January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Lara S. Williams is a British/Australian writer who has been published or has work appearing in over twenty international literary journals including Voiceworks, Cordite, Antipodes, Islet, Blue Crow, page seventeen, Magma, Island, Agenda, MiPOesias, Blue Fifth Review, Orbis and Neon. She is currently living in Seoul, South Korea, and spends most of her time writing and eating kimchi. She plays the saxophone somewhat haphazardly.
A Fugue To Happy Moments In Time
‘Son, your mother doesn’t understand like I do. You need this.’
‘I didn’t even apply, it’s a scholarship.’
‘So you’re looking a gift in the mouth?’
‘It’s to look a gift horse in the mouth.’
He concedes with a wave of his hand, sips his absinthe and lets out a loud exhalation. His foot taps to the beat of Paul Desmond’s ‘Take Five’ crackling from a stereo above the doorway; he gears himself up.
‘Hundreds of people apply to this school and ninety nine percent of them spend years beating themselves up because they didn’t make it. Waste money on extra tuition, books. But you don’t need that! They’re giving it to you on a plate. “Didn’t even apply”, good god, boy!’ Another sip of absinthe. He never uses the accompanying sugar.
‘You drink far too many of those,’ I wince.
‘Don’t change the subject. I won’t watch you turn them down.’ He slams the table with his fist.
I smile into my less abrasive vodka, turning the glass in the sun and watching smoky rainbows strike the cement. ‘Calm down. You know I‘m going. It‘s mum.’
He considers, tilting his head at an angle. Past his ear I see the café sign winking to a bookshop across the street.
‘Lie,’ he says.
‘I cannot lie to my mother.’
‘But I can.’
‘I don’t want to tell her some story. I want her to be happy for me.’ I kick at the ground. ‘There’s only so long she can use the same excuse to keep me here.’
‘Now that’s unkind,’ he replies. ‘You know how she feels. She lost her son.’
‘We all lost him. But I can’t stay home with her forever. I’m not him. I’m not a replacement!’
‘She worries. And you should be more understanding.’ He is flustered and I regret upsetting him.
‘Will you come visit me?’
‘Never.’ We are silent for some time and my father raises his hand and clicks, signalling for another drink. I smile and shake away a second vodka.
‘Why not?’
He chews his cheek and thinks. ‘I said I’d never go back to Paris.’
‘Bad memories?’ I ask.
‘No, my son, good!’ he replies explosively. ‘Good memories, excellent, the very best of my life.’
‘Then why stay away?’
He is serious now, eyebrows almost meeting at the bridge of his nose. A new absinthe appears and he pushes it aside, fearing the distraction.
‘Have you ever felt so utterly happy and content that you want to lie down and die, just to finish on a high?’
‘Not exactly. I think it would put a rather sour note on things.’
‘I have!’ He leans forward, eyes fixed on something beyond my ear. ‘Years ago in Paris, I played flute in a tiny restaurant. I don’t recall where it was.’ He waves his hand impatiently, continues, ‘blue window shutters upstairs. It was called ‘L’amour’. I met Gabriella, a Spanish student visiting for a study break.’ He looks at me. ‘She was sensational. Dark and quiet, didn’t ask questions. I finished playing and drank wine with her and the moon came out over the top of her perfect head.’ He pulls a white handkerchief from his pocket and lays it on the table, showing me the embroidery of a woman’s figure in light blue thread.
‘I always liked this.’ I touch the corner
‘You ever wonder where I got it? She gave it to me. One kiss and an eternal memory.’ He stops and shivers. ‘Paris will make you.’ He finishes the drink and I think for a moment he means to stay longer, get drunker. Instead he tumbles two bills onto the table and gestures to the book store opposite us. ‘Come with me. I’m getting you something.’
I’d been there many times before, always finding unpriced copies of penguin editions in boxes at the counter. I watch my father disappear in that direction, then return clutching a sheaf of lined paper.
‘I knew they had this here,’ he says. My fist fills with paper and he ushers me out onto the street. ‘Beautiful on the flute, that.’ As I look he digs in his pocket and unwraps a chocolate cigar.
