April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Emily O’Grady is a PhD candidate at Queensland University of Technology, where she won the 2012 Undergraduate, and the 2013 Postgraduate Writing Prize. Her fiction and poetry have been published in The Lifted Brow, Voiceworks, and Award Winning Australian Writing.
The Sky Had Turned Pale Green
When the drama captain dived into a shallow swimming pool in my final year of school the chaplain held a vigil in the chapel every lunch break. Each afternoon we gathered around a battery operated candle on the teal carpet in a blobby oval, offering significant memories while eating toasted sandwiches from the tuckshop and passing around a packet of Minties or Snakes. Each session began with two minutes of silent reflection and a meditative Angelus. When it was my turn to contribute I pretended I was too distraught to speak.
The vigils came to an end when she woke as a quadriplegic twelve days afterthe fall. The administration organised a free dress day to raise money for her family to renovate their bathroom, and renamed the end of year Cabaret in her honour. On graduation her parents dressed her in the school tracksuit and styled her short hair into a braided stump for the occasion. No one had thought of a ramp to get her on the stage so she sat by the bottom of the stairs—her parents gripping her shoulders—while a scrolled diploma tied with a purple ribbon was placed in her lap and subsequently rolled onto the floor. I couldn’t tell if the mood was one of mourning or celebration. She wasn’t wearing shoes, and I remember looking at her socked feet and thinking of sleeping lambs.
Everyone seemed to indulge in the witchy ritual of the vigils and pawed over the tragedy, debating fate and God and euthanasia in the hallways and beneath the ancient, Moreton Bay fig that left a bed of glossy leaves across the brick paths. When Felicity had drowned at the end of Year Nine, her funeral was held during the Christmas holidays, so by the time the New Year came around the murky disbelief had already lifted and any opportunity for bonding or existential discussion was avoided. Though the start of term mass was combined with a memorial service, because she’d only been at the school a few months there were no significant memories for anyone to share. Up until graduation Felicity was spoken of rarely and abstractly, as though she were a hazily remembered dream or a childhood memory you couldn’t be sure wasn’t one you’d absorbed from the television.
Felicity and I knew each other through the kayaking club. Every Friday we paddled a kilometre downstream and drifted along Norman Creek. I’d been kayakingsince Year Eight, but it wasn’t until Felicity began boarding at the College that I’d come to tolerate those afternoons sweating into the Brisbane River. It was mandatory for every student to play an extracurricular sport unless they had a medical certificate. I chose kayaking because for the most part it wasn’t a team activity, and even in April and October the heat could be so oppressive that the thought of hockey or touch on the oval was unbearable.
We kayaked three afternoons a week. On Monday and Wednesday we trained for the interschool competitions held every few months, while the Fridays on Norman felt like a holiday from the repetition of sprints along the bank. The creek was always dank with mangroves, and rotting jetties that led to shacks with weathered Tibetan prayer flags strung from their porches. Cans of XXXX bobbed on the water like golden, mangled logs. When we got too close to the mangroves the tips of our paddles would stick in the silty sludge that reeked of sulphur. The creek was always silent but for the chug of the coach’s tinnie, the slurp of fibreglass being suctioned from black mud.
Felicity boarded at the College even though her parents lived in a townhouse on the other side of the river. The other boarders were from out west, or from the Torres Straight and Pacific Islands, and had home visits only for term holidays and sometimes long weekends. At the end of each week, instead of going to the boarding house Felicity would skulk up the ridged boat ramp, bare feet slick with river water, to the school gates where her mother would be waiting with a taxi.
One afternoon I followed her from the water. While the rest of the team capsized into the river in ritualistic unison, Felicity dumped her kayak on the green turf pontoon and headed to the boatshed. She never capsized, not even on purpose.
She stood by the paddle rack, fingering the fibreglass cuts along her legs: swollen welts with glistening slivers prickling the skin. I unbuckled my lifejacket and took a sip from the bubbler. The water was warm and tasted of chlorine. Felicity leant against the cement wall and wiped her wrist under her nose.
‘God, this is such rubbish,’ she said.
‘What is?’ I said.
‘This,’ she said, gesturing to nothing.
‘Did you capsize?’ I said, knowing she hadn’t.
‘No,’ Felicity said. ‘But I’m itchy.’
‘Here,’ I said, handing her a greasy bottle of baby oil from the first-aid kit. ‘You’ll get used to it.’
Felicity shrugged. She flicked open the cap with her teeth and poured oil into her hand. It pooled in her palm and leaked over her fingers.
‘Have you kayaked before?’ I said. ‘You’re pretty good.’
‘Christ no,’ she said, glazing oil onto the cuts. ‘I hate water.’
She threw the baby oil back into the first aid kit and wiped her hands on her ruggers. From the pontoon I could hear girls capsizing, shrieking like seabirds as they plunged themselves fully clothed into the river.
Though my older sister went to a public school my parents had transferred me to the all-girls Catholic College halfway through Year Eight. While most girls complained of the school’s severity I found it calming, as though I were a baby being swaddled. Jewellery and nail polish were against the dress code, and if a teacher suspected you were wearing makeup you were marched to sick bay to strip it off with witch hazel and a fistful of cotton balls.
