January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
.jpg)
S. Gupta was born in 1988 in the middle of a Texas snow storm. She graduated from Johns Hopkins with degrees in creative writing and psychology. She currently lives in Washington DC. Her work has previously appeared in The Talkin’ Blues Literary Magazine, and Midwest Literary Magazine.
Blessing
When you are little you figure a blessing is a sort of cake. To receive it, you kneel down in front of your parents and they balance it on top of your head. As you rise you catch it and pop it into your mouth so that the last taste of home is a sweet one.
You know this because your father reads Indian folk tales to you. A lot of them are variations on the same theme: the hero goes out into the world to seek his fortune, but before that he had to seek his parents’ blessing. Mostly he gets it, but sometimes he doesn’t and then he has to resort to Drastic Action or leave home with a Heavy Heart.
You’re outraged to discover that no, in fact, a blessing is not a cake. A blessing means that your parents raise you up, kiss your forehead and say, “Go with God, my child.” You don’t understand. It’s not like words can stop you in your tracks.
“A blessing gives means your parents support your endeavors,” your father says. “A blessing can mean peace, courage.”
He would know. He was nine when he left home. His father was an engineer who hopped from city to city following blueprints to build canals and bridges, anything that would pay the bills. His mother taught her children mathematics at her knee, whacked them with a ruler when they made mistakes, and sent her children off to the best boarding school she could afford: military school where the students change clothes five times a day, run a few miles before breakfast and don’t cry for home.
Your father could not run, he came last in all the races, but in the classroom he left his classmates in the dust as he spun through mathematics, hammered away at physics until it became the lens he used to examine life, and found as he examined it, that he hated school.
But he had his parents blessing.
When he left for college, he did not have his parents blessing. He left to study physics in a place where only doctors and engineers could count on making any money, in a time where even those comfortably ensconced in the middle class worried about having enough food on the table. You’re mad, his parents told him. You’ll never be able to feed a family, they told him. You’ll starve on the streets, they told him.
I am mad, he said. I will not get married and raise a family, he said. I don’t need much money, he said. And then he trained himself to dream of a future spent living in a single room, eating very little. It was not difficult after military school where fifty boys would share one room and the occasional cockroach would be mixed into the canteen food.
As it happened, physics led him to America where he got married, gave it all up for business because he couldn’t support a wife on a researcher’s salary and then got it all back when he started his first company where he could write mathematical algorithms and found he liked it better than the political games professors, even physics professors, especially physics professors, play.
“I have found my life’s work,” he says to you when you are very young.
You have a life plan too. You are going to follow your father’s footsteps, placing your feet in the whirls and hollows he has left imprinted on the earth. First you will become a physicist. You will read his thesis, a thesis that very few people are capable of understanding, he tells you, and then you will ease your way into the company, help it lift off. It runs, it does well even, but he dreams of an empire. You will come, and it will be an empire.
Your first grade teacher is so impressed by your plans, and the stories your father tells her of how you conduct your own experiments, that she sets aside science text books for you to take home. You take them home and you and your father go through the experiments for about half an hour until you get bored.
In third grade you attempt to start your own company. You’ve got it planned out. Work out a profit proposal with your father. Your best friends are going to be your business partners. Announce the idea on the playground. They are full of ideas. Decide their ideas are stupid. The company flops.
You don’t particularly care because you’ve just discovered Sherlock Holmes and are reading your way through the complete works. Every week your mother takes you to the library and you wander in and out of the different sections pulling books from shelves, Nancy Drew, Louisa May Alcott, Tolkien.
“Junk,” your father cries. “Stop reading such junk. Read something worthwhile. Science. Math.”
Occasionally you ask the librarians for books on antelopes because antelopes are animals and animals are biology and biology is a science, but antelopes are so boring you switch to biographies and keep hitting the fiction. Read Sense and Sensibility and decide Marianne is a drip. Read Animal Farm without knowing anything about communism and decide power corrupts. Read Anna Karenina and decide men are evil. Race through your class assignments so you can read, cram homework into an hour so you can read, read through recesses, car rides, road trips, family reunions, dinner parties, read until your eyes hurt and your legs are cramped and the words on the page are more real than the sofa you’re sitting on.