‘Satie? Ah, Trois Gynopodies.’ I point the music at his mid-drift and nod my head. ‘Thank you.’
‘You can play that at your final performance.’ He sprays cocoa smoke around my ears.
‘I might not get that far.’
He backs away, jabbing his cigar in the air. ‘Course you will. You’ve got Satie.’
‘Can we go home?’ I walk beside him and finger the corners of my sheet music to sweat.
I arrived for orientation on the third of February, early on a snowy evening. My bags, bursting with music sheaves and polishing oil, slapped against my father’s flute, all pressed tightly to my thigh like a child. Already students milled around the entrance hall dragging cases, stands, trunks, coats and naked instruments. A rumble of languages filled the quiet spaces in the air. As I made my way to the dormitory a black boy with coloured beads in his hair dropped a saxophone and I heard the squealing snap of valves.
My room was a twin, the room mate not yet arrived. I put my flute on a narrow metal-framed bed and inspected the pine shelves above the head board. After lining up a few books and unpacking my pressed clothes I went to explore the grounds.
Outside I buttoned my overcoat and turned the corner of the building, heading for a varnished wooden gate set into the surrounding fence. Slipping through I entered a small courtyard dark with pine branches. Bird feeders and bony rose stems dangled from the wood and tangled together until the two became one impenetrable force. Fresh snow sat on the grass like carpet free of footprints and rain stain. A paved ring of brickwork clawed through, its only adornment a rusty iron bench.
Seated was a young woman tightening the string of a viola. She drew the bow across its face, listening closed-eyed. I thought her beautiful; haematite hair wound around the neck of her instrument, knuckles pink in the cold, finger tips white with string pressure. I approached, watching the slender arm slide back and forth. Her eyes opened when my heels clicked on the bricks.
‘Bonjour.’ She lowered her viola.
‘Don’t stop,’ I murmured.
She smiled and put the instrument away. I looked at the shape of her coat collar against the white throat. Her eyes were wet with large irises that rolled around the line of my face. I wanted to say something about her playing.
‘Embrasse-moi,’ she breathed in melodious baritone.
‘I’m sorry?’
Snow settled on my head, melt running behind my ear and traversing the hairline to spread at the nape of my neck. Her breath clouded into my nostrils and I smelt cinnamon and tasted tiny speckles of snow on her cheeks. Her left elbow was remarkably warm, sheltered as it was in the curve of her body whilst playing.
The spotlight swoons across my flute and ignites trickling mirrors in the valves. I see a man, short and portly, standing at the front. He waves a familiar white handkerchief and his presence gives me a pleasurable jolt.
I hold the flute like a fine sword, feeling a brassy thrum beneath my fingers. The lights dim, signalling my introduction.
‘This piece,’ I announce, ‘is for my father, the flautist Albert Pewty who has come here, at great risk to himself, to hear me play Satie.’
He remains standing, a tweed apostle, and the smile he illicits transforms my piece from perfected mournful practises into notes bent warm and sweet. The performance is long, accompanied by piano. I dimly hear my own playing over the roar in my head.
Behind my body the concert‘s highlight appears: an enormous silver moon born from moulded ceramic and tiny shards of glass, thick like the bottom of a vodka tumbler. It lowers before the backdrop and lights hit it on all sides, sending moonlight in every direction.
I see my father sit abruptly. His face is shadowed and he lowers his head to rest on his chest. I end my piece, arms lifted level with the flute, an unusual and ungainly stance but one that allows my body help the music collapse into finish. I lower my shivering arms and bow.
When there is relative quiet on the other side of the curtain I return to the stage. Looking down I am surprised to see my father still sitting in place.
‘Dad!’ I call out. ‘I can’t believe you came.’ I rush to the edge and drop down, sit beside him. ‘Did you enjoy it?’
He doesn’t look at me. I reach out and touch his lapel, run the finger down his body, feel the warmth of flesh under his clothes.
‘Answer me.’ I look down and see his handkerchief on the floor, a footprint across its body. ‘Dad?’
He is dead at sixty three, captured in the final happiness he feared. I bow my head and press it into his neck. I wonder why he is so warm and I so cold.
