry Prize. Her biggest inspirations are wild places and wild men.

The Search Party

My mouth has been this dry before,
White lipped and deathly dry,
But from a different kind of walking
Where your body was the path
And your heart the destination.
If there was a way back
I would lose it to the land;
The crumbs of love
Are hiding under canopies
That never let the sunlight in.
Few words were exchanged
But so much was spoken;
One is a language to unlearn
That places the future in settings
Amongst alpine grasses
And flannel flowers.
Everything is hidden or exposed,
Nothing just is
And still they search for me;
Bush has been tracked
Riverbeds, dragged
For the body that never surfaces.
There is no one to blame now that
Mr. Sin is dead;
But she swears, sin never dies.
The sights he and I saw
Blur together
And the roads disappear.
I looked down from the peak
Of the mountain
To find more mountains
Below, and understood
My loss is everyone’s loss,
And on Waterfall Way
The granite outcrop
Hid our dealings from the day.
The feeling, I remember
Was all-encompassing
Between a rock and a hard place.
There is your blood.
There is my blood.
There is our blood together.

The Last Swim of Summer

Our first swim was the last swim of summer.
You said I needed boys that
Smelt like the sea;
Now that they are gone
And you are right
Memories lurk down by the wooden boats.
Things I didn’t know about;
I hate not knowing everything.
It is a reminder that the world exists without me,
That I am not a part of everything.
If only I had known then
You can only romanticise something when it’s gone,
Like some kind of consolation prize for your loss.
I will shut my eyes, open my legs
And view the world as I see it.
I find myself wishing there was only one place
I had ever known you
So I could destroy it.
There are too many places that have part of me.
We drove back the following night and you said
We had won
And I knew by you saying it that we hadn’t.

Lorraine Marwood has three collections of poetry published with Five Islands Press- the first Skinprint in 1996 and the last two collections Redback Mansion 2002 and that downhill yelling 2005  both for children.  Her first verse novel ratwhiskers and me will be published by Walker in 2008 and her latest book The girl who turned into treacle is an Aussie Nibbles with Penguin 2007. Lorraine loves taking poetry workshops with schools, writes techniques regularly for Literature Base, and has just returned from a month’s creative residency in Adelaide with the May Gibbs Literature Trust, to write a second verse novel.  She lives in Central Victoria with her husband and most of her six children have now left home. 

Colouring In

Stretched on the lounge room floor
I coloured overalled American farmers,
patches on their knees and holding pitchforks
(my dad never had these)
and fine feathered roosters,
(our chooks had no male company).

I coloured an old tractor,
a prancing horse and sunflowers
that nodded eyes and mouths
like farmer’s daughters all in a regular
healthy row.
We were farmer’s daughters
so I sketched in the flies
and the motes of chook dust,
even the rats that stole between the earthen
chook pen floors and the sacks of pellets
my father piggy-backed,
and wondered if ours could be called
a farm at all;
after all I’d coloured beyond
the mass-produced lines.

Saddlebags

The years have pouches,
saddlebags for camel skin.

I know this as the sepia sweep
from the photograph
helps me brush across my grandfather’s
chin,  to pause beneath the sphinx shade
to reach my hand along desert lines,
sword cuts, crisscrossed railway
lines, meanderings and cul de sacs.

The prairie cheeks have harvest
stubble, rough and sharp as thistle
blades.  My grandfather turns
his head, the deep shade makes
me tumble and I see the furrows
that his travelling years have made,
the quick shuffle between farmer
and soldier, the scramble for
a horizon, like riding the dawn beach
on his own farm horse
with the pebbles of men floating
out to sea. I try and climb
along that rough prairie plane,
try to climb for the eyes, but
my grandfather pulls his hat
back over his brow

and all I have is a sepia hood,
a strong sphinx man looking
to horizon, always horizon

searching for his Anzac men.

Born in Singapore, Jee Leong Koh read English at Oxford University and studied Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, New York. His poems have appeared in Singaporean anthologies, and American and British journals such as Crab Orchard Review, The Ledge, Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide and Mimesis. “Mimesis”: His poem “Brother” has been selected by Natasha Trethewey for the Best New Poets 2007 anthology, to be published by the University of Virginia. His chapbook, Payday Loans, has just been published in April 2007, and is available at his blog: http://jeeleong.blogspot.com/. Of this thirty-sonnet sequence on love, work and migration, organized by the month of April, Marie Howe says, “Cash in your paycheck and buy this book.”

Valentine to Volume

More than a point in time, more than a line
from first to second date, more than a plane
of three coordinates –  the groin, the brain,
the heart beating the amplitude of sine;

but less, much less, than the amassed incline,
the spike of rock, the muttering hoofs on plain,
on hatless scalps the drumming of the rain,
less than the density of years’ design

measures your body, after we have played,
not by the glistening mesh of pubic hair,
nor the mechanical springhook of knee,
not on the golden scales of shoulderblades,
but in the bathtub of my body, where
displaced water makes a discovery.

Lachine Canal, Montreal

To China through the northwest corridor,
through blasted passages, ice-crusted tides,
     to reach the dragon-guarded shore,
the argosy of afternoon light rides

and disappears. Upriver, the fur trade
boomed, and busted land agreements reached
     by bog trappers and royal maids
whose children pedal down in boats and, beached,

sleep singly or in twos. In my head, grass,
green toothpicks, pricks the back of my eyelids
     to picture this carnal bypass
aslant the clenched black rocks spitting rapids.

Bright Admiral, my expeditious force,
command this rented tandem kayak, share
     an hour of my eunuch course,
unscroll us through white arches of the air.

from Fire Island

7. Fire Island

It came to me days after my return
          from the island,
          the real ending,
the resolution of this brief resort
to old symbols, experience, of a sort,
and, most of all, memory’s cold, calm burn.

Staring into memory’s eyes, I saw
          the Atlantic,       
          then the island,
and on a towel small as a handkerchief
my hollow body sleep, no joy, no grief
like a swan’s wingbone tossed up on the shore.

The beach, burning up the air, was empty,
          sucked me to it,
          to the body
and I entered it. I opened my eyes
and I knew something that rises and flies
from the Ocean had penetrated me.

I am no small matter. There is an ease
          in a gold helm,
          with a gold shield,
that tells me I’m born to overthrow gods,
born to whistle till night comes and the cold
land gives up its ghost like a steady breeze.

from Talk About New York

3. Daylilies

… I prefer to absorb whatever I see, take in the sights. It’s like if I talk, I’m afraid I will lose
whatever I am trying to keep in my heart.

There was a Chinese garden in the garden of
my memory: paper lanterns flying to the moon-
shaped entrance to an artificial, green lagoon
reflecting the pagodas and lotuses above.

Perhaps I fell in the lake after you said you cried
on seeing Hangchow’s bridges span its wide canals.
Perhaps a Chinese garden forms in all locales
where past and present, hurrying to meet, collide.

Perhaps. The fact sticks it to me that I was wrong.
Also mistook your hotel’s name, Pennsylvania,
for my Peninsula, my metropolismania
programmed to build a city where I may belong.

But you were staying in Penn’s Woods, and in the Bronx
we strolled through local forest the geography
teacher in you explained when asked – canopy,
understory and floor – , then glimpsed two quick chipmunks

scuttling into the shrubs. Cheeky reminder that
we weren’t home climbing Bukit Timah, leading the way
for students, playing parents for less than a day,
recognizing the will of the brownnose or brat.

You paused, and read from a botanical park sign:
that tree, a pine-like species, was deciduous –
a fact that contradicted the world known to us
who thought that every conifer was evergreen.

We walked on, slightly changed, around the real estate
camouflaged by daylily and rose gardens. Dazed
by the noon sun to silence, we walked on, amazed,
before our bodies caught up with us at the gate.

Jane Kim works at the Museum of Contemporary Art and is inspired by paintings, ceramics and music – a lot of which figures in her poetry. This is her first time published. Jane studied a B.A. Communications at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Mother’s Prose

I’m deft to hold her head and pluck
those grey hairs, to deceive people into thinking she’s young and
take endless care in finding more wires amongst the black,
to find the talking points over the past 24 years and remember that when
her mother was here, she was hit across the face.

Is this how we do things (?) move to different
countries and have a kid Aunt
receive her spirit – a warm feeling that died to meet her husband at
death bed. I still don’t know what no one
wants to say about their parents and some day, she won’t
be around to give in to a book.

I’ve found her youth written blue
in a puzzle box comprising of 1000 pieces and I think she feels
the truth in my face. She’ll knit matching jumpers though hers
will always have a trim & mine kept simple to highlight skin.

The Ocean will be a Desert

I talked across the table
to her best face, with glasses &
velvet blazer – she’s got so many of those, but this time
it’s political.

I tell her I’m scared because I know
she’d be a lot worse in my seat.
She’s one of those

comforted by risks others take.
It takes a human
then, not less, to fight against guilt. So it’s two rights:

the first being stability
& the next, the need to live a chance life.

What time is it?

For the next lunch, whoever owes a soup dish or sandwich, I’ll
tell her about my father who never turns on or off a light. Would much
prefer to sit in a dark house with the soccer and instant coffee.

And then there was the strange little dog, given to us.
Died in the yard
on my mother’s birthday. I found her curled

over the drain and felt the rabbit fur scarf wrapped around my neck. Those eyes

weren’t shut, I backed into the house.

We went to dinner very quiet, at a Chinese restaurant and ate a lot.
For my mother’s 45th.

Dave Murray, 44 yrs old. Still studying (Masters at Newcastle Uni) between full-time work as a Public Servant. Married to Michelle. Two children:  Joe, 24; Shani, 11. Two Russian Blue cats. Likes reading Shakespeare for the words, gardening, drinking beer on Fridays and  supporting The Sydney Swans. Dreams of surfing the North Coast one last time. 

from "The Passenger"

The photos are mostly from my mother’s side: cousins, a great-grandmother, aunts, uncles with half-remembered names grouped in backyards or on “days out” at the beach. The eyes have a trapped-animal-gaze, caught in that moment freezing out death. Some of the faces are beautiful, some contorted from squinting against the sunlight. I look for inherited noses or lips, any gesture connecting the silence of ancestry – but find black & white uneventfulness rather than any dark secrets: labourers, compositors, housewives, nurses, teachers. Teetotallers or drunkards, prone to underachieving. All British, all intimate with depression and wars. The great-grandfather and wife in a Tasmanian portrait after the ship from Ireland in 1802; he was a shoe-maker. His face is severe. Victorian. His grandson (Mum’s Dad) followed the Newspaper trade to Newcastle after returning from French trenches dragging a six-pack Catholic family and a body (like so many) restitched and recycled in a front-line field hospital. He survived with medals and a belief in struggle, worked hard and gambled, a long shot in the 4th at Broadmeadow covered a cash down payment on a Blackalls Park block – a quiet Lake Macquarie backwater, protected by eternal gums, the penultimate stop on the Toronto line. The house my grandfather built sloped gently all the way to the forty-foot long jetty, that through certain angles disappeared into the still water, broken only by silver mullet flashes, confused by predators in the shallows. As these things go, it was sold after Nan carked it, the new owners replaced it with a terracotta, two-storey, mock Italian seaside villa, with uninterrupted water views.

Carolyn van Langenberg is the author of the novels fish lips, the teetotaller’s wake, blue moon and sibyl’s stories (Indra Publishing).  In 2000,  fish lips was short-listed for the David T K Wong Fellowship, East Anglia University, UK. After many years of writing prose, she has returned to poetry, recently publishing on the net and print journals like Shearsman (UK), Cordite, Aesthetica (UK), Antipodes (USA), Staples, Macau writing and Poetando. She is co-poet with  Shé Hawke of the chapbook tender muse (Picaro Press, 2007).