Rather than rebelling against the rules, it evoked a sense of ferality amongst even the prettiest girls. At lunchtime they’d strip down to their underwear on the H block verandas to change into their sport uniforms. When it rained, they made no effort to take shelter, and came to class with mud-flecked calves and their bras fluorescent under soaked blouses. During dissections in Science, a particular clique even hacked the tails off their rats and kept them as talismans, the limp flesh creeping out of breast pockets like thin, white fingers.
On her first day of school Felicity was fawned over.
‘You’re like a little doll,’ the girls said, as they draped Felicity’s hair over their own straw-like ponytails and compared the pale underbelly of her forearms to their freckled sunburns. At lunchtime they bought her cartons of chocolate milk from the tuckshop, manically grabbing at her clothes and hands to get her attention. But it wasn’t long before Felicity’s shine dulled, and after a few days no one was interested in her strange inflections or the way her fingers were like polished twigs.
My parents felt sorry for Felicity. Whenever she came over after training my mother cooked fancy meals from recipe books and had us sit at the table to eat. My sister bombarded Felicity with questions about her father’s job in Japan. My father switched off the races.
One night after dinner I sat in the bathroom with Felicity as she drew on her eyebrows with a black eye pencil. Most mornings she shaved them off with a disposable razor. When she hadn’t shaved them for a few days she compulsively ran her fingertips over the stubble.
‘Your family are really nice,’ she said, sketching the pencil along her brow.
‘They’re alright,’ I said. ‘They get so excited when you’re here.’
‘Your sister’s so pretty,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you go to the same school?’
‘I went for a while. They were all morons.’
‘Did you have any friends?’
‘Course I did.’
‘It was just a question,’ Felicity said, raising her eyebrows to her reflection.
‘I had this one friend but she was totally mental,’ I said. ‘We were playing Mercy one day and one of her wrists snapped.’
‘What’s Mercy?’
‘Here,’ I said. I grabbed Felicity’s wrists and laced her fingers through mine. I gripped her knuckles between my fingers and twisted until a knuckle cracked. ‘Like that,’ I said, freeing her hands. ‘But harder.’
‘That’s awful,’ she said. ‘Why would you do that?’
‘It’s a game.’
‘Pretty weird game.’
‘It was kind of funny,’ I said, washing my hands in the sink. ‘Plus, her bones were like little sticks.’
‘Did you get into trouble?’
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ I said. ‘She was so skinny.’
I flicked my wet fingers into Felicity’s face and she elbowed me at the waist. She’d changed back into her uniform after kayaking, and wore the blueberry skirt unbuttoned and low on her hips like how the other girls at school wore theirs. A strand of hair fell from her elastic and into her eye. She tucked it behind her ear and peered at herself in the mirror.
‘Your teeth are so white,’ I said. ‘Like little pearls.’
Felicity began to take kayaking as seriously as the seniors training for States. She was always at the front of the pack unless I convinced her to lag behind with me, and she never skipped training, not even if she had a cold. After a while her shoulders and stomach thickened from lifting weights on the scraps of dusty carpet in the boatshed.
‘I’m so fat,’ she said one night at a sleepover, pinching the skin of her thighs.
‘Well, you’re pretty so it doesn’t matter anyway,’ I said.
‘My mum says I’m getting fat.’
‘Who cares?’
‘I’m sick of kayaking,’ she said, collapsing back on the bed.
‘You better not have any of these then.’ I tore open a packet of Tim Tams and bit into one. The chocolate coating was mottled white from being in the fridge. It had no taste and the crumbling biscuit felt like ants in my mouth. Later, when Felicity went to the bathroom, I realised I’d been clutching the half-eaten Tim Tam in my hand the whole time. It had melted into my palm, a fistful of mud.
Unlike Felicity, most of the girls at school were soft and large. They took up space, sprawling their fleshy arms along desktops, hooking their feet around desk legs, skirts draped between their thighs. One of the girls had only four fingers on her left hand. We’d been in Girl Guides together for a short time in primary school. Despite her deformity the other girls had always given her the gifts we made on craft nights, trying to court her affection: flaking soaps moulded into pastel flowers and ducks, and splintered Paddle Pop stick photo frames.
One morning before Soc. Ed I saw Felicity staring at the hand. The girl was at the set of desks beside us, sifting through her hair for split ends and nibbling them off with her teeth. The hand was a rubbery pink, contorted into a stiff curl. She used it as a weapon, wrapping it around her friend’s necks, or scraping the splitting fingernails down their cheeks. She called it her paw.
When she saw Felicity staring, she jabbed the paw out.
Felicity turned back to her text book, but after a minute was gazing back across the desk as though hypnotised.
‘Can I touch it?’ Felicity said. She leaned over to where the girl was balancing on the back legs of her chair. The hand rested limply on the desktop like it wasn’t a living thing. Felicity moved her own hand tentatively. When she brushed the girl’s scaly palm with her fingertips Felicity jerked her hand right back as though the paw had electrocuted her.
‘Does it hurt?’ Felicity said.
‘Nah,’ the girl said. ‘It’s always been like that.’ She drummed her fingernails
against the desk and turned her chair towards Felicity. ‘Your dad lives in Japan, right?’
‘Only sometimes,’ Felicity said.
‘That’s so cool.’
‘I guess.’
‘We’re having chips in the park after school,’ the girl said. ‘Come if you want.’