‘I’m glad you came,’ I whisper.
The jazz saxophones were swinging, punching out a fast paced version of Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Baker’s Street’. The vocalist, a young man, was perched on a green stool, thin black moustache pointing at the drums balanced across his knees. I sat, head on chest, nodding out of time.
‘Vous desirez?’ The waitress repeated herself three times to my silence before giving up and leaving a menu on my table.
A woman opposite me lifted dark eyes to meet mine. She was wrinkled and very beautiful. There was an aura of contentment around her greying hair.
‘You’re sad,’ she said in a thick Spanish accent. ‘Would you like a drink?’
I lowered my head and nodded weakly. ‘Thank you. A vodka.’ I paused. ‘Actually, absinthe.’ The woman called to the waitress and she soon appeared bearing two glasses and a bottle.
‘Voila, Madame.’
‘Why aren’t you with other young ones, enjoying such a beautiful night?’ She looked up at the moon, now full, hanging above her silver-tinted head. I took the absinthe in my fingers, steeled myself, and swallowed.
‘I’m not much for company tonight. But thank you.’ I gestured with the empty glass and she dipped her head.
‘Drink, talk.‘ She sipped and threw a hand across her glowing head. ‘After all, you’re in ‘L’amour’.’
I turned my head to look at the peeling wood sign. The blue window shutters banged in the breeze. I clapped my hands together and laughed. ‘Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?’
The woman went to refill my glass.
‘No!’ I cried involuntarily, placing my hand across the rim. ‘One is enough. Just one.’
Her tongue reached out to caress her bottom lip in slow contemplation. ‘It is a beautiful night,’ she sighed. ‘I have met a beautiful, sad man. But I am happy. If I were any happier, I would die.’
I don’t hesitate. ‘You probably will.’
‘What an end to the world.’
The drums fell away and one single saxophone carried the tune. The same rough voice sang only to me. Felt only me.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jee Leong Koh is the author of two books of poems Payday Loans and Equal to the Earth (Bench Press). His new book of poems Seven Studies for a Self Portrait will be released by the same press in March 2011. Born and raised in Singapore, he lives in New York City, and blogs at Song of a Reformed Headhunter (http://jeeleong.blogspot.com).
In His Other House
In this house there is no need to wait for the verdict of history
And each page lies open to the version of every other.
—Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, “In Her Other House”
In my other house too, books line the floor to ceiling shelves,
not only books on stock markets, self help, Singapore ghost stories,
but also poetry, Edwin Thumboo, Cyril Wong, Alfian Sa’at,
and one who moved away and who wrote Days of No Name.
My father comes home from the power station. When rested
(and this is how I know this is not real) he reads to us again,
for the seventh time, Philip Jeyaretnam’s Abraham’s Promise
in a sweet low voice, unbroken by a frightened young supervisor.
When he closes the book, my dead grandfather stirs from a dream
and says a word or two, that really says he has been listening.
And my beloved, knowing his cue, jumps up from the couch
to clear the dishes, for, as he says, dishes don’t wash themselves.
Softly brightened by a feeling I do not hurry to identify,
I move to the back of him and put my arms around his waist.
His muscles twitch like the needle on a motorboat’s dashboard
as he turns a porcelain plate against a rough cotton cloth.
The light from the window looks like a huge, blank sea.
In this other house there will be time to fill it but now
the bell rings with a deep gold tone, and here, on a surprise
visit, are my sister and her two girls coming through the door.
The Hospital Lift
The Virgin was spiralling to heaven,
Hauled up in stages. Past mist and shining
—Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, “Fireman’s Lift”
My mother is the aged Queen of the spin
of washing machines. Her body sags now
but when she was young eyed and toned
she washed St. Andrew’s Children’s Hospital,
whose best feature was its old hotel lift.
I would close the brass grille with a clang,
thump the big black top button, grow up
watching the concrete floors drop to my feet,
the bowl that glowed in underwater green
the babies crying, startled by the light
in blue gowns the boys chasing the clown
the professional look of clean white smocks
before arriving on the roof, the air
smelling of detergent, wind and sun,
the sheets flapping like giant birds.