The Tricky Light
Coles Bay, Tasmania

i) At Freycinet National Park
unusually bathed in sunshine
how I stood on the rough path
above the still composition

–aquamarine fastness,
ochre rocks and rubble,
brown tussocks bristling up
sand like pale, crushed shells.

Time stopped where my heel sank.
When I pointed my camera,
how I clicked the shutter on beauty.
Or was it breath taken away.

ii) Home with holiday snaps
how I studied the nature pics –
white banksias  and orange moss
under whisked shadow of flight,

wingspan wide across sunned air –
then her face staring, straight
hair pinned off broad forehead,
hand shielding eyes from glare,

dressed in a calico pinny, black smock,
body wedged between rocks and grass
below the high-tide line of the cared-for shore
fetched up in conjuring gold.

Saucer
(for Leonie)

White saucer snagged in reeds
gleamed under watery green
for the slide of long-fingered curiosity
to fit with story and cup.

A mouthful of sky empty of nothing,
it leads an unremarkable life,
no name to lose in riversand,
no dream to hold in mud.

Vanished for years without a word,
the flooding currents of the river
sank unwritten history
at the bend near the big red house

where the date palm widened midday shade
and pink begonias flushed the lawn, the favoured spot
for the clean-up blitz when orange flames licked
waste paper, empty tins, cracked saucers.

Dumped, eventually, in the back of a boat
with scavenged things, it found
a mismatched cup, but no cloth spread
over the roots of  a sprawling tree,

no table set for afternoon tea.
An oar knocked silence. The saucer trembled.
A cow with its tail frisked flies from its back.
And a spoonful of sunshine slipped upstream.

Brenda Saunders is a Sydney writer and artist. She is a member of the Poets Union NSW and the Round Table Poets. As an urban Aboriginal artist and activist she is also a member of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative. Her poetry and articles have been published in journals like Thylazine and Poetrix as well as being broadcast on ABC Radio National. Brenda was selected for The Red Room Company’s Poetry Crimes, and more recently for Poetry Without Borders ( National Poetry Week 2007).

Dark Secrets

Truth can spill out
with little hooks
of questions,

caught in photos
stuffed at the back
of a drawer.

Families of black people
camping in tents
faded to sepia tints.

A loving couple
one white, one dark
uneasy in a boat on a lake.

And the negatives
give nothing away.

Vanished frames of secret lives
pale squares on wallpaper
whisper denial.

In the silence of the old house
my fingers leave traces
in the film of dust.

Untitled

Dark hands
beat the silence.
Curled tight they hold
the anxious moment,
let others slip by.

Years of blackness
spread across the palms
– rivers dispossessed,
tributaries
going nowhere.

Time runs out
with the present fear,
a lifeline held
in metal cuffs
caught at the wrist.

Black-out

‘Sista girl    need money    to get home    Native title
case   ‘Big time!’   she raps, edgy.

Some story.

She’s young, black and living in the city:

‘Gimme a dolla
Pay the Rent
whitey guilt
easy street’

Up in court, on the run. Stealing stuff,
could be.

‘This is a refuge’ I say, ‘OK? For Koori women at risk
Rape and violence, you know.’

          – RIGHTS FOR WOMEN  pinned to the wall,
          a poster men don’t read,
          (after the rage he’s blotto on the bed.
          She plays dead.)

I give her money, refer her on.

Now I hear she’s working
on the Block,

tradin’ for cuz
speedy in the fast lane:
Live for the day.

Locked in jail,
singin’ up country.
Dreamin’s free

… cuz: cousin, friend, singin’ up country: remembering tribal land

Margaret Bradstock is a Sydney poet, editor and critic. She is an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of NSW, a long-term committee member of Poets Union and co-editor of Five Bells. She has published four collections of poetry, the most recent of which are The Pomelo Tree (Ginninderra, 2001), which won the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry, and Coast (Ginninderra, 2005). She has also won Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson awards. Margaret was Asialink Writer-in-residence at Peking University, Beijing, in 2003.

The Butterfly Effect

(after Decompose, by Gaye Chapman)
‘Is the moon not there unless I can see it?’
                                                       – Einstein

Back home, but never back,
     exploding like ectoplasm
across the empty rooms,
     the decomposed gardens.

Old responsibilities, seasons
     rise up, numinous
as Christmas ghosts, this space
     that once took us in.

For the cabbage nymph, or neophyte,
     it’s chaos theory.
Dust on the snooker balls
     might change

the moment of collision,
     the dense stars wheeling
in the firmament,
     or the response.

In Albert Brown Park

The night-stroked suburbs,
      flare of occasional street lights
            holding us in shadow,

and drought-starved gardens.
      Downhill, past the Alsatian
            revving up behind meshed wire

patrolling his square of concrete,
      past the corner park, more
             strip of green than park.

On the signpost
      something hunches
            (frogmouth or nightjar),

a soft churring
      shaping its gentle breath.
            We douse torches, so close

I might have touched it,
     flight-feathers pinned,
            waiting for prey.

Light plane over Sydney Cove
(after Brett Squires)

Crossing the Blue Mountains
                        soon after dawn

the air like torn canvas
you stretch the limits of reflected light
promontories reaching out
                        the Harbour glimmering.

Those Dubbo mornings
flying back from Emergency
the nightshift routine
of work, sleep, eat, repeat . . .
         broken and restless for harbours.

Cupping the city
in the curve of your hands
you photograph the moment
                 the propeller’s beat.

Heng Siok Tian has published three collections: Crossing the Chopsticks and Other Poems (1993)My City, My Canvas (1999) and, Contouring, (2004). She has been published in Harvest International (2006/2007), Idea to Ideal (2004), Love Gathers All: A Philippines-Singapore Anthology of Love Poems (2002), No Other City: An Anthology of Urban Poetry (2000), More Than Half the Sky (1998), Journeys: Words, Home and Nation (1995), The Calling of the Kindred (1993), Singapore: Places, Poems, Paintings (1992), New Voices in Southeast Asia (1991) and Words for the 25^th (1990). One of her short stories has been translated into Italian for a collection of Singapore short stories published by Isbn Edizioni (2005). Her short play, The Lift, staged in 1991, was selected to be read at the Third International Women Playwrights’ Conference in Adelaide in 1994. Siok Tian holds a Master of Arts in Literature from the National University of Singapore and a Master of Science in Information Studies from the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. In 2000, she attended the Iowa  International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, USA on a National Arts Council Fellowship.

Sayang Airwell 

Airwell
in the centre of a baba home
shows me
a mosaic of blue.

Like a pre-hologram,
glimpsing an early sky:

I see amahs in samfoos
in their time and space
squatted here,
washing, working within the marbled tiles,
for big master and mistress who slept above,
for little masters they would sayang and love..

Where was their half of the sky?
next to babas and nonyas twirling, whirling with a gramophone in an upstairs dance studio
which became the play den of fruit bats when owners upgraded,
now
layered with droppings, so decomposed they become
earth.

To first lose the turquoise of mosaic-blue, then the shapes of carved zodiac animals,
to leave them with the wings of bats,

to touch again these losses
as I linger on the airwell,
so sayang,
sayang.

Carnivalesque

My noise won’t stop.
Elephants howl for no reason
I could not get
my clown-act right
and the master trainer
threatens to whip me.
I fear so much
I wish so hard
he begins to change from pumpkin to marsh-mellow

I stop believing I have a wand
to magick away
unpleasantries
baking them into cup cakes
which I serve my audiences,
as they reach for them,
the cakes become bubbles,
they become angry at my alleged deceit.

Did I ask
to cruise into midnight
to meander into side-alleys,
to be led
into labyrinths
where cobwebs become
fishing hooks
that sink into dry flesh,
shooting stars
cannon balls
running through my head
lines of a chair
become dancing skeletons
that slip near to me?

I lost my posture as a chimpanzee,
broke my brittle back with stilettos,
rectify with surgery, pilates, yoga…
only to find myself
fetal-like in bed,
licking words off the edges
cursing Caliban-fashion
the knowledge of names.

Gareth Sion Jenkins: writer, performer and digital media artist. Gareth currently teaches creative writing at the University of Newcastle, the University of Technology Sydney, and the University of Wollongong where he is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Creative Arts. His theoretical work focuses on art-makers who have experienced schizophrenia and he has presented his research in Australia, Europe and the U.S.A. Gareth’s creative work explores poetry, prose, digital media and performance. He has performed and been published in Australia and internationally.

Corfu

Swallows loudly in ancient architraves wake me
diving onto cobbled stones washed each morning.

The motion of my mind towards you,
lips bent and feeling no thing, no thing
finds me.
Swallows loudly.

I remember every dream in which you sing,
your voice a hedged rustling;
aural snow drifting into the Pyrenees rift,
your breath moves me breathing –
breathe,
breathe me in.

I remember every dream in which you say:
“My heart is four chambers singing your name.”

Come stand with in me.
Watch the morning light bright with Swallow’s wings uncoiling.

Premonitions

I looked for you on the subway and in Washington Square;
thought I saw you wandering through Central Park
as the light fell into the ice.

In Brooklyn there were rumours of your movements
spoken at the edges of basketball courts,
amid the crumble of brownstones.

I waited for days outside Printed Matter at 195 10th Avenue,
I was sure you would come and read their hand-made books.

Descending into Tahir Vintage Clothing Boutique at 412 & 9th St
I thought at last I had found you
chatting with the warm-smiling creature behind the counter.
You turned and morphed, striding away into another life,
leaving me seduced by a loosely-woven scarf.

“Premonitions,” said the psychic at 1091 2nd Avenue,
her ringed finger coiling the curtain.
I listened to the passage of feet on the pavement outside,
hearing you again and again stop to check your watch, straighten your hat.

I have left my breath for you in Manhattan’s subterranean steam,
my fingerprints in the American Folk Art Museum,
my footprints in the tangled subway,
my laughter in the budding Central Park trees.

Skin Drink Rain

I ask her if she minds me smoking, holding before me a packet of rolling tobacco
as explanation. She holds up her own and as the carriage blunders the length of Spain
we fill the air with smoke. It soars forth between lips parted as if to speak,
though silence reigns;
clouds of silence fill the air, more convincing of a union than any words could be.

She runs out of paper and I lend her. Each time I set out to smoke I offer,
each time watching her hand as it reaches over,
veins rearing up under her skin.

Morning comes with mountains, waking me from an unknown sleep.
The wind is back, drawing dead leaves from trees.
Rain, hard against the metal roof, blurs and magnifies the world.
After the changeless weather of near Sahara, upper Africa – this blessing,
the air is laced with ice.
I take off my shirt and press my chest against the cool of the glass,
hang my head out of the window,
                                    let my skin       drink           rain.

She sleeps, immersed in a pool of dreams. “Come in the water’s beautiful,” she says
without moving her lips.

I wake later and she is gone.
Not even the depression of her weight marks the spot where she sat.
I run out of paper and curse her for hours, trying to read –
                                     trying to ignore the tapping of my foot,
                                     voice in my mind, restless tight rasping
                                     demanding to be fed.

Stephen Oliver’s latest collection of poetry is titled, Either Side The Horizon, Titus Books, Auckland / Sydney, 2005. His next collection titled, Harmonic is forthcoming from IP Interactive Publications, Brisbane, in 2008. IP is to release his CD recording of poems read by the author, to music composed by Matt Ottley, November, 2007. The CD is titled: KING HIT Selected Readings. 

An Avenue To The Sea

Knowledge comes by indirect paths,
found addresses, by moonlight’s note left on the

back doorstep, molecular puzzle

of pigeons (brown and white potsherd)
in the high air at mid-day over this raucous town.