‘Can’t,’ Felicity said. ‘I have kayaking.’
‘Too bad,’ the girl said, reaching into her pencil case. She unwrapped a pack of grape Zappos and placed a lolly on Felicity’s text book.
‘You should wear a glove,’ I said to the girl.
She ignored me and went back to her ratty hair. Felicity chewed on the Zappo and smoothed out the grey wrapper until it was ironed flat. Later, I wrote Felicity a note folded into a tiny square and flicked it on her desk, but she didn’t look up from copying off the whiteboard. When she yawned her tongue was stained purple in the centre like a pinch bruise.
The following week the river was thick with jellyfish. Usually the water was a dull brown, but it was close to clear, as though the blue blubbers were small moons illuminating the river.
‘Are they poisonous?’ Felicity asked as she rested her paddle along the pontoon, steadying the kayak as she clambered into the cockpit.
‘Only if you fall in,’ I said.
The water was choppy from the shock of frothy waves from City Cats zigzagging back and forth across the river. As we paddled along the bank I tried to spear the jellyfish with my blade. Every time I got close to slicing one it darted deep into the water.
‘You’ll make them angry,’ Felicity said. Her balance was shaky, and she kept her eyes fixed in front of her, not looking down. She’d forgotten to put on a lifejacket. Her thin shirt clung to her back.
‘They don’t have nervous systems,’ I said. ‘They don’t feel anything. How could they get angry?’
When we got to the mouth the rest of the team were already paddling deep in the creek. Because it was the end of term, instead of being in the tinnie the coach had taken a kayak and was leading the group. The sky above us was grey and as shadowy as the damp trees. The mangroves surrounding us like burnt forests.
At the first bend I stopped paddling. Felicity was in front of me. I prodded her in the back with my blade.
‘Let’s go back,’ I said. ‘We can paddle across the river. Go to the park.’
Felicity sighed and looked up into the trees.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘It won’t take long.’
‘We’ll get in trouble,’ she said.
‘No one will notice us,’ I said, paddling beside her. ‘Look how far ahead they are.’ The last of the girls had turned around the second bend and were disappearing further up the creek.
‘I just don’t see the point,’ Felicity said.
‘What?’ I said.
‘I don’t want to,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to go with you.’
Felicity rolled her paddle along the cockpit rim, her water bottle sloshing between her feet. Falling, blackened leaves made tiny ripples in the still water. The string bracelet I’d weaved her twisted around her ankle like a multicoloured snake.
‘Fine,’ I said, reaching for the bottle at her feet. ‘Fine.’ The white food particles from Felicity’s backwash looked like Sea-Monkeys contaminating the water. I took a sip and the stale water felt thick and warm. I stared at Felicity’s shirt and she looked down as well. Goosebumps burst from her arms like lavender hillocks.
‘That was pretty stupid of you,’ I said, tightening the buckles of my own lifejacket. I tossed the water bottle into the mangroves and started turning and paddling up the creek, back onto the river. The sky had turned pale green, the infested water an expanse of eerie blue as translucent monsters riled beneath the surface.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Professor Catherine Cole is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong. She has published novels and two non-fiction books. She is the editor of the anthology, The Perfume River: Writing from Vietnam and co-editor with McNeil and Karaminas of Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television, (Berg UK and USA, May 2009). She also has published poetry, short stories, essays and reviews.
from War Aphorisms
21.
If you fuck in the fields on a summer night the moon will appear at midnight.
Such is the nature of elongated days that when at last you see a face in the enamelled sky you must remind yourself not to be afraid:
it is just the moon, veiled and bursting.
22.
I stand on the edge of a field, on the edge of a trench full of poppies, runaway barley, weeds.
In the trench is all history since 1914.
Isn’t a trench a cruel thing?
23.
Two hares box in the frosty field,
their hind legs turning hoare to crystals.
A halo of frost around their heads, ears long flat ribbons.
Naked fun.
They disappear, white tails the last of them.
24.
Sometimes a horse looms from the mist,
ghost or real, who can tell.
It’s hooves send clods flying.
I know horses.
I know mist.
I know soil.
What truth can be found in that trinity.
25.
An old stone wall with eighteen bullet holes.
Probing fingers enter the wall.
If the souls of the dead need somewhere to go it surely must be holes filled with abandoned swallows’ nests.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Meeta Chatterjee is a lecturer in academic language and literacy in Learning Development, University of Wollongong. Her academic and professional interests lie in the area of doctoral research and writing. She has written about humour in Indian women writing in English for her Masters thesis. She has been writing poems for decades, but has only published occasionally. She enjoys the challenges of creating multisensory images to tell a story.
Erasure
Those who saw her go, deny that she was naked.
She tugged the sky off the clothesline, wrapped it
round herself and walked into the river-they said.
Fourteen days later lamps and rumours flared
on the banks of the Ganges.
Fishermen say that she strides into the village
stark naked, on full moon nights.
She ignores offers of clothes,
ties her wet hair into a bun
and walks past the living.
Some say she visits the temple, clangs
the bells to crescendo and then
dissolves into the flame of an oil lamp.
Others have seen her behind the abandoned house
beckoning drunken gamblers.
“Very unbecoming of a Brahmin girl-even in death”,
they shake their heads.
Others claim that they have seen her big with child
waving her voice at the wind—
her songs naked too.