When my mother turned to greet me
with a tight smile (now loosening indefinitely),
how was I to guess the magic act
of hauling up an ancient lift
by spinning modern wash machines?
The Bowl
I made a trip to each clock in the apartment
—Elizabeth Bishop, “Paris, 7 A.M.”
One clock is short. Another clock is a dog
that bounds round every twelve years and barks
at dogs not yet born and dogs gone before.
The good clock in the kitchen is a bowl.
The one I check to go in step with New York
rests in my pocket, next to my penis,
and rings with a ringtone called Melody.
So many clocks! How does one keep time?
I have lived here long enough
to have had three loves, one of whom
is sleeping in my bed, a ghost from the west coast.
He ticks softly, this clock. The second
goes all the way back to the Mayflower, he talked.
The third is striking fifty-one today. He sounds sad.
How do I sound to him?
How do I sound in his tall apartment of clocks?
My collection of clocks
in that apartment, and that apartment, and that apartment in the city?
First visit to an airport, I was rapt by the world clocks,
Jakarta, New Delhi, Tel Aviv, Berlin, London, New York,
steel round-faced timekeepers, all different and all right,
their hands ringing in my ears
the sound a wet finger makes rubbing round the rim of a water glass,
and I felt like a dog that is trying to catch its tail.
Dizzy, yes, but filled with so much joy
I think I have not left the spot.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anna Ryan-Punch is a Melbourne poet and reviewer. Her poetry has been published in Westerly, The Age, Quadrant, Island, Overland, Verandah and Wet Ink.
Archaeology
With a fingernail
I carved a dry gourd.
Rattling my history
like a bag of tears,
I poured curling puddles
into dusty earth.
I poked their painful edges
broken crusts of memory.
With a toe, extended,
I scraped out a cactus.
Scoring my passions,
multiple as cabbage moths,
millipedes, crickets and
other unwanted plural creatures.
With a calloused thumb,
I decided they were not
objects of beauty or use.
I crushed their stink bodies,
left them to dry
into brittle filings, and
did not stay to see them
blow away in soft flight.
January
Gales increasing on hard rubbish night.
Brown Christmas trees
blow up the road, up the footpath
festive tumbleweeds.
Their evergreen didn’t last long this year
barely curled out 12 days
before they were dragged to the roadside.
Brittle needles crisp in smoky heat.
The television calls to resolution-makers:
dieters, quitters and exercisers.
New sneakers stink with good intentions
but newsreaders warn against exercising outdoors.
This is small news for homes in the suburbs
where all flames are out of sight.
Parched clay cracks around foundations
jagged gaps in the bathroom wall reopen.
Dead Christmas trees drift back downhill.
We can look at the sun without squinting
but hardly notice the smoke.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Of German-Russian heritage, Peter grew up bilingually in Sydney. MPU First Prize 2009. Third Prize Val Vallis Award 2009. MPU Second Prize 2008. Second Prize Shoalhaven Literary Award 2008. Varuna-Picaro Publishing Award 2009. Chapbook: ‘The Knee Monologues & Other Poems’ (Picaro Press, 2009). First full-length collection: ‘The Post-Man Letters & Other Poems’ (Picaro Press, 2010). Peter grows 103 heirloom apple varieties in Bundanoon, NSW.
Other Flesh
Bare front yard concrete driveway, a single
small frangipani shrivels its furrowed grey
elephant skin near the grey paling fence, up
the red brick steps hot in the sun to the threshold:
now speak. German. Another. World.
Brown linoleum hallway, or is it carpet,
to the dining room. Mother there, or kitchen?
Maybe just the spicy dream-world smells
from an Asian boarder’s cooking,
into the bedroom shared with Omi
where mornings we play ‘I spy’ in German,
the armchair with the polished dark
brown wooden rests that prop
my arm holding up a child’s head heavy
with listening to the white wireless,
the wide glowing dial, little green neon wand
I can move to the unknown reaches
of the unseen world full of soft maternal
English voices telling Argonaut stories,
the thrill of Tarzan’s chest-beat yodel,
Clark Kent closing the phone booth door
followed by Superman’s bullet flight,
the dial against which, listening, I press,
peacefully embalmed in fantasy like a baby
at the breast, my small nibbled thumbnail
to see the warm light
coming through all
that other flesh.