By panels of light cantilevered off cloud
that signal the departure of angels to earthly realms.

City of property investors, real estate mania.
City of rack renters and home renovators.

City of bladed light and blue-grey harbour.
City of broken contracts and sybaritic compulsion.

City of up-front rip-offs and council rorts.
City of jasmine and the eternal summer party.

City of shimmer dreams-sans-memory.

The most famous of living poets remain anonymous
and unrecognized in foreign towns,
                   ghosts before their time.

An avenue of artists, philosophers, poets, musicians
leads from the city square out through suburbs,

past terra cotta, yellow, and liver-brick villas –
(smoke twists through pine and laurel grove)

an avenue wide enough for a phalanx of soldiers
or two tanks grazing side by side.

Flags of spiritual battles won and lost adorn poles
set at intervals, diminishing
                     whitely into distance,

where it is observed that a central point at the close
of the avenue, bright as diamonds streaming in

the light, (barely larger than your pupil) is the
sea burning in its cauldron of watery fragmentation.

For Night To Roll Its Camber Over

The ruddy glare,
         yellow, blurs its palette in rain,
at the boundaries of vision

flaring to white, blindingly, passes on (reassuringly)
          into darkness, a rubbery hiss.

August is the windiest month,
west, sou’ westerlies rattle the Sydney basin.

Light beams search down through underside
of cloud where planes lower unwaveringly toward

          North East, South West runways.

A machine screams slowly backwards over rooftops
(a sound that moves away-and-toward)

pushing space apart, seemingly swallowing itself.

Reverberations directly overhead wrap around
the room you’re in and rooming under

            for night to roll its camber over.

Tammy Ho Lai-ming, aka Sighming, is a Hong Kong-born and -based writer. She is the editor of HKU Writing: An Anthology (March, 2006) and a co-editor of Word Salad Poetry Magazine. Tammy’s creative works appear or are forthcoming in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Macao, New Zealand, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, USA, and Great Britain. More at www.sighming.com.

In This Massive Hallway

In this massive hallway the mahogany
reception desk is guarded by a woman of
mixed ancestry. The owner of a well-trimmed
moustache, an old man, told me he
has been hanging out there for more than five years:
too long, indeed, too long for his original to wait,
and he died of lung cancer. The old man has five
poems: three on canoeing, two
on the Canadian poet-cum-singer Leonard Cohen.
I am newly sent to this New York journal armed
with three petite prose poems: one on fishing,
two on post-postcolonial Hong Kong. My original,
naive and expectation-laden, is sending numerous mes
to different magazines, e-zines and whatnot. Us –
all of her invisible outer doppelgängers –
carry her manuscripts and wait, sometimes for days,
sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, for
responses from editors. We haunt waiting rooms,
store rooms, nearly-empty rooms, forgotten rooms.

(This poem appeared in a different form in 21 Stars)

In The Summit Of Greying Snow

A poet died in the summit of greying snow.
He wrote about the realistic unordinary angst
of ordinary families, or vice versa,
and the human’s subconscious wish to be short-lived,
fast-mated insect (no mid-life
crises). Some envious poets thought aloud
to each other: oh it was wonderful to die
in the sacred cold, don’t you think? The icy weather
effortlessly formed a natural tomb for the sealed
and healed spirit. Other poets took up the task
to console the poet’s wife: her cream marble face
scarred with two non-parallel one-way tear tracks.
At the funeral, the wife asked the poets
to recite a poem of her husband’s – any poem
from any period of his writing career would do,
she said. Even the insect poems, she added.
The request drained away all sounds in the hall
in which the coffin was appropriately centred.
No one present, except the wife, had read
the poet’s poetry, and they called themselves
members of the same community of practice.

They spent too much time complaining at meetings
about the shrinking of the reading public
in the junk-layered village and being jealous
about other more successful writers –
mortal enemies.

Reid Mitchell lives in New Orleans.  Following Hurricane Katrina, he refugeed one crucial year in Hong Kong.  There he and a Hong Kong poet began work on a series of dialogues, some of which have been published in Admit2, Barrow Street, Caffeine Destiny. Poetry Monthly Magazine, and Poetry Superhighway. [http://www.sighming.com/dialogue]  Mitchell has published some short stories as well as the novel  A Man Under Authority.  He has also published several books on nonfiction.

1. Sanctuary

Two and two-thirds red columns, roofless
House left unfinished?
Mansion in ruins?

2. Singapore River
(An answer to Mingh)

A word misconstrued
does not necessarily lose
all value

a path obscured
by leaves and words
may lead somewhere in the end

two people lost
in dark woods
may wander in circles

two lifetimes.

3. When I Imagine Us

When I imagine us
I see you, golden in Italy,
your small face peeking through Umbrian green, Tuscan dust, Sienna sienna, as
in an excited way, excitable you run ahead, one finger pointing.

Didn’t we walk, hot and dry, between blood orange and olive?

Didn’t we look down on the sea blind Homer promised would be wine-dark,
and the beach that slaughtered Athens,
and where we nonetheless smiled and kissed?

You watched me eat artichokes with garlic.
We strolled from ghetto to Pantheon,
past the Mandarin restaurant
and you announced you would kiss no more foul foreign mouths?

No, sad no.

The South China Sea does not lap Sicily
and those fish will not swim to Hong Kong to be sold in Causeway Bay.

And you? You were fighting with your sisters, washing your hair on the street,
finding out that words, even more than boys, could be playthings.

I was by myself, with passport, poetry I forget, and faint, unquenchable hope.

But when I imagine you,
I see us in Italy, between orange and olive,
your head glistening, your feet dusty.
You run with index finger pointing toward a miracle I cannot yet see
just ahead.

4. Ghost Bodies

Seducing a woman twelve time zones ahead
is like bringing a ghost to bed:
a nice thing to write about

I do not want your body without your mind
nor your mind without your body.
But seeing I may have the attention of one

I would like to swap briefly for one night,
seven years,
or most likely one long sunny afternoon
spent in Singapore or other southern port

“Physical intimacy?” you say.

I don’t want an abstraction.

That patch of dry skin,
the crooked toe,
the ears that don’t quite match,
your breath gone sour, hair hot with sweat.

I want to touch you all the places you hope that men don’t notice

in Saigon, Singapore or some other southern port
one long muggy afternoon when sweat refuses to dry.

I want your body,
perfect in its imperfection.

5. In Praise Of Youth

Show her no mercy,
younger children.
She showed no mercy to us

calling this love dry
and another fat.
Pointing out teeth that have yellowed
worse than old photographs.

Let her be humbled before she turns thirty
by teenage girls gawking on the escalators at Kowloon.

Let them say, “What does she mean by wearing that?”
as she passes down with bare midriff and blue velvet cap.

Let young girls’ eyes be her only mirrors.  

Arlene Ang lives in Spinea, Italy. She is the recipient of The 2006 Frogmore Poetry Prize (UK) and the author of The Desecration of Doves (iUniverse Inc. 2005) She serves as a poetry editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. Her chapbook, “Secret Love Poems” is available from Rubicon Press. More of her writing may be viewed at www.leafscape.org.

Self-Portrait with Umbrella

I am one-third umbrella.
The fakir in my left eye (detail) is a glass
of Bordeaux. Pins and needles
chatter the backwoods.
Maisie’s hands cut my hair.
I wear it like a fishnet. She changes
the appearance of everyone
she meets. Before we make love
I throw up in the bathroom. My necktie
glistens a lunch break.
Under the scissors, my smile
swells a tsunami. I am unemployed
again. I am with the woman
I love. When I grow up,
I tell her, I will be a firefighter.

A Warning about Attachments

You’d think, at first, it’s Ebola.
Or something white that comes through the mail.
A bridal shoe. A bridal cake. The bride—
blindfolded and schmucky (whole package),
or laced with small ransom letters (in parts).
By the time you’d have realized
something’s not quite right, it’s in.
A postal box can swell like your stubbed toe.
And then, you’d admit needing assistance.
The yellow pages are fully infected: Looking for
cheap thread? Come to Marley’s
for a good time. Your pipes are our business.
Turn tables at low, low prices.
You’d think, afterwards, it’s a glitch:
the anti-virus fouled up the way you fouled up
your first date with ketchup. And no, you’d think, no
way. It hasn’t got anything
to do with sex. Length issues, perhaps.
Mostly, spam. Slick girls and gonorrhea in a row.

Wu Jin Contemplates the Tattoo on a Soft Cheek

The medicine pedlar knows
her eyes are veined with red. It is almost
noon. The price on the ointment
for deep burns hangs crooked,
like bamboo in her stepfather’s hands.

She was exiled to Zhangchou
after stealing ten ounces of gold.
When her face was branded,
she didn’t cry. Eventually, she escaped.

The mark on her cheek allows her
favors from passersby. For weeks the wife
of a rich merchant dressed her in silks,
fed her spittle and fish lips from a bowl.

She learned to slip a dagger
from of her sleeve, aim at throats
without regret, share the intimacy
of death from other people’s eye.

Today he offers a salve for pains
that rot through the bone. He asks her
keep one for herself; she walks away.
Tomorrow she will be back, perhaps her fist
opening to take something for herself.

Papa Osmubal writes from Macau, South China. His works, visual and literary, have appeared in various publications, hardcopy and online. He is contributing writer to Chick Flicks, OOV (Our Own Voice), eK! (Electronic Kabalen), and others. He has work archived in University of Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry.

An Exchange With An American Animal Rights Advocate

In the Philippines, I told my friend,
we feed dogs with swill of fish bones
and rice swimming in plain water.
It is notoriously tasteless,
salt just does the job.
When they are big enough
we stew them with soy sauce and ginger.

Her face mysteriously turned red
and she suddenly rushed into the john
clutching her stomach.

(Her dogs are pampered
with delectable goodies manufactured
by underpaid, overworked Filipino workers
thriving on mere tiny fish and plain rice with salt.)

When she came back out
we were no longer friends:
she flushed our friendship down the gutters
along with her vomits.

In Giza

There is nothing here, absolutely nothing
only a handful of camels and pyramids and sea of dust.

Whoever created these was a real genius, he says.
I nod my head in measured manner.

I am looking at the pyramids.
He is looking at the camel humps.

Rainy Days

The floor is creaking.
It is mom again
emptying those buckets.

I cannot sleep.
Others count the perennial sheep,
I count raindrops dripping in buckets.

The Florist at Hong Kai Si (Red Market) Macau

The inviting smell of food from nearby restaurants
is not enough to suppress the smell of her flowers.

The clothes vendor looks at the flowers
then turns to look at the clothes he sells: what is in his mind?

The florist side-glimpses at a passersby,
crooning a song.

She momentarily interrupts her croon
to pick up the newspaper.

She folds the newspaper to the size of a book
and bashes the flies hovering around.

After putting the newspaper back down, she stares at a bee
that busily does what bees do to flowers.

Listening to the bee’s buzz, she covers her mouth with her palm,
then yawns.

Fragment

Sunday.
And everyone is wearing their haloes.

Vivienne Glance’s poetry and short stories have appeared in journals (incl. indigo, Blue Dog), anthologies (incl. The Weighing of the Heart, Open Boat Barbed Wire Sky, Friday’s Page) and online (Poems Against War 2003) and other publications and she’s won prizes and a commendation in competitions (C J Dennis Literary Award, Split Ink, Southern Cross Literary Award). She is currently working on her first collection of poetry. She runs a performance workshop for writers and was a finalist in the 2007 National Poetry Slam. Her writing for theatre has been performed in Perth, Sydney, Seattle USA, London and Edinburgh UK, and she is a professional actor and theatre director.

Spectrum

There is no real difference between dark and light
though I measure memory and beauty by shades
and love by the umbra of what you said.