In her own home, no one speaks of her.
They’ve blacked out her pictures from family albums
and scrubbed her off collective memories.
But on some cold winter evenings, when the sound of the conch
scatters and scatters
through the incense-filled prayer room
images of my dead eighteen –year old aunt dance
on grandma’s eye-lashes
asking to be grieved.
Landscape: Travelling Through South Australia
The coastline disappears-bewitching in its flouncy, racy skirts and the
promise of bare skin.
The smell of the rainforest and the seeds in the shade is memory.
The sky is a chalice, upturned on land –the last drop gone.
Occasionally the soil desperate for seed and water
parts its itchy legs
stealthily to irrigation and grows guiltily pubic.
But mainly, the land blisters and throws up dead animals on the veins of roads.
Bones jutting, skin broken and broken again, the land endures the sun
roaring its orange pulp of heat.
At nightfall, the sky and land meet like wounded saints- too tired to sleep.
‘Erasure’ and ‘Landscape: Travelling through South Australia’ were published in The Journal of Literature and Aesthetics in 2004.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Joseph Han was born in Seoul, Korea and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. His fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Bamboo Ridge Press, Word Riot, CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art & Action, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Eclectica Magazine, and Hawaiʻi Pacific Review. As of Fall 2015, he will be a Ph.D. candidate in English at University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa.
Real estate (dream house)
This burning house belongs to my father
waiting for wood to buckle under
the weight of heat. The realtor said
he could keep the land if he remained
standing in the center. Like a good son,
I crawl around beams, past melting
plaster burning ripples, searching
for father through walls. He kneels
in the living room, writing plans with
his finger dipped in soot and saliva
mixed in an empty cup of soju.
We’ll build a hagwon here, father
and son. Next round waiting to boil.
I sit by him and pour in the glass
meant for me, unable to tell sweat from
tears on his face. On my own. They taste
like ocean. He grabs his lower back in pain.
You can teach English, I can drive students,
give a tour. His face melts under eyes,
cheeks sagging. No more taxi cab.
I wrap myself around his legs to hold
him in place, a beggar wondering how
much left of us can burn. Please, no less.
My father stands tall – a faithful candle.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 1 Comment
Stuart Barnes is a Tasmanian-born, Queensland-based poet and the poetry editor of Tincture Journal and Verity La. In 2014 he was named Runner-up in the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and co-judged the ACT Publishing Awards’ poetry category. An anthology of poetry, with Robbie Coburn, Nathan Hondros, Rose Hunter, Carly-Jay Metcalfe and Michele Seminara, is forthcoming from Regime Books. Twitter @StuartABarnes
MH: Who is the poet who has most inspired you, and why?
SB: At my 30th birthday party a friend gave me a Brunswick Street Bookstore voucher, which I redeemed for Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems (and Mervyn Peake’s The Gormenghast Trilogy, which inspired Faith, one of my favourite records by The Cure). Collected helped me navigate a particularly intense depression. In Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Lowell writes: “[Plath] almost makes one feel at first reading that almost all other poetry is about nothing. … [Although] I can scarcely bear to read her poems through, they are so agonized. A bit formless for my taste, too”. Interesting observations. The former I agree with; the latter rubs me the wrong way. I find Plath’s poetry and prose—Johnny Panic, Unabridged Journals, Letters Home—transformative, distinct, composed; thick with wit, drive, love, hope and well crafted last lines. These aspects continue to inspire; her life’s minutiae only insofar as they influenced her writing.
MH: What is poetry for?
SB: Pleasure. Pain relief. Enlightenment. Escape. Absolution. Past, present, future.
MH: Could you tell us a little about being an online editor? What are the pains and joys of this?
SB: I love editing poetry for Tincture Journal and Verity La, but the online environment is a double-edged sword: 24/7-accessible, yet an energy leech. More and more I dream about living off the grid, but I don’t want to relinquish what I do. To be able to read and edit others’ poetry is a privilege and a great collaboration. I often think I’m more enriched by the experience than the contributors. One of the joys, which outnumber the pains, is accepting that first work by an exceptional new writer: an unearthing of buried treasure. One of the pains is sifting incorrectly sent material; guidelines are so easy to follow.
MH: If you could live anywhere else in the world where would it be? Why so?
SB: Ancient Egypt or British East Africa. Dreams, visions, past life experiences.
MH: Could you list ten of your favourite poetry collections please…?
SB: Alphabetised: Ashes in the Air, Ali Alizadeh; Free Logic, Rachael Briggs; When My Brother Was an Aztec, Natalie Diaz; The Three Fates & Other Poems, Rosemary Dobson; Bone Scan, Gwen Harwood; The Striped World, Emma Jones; The Earth in the Attic, Fady Joudah; Ariel: The Restored Edition, Sylvia Plath; The Brink, Jacob Polley; Akhenaten, Dorothy Porter.
MH: What is your relationship to music?