***
Hit sixth grade. The homework starts getting serious. You can’t finish math homework while the teacher explains the lesson anymore. Slowly, so slowly, you don’t notice it, you start to lag behind. A little knot starts living in the pit of your stomach during tests and grows larger and more wretched with each test.
Read so you can forget about math. Read while you should be doing math. Read, read, read.
Occasionally write. In seventh grade a poet teaches your English class for a few days. Before she leaves she pulls your parents aside.
“You must be a writing family,” she says.
“Quite the opposite,” your father says. “I was terrible at the humanities.” He was. He likes to tell you about how he wrote one English paper in high school and turned it in year after year for a solid “B”. A “B” was good enough for English.
“Your daughter is talented,” she says.
He smiles. He is proud. Middle school is all about being proud of you, the poems you are getting published, the essays that the teachers talk about in the hallways, it is almost enough to make up for the fact that the math is getting worse each year. By eighth grade the math teacher is calling you in after class to ask you if there’s anything she can do to help improve your grades.
“You’re not stupid,” your father says. He says it often. He says instead, that he has failed you. He should have spent more time teaching you math when you were little, as his mother taught him. Instead he devoted his time to his company.
You nod and you think of all those wasted hours, the hours you spent reading about fictional people with fictional lives when you could have studied the curve of the universe, understood reality, and you want to throw up.
You have begun to panic about your future. The math isn’t working out, the writing is, but everyone knows writers don’t get jobs, and somehow you know already, that you will never be a writer. You were meant to travel other paths.
Take a deep breathe. High school is around the corner. In high school there will be real science class, and there you will learn, oh you will learn.
***
In high school you load up on physics and chemistry and math. Your father looks through your textbooks each summer.
“You’re going to love these courses,” he says. This is the sort of thing he wishes he had when he was your age. “You should study over the summer,” he says.
You try. You sit with last year’s text book and the coming year’s text book and you tell yourself you’ll do two hours a day, but sooner or later you reach for your pile of library books and the calculus, the chemistry, the physics lies forgotten, and then the school year comes around and there again you’re taking home grades that steadily sink lower and lower.
Stay up late to finish problem sets, drink coffee on test days until you vibrate in your chair, start having nightmares about failing months before each exam. Write in your blog about how much you hate school. Get a small audience. Keep writing in your blog. Write. Write. Write.
“Be careful about your blog,” your father says. “You’re going to be someone running a company one day and you don’t want your blog to haunt you.”
You try.
In eleventh grade you take Calculus. In the hallway at school a parent stops you. Her son is in your Calculus class.
“I used to work for your father,” she says. “He’s a genius. I’m so excited that my son has the chance to be in class with you. He keeps telling me about there’s freshman in his class who is setting the curve. That’s you right? ”
Smile. Back away. Later in the day the Calc teacher hands out the mid-semester grades. She gives you your first fail.
That year your father makes a mathematical break through. His best friend is over at the time, and when your father shows him the math, he gasps and drags you over.
“Have you seen what your father has done?” he asks and graphs and formulas pour out of him and you shake your head and back away.
Your father shakes his head and smiles a little painfully, the smile of the perpetually isolated, “Stop. You’re not being fair to her. She hasn’t studied that. She can’t understand.”
“A pity,” his friend says. “Such a pity.”
“Physics is about seeing and understanding the world in its precise truth,” your father will say periodically. “It’s not like the humanities or the arts, where nothing is known, where nothing is precise and you can build nothing.”
You envy the scientists, the mathematicians of the world— people who are born seeing the truth, people who can slice through the multitudinous deceptions of ordinary mortals, and reveal the bleached bones of truth.
What would that be like?
You can not imagine it. You are not capable of it.
Tell your college counselor on whim you want to go to a place with a good English program.
***
The summer after you graduate from high school you run into that freshman, now sophomore, who was in your Calculus class and dazzled the teachers. “I don’t know what to do,” her mother says half laughing, half afraid as if this girl’s talent is bright enough to burn.
Your father writes down his telephone number, rattles off books and techniques, says, “You must call me if you need anything.” Later he shakes his head and smiles. Oh that girl, that girl, he sees his younger self in her eyes.
Then he tells you not to sign up for Calculus III in college.
“Don’t torture yourself unnecessarily,” he says.