Your spectrum ranges far beyond my sight
and as the palette of this landscape fades
I am left with burning visions of infra red.

But still my breath stops suddenly when i see
a crow’s laborious ebony above my head
or water sparkling under broadleaves shade
the gash of black dissecting sterile white –

you asleep upon my bed.

first appeared in Indigo, August 2007

Indian Tea

On tea clinging mountains
my father lived with green
waves filling his vision
monsoon washing his skin

He saw colour-draped women clip verdant tips –
bitter scent seep into brown skin. He stood by  fresh
green spread to ferment and succumb to slippery black

Furnace-breath-dried leaves stuffed
weighed, labeled  in coarse sacks –
a pungent harvest stacked
awaiting English tables

My father inhabited this place between coast
and plain – its contours bowed like the backs of women
and colonised by tea. Born into this place but

serving another place –
foreign stock grafted on
native root belonging

to neither

Bonny Cassidy is completing a PhD thesis on the poetry of Jennifer Rankin and Jennifer Maiden at University of Sydney. Her poetry has been published in various journals and anthologies, and her first libretto will be performed as an opera in June. In 2008 Bonny will be undertaking a residency in Japan supported by AsiaLink and the Malcolm Robertson Foundation. Bonny co-edited The Salon Anthology: New Writing + Art (Sydney: non-generic, 2007) and works as Chief Researcher for The Red Room Company.

The mourner

His right foot drags an affected waltz
as if the way back lingers behind –
to a time of still
before he were wiser –
a time that comes after
death, after knowledge.
His legs snap shut. Only
the mules fill the cone of dust
before the next heave forward.
They bungle right through it on the double,
and he imagines animals alone
must own that frosting time,
always between one step and another.

Weight
For Mo Jingjing

A punching bag rises
in the breeze before rain. Above it,
waving, thumbs of mango buds.
She shows me how to pinch
egg wrappers into goldfish;
warm and yellow corners
of mushroom jostling, plashed with flour
to grow clear and tight in soup.
A small and dusty crowd gathers on the tabletop –
leaning one another in stretchy fatigue, pleated tails
skirting the fingerbowl.

The radio jabbers into the trees.
I wonder how many mangoes
will grip the end of winter;
and whether she’ll be here to slice them,
or back in the thick of Hunan, deaf
to that blushing drop of night fruit.
We’ve been hushed by our silent, signing work.
Dumplings bob through plain, hot water
as the storm clouds twist and slow.

Greg McLaren is a Sydney poet and critic. His books are Everything falls in (Vagabond, 2000), Darkness disguised (Sidewalk, 2002) and The Kurri Kurri Book of the Dead (Puncher & Wattmann, 2007). Greg is presently co-editing a collection of essays on Australian poetry, and is poetry editor at Puncher & Wattmann.

Transit Lounge

On the last day
I leave work hours early
and bus in to meet you by the quay,
you nearly drunk
an hour before you reach the ferry

Past the terror-proof windows
everything is busy-ness,
flight preparations are tinted
a pale yellow that in some light    
might seem orange        

I wander through the fluorescent mall
of the airport, wait thirty minutes
for a train and dawdle
in the bookshop underground
until a friend rings my mobile

At cruising altitude
you’re sheeting across the south east
of the continent just short
of the speed of sound
My bus slopes back up Parramatta Road

Your mother the commercial artist
greets you past the gates
with something between coldness
and expectation, and with news
of her latest exploits on e-bay

Somewhere, I’m not sure,
I’ve kept the train ticket,
that emblem of love,
its coded magnetic strip past expiry,
peeling from the backing like a mirror

Retail Therapy

        for R.B.

With a face like a Castlecrag property deed,
and the spruiker voice you got from your brother,
you interrogate clients and staff alike:
Do you like the new fit-out?, and What
do you think of the chandelier? As if you had

a North Shore mortgage on taste, judgement
or – get this – delicate tact. After the half-
a-mill reno: the cut-back in casuals’ hours.
After the million dollar fit-out in Melbourne:
the nervous house-sale, the knuckle-size mention

in the weekend rag, and, always, the lack even of an
ironic self-awareness. The mission statement is riddled
with typos, and reads like a hippy business plan.
You want to target “the high-end literary market,
or even just general readers”, and to hose them

with “Paris Café Jazz”, that iconic genre. You hire doctors
and pay them peanuts: we fart in your car.
The in-store music? A burnt CD you paid money for,
and could never sell: Roberta Flack, singing “The first time
ever I saw your face”, followed by James Reyne, “Fall of Rome”.

Wangi

Seen from the car, a blurred barcode
of trees against the background of the lake
The lake is a fuzz of smoke. The heavy clang
of cicadas engulfs us, crashing through

the bush and cramming the thin black road
with noise. The car’s metal body keeps out
nothing; heat and noise seep and drip like sweat
on cracked vinyl. Our parents are two heads

bobbing, neither wanting this exchange
of one place for another. They become
bored children again, visiting her mother.

The grey-green racket rolls, sea-sick
in waves as we slide up and down hills.
I think for a moment I ought to be in it.

Ian Irvine (also writing as Ian Hobson) is an Australian-based poet, writer and academic. His work has featured in many publications, both in Australian and overseas, and his poetry has appeared in two national anthologies. He is the author of three books and currently coordinates the Writing and Editing program at BRIT, Bendigo. He has also taught social theory and history at La Trobe University (Bendigo) and in 1999 was awarded his PhD for work on chronic ennui in European literature, philosophy and psychology. He lives with his partner, Sue, and their children on a bush block not far from Bendigo. His poem “If You Eat a Pomegranate” is dedicated to our feature poet Thanh Thao.

Soft Breeze of a Temporal Implosion

After the bus trip:
        light-green peaks, rice
        plateaus and quiet water
        buffalo.

As good a place as any  
        to reconstruct the countries
of the past.

And  there is nothing generalist
        about the H’mong children
        dancing the narrow street below,
or
the German tourists, pleasantly
        drunk on the hotel’s upper
                    floor.

We’re sandwiched,
as always,
        between the present
and the impalpability of memory –
I muse:
        Indonesia 1994:
        3,300 rupee to the dollar.
        Vietnam 2007:
        16,000 dong to the dollar.
This impulse to quantify comforts
                    the illusion of time
        as something solid.

Like the Dao coin I wear as
        a necklace, the seller said ‘1820, Sir.’
Its shape is strange, like
        a man without arms, ‘an ancient
        unit of exchange’ before the
        coming of the French.
The guide whispered:
        ‘A fake.’ But the shape
and the smooth-rust brown surface,
        are all that matter to me
        at four dollars US.

And the practicalities of spirit –
those women at the pagoda.
At the entrance –
        dark rocks and lush
        miniature trees.
Inside –
        incense-drenched fruit,
        a giant cauldron-urn, and
just above the entrance –
        multicoloured lanterns.

They loaded us up with free fruit
        and hugged our children.

Such calmness
        like the men in the white-domed mosques of Java –
        bowing, praying whilst
out on the street,
        similar densities of
        do-it-yourself technology.

I was thirty then, musical, reciprocating
        love – and we’re still together
walking the town of Sapa,
negotiating maps, as always
                   will to will,
appreciating the flower-banked
lake, exchanging gifts, raving
        about the view, caressing  
        and enjoying the local food.

A pleasant time-warp, like a lost map
        to an old intensity of being
Making love in a grass hut in
central Sumatra – her soft
        tanned skin, our
       mutual freedom.

And then the day with icing:
as if outside time, and
        abnegating the difficulties
        of culture shock,
our daughter
        her first poem.

Hospital Cave and the Superpower

The old man is 76 years old
        still wears the khaki hat and shirt
        of the North Vietnamese army.

He lives less than a kilometre
        from the place that defined
        his life. He’s
fit and stout and funny not at all

like the devil promised us by LBJ. Carries a
       flashlight and knows
       every inch of this
underground labyrinth.

During the war hundreds of people –
        soldiers, surgeons and farmers –
took shelter in this cave. These days
it’s deserted, just damp concrete
        floors and walls beneath
        an eroded lime-rock ceiling.

When the Americans bombed and
        bombed the island the locals
        would crowd in here:
what
did it feel like
        waiting for the superpower?

He shows us the ‘reception’
        the doctors’ sleeping quarters
the medical rooms proper to the left and
right of a long corridor, until we arrive
at the ‘lunch-room’. Here
he drops his flashlight, introduces
        himself again in Vietnamese
and asks (commands) us to sing
        “Vietnam-Ho Chi Minh”
        “Vietnam-Ho Chi Minh”

He lets me record the performance
        and suddenly
all the war before me, cold chills.
        Tonnes and tonnes of bombs
Agent Orange, vast networks of tunnels
        in the South, the Tet Offensive, the
        fall of Saigon.

I’ve met some Aussie Vets
seen them join the Anzac day throng
still tentative-as young boys
        they met their reality match
        in quiet Vietnamese determined to
        end colonialism once and for all.

Here, just 70 miles from the Chinese border,
       I begin to understand.

The digital video is blurry in the cave
        (all sorts of shadows)
as the tourists sing and clap (nervously) the echoes
        are immense, like 1969, like 200 people
        singing, like injured farmers, like jets
prowling the paradise skies – and before us
        this old soldier
        like a phantom,
38 years among ghosts.

If You Eat a Pomegranate

For Thanh Thao

If, after eating a pomegranate underground,
        you manage to return to the surface
it is said  that you will have acquired
         the ability to see ghosts.

Perhaps I’ve consumed such a fruit
by accident. Things have been strange
for over a month now – began with my
memories of that sunrise crossing
the DMZ:
        The sun coming up
        and all those people on the roads
        in the rice paddies, or hanging around
        the gravestones or houses.

I’m  no longer certain who was alive
        and who was dead. As though
another layer of memory-repressed
        at the time – has invaded
the ‘realism’ of what I
        thought I remembered.

The problem: supposing all memory
        collapses like this? What
will stop this tendency invading my
        day time consciousness?

And the train,
        as I recall it now, moving slowly,
            far too slowly
along the tracks,
        as though the dead
            had engineered some kind of
deceleration – so I could see them,
        so I could begin to hear them speak.
Though for the moment
        the protection of glass
remains.

Who knows where this is headed.

It is said that a spell three times spoken –
        especially if by the caster, the
recipient, and an unbiased intermediary –
        is certain to work.

Leaning forward across the table
he asked me something in Vietnamese:
        ‘Why do you think I continue
        to write poetry
        at my age?’

Despite clear translation
I had no answer, said:
          ‘I don’t know your work
          well enough to say.’

Eventually he replied in Vietnamese – and
after this was translated, I heard:
        ‘For those who are unable to speak’
But she wished for further clarity, said:
        ‘He says he writes for those
        who have no voice … who are
        no longer with us.’

Startled, I asked –
as though struggling to absorb the future –
        ‘For those who died – for the dead?’
She nodded, said:
        ‘Yes, for the dead.’

the table went
very quiet.

Jill Chan was born in Manila, Philippines. She migrated to New Zealand in 1994. She has two books of poetry: Becoming Someone Who Isn’t (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2007), and The Smell of Oranges (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2003). Her work has been published in Poetry New Zealand, JAAM, Trout, Takahe, Brief, Blackmail Press, Deep South, Southern Ocean Review, foam:e, MiPOesias, Tears in the Fence, Blue Fifth Review, Asia and Pacific Writers Network, and many other magazines.

Body

There was a woman who wore nothing but silences. All the men would bring their words to her, make her dream
without sleeping, next to the loudest scream. How each of them would pronounce their words like a body running
into language, full weight of vowels and purse of lips.