SB: I was raised in a home where there was always the right LP for the right occasion. Before I could speak I could hum Dolly, Johnny, The Beatles. From an early age I’d set my alarm for 11 p.m. every Friday and Saturday, watch rage till just before my parents woke. I loved, equally, the new music, the guest programmers, the Top 50 Countdown. Besides befriending Gwen Harwood, hymns were the only thing I liked about church. At ten, with my own pocket money, I bought my first record: Bananarama’s WOW! An obsession with everything Stock Aitken Waterman followed. At fifteen I was introduced to The Cure, discovered a number of almost-as-brilliant UK bands: Curve, Ride, Dead Can Dance, Swervedriver, Cocteau Twins, Stone Roses, My Bloody Valentine, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Jesus and Mary Chain. From America: Primus, Fugazi, Red Hot Chili Peppers. In those days triple j was a spring of astonishing alternative music; I digged, just as much, Hobart’s local mainstream stations. When I moved to Melbourne at eighteen I met a girl obsessed with Britpop and electronica. Each week, music drew us to Q&A, Smashing, Teriyaki Anarki Saki. Blur, Pulp and Suede I still listen to; FSOL, Sasha and Digweed and Laurent Garnier, too. At the turn of the second millennium, Warp Records, Philip Glass, Henryk Górecki. Gay, underground and day clubs, raves and dance parties offered up a honking skein of artists. For a number of years I played violin, guitar, piano; for several I wrote songs and sang “as badly as Robert Smith”, according to my family (I always wanted to be a writer, but I always wanted to be a rock star more: too shy; and I never could perfect that union of lyrics and melody). For a couple in the mid-noughties I DJ’ed at three Melbourne pubs. Eventually I stopped going to bars, clubs, gigs, stopped smoking, drinking and whatnot. “Our relationship will suffer!” I needn’t have worried. I became more resourceful (podcasts, SoundCloud, Shazam). Nowadays, I put on music less often, though with no less affection; I’ve learnt to enjoy the silence. Occasionally I miss the dance floor’s sweat ‘n’ bump, its tribal triumph. All music and all lyrics, particularly The Cure’s and Robert Smith’s, have influenced the big things, writing especially. Music has been pacifier and blue security blanket. Catalyst of Dionysian Mystery and screaming at the moon. Music is white flag, time machine, memory aid, stimulant, narcotic. Saint Etienne’s “I couldn’t go to Somerset on my own, so I used Top of the Pops as my World Atlas”. Magic moments (Underworld’s ‘Born Slippy’ at Wall Street at midnight on New Year’s Eve; The Orb’s extended live version of ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ at Earthcore at dawn; Diamanda Galás’ version of The Supremes’ ‘My World Is Empty Without You’ at twilight at Hamer Hall). Music is my North, my South, my East and West. The perfect—the only—drug, best served without preconception. Causes me to dance and sing, get up and do my thing. I am as happy cranking Zappa as I am miming ABBA. Spice Girls are as vital as Billy Bragg. Not every day, but I wake, write, edit, eat, shower, daydream and fall asleep to music.
MH: You are a big writer of centos. What attracts you to them?
SB: For years I’ve marvelled at the art of mixing vinyl, which I never mastered in the DJ days. I’ve never solved a cryptic crossword; the cento, I think, is poetry’s cryptic crossword. The challenge is highly attractive; I like rules, e.g., ‘Forcento’ (Rabbit Poetry Journal #10) lifted one line from six poems about gravity, ‘Penultimates’ (Regime 05) the second-to-last line from each of Ariel: The Restored Edition’s forty poems, ‘Cinquecento’ http://cordite.org.au/poetry/notheme3/cinquecento/ one line from fifteen poems written in the sixteenth century. Also (and this realisation occurred while talking with friend and fellow writer Nigel Featherstone last year), writing a cento is my way of critically engaging with other texts without reviewing them (I enjoy reviewing, but I’m slow at writing prose).
MH: Once upon a time poetry was quite popular. If in fact it still is, what can we do to make it even more popular, without sacrificing any of its difficulties?
SB: Sacrifice its poet-difficulties: the cynics, the trolls, the ogres.
MH: Why is the word ‘poet’ slightly amusing?
SB: “I’m a poet” is almost defiant; I have to find strangers’ and acquaintances’ insensitive responses slightly amusing: “I didn’t think they still existed! Where’s your inkwell, where’s your quill, where’s your powdered wig? Your favourite poet’s Plath, eh; you love all that doom and gloom? Does poetry pay the bills? When are you going to grow up? When are you going to get a real job?” And my favourite, which Ivor Indyk mentioned in Sydney Review of Books http://www.sydneyreviewofbooks.com/20-march-2015-ivor-indyk-on-novelists-and-poets/: “Poets just sit around for months on end, waiting for inspiration”.
MH: How does living in Central Queensland affect your writing?
SB: In my editorial for Tincture Journal Issue Nine http://tincture-journal.com/buy-a-tincture/ I wrote about the astrological implications of living so close to the Tropic of Capricorn. The proximity of rainforest and the sea and clearly seeing the Milky Way have expanded my awareness of, my sensitivity to nature’s rhythms. Rockhampton receives over three hundred days of sunshine a year, a stark contrast to Melbourne, so I’m a happier chappie, a happier writer. Moving from Victoria utterly befuddled me. When I settled, however, the past’s horrors were uncorked and in poured new influences. I started taking yoga and meditation seriously; now, I practice every day. I kind of haunted Clifton Hill from a tiny three-storey two bedroom flat; here I’ve an enormous three bedroom Queenslander with a tyre swing, mangoes, coconut palms … Recently, my first tropical cyclone; in Marcia’s aftermath, as I gape at the poincianas and the gums, I’m reminded of lines from The Cure’s ‘Shake Dog Shake’ (“I’ll tear your red hair by the roots”) and Plath’s ‘The Hanging Man’ (“By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me”). This city’s very different, still very much an inspiration.