Despite your best intentions you become a writing major in college. Spend three years dissecting books, ripping up your writing style and piecing it together again, learning that you know nothing. Hate the stuffy professors, hate the redundant syllabus, hate the pompous students, get high on Neruda and Eliot while you do your homework, fall asleep dreaming of libraries. Send your father all your stories. He reads them and tells you he’s not the best person to give you feedback: this is not his forte.
Then it’s your last year of college and you have to go job hunting.
No one will give you an interview.
“If you were an economics major or an engineering major you would have a job,” your father says. “They see writing major and toss your resume out. This is the price you pay for following your passion.”
“This is the price,” you say.
“It’s just the writing major,” he says.
“It’s just the writing major,” you say.
No one will give you an interview.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “You can always work for me.” His company is beginning take off, it is expanding, these days all he can speak of is the latest algorithm, how it is dynamite and unleashed it will change the world.
After seven months, the government offers to hire you. Your friends laugh. “Good luck accomplishing anything there,” they say. They had expected more from you.
You call your father.
“Come work with me,” he says. “We need you and we’re growing and we’re at an exciting place.”
“But what about this job?” you ask. “What do you think of it?”
“God, when I compare what’s going on at my company with a shitty little government job…oh, it’s frustrating.”
“It’s a shitty little job,” you say.
***
The job isn’t bad as far as shitty little jobs go. You get up, you go to work, then you come home and you write, you write, you write until you think you’ve used up all the words in the world, and then you fall asleep and get up and do it all over again the next day, and sometimes there isn’t enough time to write, and you think, maybe you could be a writer, only there’s never enough time, there’s never enough time and meanwhile all you have to write about is what happens inside the gray cubes of the government.
You can’t stay here forever. But you don’t want to go to business school, you don’t want to get another job that will take away even more of your writing time.
“I know at the moment writing is very important to you,” he says when you tell him this, “But think. Probably, you could do well, even pick up a few hundred every year, but is that enough to live on? To bet your life on? I know you. You wouldn’t be happy without the kind of success I have.”
The next day you go to work and your boss calls a staff meeting. You sit with excellent posture in your crisp white shirt and neat black skirt. You have a notebook full of questions and you ask them in a crisp little British accent. You think about how this isn’t bad, and how in ten years on a morning like this when a fresh breeze is blowing through the room and the air smells like sunlight you will still be wearing a crisp white shirt speaking in a crisp little British accent in some office somewhere. A good life.
You go back to your cube and pull out your assignment, only your head aches so you think perhaps you will sit for a while. And as you sit, you think, ah, you will go home, you will write. But what to write? And you imagine that you are a stranger, picking through your own stories, bidding on them, and you want to gouge out your eyeballs.
It is no use, you think. It is a hobby worth a few hundred a year.
You sip some caffeine to fill something in your chest that has gone hollow and funny and go back to work.
You know what a blessing is now. It is a stone compass, round and heavy that your parents slip into your hand when you are born. Pray that you have the strength to carry it, pray that you are able to follow the direction of the arrow easily and effortlessly so you will never discover how relentlessly it tugs you forward.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
.jpg)
Heather Taylor Johnson moved from America to Australia in 1999 and since has received a PhD in Creative Writing, has had a poetry collection, Exit Wounds, published, and has discovered that reviewing poetry is a fantastic genre to work with. She spent all of 2010 living in the Colorado Rockies with her husband and three young children and though she couldn’t leave the subject of ‘home’ alone in her writing, she also found that mountains were very difficult to ignore.
While A Flock Of Seagulls Flies North
Tree stumps wide as the length of my body
and as long as yours
touching mine
from head to toe
scatter this beach;
its perimeter the outline of a powerful tide.
Without you there would be no ex-pat.
Without me no working visa.
We inhabit this earth as if it were our own.
Trying to imagine this ocean carrying
great trees of small forests in such a rush
of movement and moons
depositing them on foreign soil…
sand, not soil
but then you and the beauty of this drowned-out colour
and washed-out texture, how the stumps broke apart
from roots and limbs to rest on this beach
are just the reasons I am here.
The reasons I move, then rest.
Amongst It
Our nine year itch moved us to the mountains.
Small town, big earth
we breathed it every day:
snow
snow falling
snow sifting, resting, misting upwards
from a sexy wind.
Our waterless lips
were constantly parted
constantly wanting to lap it up.
We became so spontaneous the frozen waterfall
we walked upon, ad-libbed and perfect.