And in the farthest hidden corner where not even silences could exist, a rolling of thoughts into flame. A game of
never ever losing, hot rays, and runs always near enough to win. No worms, no forms of death to worship or deny.

Neither the woman nor the men went there to stay. They visited a few times a year or if they could, every second,
but couldn’t stay longer than that. Time lay down to dream in that corner.

They took from there the loud gazes, and went home with their words like a body running out of language.

Places

When we first met,
you were living
in that stone house.

Salt air, strong winds.
You stood afraid of nothing.

Is fear just a turn
towards many destinations,
fulfilling none?

I could just as well stay here
in my house of straw,
drawing near the sky,
filling the ground with feathers
of abandoned flights and starts.

Where you are,
I have no chance of following,
now that the years
have become stone,
heavy, edgy with character.

The Poet

You are always the poet
with no ending,
with an ever-present way
of continuing,
looking a little shy, perhaps,
about making too much sense
with too vast a purpose,
how we try to remember
every beginning
that dares to become another,
a suddenness
beyond quickening,
to arrive like the many shapes
it makes of appearances –
your word calling to be written.

I was born in Sydney in 1972. I currently teach English in a Loreto Sisters secondary school in Sydney. My work has appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, Eclogues (The 2007 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology), The Big Issue, Spinach 7 (online), Vegan Voice, The Drum Media, The Brag and 3D World. My poetry was highly commended in The Broadway Poetry Prize 2004 and The Inverawe Poetry Prize 2007. I am passionate about bird watching, traveling about Australia and the electro-reggae band Dreadzone. I am married and have a baby boy.

Trolley Man

For over twenty years you pushed your trolley between Sydney’s glass and chrome
with a red crash helmet protecting your imagination from having a head on with reality.
Hunched like Atlas during his nursing home years, villagers who worship rice,
you were this bitumen Bedouin who’d arrived from the far corners of abstraction,
never the Central Business District’s central business, but always mine.

Your ambiguity unhinged me; your tongue carried the weight of Bedlam’s flare; your
ubiquitous presence provided this surrogate backbone through my edgy Marist
testosterone years. Along with the Monorail’s click-clack glide-hum, Club 77’s pop arc,
the hanging whale geometry in the Australian Museum foyer, neon-smacked vegetable
boxes in Dixon Street and whispers within St. Mary’s Gothic skin, you were my Sydney.

Your origins and the contents of your trolley were the stuff of Holt’s conclusion.
The dove-hearted who fed the wandering bed cravers said you were a shipwright and a
knife-sharpener. Homeless men with ashy cigar toes and Orc profiles said your trolley
contained old letters and photos from a frozen bullet space you’d fled. To open truth, one
would have to make a point of cross-questioning the pointers of The Southern Cross.

The only certainty is that in nineteen ninety-four, you pushed your fading street-life
into the gardens between The Domain and the cool jade lapping that defines us. Amidst
weaves of lush multicultural foliage, under a sweaty scarlet sky cooled by the wing flap
of fruit bats, you sat facing The Bridge’s inverted robot-smile, shut your eyes and waited
for the long golden afternoon to cave in on you and your bright dancing secrecy.

Sixteen Pieces from the Forty Weeks of Pregnancy

On Christmas morning, after months of hollow days, you whisper, “There’s someone
who wants to meet you”.

Praline butterflies, chocolate bilbies, Iranian floss-candy; sweeter than all these Easter
gifts, the knowledge that our child blooms within its rich, dark egg.

My ear on the side of the most buoyant balloon… under nine layers of skin, the magic
mammalian swish cycle.

Off Mistral Point, in splattering skua weather, a humpback spy hops. If it were to dive
after drifting unicellular snacks, perhaps their breech baby would finally face downwards.

At the ultrasound checkup, a midwife uses her Christ-pen to find the beating bubble, and
next to it, the blackest of holes from which fragile primal light tried to escape.

For that divine moment of release, you will concentrate on peony roses opening in
spring-shine; I will recall fluid falcon flight through The Valley of The Winds.

From the neighbour who talks to The Southern Cross at four a.m., barks at laughing
children and fears visiting her letterbox, an article under our door on raising healthy
infants.

At the antenatal class, the kebab king said his wife would have to work in their restaurant
up until the birth, so they’d reserved table nine for the delivery.

Tunes by Mahler, Ravel, Sigur Ros: daily aural Valium for delaying the inevitable, acute
extremities.

In the private Royal Prince Alfred room, a melting mother cradles her hour-old twins in
the half-light of late dusk. By the bedside, her husband, in a Wallabies jersey, gives in to
the heaviness of it all.

During the Calmbirth sessions on Merrigang Street, Bowral, a merry gang of expectant
couples learned to breathe for the first time.

With her three-year-old on her lap, the Newtown back street soprano says, “Before I gave
birth for the second time I ate chilli chips, drank Cascade and went on the swings at
Enmore Park for half the day.”

How there must always be poetry within the delirium of sleeplessness.

Whilst watching Desperate Housewives, you hum private melodies and your hands move
slowly over your swelling belly, as if God conjuring Earth-stillness.

Between every layer of tiredness, the dramatic acrobatics of our weightless little
astronaut, rocketing towards his or her new sun.

This never-ending heady longing to meet our child’s midnight banshee guise and that
first ever smile that has the potency to soften extremists and inject this fearful age with
the sugar-stuff of afterlife.

Lou Smith’s poetry has been published in Wasafiri, Overland, Kunapipi, Undergrowth, Mod_Piece and various other journals and anthologies. She is currently re-tracing her maternal Grandmother’s life story – her migration from Jamaica to England to Newcastle, Australia, through narrative poetry. Lou also loves making handmade books.

Remembrance

Over fig-roots from Moreton Bay
cracks in roadways
and cicada shells dropped
crunching under soles
with a shock  
lubb-dupp lubb-dupp
of the heart

the tips of summer grass singe brown

and the cattle in Abermain grow thin to rib

curtains closed halfway
from glare off pane of glass
we squint at the world outside
our island,
red-tiled roofs, and Jacaranda trees
that have lost their leaves

the bush has burnt black, ash
falls like feathers
and green sprouts from crevices
in trunks of Banksia

after dinner we dust fritters with fine castor sugar

yellow-combed cockatoos feed on berries

you bite into pawpaw flesh
the seeds spilling
down
your neck
like strings of black pearls

Setting Sail

Sports on deck
quoits and rounders,
to prepare you for English life,
holidays at Brighton
on pebbled beaches.

and there
next to you
smoking his pipe,
his boater shading the
familiar sun,
stood Grandad
leading you
to your new home.

Columbus sailed this sea,
thinking he was in Japan,
thinking he was in Cathay,
thinking he was anywhere
but here.

And in the sea
you saw the sky,
intense, endless blue
ripples of cloud
skimming the water’s surface,
the sea, where in 1494, mermaids sang
and led sailors astray.

Staff Sergeant Butcher
posted back to London
left Jamaica with you that day,
the year 1930,
the year you married
at the Scots Church in Kingston,
the year before my mother was born
in London, England
and your mother was already in her grave.

The Sadness

It’s in the currawong’s song
dropped bark, groundfall
moist rocky clay soil.
It’s caught in corner
of the eye
between
cilia of leaf
and cicada wing.

And here it is seamed
scars,
raised white
wounds carved in
deep
and bloody

in my palm.
I hold a river stone,
my fingertip rests
in the cool hollow
of remembered  
grooves and ridges.

Maria Freij is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle where she also teaches. Her theoretical work focuses on literary representations of melancholy, place, and identity. She is also interested in translation between English, Swedish, and French, especially of poetry. Maria has presented her work in Australia and Europe and her poems have appeared and are forthcoming in journals and anthologies. Her collection, I Was Here, won the University’s Harri Jones Memorial Prize in 2007.

Kindergarten (I)

The child’s breath appears
and disappears on the window-pane.
Beyond the reflections
of the others playing catch
and the smell of orange and clove
lies the forest with its secrets.

Shadows join deeper shadows,
melt with the tree-trunks,
sweep away the toys left in the playground,
the stray mitten.

The sweet odour of sweat and wool    
blends with the sound of the ticking clock,
the voices of parents collecting their children,
the bitter taste of orange peel on fingertips.

No one notices when the child falls
through the reflection of her own eyes.

She finds herself standing
in the middle of the yard.
All is quiet;
the sky is a black bowl
over her head.

In the air,
snowflakes hang suspended
like promises.

Kindergarten (II)

This is the same spot where, last summer,
you collected tiny frogs in buckets.
Frail lives:
delicate legs and sticky eyes.
This is the same spot
where the girls shrieked in pleasure
when cold little feet touched their palms.

The boys collected more and more
until the sun set behind the pines
and the air turned cool and wet.
This is the same spot
where they sometimes found a toad
and beat it to death with a rock.

The air smells like it is about to snow.

Last year’s air is trapped in the crystals of ice
that form in lumps of moist, aerated earth.
Inside, your history shines in the sharp light.

You look inside:
see yourself walking to kindergarten in the dark,
being collected in the dark,
the soft toy that went missing in the forest,
the silence at the dinner table,
water tracing the outline of an icicle.

The flat rock burns white before you,
its surface smooth like a skull.

Spears of ice whirl through the air
as the other children throw the porous chunks
into the rock face. You, too, lift your hand.

Kindergarten (III)

Monday afternoon: playtime.
    Long johns, socks, trousers,
        shirts, sweaters, scarves,
            mittens, bonnets, jackets.

The sun has already fallen
behind the red shed; the roof’s ridge
is alight for one more minute.
Always this sense of urgency,
of having to savour the light.

Too late.
    The fire goes out;
        the drifts turn blue;
            wind blows the snow into waves.

Under heavy layers of down
the children play hide-and-seek in the half-light,
stand still in the shadows.

            When you turn your back,
            the shadows break free from their objects
            and dance over the snow like birds.

Amber

How many times has she been to this beach? When she was a child, she used to come every day. Countless times she’s walked by the water’s edge trying to find an amber bead lodged in the wrack after a stormy night. She turns the seaweed over with a stick: a cloud of sand flies, some wet feathers, bleached bones. The air fills with the scent of stale water and rotting wrack. No pearls. Every day the newspaper reports findings of large chunks of amber, with mosquitos, bugs, rainbow-coloured beetles trapped inside. The jeweller on the corner polishes the amber into art. The girl presses her face against the window but never steps inside the shop. At night, she is a spider scurrying down a tree-trunk. She cannot seem to move fast enough.The drop of resin, like a ball of lava, catches up with her. She strikes a pose.Today, the ocean is calm. She swims one hundred and eleven breaststrokes just like when she was a child. She spreads her towel, lights a cigarette.On her back in the sand, she closes her eyes. The insides of her eyelids burn like amber.

Mario Licón Cabrera (México, 1949) has lived in Sydney since 1992. His third collection of poetry, La Reverberación de la Ceniza was publshed by Mora & Cantúa Editores in 2005. He was invited to the Spring writers Festival (Sydney) in 1998 and to the Semana de la Poesía Barcelona, 1999, and to The National Poetry Week in 2006. He has translated the poetry of Dorothy Porter, Judith Beveridge, Peter Boyle, J.S. Harry, Robert Adamson, amongst other Australian poets, into Spanish.These poems are part of Yuxtas, a bilingual collection (Spanish/English), written with the assistance of a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts/Literature Board. Read Peter Boyle’s review of Juxtas in our Reviews and Essays section.                                    

                                                                                                                                                    Photographer: David Cahill

Osario

 Will these be  the 206 aristocratic bones of my father?
		R.H
                                                                                             

I
 
Rodolfo Hinostrosa speaks of his father's bones and 
   I think about yours, padre,  
   and suddenly I wanted to see them.  