MH: Are there any areas you feel poetry should not venture into?
SB: No.
MH: When are you going to put a book out?
SB: A publication, with fellow poets Robbie Coburn, Nathan Hondros, Rose Hunter, Carly-Jay Metcalfe and Michele Seminara, is forthcoming from Regime Books.
~~~
MATT HETHERINGTON is a writer, music-maker, gourmet Indian chef, soccer nut, bludger, and lover based in Brisbane. His first collection of all-Japanese-related forms (and fourth poetry collection) is For Instance, published by Mulla Mulla Press. Some current inspirations are: Timbaland, Frisky Dingo, Jess, Luce, and northern sunshine. Matt’s latest published poetry can be found in a three-way collaboration with poets Ryan Van Winkle and David Stavanger here: http://ryanvanwinkle.com/projects/commiserate-2015/
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Chloe Wilson’s first poetry collection, The Mermaid Problem, was commended in the Anne Elder Award and Highly Commended in the Mary Gilmore Award. She won the 2014 Val Vallis Award for Unpublished Poetry and was Highly Commended in the 2014 Manchester Fiction Prize.
Pronunciation
It would be wrong to say he bought me. It’s never like that. He chose my photo, my description; I received a call from the agency; then we met at a dimly lit restaurant with black banquette seats. He ordered champagne and a platter of sushi and sashimi, the slivers of fish pink and glossy, like tongues.
‘You’ll have to teach me how to use chopsticks like that,’ he said.
‘You’re very good,’ I said. ‘Very natural.’
‘I hired a tutor,’ he said, slurping up a piece of eel, ‘last time I was in Japan.’
We negotiated terms. Of course, it’s not as businesslike as that. He talked about what he wanted – companionship, someone to take to dinners and parties, maybe with a view to the long term, depending on how things progressed – and when I didn’t object, he relaxed, ordered another bottle of wine.
He said he loved the way I had trouble with certain phrases – fifth floor, not at all.
After a few weeks, I had my own credit card.
After a year, he said he wanted to marry me.
I took his last name. But at night, in our futon with the koi-patterned sheets, he would whisper Mitsuki Tanaka, Mitsuki Tanaka. Even then, he was always trying to get his accent right.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mark Brandi was born in Italy and then spent most of his childhood in a remote country Victorian pub. He now lives in Melbourne, where he writes fiction. He was the grateful recipient of a 2015 Varuna Residential Fellowship and was runner up for the 2014 NSW Writers’ Centre Varuna Fellowship. He was the 2014 winner of the City of Rockingham Short Fiction Awards and shortlisted for the 2015 Seizure Viva La Novella Prize. He was also longlisted for the 2015 International Caledonia Novel Award. His shorter work has appeared in literary journals and been broadcast on ABC Radio National. www.markbrandi.com
Like Ice
It stinks of shit. Heavy and sweet. Like the chow mein Mum cooked for the punters. Fried mince, cabbage and curry powder.
Dad’s lying in bed, the blankets pulled up to his neck.
“Are you okay?”
“I think so.”
Mum’s eyes. Cheap liqueur chocolates. Her mouth twitches a broken beat. Closes the window. Opens it. Looks at me. Says it with her eyes.
I didn’t know who to call.
“Dad,’ I say. Too loud. ‘Is your head okay?”
“No.”
“Are you feeling sick?”
“I’m not sure.”
Mum’s candy-brittle smile. Crosses her arms. Shakes her head. “He’s just embarrassed.”
I help him sit up. Pull the blankets back – the shit is there. It’s on the mattress. It’s on the floor. There’s shit everywhere.
Mum dry retches.
He swings his legs over the side of the bed. Stands up shaky. Faded cotton undies and short-sleeve Aldi shirt. Chicken legs with hairless skin. His belly is much too big for chicken legs.
His thin, white hair is standing on end. Like a bush cockatoo.
Dad’s outside a country pub.
He just bought it.
He’s with Mum.
A gold-rush pub.
Empty for years.
Full of rats.
But there’s gold too.
Behind the fireplace.
They’ll find that later.
I tell him to put his arm around me.
“We’re gonna walk to the shower. You feel okay to walk?”
“I think so.”
We walk there. His hand on my arm. Soft fingers. Thin skin. Not like it used to be. Dried up leather. Old Blundstones in the sun.
It’s a nice bathroom. It’s better than mine. Dark-grey tiles. A special shower.
I show him how to use the mixer tap.
“I know,” he says.
“Make sure you clean your backside.”
Dad watches me mime the action of washing my arse with imaginary soap. The soap is clean and green in its little chrome tray. It doesn’t know what it’s in for.
Mum doesn’t know what she’s in for.
She doesn’t speak English.
Dad taught himself on the boat.
They’re gonna run it, he reckons.
He’s never run a pub.
He’s a train driver.
Diesel engines and punch-ups.
Aussies with big mouths.
Dad hurt his back.
Mum’s gonna be the cook.
Dad’s family are all insane.
Just ask anyone.