And the night in the lounge after Sunny’s party,
the mess, wood stove, us.
Riotous snowballs melted down
the backs of our knitted necks
and the jolt, the stagger, the interchangeable
skin and liquid ice (liquid ice
and incredible skin).
Something fleeting about it all.
And those mountains –
their permanence.
When we finally looked away we breathed;
it was evergreen, deer dung and snow.
In the end we became asthmatic
because after the mountains
my eyes found yours
and then we gasped
forgetting to breath
forgetting the snow
forgetting even
the mountains.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
.jpg)
Eileen Chong is a Sydney poet. She was born in Singapore where she studied and taught before moving to Australia in 2007. She is currently completing a Master of Letters at Sydney University with a focus on poetry. Her writing has been published in literary journals such as Meanjin, HEAT Magazine, Mascara Literary Review, Softblow, Hecate and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, with a poem forthcoming in Overland. Her work has also been selected for Black Inc’s Best Australian Poems 2010, to be published in November 2010. In 2010 she was awarded the Poets Union Youth Fellowship for 2010–2011. A chapbook of her poems will be published in mid-2011 with the assistance of Australian Poetry Ltd.
You went to Rome on your own
all those years ago. Your maps sat
on the shelf in your mother’s house,
creased, yellowing. We lay
on your old bed that afternoon
and you traced a flight path
down my arm. It’s not somewhere
you want to be alone, you said.
We took a room on the top floor
of the hotel. There was a balcony
that overlooked the cobblestoned lane
that rang like an ironsmith’s
each time a woman strode past
the shops towards the piazza. We
stopped for coffee but did not sit.
You clutched a map but didn’t need it.
I was here, you gestured
at the fountain, it’s for lovers. I looked
to see its beauty but saw only
tourists fingering cameras, myself
included. I let my hands drop
into the flow and laughed
at how cold it was. You kissed me
on the side of my salty neck.
In the darkness of the providore
we stood and breathed in
the brine of the meats, the ripeness
of olives. We learnt the true names
of prosciutto. We drank warm
oil. The man behind the counter
asked where we were from. Paradise.
You should visit one day. He shook his head.
At the markets we bought
red-stained cherries. I carried
them in one hand and your
years in the other. Each step
we took overlaid each step
you’d taken. In our room, I washed
the fruit in the bathtub. They floated
like breasts, free and heavy.
What Winogrand Said
“I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.”
So we write. We write
not because we don’t know
what it is we’re writing about,
stuck in our rooms at our desks
with a window facing
the park, the sea, a bricked-up
wall beyond which neighbours
scream at one another well
past midnight. We write because
we’re finding out what
the woman with the cigarette
on the bus felt when she was told
there was no smoking on the bus. What
the young man on the street corner
really wanted with his outstretched
hands and naked, vulnerable neck.
We write because all things
are writable. Nothing
is sacred. Not even the memory
of your mother’s pale leg
propped up on the wet stool
as she washed, you, too young
to turn from the dark flower
at the juncture of her thighs. The scent
of her breast: pillowy, milk-full.
The first time you reached down
and put him inside of you,
even though he, seventeen
and bare-faced, said for you
not to. We don’t know
if all things in our poems
are beautiful, but we do know
that things can be beautiful
in our poems. Or cruel. Lies,
all lies, some say, but really,
we write because it’s not about
what the thing is, at all.
It’s about what the thing becomes
in the poem. It’s about the poem.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
.jpg)
Sridala Swami’s poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Drunken Boat, DesiLit, and Wasafiri; and in anthologies including The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (ed. Jeet Thayil, UK: Bloodaxe, 2008); Not A Muse Anthology (ed. Katie Rogers and Viki Holmes, Hong Kong: Haven Books, 2009) and in First Proof: 4 (India: Penguin Books, 2009). Swami’s first collection of poems, A Reluctant Survivor (India: Sahitya Akademi, 2007, rp 2008), was short-listed for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award in 2008. Swami’s second solo exhibition of photographs, Posting the Light: Dispatches from Hamburg, opened at Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad, in November 2009.
Chromatography
Give sleep a chance and know while you do
that very little separates it from death. Rent
your language by the night. Pay your dues:
Filter
plant your dreams and watch them grow. Consent
to their eventual departure and separate view
of you from where they stand. Discard resentment:
Diffusions
wear your vocabulary like a badge. Few
dreams can survive their naming. Fragments
of your days dissolve and separate into
Separations
impossibilities. Try not to prevent
whatever happens. What happens is, you
will find, your days and nights are never congruent.