Will they have survived this quarter of century 
   buried under those drastic, 
   so insolent climate changes?

The scholars in such matters say that one – or better said, 
   our bones – can survive thousands of years 
   buried in the Sahara sands.  

But you are not directly buried in the sand.  
   I don't even know what kind of coffin 
   my brothers had elected for you. 

In any case, I don't believe that you were buried 
   in a dark and fresh clay wombs' pot
   as our ancestors used to do it.  

II

Will they move. Will they change site – 
   skull, humeri and femurs?  A shoulder blade  
   on a fibula or a tíbia?  

Will they seek the trace of the once beloved bones, 
   the bones loved
   beyond the skin?  

Of what will they dream? 
   Which song they will remember?  What name 
   will they want to name – the bones –, in their darkness?  

Perhaps when it rains they are scattered? 

III

Once, as a boy, I saw the relics of some coffins 
   and in them – remains of hair 
   and clothes stuck on some bones.  

They had removed a cemetery to build a playground in its place.  
   We never played there:  
   It was so much its dryness that we all crossed  in full silence.  

IV

One night, a couple of years ago  
   I passed in front of your last shoe-repair shop, 
   that one near the now extinct creek  of your Villa de Seris.  

The doors were wide open. 
   A dark deep silence inside. And the ruins 
   of the old huge house of Los Gómez more dead than ever.  

Now I think that the ideal place for your bones would be there 
   beside the ghost-creek, near the narrow bridge where all passers-by 
   greeted you with so much respect:  Don Ventura.  
 

Tonight

Tonight  I will not read 
any of my poems.
Tonight I want only to give thanks –
thanks to Poetry and to a bunch of poets.

To Poetry herself, for having given me 
another voice,
another voice with which I can talk
to the trees and stones and birds.

I want to say thanks to the Aztec poet 
Ayocuan Cuetzpatzin for his deep knowledge 
of the human heart. 
To Saint John of the Cross
for his advice on how to make love
to my soul. 

And thanks to Dante Alligieri and Arthur Rimbaud 
for having given me such good instruction 
on how to commute through the Hades.

To poetry for giving me a pair of hands 
with which I can greet  the wind and touch
the faces of my beloved dead-ones. 

To Walt Whitman and Federico García Lorca
for the profound resonance of their cry and for
the great love the second one had for the first one.

To Vicente Huidobro and Nicanor Parra for
taking off the face of to-much-solemnity 
that Pablo Neruda gave to poetry. 
And because the first one showed me how 
to fall from the bottom to the top.

Thanks to Jorge Luis Borges who in his noble blindness  
thought that paradise was a library. 
And thanks  to Cesar Vallejo, for all 
his sorrows, his solitude and his  poet's bravery. 
 

Esta Noche

Esta noche no leeré
ninguno de mis poemas.
Esta noche quiero solamente dar gracias –
gracias a la poesía y a una banda de poetas.

A la Poesía misma porque me a dado
otra voz,
otra voz con la que puedo hablar 
con los árboles y las piedras y los pájaros.

Quiero dar gracias al poeta azteca 
Ayocuan Cuetzpatzin-
por su vasto conocimento del corazón humano. 
A San Juan de la Cruz
por sus consejos de como hacer el amor
con mi alma.

Y gracias a Dante Alligieri y Arthur Rimbaud 
por darme tan buenas instruciones de como entrar y 
salir de los infiernos.

A la poesía por darme unas manos
con la que puedo saludar al viento y tocar
el rostro de mis queridos muertos.

A Walt Whitman Y Federico García Lorca
por la profunda resonancia de sus cantos y por
lo tanto que el segundo amó al primero.

A Vicente Huidobro y Nicanor Parra  por
haberle quitado el rostro tan solemne que Pablo
Neruda le dió a la poesía. Y por que el primero me 
enseño a caer de abajo hacia arriba.

Gracias a Jorge Luis Borges porque en su noble ceguera 
confundió el paraíso con una biblioteca. 
Y gracias a Cesar Vallejo por toda su tristeza 
todas sus soledades y toda su bravura de poeta.

Mark Tredinnick is a poet, essayist and writing teacher; he lives in Burradoo, in the highlands southwest of Sydney in Australia’s southeast. His books include The Little Red Writing Book (published in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2008 as The Cambridge Essential Writing Guide), The Land’s Wild Music and A Place on Earth. His landscape memoir, The Blue Plateau, and The Little Green Grammar Book will appear in 2008. Mark is also at work on a volume of poems and a book about the consolations of literature in a frantic age. Mark’s prizes include The Newcastle Poetry Prize, The Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, The Calibre Essay Prize, The Wildcare Nature Writing Prize and shortlistings in major awards, including The ABR and Broadway Prizes. His writing (poems, essays and criticism) has appeared in many books and anthologies, in Best Australian Essays, and in Australian and overseas journals and newspapers including Island, isotope, Orion, Manoa, PAN, Southerly The Sydney Morning Herald. He has written regularly for The Bulletin.

In recent years, Mark has edited a number of collections of Australian writing, each published as a special issue of a literary journal: Where Waters Meet (Manoa18:2, with Larissa Behrendt and Barry Lopez), Watermarks (Southerly 64:2, with Nicolette Stasko), and Being True to the Earth (PAN 4, with Kate Rigby). He has taught landscape writing, creative non-fiction and poetry at centres in the USA and at The University of Sydney.

Photographer :Tony Sernack

Urban Eclogues

I

Adrift in the middle of my years, I sit in a corner and drink. I eavesdrop
a tableful of girls romancing their cell phones, workshopping
love’s abstract particulars.
            Football plays on the big screen;
I listen like a thief in case the women know the score.
But I never could tell. At fulltime I walk home like a motherless child.

II
    
Witness is a solitary game. There isn’t a thing I have left to say
but back in my room I ring like a singing bowl,
empty and unable to stop.
        You’re in nine kinds of pain, my friend; you know
the twenty-seven strains of despair. And your lovely hair has fallen.
The moon at my window is a rusted shot, caught in its corrupt trajectory down.

III

The world was always someone else’s oyster, a metaphor
I never could prise open.  
All I’m good for tonight
                     is to let the night pass,
while beyond me the world peters and my friend fights beautifully
like a trout on God’s line. The usual idiots are still in power. But they’ll keep.

Two Hens

Make prayer at the concrete trough
beneath the dripping tap. Flush now with summer
the water poplars graze a slow benediction
over the birds, and a miser’s rain falls through the
morning.

From my desk I look out on this
epitome of good fortune and pray for more

rain. The weather has turned. It will do that
if you wait. The wind is in the south
and the leaves of the poplars shiver silver
as though something that was wounded is now healed.

These past days have tried and found me
wanting, and I have almost failed, but here

I am, still who I always was,
only more so. The days you love are not
the days that prove you. Winter is my weather;
I grow by waiting. And there is no end

of the dying one did not know
one had yet to do to one’s self.

But you’ve had days like these. I envy
the hens the steady circle of their days,
but this is not how mine go; I am strung from stars
that once were gods and can’t seem to forget.

Plenty

Dandelions break out like lies in the grass. There’s an election
in the wind and promises on the table beneath the poplars and even the weeds
look good in the spring. But not far west        
                        crops fail in their red fields
and rivers wither into memory. The future fails and the economy blooms
its profuse abstractions. What will the children eat when the wheat no longer rises?

And You

One child learned to walk
                 the day another learned to drive
and in between sixteen years ran before they could crawl
me any closer to who I’m meant to be
by now. November’s fallen back into winter. All day long on the roof
the rain writes the only script there’ll ever be for any of this.

God delivers when you stop
                   praying. The music starts when you stop
playing so hard and listen.
Some good came along today when I was busy hoping
for nothing, sweeping the cowshed instead and putting things off.
Want only the rain to fall and your children to find out for themselves.

Oh, it’s way too late now
                to hope to say anything new.
All the music and all the meaning there ever were
have been here all along, and you may catch some –  
but you mustn’t try too hard – between your child’s first steps, between
downpours, between the sweeping judgments of the broom.    

The way Nan walks the lane
                   morning and evening behind her dog,
each step sounding one year of the ninety
she has seen; the way the black ducks land like tardy extras
on the rainy grass at dusk – enactments that say something I’d like my life
to say. Something the weather says, my children say, and you.

Marcelle Freiman is a Sydney poet who migrated from South Africa to Australia via England in1981. She lectures in creative writing and post-colonial and diaspora literatures at Macquarie University. Her poetry has appeared in a range of literary journals and anthologies. Her first book Monkey’s Wedding (1995) was Highly Commended for the Marjorie Barnard prize.

Yellow

The journalist Nat Gould gazes into a doorway of a Sydney Opium Den 1896.

My pipe is honey, Englishman,
to you I am indolent, yellow
on a low bed in my house of pleasure,
head on a silk cushion, hip rounded.
I see you clearly through the smoke
sweet odour of my O P’Ien,
my slender pipe of bamboo like a flute.
Your slack mouth hangs with lust.
Is it my cheongsam body you desire
or the pagodas, ice and crocodiles,
the Herb of Joy brings,
the fine pitch of taste, the way
my smooth skin lives?   

You at the door, half in half out,
– I am not a woman
but opium and sex. You would steal it
as your country did at Nanking,
pious in your avarice.
My life is nothing to you –
I am dragon-woman
exotic to you as baboons and monkeys.

This is no den, it is your own
dark cell. Your necktie
is choking you. I am bright as fire,
my hands are small.
Yes, drink from your hip-flask, Mister,
shake my gaze from your face
if you can.  

Nat Gould, ‘Eaters of Raw Meat’ (1896), The Birth of Sydney, Ed. Tim Flannery, Melbourne, Text, 1999.

Clown

A smile, crazy with shame,
little lost diamond-eyes,
the clown mask pushed
its face against the glass
days of empty rooms
when we played a mad tune  
flippy with pigtails and mama’s red lipstick
stolen for sheer revenge –

turned itself tight, yes,
little monster found its power
but got trapped in the smile
like a puppet, got locked
in the cold room,
wild at the boar-shaped world –

and elsewhere it knew was sun,
like the ball left in the corner,
yellow as light of windows.

Road

I like streets that go down – Grace Cossington-Smith 1971

It’s a road that ribbons down a hill
and up –  a velocity, a force
more than a road –  

the sky is wide and bright
and the speed of your eye
grabs the horizon –

wanting elsewhere, beyond –  
fast as telegraphed voices in the wire,
fast as the line

of the eucalypt that bends its curve
on the surface of your eye
upwards from the purple gully.

How it fights with the walker, this road,
with the slow horse cart,
its line tense

with trees humming green,
edgy with the speed of sound,
the speed of your eye on the road.

Help

With a little help from a reader
we could crawl up onto the back
of a bicycle & blow. A horn? If
you like. Or a kiss? Maybe, but first
a question –  what
is your aim? To kill
swimming? For a closure to swimming
a kiss won’t do. Better
a horn, its blue. With
a little help from a reader we could wear
the same face for both, for the grown men
asleep in a bucket, for the children snoring
in a thimble & not care which belt
we’ve been trained up to. With
a little help from a reader we could blend
the desire for hearing with the desire
for speaking & come out on top
with meat to burn, your choice
of kangaroo or stork. With
a little help from a reader we could home rule
the market women AND their troublemaking
husbands, them to houses confined until
some progress in basting & roasting. With
a little help from a reader we could insist
that our at-a-crossroads-style becomes us
& everyone after us, even the marchers
as to heaven. With
a little help from a reader we could be joined
by an Alice whose relationship to history
however tenuous is precisely the joinery
that our journey requires. With
a little help from a reader we could swallow
the first & the second & even the third word
& even, if some truth was thereby accomplished,
the whole of the poem.