Mum is in the bedroom. She’s in the bedroom on her knees.
“Bloody dis-gusting.” She’s scrubbing the floor. “Filthy bastard.”
I hear the shower go on. “How did he … ?”
“Who knows? I’ll never get these stains out.”
Dad is in a brown suit.
He looks like Bob De Niro.
The judge is Lionel Murphy.
The judge says Dad made history.
A precedent, he said.
It’s about his back.
Mike Willesee wants to talk on telly.
Mike Willessee is all the rage.
But Dad won’t talk.
And Bob De Niro’s not a lawyer.
The shower goes off. So I listen at the door. The dead whirr of the fan.
“Finished?”
“Yeah.”
“Cleaned yourself properly?”
“Yeah.”
Swish and rustle. Starched towel on flesh. I hope he cleaned himself. I hope he got all the shit off. I hope he doesn’t stink.
It’s three weeks til his birthday.
It’s my friend’s birthday.
His mum drives me home.
Double-storey brick house.
Dad is building it himself.
Spanish arches.
No need for a roof.
We’ll live downstairs.
This isn’t my house.
So drive me somewhere else.
That’s exactly what I said.
In the kitchen, we dance around it. Like the last ones no-one picked. When no-one else is left.
“Well eventually …”
“He won’t go. It will kill him.”
“What’s gonna happen when—”
“I’ll do it as long as I can.”
Steps on the stairs.
Act casual.
He won’t know anyway.
He comes through the door. Pants pulled up high. Jumper tucked right in. Jacket on. Smiling.
All ready to go.
Schoolbag in the back.
Windscreen frozen over.
Ice, he says.
Get the hose.
From safe inside, I watch the cascade.
The crystal flow.
It floods.
I watch.
And wait.
Until he’s there again.
Through the glass and frost.
Just a shimmer in the morning sun.
As the ice begins to melt.
A thick woollen jumper.
His hair turning grey.
The smile won’t leave his eyes.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Rebecca Jessen lives in Toowoomba with her two cacti. She is the winner of the 2013 Queensland Literary Award for Best Emerging Author for her verse novel Gap. In 2012 Rebecca won the State Library of Queensland Young Writers Award. Rebecca’s writing has been published in The Lifted Brow, Voiceworks, Stilts, Scum Mag and Verity La. Rebecca’s verse novel Gap is out now through University of Queensland Press. She is the recipient of an AMP Tomorrow Maker grant.
The Late September Dogs
low mist hanging off a high mountain. driving cars worth more than your self esteem. a twenty-nine dollar tax return that feels both like a gift and a joke. waiting two hours for five minutes. leaving with your fifth K10 questionnaire in as many years. hopelessness is always high. nervousness is mostly circumstantial. lying face down in your IKEA furnished study. listening to a Melissa Etheridge LP as old as you. feeling both like an old soul and too young to know what life really is. scoring yourself thirty-five out of fifty on the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale. half listening to your caseworker who is not a psychologist. almost believing when she says you eat and sleep too regularly to qualify as depressed. what you have is chronic low mood. there’s not much help or hope for people like you. sorry kid. not everyone can be happy. here take some vitamins. ignoring text messages from the government. asking your opinion on a safe night out. crying for no reason. listening to the same Melissa Etheridge song on repeat for two hours. crying for no reason. sorry kid. there’s not much help for people like you.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ella Jeffery was born in northern New South Wales and currently lives in Shanghai, China. She writes poetry and short fiction, some of which has appeared in Best Australian Poems 2013, Cordite, Voiceworks and elsewhere. She will commence her PhD in creative writing at Queensland University of Technology in mid-2015.
Moths
It’s always late when I come here. It’s always cold outside. I can see her through the glass-panelled door. She thinks she’s keeping me waiting but I’m watching the patterns of the moths around the glass. Sometimes there’s so many of them I can barely see through it. They probably stay there all night, moving around and around the same ring of light.
She always opens the door with a lit cigarette in her mouth. But this part has happened only since I told her I was quitting. She lets me in without looking at me. The chatter of bats in the mango trees is snapped off when she pulls the door closed.
Here she is: bare feet and white legs. Black underwear and a white singlet with a red bra underneath, showing through like a blush on a pale cheek.
“You didn’t call,” she says, drifting back to the couch. “I might’ve been out.”
“It’s Tuesday.”
“So?”
“So where would you go on a Tuesday?”
She laughs. She’s watching one of her crazy subtitled films. The directors are European, the women all have faces like crumpled paper and go insane about halfway through. The men are psychologists. The children die early on. Usually that’s the way it goes. She watches to the end.
I make myself a coffee while the psychologist wrestles with his screaming wife. The fluorescent in the kitchen buzzes with moths. More are on the windows, or skittering up in the corners of the high ceilings. There are always so many in here, though the only window I’ve ever seen her open is the one over her bed. Their movement is soundless, sightless. They’re not aiming for anything, except perhaps a higher part of the moulding wall. They just keep switching places and switching back, flickering around quietly, leap-frogging over each other with their chalky wings. I wonder if this is their home. A cramped space; the cupboards like tall men squished in an elevator, stretching up. The moths settle on the tops of them for a moment, and leave again. Hundreds of them bang against the light fitting. They must do this every night.