Of Clairvoyance
Squelch is not a word heard
under water. Elephants
sink and suck their legs out
of the mud their bellies arches
and beyond, a new world:
green-grey, tenebrous
weeds float like visions
behind the eyes of drowned
bodies or like harbingers of
lost sight.
The ground beneath their feet
not yours.
Breathe, breathe
beyond the last breath.
Tumble into the amphibious.
Clear and buoyant is the sky:
the elephants know this with one
half of their bodies.
With the other they see through mud
and see it for what it is.
All visions begin upturned and colloidal.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
.jpg)
Jo Langdon lives in Geelong and is currently completing a PhD (creative thesis plus exegesis) in magical realism at Deakin University. She writes poetry and fiction, and was shortlisted for the 2010 Whitmore Press poetry prize.
Garlic
I’m reminded of a time my mother
chased garlic down my throat with
spoonfuls of jam & honey,
ousting a broken fever, her face
stitched tight with worry
over my penicillin allergy.
My Dorothy shoes kicked softly
against the polished doors
of the kitchen cupboard.
She’d sat my doll body on the bench
hours before, crimping my yellow hair
for the party we left early.
This morning, she relates the details of a dream
in which I fall pregnant with six babies,
my stomach filling out like the moon.
As a child I complained she never wore
her wedding dress or rings. It took uncounted
years to see how she wears her love.
I accepted it from the spoon, counting
cloves that glowed like white-eyed stars
as she wore worry on her wrists,
a bracelet of lines, tense as a watch.
Night story
The is day still with winter,
the water brown & duckless.
Before showing stars
the sky turns
blue as the pulse
hidden in your wrist.
You drive me home &
the lit vein of highway
streams with cars like columns
of iridescent ants.
The city fills the windscreen,
moves like an aquarium.
Lights like neon fish & somewhere
a little plastic castle.
I’ll think of how,
sometimes
you wear your heart on your face
like a child.
Tonight your reflection fills the windows,
holograms the swimming traffic.
We assign an easy currency
for thoughts.
You ask for mine &
the ones I’ll give you are,
stars curled around Earth
in a seashell spiral of galaxy;
a little red planet
floating in my eye,
& a pond I want to fill
with coat hanger swans.
Walking to the Cinema, the Weekend it Rained
I watch the rain curl
your hair as we spill into
the black river road.
Street lamps & taillights
reflect & shimmer like flares
or tropical fish.
In the foyer we
lose beads of water to the
salted star carpet.
A constellation
beneath our feet: popcorn &
yellow ticket stubs.
We communicate
wordlessly; sideways gestures
in the cinema.
Pictures on the screen
fall on our skin, colour us
as we crunch candy.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Alan Pejković was born in 1971. He has three university degrees in Sweden: an MA in English language and literature at Gävle University, a BA in History of Religions at Uppsala University, and he holds teaching degree from Stockholm University in English and Swedish language. Presently he works on the last phase of his PhD dissertation on liminal figures in contemporary American novels at the English Department in Uppsala, Sweden. Besides academic work, he works as a freelance writer, translator, and book reviewer. His poetry has been published in Swedish, English, and several languages in the Balkan area. He is also widely published in theoretical and literary journals in the Balkans. For BTJ (a leading supplier of media services in Sweden), he regularly reviews books from ex-Yugoslavia as well as books on literature, language, religions and other similar areas.
Sentimental Street
The memory dropped sharply overnight. A freezing point.
Give me a drop of my old street.
Time haunts me, fills me with doubt.
The image of the aged boys, ruined girls, gardens in bloom.
The image flows backwards, changing prisms, transparent crystals.
I stand at the parking place. I sit at my office. Just a point in time.
The street is still a valid point in God’s report on me.
The street punctuates my future.
My Mistress and I at the sunny Afternoon
I am extramaritally yours, my mistress of the erogenous zones.
I stand in your shadow.
You play the violin, I adore your high heels.
Your stocking blasts a hole in my eyes.
Nylon sea. I am drowning. Whistling wolves in my ears. Air rushes from your mouth.
Enclose me in the space between your teeth.