Socks

So you really think we’ve established
a case for bliss? Stand up in court
for how long? –  two minutes
if we’re lucky. Which reminds me: some joker

has taken all of the socks from my sock drawer
& filled it with forks with bent tines, all the better
to eat what with? Our last supper for two
was a disaster. Served by nuns

in a forest clearing, we were constantly distracted
by a klatch of monks who insisted that happy slaps
(as per those on London buses) could induce
instant liberation. A kind of pudding? Sue

those slap-happy bastards. For what? Their
bowls? Their beads? Count to ten
while I put this flesh to one side, for
later. Right now there’s work to do. We need

to set up for the next scene – a carriage
at rush hour, Aunt Jane getting on at Redfern
for her morning performance, will squat & pee
as we roll into Central. Watch out

for your shoes. Socks
still missing. Stand up in court
in piss-splashed shoes, no socks, our case
for bliss? Two minutes if we’re lucky.

A Ball

You saw it on NAGS, the scratch channel, how friends
in black can breed with friends in blue & at the end of nine
have a worthwhile product, a ball, say, that you can bounce
wherever you like. Why not

in a casbah? It’s speech as though by magic
translated into Arabic, you’ll break the spell
of Delmonico (the lion tamer ripped apart
by his seven lionesses). These urchins

will love you; they’ll let you live to tell the tale:
how camels, having negotiated the perils of the Pont
Neuf & the cobblestones of Rue Dauphine,

eventually arrived in Oran with three rimes
& a metaphor into which anything, even a recipe
for a homemade bomb, could be stuffed.

rob walker’s first full collection micromacro (Seaview Press) was delivered in 2006 after a twenty year gestation period. He’s published online, onpage, onradio and onCD. His latest chapbook is phobiaphobia – poems of fear and anxiety (Picaro Press). He moved to Himeji, Japan in January 2008.

cello

we drift
into sleep. my hand
an explorer wandering
your familiar valleys and
mountains playing the
xylophone of your
back. you are a cello
my hand languid
draped on
your
waist
for
an
8
bar
rest

Danny in Detention

Dad   works   at   Hills   but   he
hasta  go to  the  physio.  for  his
arm.  whennie   was   a   kid   his bruvva   useta     twist    is   arma
round.  me   bruvva  &  me  fight
all  the  time  he’s  16 I’m 11 but
I  can  bash  im  up.  he’s psycho
he  calls  me  pissweak so I bash
im. dad belted me. I  adta  go  to
bed ungry. me  bruvva works  at
kfc. dozen  gimme  nuffin.  dad’s
got  is  own   playstation   in   the lounge.                             dozen
lettuce     uzit        tho

The koan before the satori
(a long haiku / short tanka)
 
One hand is clapping in a forest,
                                   unseen
 
The other crushed by a falling tree,
presumably
                                       also unseen

Koan: a Zen teaching riddle
Satori: the spiritual goal of Zen Buddhism, roughly translating as individual Enlightenment, or a flash of sudden awareness

Born in Newcastle in 1981, Sam Byfield is the author of From the Middle Kingdom (Pudding House Press). He has been published or is forthcoming in magazines including Heat and LiNQ (Australia), The National Poetry Review, The Cream City Review, Meridian, and Diner (North America), Nimesis (UK) and in many online magazines including The Pedestal Magazine, Foam-e, and Divan. He currently works for a public health/environment NGO in southwest China.

Sapphires

All afternoon panning for sapphires
in eucalypt shadows, hands dry
from rocks and river water,

frost-browned grass burnt back
by the optimistic site owner –
no snakes in that grass now.

Cockatoos make a sound like pure panic
and the dog races off after rabbits
and trouble, but not too much,

while the Milky Way comes out
like it only does in the country,
a massive tangle that seems to float

above the Earth. Way off, the cough
of kangaroos, big rough males
like the one my father told me of

from his childhood, that kept coming
and no amount of .22 slugs
could stop. Another image of him,

out on the Nullarbor hitchhiking dead –
west, nothing but sand and crows
for company, ending up in Esperance

and writing her, saying
it was the most beautiful place he’d seen.
He came back and proposed, straight away.

The Infinite Possibilities of Water

From here I can see the flood; the view is sublime.
Thirty year swell and the beach fills with container ship,
the Pasha Bulker like a boulder resting in a river bed.

            God of such things, remember the anemone fossil
            I discovered high in the mountains, a swirl waiting eons
            to be found? And quickly lost, as such things are.

From here I can smell the salt of the rearranged beach,
and I can see the gulls, watching the ship and thinking
What a strange sight for a Sunday.

            God of such things, remember the salt of her breasts
            three days up the valley, how she felt as insects danced
            like fireworks and the whole place shuddered?

Light funnels away from the ocean, turns red
then white; then, the quiet reconnaissance of the stars.
In the morning the faintest hint of smoke.

            God of such things, have you ever noticed how sometimes
            a woman smells like pine, or pine smells like a woman?
            The streets fill quickly with flood, yet the warmth.

Cures in a Cold Place

Ten minutes off the plane, first snow of the season. It starts as tiny darts, wind-whisked and rapidly dissolving,
then the city fades to white. It seems timed for my arrival.

I left here four months ago, walked straight into trouble. I was hollow, as if some piece of me remained in the city,
some fundamental part. Months later I landed on my feet and the terrain began to look familiar, yet things were
still off kilter, my yin and yang somehow askew.

Spent three days in Beijing, a city that has never been good to me. I had to make things right, settle some scores.
Outside a rowdy nightclub a beggar told me of his sick eight- year-old daughter. They’d come to Beijing to see a
doctor from a city eight hours south, but now had no money to pay and no ticket home. He said a man should
never be this low, begging to save his daughter. Above us, the flicker of coal-stained lights.

Then today, Changchun, the lake, frozen over a month earlier than usual, foot-deep tracks like tears across the face
of an angel. Old people spoke soft, faces lined like willow trees; the young threw snowballs and flirted in that
Chinese way. Street sweepers cracked the ice from roads, danced as if the snow made them warm. I found a piece
of myself, put it in my pocket, whistled a tune.

Sherryl Clark has been writing and publishing poetry for over 20 years. She is a co-editor of Poetrix magazine, and teaches at Victoria University TAFE (Professional Writing & Editing). Her verse novel for upper primary readers, Farm Kid, won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Children’s Writing.

Strategy

Down this back street
where foreigners are like
grains of rice on black cloth

you come to play
your secret game, undressing
with the slow malaise

of heat coating your skin,
ready to haggle with me
over who should spring the trap.

Rank clothes hang from windows
like human curtains,
your hands stroke his hair

you contain pain in your fingers,
strike like a cobra
prodded with a stick.

I see your face twist
in the mirror; from where I hide
it looks like a smile.

O

There are days when I don’t know
how to keep breathing this air;
there is too much of it, or
not enough, it’s too thick or
full of life, too empty of
anything I can use. I look
at clouds and wonder if
they are any better, being
full of water, or if I
should move to the desert,
to an altitude where the air
will whistle in and out of me
in thin, clean streams.
At night, I lie on my back
stare at the blank ceiling,
wait for air to be blameless,
to do its job of pressing
and sucking without my
interference.  Or to just stop
demanding I deal with it.
I try as hard as I can
to resign, abstain, push it away,
but here it comes again,
shuddering, determined to
have its way with me

Sue King-Smith is currently completing a PhD in Creative Arts at Deakin University. For three years, she was the co-editor of The Animist, an electronic arts ezine that has been archived by the National Library as part of the Pandora Project. In the past few years, she has had poems published in various journals including, Famous Reporter, The Paradise Anthology, Tarralla, Blue Giraffe, Woorilla, Pendulum, Oban ‘06 and Tamba and she has had essays published in JASAL and Linq. Her first collection of poetry, An Accumulation of Small Killings, will be published by MPU in early 2008.

Swimming the Unconscious

Before degrees of separation,
we swam the mire, quick-silver dark
with pores as porous
as water. Schools of fish caught us
in collective darting tides,
all of a mind, singular, no beyond
or outside and we rode the sliding
fractals of existence. Opening rice-paper
wings in unison, and rising
into flight we soared the curdling
updrafts and hung like tiny origami
marionettes, guiding strings
unseen. Migrating south we bounded
down a mob of kangaroos, eyes slight
for dangers, our sinewy legs
like springs. Life was a small
f lowered chaos and we duck-dived
kaleidoscopic centres.

Sometimes still, synchronicity swims
through ether, and you send
me an email, and I send you a book,
that cross unlikely paths in
cyberspace. And they speak the
same language, tell the same story,
and we laugh across the coincidence
that is not coincidence at all. (We shared
a primordial womb once.) And at night, still,  
we dive head-first into waters embryonic
and old as time, swimming the
unconscious.

Terry McArthur is a poet, songwriter, and playwright. Terry’s plays include Country Of Tears for The Midnight Sun Theatre and Dance Company which was performed at the inaugural Sydney Arts Festival and Naratic Visions which he co-directed with Chin Kham Yoke. He has written produced and directed multi-media performances including Seeking Knowledge and Casting The Oracle for the Australian Awards For University Teaching, and New Horizons for the opening of the Sydney SuperDome. As a lyricist Terry has co-written hit songs for John Farnham and James Blundell. As one half of the spoken word duo the cube he has released one album Permanent Scars and is now preparing to release Weapons Of Mass Sedition. Terry’s poetry has been published in, Upland (University Of New England Press), Holes In The Evening (Fat Possum Press edited by Michael Sharkey) and The Tin Wash Dish (ABC Books edited by John Tranter), Thylazine, Blue Pepper and Stylus. Terry’s latest collection of poems, Walking Skin is due for publication with Artesian in early 2008.

The Weather Eater’s Lament

Summer swift black sun burns
Dry rivers drink in dread the blaze
Days are dust settled thick and thin over
This track where light and language languish
The tongue no longer speaking

No more speaking
What’s done is done
Who can trace the ember from the fire
Smear ash across the face of our broken land
Or bear our lamentations beneath the dead drought years
Crossing and recrossing this once fertile valley
Hearing the song of the future blow in from the void

More Dirt Music

( for Tim Winton and Audrey Auld Mezera )

South of the dry lands
Between dirt and sea
Moving forward under brazen moon
Crossing the night tracks by foot
There is a moment when your eyes fall upon the gathering gates
A moment like no other
Those ancestral gates desolate and perpetual
Call in the forgotten songs
Cradling the words that sing of love and loss
Each song a code that blisters hearts
For who can bear such words of joy and sorrow
Who will carry such secrets in their marrow

Under the starlight of the gathering gates
There is no tomorrow
Only the songs under the shadow of blood rocks
Only the songs wedged in the red earth
Seeking out the singer
Seeking out the season
South of the dry lands
Between dirt and sea

No Worries

( for David Gulpilil)

He appeared
As if from nowhere sniffing the air
Looking out upon us who watched in the darkness
His darkness
And he spoke
As if his words had always been with us
We listened as if hearing for the first time
His darkness
One leg he said in whitefella world
One leg in his dreaming

His story
Fell upon us like the rain of rains
His coming into the camera lens like a luminous spirit
Bearing the lineage of his people
Holding the lightning in his eyes
We took him in and grappled him to ground
Fed fame and paid pittance
Let him drink and almost drown
Crowned him blackfella king
Deserted him for newer younger kings
Let him drift and ride the roar between twin worlds

He looked at us in our darkness
He smiled the smile of ages
He sang the song of his father
And disappeared
An invisible crocodile beneath the river’s banks

Andrew Slattery is a Communications graduate from The University of Newcastle. His poems have appeared in literary journals, newspapers, magazines throughout Australia, Europe, North America and Asia. His awards include the Henry Kendall Poetry Award, the Roland Robinson Literary Award, and the Val Vallis Poetry Award. He lives in Berlin.
 