*
She lives just off the highway. I listen to the cars while I move over her. She never makes much sound but it didn’t take long to learn what she likes. She’s not a talker. She doesn’t get on top. I use my stubble against her, raking over her neck and cheeks. I hold her hands down. The only noises are the jolting of the bed, and under that is her quiet breathing, and under that is the sound of the moths, which gather in her bedroom more than anywhere else in the house.
I’ve never known a house to be more full of them than hers is tonight. The cars roar by. Where do people go on Tuesday nights?
A moth brushes over my hair as I finish and replace myself on the other side of the bed. She lights a cigarette, smokes from the flat of her back. She doesn’t offer me one, but I’d have taken it. The burning end shows her face in shaking light. When it’s done she ducks off to the shower and flicks on the light as she goes. Her room is never dark enough.
As she leaves I look up at the ceiling from the same place she laid a moment ago and see so many moths up there, more than I could count, and there is so much movement I feel almost dizzy. And more moths come in, and more and still more, so many moths that the light is now dimming, now blacked out, except the colour’s not black, it’s dusty brown and grey. Soon the room is filled with moths. They’re covering my skin and hair, and my mouth is shut as tight as it can go and I’m worrying about my ears and my nose, whether they’ll try to nudge their way inside me with their bulging alien faces and chalky wings. There’s only the sound of dull ruffling wings. Their antennae move noiselessly, listening or tasting, I can’t remember which. They’re on my face. I can see their tiny mouths, the tiniest mouths I have ever seen. And more are coming, stuffing themselves in through the door, and I can see them pressing their little furred bodies up against the windows, skittering over the walls.
I close my eyes. Moths land on the lids. The imprints of their feet. They don’t go anywhere. They don’t have anywhere to go.
“Hey,” I call out to her. “Come in here.” I keep my eyes closed and press my lips shut again and keep perfectly still under the movement of so many moths.
A second later she’s back and there are moths on the towel around her neck, landing in her wet hair. She shrugs and says “They’re just moths. They won’t hurt you.”
I get up anyway, shake them from my clothes and walk out of the door where they’re still crowded like mystics around the circle of light spilling out. I walk down to the highway and hope the last bus is running late. I look at the bone-coloured moon and I don’t imagine her in that old house, sleeping under blankets of moths.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Blake Curran is currently studying a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Creative Writing) and a Bachelor of Arts (English Literatures) at the Univeristy of Wollongong. He is in his third year. He lives somewhere around Campbelltown, and finds inspiration for his stories in the suburban and natural world around him. He hopes to one day be a published novelist, but also enjoys writing shorter pieces very much.
Empty
The uniform houses lie like squares in a patchwork quilt, flung over the undulations of the earth as far as she can see. She sits on a hard, wooden bench on the front verandah, cigarette warm in her hand. She knocks it against a small ceramic dish before it ashes. It is evening. It’s always evening, by the time she gets a chance to come out here and have a quiet smoke by herself, churn things over, cast a meandering glance over the observable world.
Last night, the air was warm and it felt like a summery dusk from her childhood: you could stretch in its luxuriance, and the world went on forever in perfect golden tones. But tonight, the air is sharp and everything looks monochrome. Crickets chirp, and grass glistens like glass darkly caught in the shine of the moon. She hurries to finish her smoke so she can go back inside.
It is a new suburb. Many of the houses have only just been built; some are not even finished. She is lucky, in a way, to be able to live in one so soon. Her previous house, which she had been renting by herself for years, had been demolished at the landlord’s bequest, forcing her to pack her few things and leave. It pays to have a cousin in contracting. What was it her father used to say? It’s not what you know, but who. And blood is thicker than water. Apparently.
How can she believe that when everyone she’s ever loved has left her, one way or another. At the occasion of death, blood turns to water. At least here she doesn’t have to think about it. She can pretend not to, anyway.
She has forgotten about the cigarette, and it has gone out a couple of centimetres from her fingertips, a small heap of ash beneath. What a waste. She considers lighting another, but does not bother. The once-lit cylinder hangs limp from her calloused fingers. There is no point in lighting another. It is cool outside and she can feel the threat of rain close by. She could go inside right now and run herself a hot bath, pour a glass of heady red wine and relax into one more early night, ready for another day of work tomorrow. But she does not move. She remains motionless, except for her eyes. They rove over what used to be rippling bushland, seeing none of it. She is thinking about how she is the only one living on this street, on the whole block, and how this grey light makes her ache in some unexplainable, non-physical way. Not even a car has passed by all evening, and now it is night, and she has not seen another person since she got home. She has been sitting here since the streetlights clicked on down the road, but this block belongs to another transformer, and has not been wired up properly yet. So she sits in dim moonshine, alone on the outskirts of artificial light.
She lets the cigarette drop into her ashtray on the arm of the wooden bench, picking up the carton from the empty space beside her. Inside rattles her last cigarette and a cheap, silver lighter. She holds the cigarette between her lips and flicks it alight between cupped hands. The sky begins to drip. She inhales a hollow breath and thinks empty thoughts that loop endlessly.
Emily O’Grady is a PhD candidate at Queensland University of Technology, where she won the 2012 Undergraduate, and the 2013 Postgraduate Writing Prize. Her fiction and poetry have been published in The Lifted Brow, Voiceworks, and Award Winning Australian Writing.