A Boundary Lover’s Poem
I love your fence surrounding me, your words shutting me in, your staying with me till morning fires build up a wall.
I adore that you contain me, insert me into your love.
You have me inside you like a screaming fetus.
You include me in your collection. You form my boundaries.
You add me to your gallery of destroyed borderlands.
You burn my limits to unrecognizable geometrical patterns.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Tricia Dearborn is an award-winning Sydney poet and short-story writer whose work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies in Australia, India, the UK, the US and online. Her first collection was Frankenstein’s Bathtub (2001). She was joint winner of the 2008 Poets Union Poetry Prize.
Fig
I’m stunned by your dimensions
and your presence—
no less impressive than if a brachiosaurus
stood in the park before me.
As I walk around you, gazing up,
your branches weave patterns
that dissolve and form before my eyes.
There are wrinkles at the bends
of your giant limbs, the tip of you
sixty feet above the ground, your lowest
branches curving gently down
to my chest height.
I breathe on a leaf and wipe the city grime from it
with my palm, startled to discover
its faint scent of milk.
Mapping the Cactus
I used to worry when you wilted,
dipping your spiky head
to the edge of the bowl
until (the laboratory years
stirring within me)
I charted your movements
over months, and saw you
in time-lapse
rise and swing and fall
like tides. Whether you followed
sun or moon
or shifting magnetic pole
I still don’t know
unable to decipher
your slow-motion semaphore.
But clearly you didn’t droop
with thirst—bowed
to a power greater than
my small green watering can.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Aidan Coleman teaches English at Cedar College in Adelaide. He is currently completing his second book of poems with the assistance of an Australia Council New Work Grant.
Astrocytoma
like the worst thing you ever did at school
the news comes steep and ashen
brisk mind to hurt mind
face to broken face
the pea
uncancelled by forty mattresses
clicks the past into place
leaves the future (whatever that was)…
Void
It was one of those restaurants where fish with heads like buses
were bumping against the glass.
I found myself stalled on annihilation;
of things going on despite me, of you alone.
Amongst the talk and laughter of others,
I stared and stared, and couldn’t blink.
Post-op
The head I wake in is airy and painful.
There’s still work going on in there.
Last night, a circle of numbers
and hammers,
forever
slanting away.
I clutched my bowl and sat it out;
thought about another year.
This morning: birds and fair-weather light;
a calm I can’t meet
with my eye.
Meat, sick, disinfectant on/off through the air.
In the next room people are talking about me.
They’re talking inside of my head.
Steroids Psalm
I am fearfully and wonderfully made
The delicate thread of each breath become rope
At night I glow with a Holy insomnia
In the ripe air I taste your promise
So many plots and schemes
So many plots and schemes
Now back from the dead
I have to tell you these things
I have to tell you all of these things
The walls of my room are effervescent
Shakespeare heads and butterflies
I walk through doors and mirrors and walls
Because so much is tied to earth
So much is tied to the earth
I am Henry V on the eve of battle
The guy who is in on the prison break-out
I’m Francis, Churchill, Robin Williams
People stare unconvinced
and I tell them…
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Philip Hammial has had 22 collections of poetry published, two of which were short-listed for the Kenneth Slessor Prize. He was in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris from August 2009 through January 2010.
Affair
We should concern for this affair. Affair
of there ought to be some in kind who refuse to accept
a stand-in (not the first killing that dumped its government)—
white public lovers who dealt as best they could with the spellers
who encroached upon Madame’s overly-ripe sensibilities & were not
in the least bit successful, for, look, there, a naked someone
actualised so close you can smell her as though
she was dead but in fact is still alive, just back
from a holiday in Egypt, or Senegal, or China (Clarity,
some help here) like one of those debutantes who extract privilege
with impossibly dainty fingers, morsels
tidy, morsels teeming with, Thanksgiving just
around the corner blowing its horn, strutting its turkey, “When
the saints come marching in” it’s Madame who leads them, baton
twirling, bobby socks dream girl, 1954, I wasn’t in that marching band;
if only I had been I might not have come to this: my life
as a fetish not what it’s cracked up to be, can’t just
walk up to someone & ask for a good spanking, call it
one for the road or one for the angels in the fountain who fall
like hail on the replica of my hard-won grace temporarily won
when I took the hand of a gentle killer & we slipped through
the gate, eluding the Big Boys, the thugs who guard
the Chocolate Farm, a bouquet in my other hand (how
it came to be there I’ll never know) for Madame who refused
to accept it, our affair long over she insisted with a smile
that she’d acquired in Egypt, or Senegal, or China (Clarity,
some help here).