Besuch/Visit
contours in the sand/ konturen im sand
combed wind, wires/ gekämmter wind, drähte
up there at the estuary/ vorne an der mündung
a sudden thought of you/ dachte ich an dich
been there again clawed/ wieder da gewesen verkrallt
into branch moss/ am ast das moos
dragonfly wings about the heart/ libellenflügel ums herz
lightless/ lichtlos
Resumé
bröckelnde bäume der lunge
harzverklebte nüstern
das herz klirrt
die scheibe zerspringt, das messer
dies der tod der luft
crumbling lung trees
resin-gummed nostrils
heart pounding
the pane shatters, a knife
this the death of air
mohnerinnerungen verblassen
hart der strassenrand und gerade
nagle im schuh
möwe grell über der halde
dies der tod der krume
poppy memories fading
hard road’s edge, straight
nail in shoe
gulls livid over the dump
this the death of soil
kein sinken wie Ophelia
ranzige bretter, kellerasseln
das pferd verquollen
zahnlos, gischt
tod des wassers
no sinking like Ophelia
rancid planks, wood lice
bloated horse
toothless, spume
the death of water
im spiegel das gesicht wegrasiert
fern gewinkt, schon ans telefon
fliessend k/w und zH, abgelenkt
lebenslang vom staunen
dies der tod des feuers
face shaved off
in the mirror
half waving from afar
already phoning
running h/c all mod cons
distracted lifelong
from the wonders
this the death of fire
Acknowledgement: ‘Other Flesh’ has appeared in ‘The Post-Man Letters & Other Poems’ (New Work Series Picaro Press, 2010)
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
1981, Sam Byfield has published one chapbook (From the Middle Kingdom, Pudding House Press) and his first full length collection Borderlands is forthcoming through Puncher and Wattmann. His poetry has recently appeared in such publications as Heat, Meanjin, Island, Southerly, The Asia Literary Review, The National Poetry Review, Cordite and previously in Mascara.
Split Earth
Morpeth’s bulging river and rich
farmlands, the sky heaving itself
down in great drapes.
We browsed the bric-a-bracs
and lolly shops, climbed
an old steam engine and listened
to the rainsong of frogs amongst
the ferns and old stone walls.
The bridge rattled, its heavy presence
hanging on into its second century,
shading the flash of reeds
and river mullet. While the women
drank coffee I walked with Thom
to where the gardens met the river,
took a photo of us, arm-in-arm,
obvious brothers despite our
different hair lengths,
despite his axe man shoulders
and my clean shave. Our eyes
were an identical blue, though
not long since the accident his smile
didn’t reach them, cautious as
an animal crouched in barnyard
shadows, relearning trust; his scars
jagged and red, like split earth.
All this year I’ve carried the photo
with me like a talisman,
watched his eyes and mouth
telling different stories, as if I could
stop the world from hurting him
further, from taking any more
of us too soon.
Escaping the Central West
Out on the flat land, the yellow land,
driving from one country town with
a funny name to another, in the old
blue Cortina, the sun making wheat
of dad’s beard. John Williamson’s
singing Bill the Cat, about a moggy
who loved the budgies and wrens
and ultimately lost his balls.
Sporadic signposts, nothing
but sad little dams, wire and sheep.
One flock grabs our attention—
animated discussion in the front,
dad still refusing to unfold the map
before the realisation sets in that
it’s the same flock as two hours
and two hundred miles ago.
*
It’s a story that’s passed through
the years until how much is real
and how much is myth is hard to say.
We lasted two months out there.
My parents must have fought
like hell, though those memories
haven’t stuck. We headed back east
in the middle of a flood, the whole
Central West beneath a foot
of ironic water. Night time shut
the light out and we drove blind,
just hours of water threatening
to swallow us, to breach
the Cortina’s rust and rivets;
and a storm in Dad’s head
that wasn’t about to abate.
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.
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
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
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.