Bathey Pelagium

Having slid up and below the surface;
urged itself to reach out
and take the moon whole in its eye,
the giant squid goes to depth –
eight arms and two tentacles

swirl the slick, torpedo body
on an imagined course to the ocean floor.
Twin front finlets rudder its frame,
lining through a school of oarfish.
The deeping waters start to cool 

its runneled core. The floor
is not subject to the moon’s lug.
Tube worms and giant clams pulse,
but seem motionless in the mudded dark,
like organs under skin.

The sun is cold. There are no tides or years.
Giant squid rests its locomotor,
it’s lurked arms scan the boundary
of its mantle length for food.
The ocean floor is an undulant blank,

with an outline so faint
this whole thing could be myth.
Slow-swimming along conveyor tides,
it takes the ocean with it and keeps the earth
in its spinning. The giant squid 

spools along canyons cut from the ice age –
movements aggrandised over time,
its organ pipes roll the sea bed,
with solitary rills, hear its weight
unlying the sea.

Kalle Metro Graveyard

Someone snuck in a cemetery. A break
in the line of sandstone apartments
like a tone blip in the city plan. 

Surrounded on all three sides by the high-rise living –
the whole yard the size of a house, but thick
with blooming dark grass and the pale whites 

of tree foliage. The centre gate is locked off
and wrangles of weed truss the tall iron fence.
Inside, the gravestones are edged black

with granite moss and hold a calm slant,
they line the ground, side by side, and some
so close they seem to be one split block.

Someone’s decision to bury the coffins
vertically. They said it would triple capacity;
that it was in keeping with the skyscraping

pitch of urban planning (“Drop ’em in
feet first… it’ll save space.”) Those too ‘proper’
to be cremated; too ‘proud’ to end up

on the outskirts in the communal graveyard.
Someone snuck in a cemetery, into the heart
of a city gridded with slender cross-streets

and municipal pressures. Bodies standing up
cool in their boxes. They must’ve slid them in
like a flower stem led down a tall jar. And tall

runs of whiteweed rise up the fence, through
the black, wrought gate latched to a sole iron
pin. The grass is strewn with wraps of strange flowers,

thrown over the fence by a visiting relative, or anyone
whose heart the city has warmed with stone.
The ground holds to the cold like the joining

of bone. At night, the apartment windows flick on
from all three sides, they throw down twisted squares
of light and bring the flora junk and top stones

out of mute dark. In summer, when the green rim
of a moon arcs the night, the tall weeds lean out
from the fence and dip their tips to the warm pavement.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula (1980), received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has published five other volumes of poetry: No Man’s Grove (1985); Modern Secrets (1989); Monsoon History (1994), a retrospective selection of her work; What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say (1998); and Listening to the Singer (2007), a collection of poems out of Malaysia. Bill Moyers featured Lim for a PBS special on American poetry, “Fooling with Words.” She is also the author of three books of short stories; a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (1997 American Book Award for non-fiction); two novels, Joss and Gold (2001) and Sister Swing (2006); and a children’s novel, Princess Shawl (2008). Herfirst novel was welcomed by Rey Chow as an “elegantly crafted tale [that] places Lim among the most imaginative and dexterous storytellers writing in the English language today.” Lim’s co-edited anthology The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology received the 1990 American Book Award. She has published critical studiesandedited/co-edited many volumes and special issues of journals, including recently Transnational Asia Pacific; Power, Race and Gender in Academe; Asian American Literature: An Anthology; Tilting the Continent: An Anthology of South-east Asian American Writing, and special issues of Ariel, Tulsa Studies, Studies in the Literary Imagination, and Concentric. Her work has appeared in journals such as New Literary History, Feminist Studies, Signs, MELUS, ARIEL, New Literatures Review, World Englishes, and American Studies International. Among her honors, Lim received the UCSB Faculty Research Lecture Award (2002), the Chair Professorship of English at the University of Hong Kong (1999 to 2001), University of Western Australia Distinguished Lecturer award, Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer award, and the J.T. Stewart Hedgebrook award. She has served as chair of Women’s Studies and is currently professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Newcastle Beach
(For Kerrie Coles and Brian Joyce)

At 6 a.m. I set off for the Pacific,
her heaving bosom stretched between
rival lovers gazing from opposite beaches.

Silicate, shell and stone roil beneath her touch,
back and forth, groaning, while she slips
away and toward, teases sun rising
and setting, and the surfer men come daily.

I also adore her, threaded to her fine
eyebrow horizons, changeful swells that raise
my thirst no matter how much I swallow.

I can never be a woman like her,
forever wet, incipiently
violent even when calmed. In Newcastle
young boys and older throw their bodies

passionately at her each morning,
naked male skin carried toward dark rock
and cars. By sides of streets they strip,
wriggle into work clothes, as day

collapses into schools, offices, coal-mines
and their women’s arms, awake and sullen
in the world of dry air. They are mermen,
stolen away from their mothers’ hips.

And I? Drawn early down to Bogie Hole,
treading the slippery convict-shattered
stone steps, descend to the maddened

slamming of her spittle against tumbled
boulders, gulp the white and yellow sprays
that break, withdraw and break, in digital
seconds never returning. Like our men

moving on to other bodies, while the Ocean
Woman breathes in, breathes out, breathes in,
cradling her surfers past danger and drowning.

Bogie Hole

Before that old crone curse, arthritis,
comes down on me, I walk up Newcastle
Beach to Bogie Hole, where the governor

had a pool carved out of ancient basalt
by Irish convicts. Surf smashes on the rough
hewn blocks thrice every minute

it seems–and white foam sprays in ceaseless
upsurges of power. What power, I ask,
as I peer over the handrails, studying

sea-moss slime-slippery steps cut
into cliff face steep down to Bogie Hole,
studying as if a curious text

the heart skips over, falling in love
with falling, before backing off
from the savor of salt fatalism.

Not yet, my feet say, stepping away.
Today, for the first time I see
dolphins jumping above the surf line,

black fins racing over the Pacific
natural as my feet walking
in sunshine along Bathers’ Way.

What has brought me to Newcastle
no one knows, least of all me.
Blue skies and Pacific air the same

as home, leaving home is mere
practice for leaving all, all
the leavings learned again and again,

until goodbye becomes
addictive, the last look
behind, the first look forward,

what you carry everywhere
and everyday. Temporary living
is what childhood taught me.

Packing up, sleeping on others’
mattresses, and always hungry
for the new morning, and night

to be endured, supperless,
sharp as a paring knife peeling
another brown spot.

Writing a Poem
(At the Lock Up)

as if they were the sweet nectar of day,
which they are. It is impossible
to think or write. Its buzz takes away
feelings, takes over ears, is drilling a hole

in a loose tooth as you sit in history’s
dental chair, frantic and still, the drill
hammering gums until only
spit oozes, dribbles, spills over, fills

cavities you didn’t know you had,
only the drill lives in your head,
only the sharp dull dizz-dizz-dizz.
This is how the poem ends, dizz-dizz. . . .

Dating
(At the Hunter Street Mall)

I went on another date with my writing today. We’ve been dating for a long time. I don’t know why we keep meeting. It never ends in sex, although sometimes it’s led to my reading a book in bed. Often he does not bother to appear. I wait and wait, throat burning in dread, my tight chest overflowing with aches and burrs of anxiety, until I cannot bear the humiliation, even if no one is there, no one’s watching, and I don’t care, I finally leave, abject and alone, for something else, a nut muffin, or worse, a plate of limp over-salted French fries. I never get really angry. I wish I would, and then maybe I’d say goodbye.

But when he does turn up, I’m fascinated by his blather, it can throw a surprise like an amateur hitting an underhanded blow. Yet I’ve heard most of his stories so many times I can end his lines for him. You could say I find him a bore, so I don’t know why I keep listening.

He’s capable of mumbling. Between duhs and ums he may say something I like, and I carry it back in my mouth, imagining it’s a bit of worm a magpie crams into the hungry crop of its chick, and I take it out when I am alone, greedy, before I actually swallow it.

We’ve been dating like this since I was nine. I wouldn’t call him a pedophile but he’s not a big brother either. No, it’s not a healthy relationship, although it isn’t exactly sick. And, yes, he’s created problems, particularly with girlfriends who get jealous because of his attentions. They don’t see how long-suffering I’ve been. My husband doesn’t care. He understands first love comes first. Besides, he’s my last love, and they don’t offer the same fruit, apples to bananas. I get fed up, today, feeling my age, and want to sit in the shade instead, eavesdropping on busy hummingbirds pillaging fuschias and lilies. They’re attractive even if empty-headed. Still, every April, they lay their eggs, and at least one fledging sticks around till summer ends.

Shark Story

I’ve seen him hobble on one long strong leg,
the other a dangling stump, third a crutch,
in swimming shorts and tee, and sit by Nobby’s Beach,
on the wood-slatted bench near the hot parking lot
and sucking surf tucked distant meters away.
He said this sandy stretch, the boast of Newcastle,
appears like acres of salt tears he hadn’t shed
when they’d lifted him out of Shark Alley
winters ago, after the juvenile gray snagged
the limb from him, harder to cross with hobble
and crutch and one good leg than he’d first imagined.
Most afternoons between lunch and sunset crowds
he sits watching the black-suited amphibian
boys hurry with bee-waxed boards into the waves.
Yes, they do look like elegant seals in and out
of ocean. Ignore his gaze that says nothing
except wonder where among the particles
of the Pacific his flesh and blood now surge
with the spindrift and its tide, sensation
of thigh and calf and foot and toes clasping
like that bite threshing its fish head still
in the surf most afternoons on Nobby’s Beach.

Francesca Haig’s poetry has appeared in Blue Dog, Overland and Famous Reporter and has been featured on Radio National’s Poetica. Her first collection of poetry, Bodies of Water (FIP, 2006) was highly commended in the 2007 Ann Elder Award. She has read her work at the Melbourne Writers Festival and Tasmanian Living Writers Week. She lectures in Creative Writing at The University of Chester, UK.

Dating a poet: a relationship in six stanzas

i.
In making love
we unmake words.
Later, you take out your journal
and reconstruct language
under the strict tuition of your pen,
while I make out the graffiti of your chest hair.

ii.
The naked page.
How the sound of your pen on paper
is more intimate than any of the noises
we made last night.

iii.
You are a virtuoso:
who knew so much could be
done with syllables?
Your daredevil tongue.

iv.
You write only in free verse
but, at night, the perfect pentameter
of your sleeping breath.

v.
I scour your words
as I have read other men’s faces, hands.
In all your poems, as with photos,
I seek myself out first
to see how I look.

vi.
I know your mouth
is a fortune cookie.
After three weeks I crack it open:
on that slip of paper, your tongue,
is her name.

Baghdad

Back in Texas, he understood perfectly
the logic of soil.
No good with letters or numbers,
by nineteen he was fluent in the tangible language of dirt:
planting time, the heavy satisfaction of
a good rain. The places
where clay makes the ground stubborn.
Knots in the earth, snagging the plough’s comb.

In Baghdad it’s the soil that confounds him:
how, west of the Green Zone, you could dig all day
and never strike wet.
How lightly the Tigris carries its silt load,
while the sandstorms make the horizon
sway like a cornfield.

Mud in the water,
sand in the air.

Over here, he’s betrayed by dirt,
and what it grows:
the sudden bloom of an explosion.
The reliable crop of car bodies.
Behind the burnt-out police van
that row of heads,
coming up like pumpkins.

Sean Singer’s first book Discography won the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Baby