Sartorial
I’ll have it—the courage to wear what I kill. It
being difficult if not impossible to say at this point
in the proceedings when I ended up in bed
with the wrong family because my admirers
(that motley crowd) are demanding one of my fly-ups. Molly,
have you seen my wings? Now that I’ve finally mastered
the art of remembering where I’ve left my glasses
I keep losing my wings. At least with glasses
I can see to find them, no more groping around
on the floor on my hands & knees. Wrong, as in family?
Wrong. Wrong as in now that I’m up & away (she found
my wings in the oven where I left them to dry) at 30,000 feet
the oxygen masks have dropped & begun to sway
hypnotically, a dozen passengers in a voodoo trance
dancing obscenely in the aisles & the rest engrossed
in a past lives therapy session from which they’ll emerge
as clean as scrubbed boys for Sunday school. Me,
I’m with the voodoo mob, ridden, as we all are,
by Mami-Wata, the mermaid who, when she’s finished
with me will leave me with a small token
of her appreciation—the courage to wear what I kill.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Brook Emery has published three books of poetry: and dug my fingers in the sand, which won the Judith Wright Calanthe prize, Misplaced Heart, and Uncommon Light. All three were short-listed for the Kenneth Slessor Prize.
The black hill looks to float straight out to sea.
Cars incline. But the driver’s eyes are raised
to an unvarying wash of night.
For a moment, just an instant, his gaze
is arrested by a tree beneath a streetlight,
a lean, straggly, unkempt bottlebrush he thinks,
and strangely, beneath the light, it is the focus
of his thought. It’s almost two dimensional,
as though it were the section of a tree
pressed between two sheets of glass
for microscopic examination. It stands for nothing
but stands as something, its shapeless branches
and drooping leaves as nondescript
as any failure of a man, any thought
whose time has come and gone and gone again.
He’s nearly home. It’s about to rain,
the wind is getting up and he can sense
an approaching chill. He’ll be home before the storm.
He’s shut the door. Locked the outside
outside. The gathering dark, the gathering cold,
all the unhoused, creeping possibilities,
the distresses of the day, tomorrow’s fears,
wolves howling on the Steppe, hyenas
around the stricken cub, roaches, slaters, snakes,
the tubeworm deprived of light, no mouth,
no anus, dependent on bacteria
to process food, the nonexistent nameless dread
that nonetheless exists with rapists, goons,
gangs of untamed youth, the super-heated words
of presidents and priests, toddlers fastening bomber’s belts,
and stepping out in supermodel clothes, crewcut men
in sunglasses sweeping children off the streets
and banging on the door; the looming nursing home.
The heater’s turned to high. The television
splays its cathode light across the room,
a cup of tea is cooling on the armchair’s arm.
That stupid, ugly tree, he thinks,
the light between its leaves, its immobility,
then the way it twitches in the wind,
what is it that won’t let me be?
All morning it’s been difficult to settle, difficult to harness
energy or purpose for all the things
I have to do. Charged sky,
sudden light at the horizon, grey, then streaks of blue, then
grey again. An unsettled sea,
white water contending point to point,
waves like another and another avalanche, unceasing noise,
sand compacted to a crimp-edged,
man-high bank and I can see,
then can’t locate, a buoy like a white-capped head
sinking and floating in the rip,
wrenched from its deeper mooring,
now driven in, now swept back out, tethered there
by net and anchor that, for now,
have new purchase in the sand.
Conceivably, should I be silly enough to surf tomorrow
it could be me entangled, drowned:
mistake and misadventure; bad luck.
In Switzerland they’ve flicked the switch and particles
surge round and round a tunnel
in opposed directions preparing to collide
in an experiment to explain how the universe got mass
in the seconds of its birth,
why what we touch is solid.
We stalk the irreducible, the constant speed of light unfolding
though the eye can’t see and the hand
can’t touch such magnitude:
time may shrivel, outrun itself, sag under accumulated weight:
end in our beginning: red shift, white dwarf,
rotten apple on the ground.