January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Born in 1988 in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong is currently an undergraduate English Major at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His poems have received an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Beatrice Dubin Rose Award, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as two Pushcart Prize nominations. His work appear in Word Riot, the Kartika Review, Lantern Review, SOFTBLOW, Asia Literary Review, and PANK among others. He enjoys practicing Zen Meditation and lives in Brooklyn with an 84 year old lady who he nurses in lieu of paying rent. Visit his blog at www.oceanvuong.blogspot.com
Arrival by Fire
Wooden teacups, steam swirled into the blue
then gray of morning. There was no one there to drink.
Before dawn blurred the edges of the sky,
when darkness made fools of limbs, we followed
the lantern’s golden eye, blinking from across the shore.
The river sliced our legs at the waist. Water
could not keep our secrets. When a croc’s eyes lit
like coals in the dark, my mother’s hand
clasped my mouth. The scent of sweat and garlic
would infuse my dreams for years. I had to touch
to believe my father was shaking. But there
is something different about reptiles.
Unlike humans, they do not eat when full.
But to disappear one must be swallowed
and so, we crawled into the bowels of a boat.
When we drifted to where sky and sea vanished
into a black wall, someone began to sing
a childhood song, and someone else begged him
to stop. The air began to tremble
as a hundred prayers hummed through my skin.
And where a fragment of moon fell through the hull,
a blue river of piss and vomit streamed
across the deck—washing away the fallen tears.
When there was too much silence, we would place
a hand on the closest chest, feel for drumbeats
then drift into dreams of chrysanthemums
flickering in the youth we’ve never known.
When we reached the new world, we dissipated
into shadows, apologized for our clumsy tongues,
our far and archaic gods. We changed our names
to John, Julie, Edward, or Susan. How many mirrors
have we tried to prove wrong? Who were we
when burning houses dimmed with distance,
and we watched our fathers hurl their hearts
into oceans where the salt sizzled in their wounds?
Now, on nights like this, when sleep sounds too much
like the sea, when the bed stretches into a ship
we cannot abandon, all we have are these stories, resurrected
like ghosts over steam of tea. Listen. Someone is trying
to croon that old song but the voice cracks over words
like Mother, Home. Nicolas, comrade, brother, whatever
your name, touch here—my hand, and remember: we were drifters,
we were orphans, but mostly, we were heat—steam
escaping
our bones.
If You Are a Refugee
There will be nights when you wake
to touch the photo, your fingers
fading the faces you cannot name.
They are phantoms of your own,
whose eyes have watched the precession
of waving hands
diminish into distance.
There will be moments, between
a lover’s kiss, when you remember
the taste of blood,
and the limits to the answers
one mouth can hold.
When you sweat, you will sweat the oil
that has stained the city
of which you only know
from what is lost.
You will return to that city,
beg the woman whose hair
has grayed to scalp to tell you
your true name. You will stare
into her turbid eyes and ask
of the crescent in your mother’s smile.
And when you dream, you will revisit
the body in the forest, say
it is not your brother’s. You will see again
the naked man crouched
by the charred house, licking ash
from his fingers to taste the bodies
he can no longer hold.
If you are a refugee, you will come to praise
the thickness of walls, the warmth
that clings to cotton
from embrace,
the cricket’s song
in a night virgin to death.
But before you leave
what is gone forever,
go back. Go back and gather that boy
you left behind. The boy who stood
at the edge of a field
where your father once prayed
with a pistol in his mouth.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ilumina, edited by Judith Beveridge and Roberta Lowing
REVIEWED BY MICHELLE CAHILL
Ilumina
Poetry UnLimited Press
ISBN 9780646476100
Sydney 2007
Ilumina is one of this year’s surprising packages. Published by the vanguard Poetry Unlimited Press under the loving patronage of Roberta Lowing, and edited by Judith Beveridge, it features work by commissioned guest poets of the monthly salon readings at Sappho Books Café, as well as the best of Sydney’s emerging talent. For the last two years post-graduate students from Sydney University, UTS and other non-affiliated aficionados have met in a grungy café behind the used bookshop in Glebe Point Rd to enjoy readings by guest poets and to read their own work in the open section. From personal experience these readings are of a high standard with an open, relaxed, and supportive atmosphere. A place where you can share a verse, a glass of wine, a few quiet words.
The PULP project is one of the few existing communal poetry projects, providing the opportunity to foster connection and nurture poets who are finding their voice in the factional and fractured Anglophone scene of Australian poetry. Ilumina provides us with new encounters; many of the contributing poets being of a non-Anglo-Celtic background, at a much higher proportion than you are guaranteed to find in any of your “Best” Australian anthologies, or for that matter in the majority of the mainstream journals.
Disregarding clichéd reverence, or the usual stylised conventions, many of these poets engage with disconcerting subjects like war, racism, dislocation and relocation. A good example is Tessa Lunney’s “You, My Brother”, a stark evocation of racial and sexual violence. There are chilling poems about war by Louise Wakeling, or this sparse stanza by Betty Johnson from the poem “Ali, Iraq”:
Your doctors promise
Miracles: new arms, new skin.
Burnt
We are shy. Ruins wait.
(160)
Onur Karaozbek’s “The One Who Might Be Any One” explores otherness by satirising social stereotypes:
I’m the Asian fella going to university knowing little English
or the kid from Albury studying Asian Cinema and Culture
I’m the one serving your grass juice,
the suit pushing you aside during the CBD rush-hour.
(162)
A new discovery for me was Micah Horton-Hallett’s spare, tense narratives that build around metaphors of space and language:
unaware that we
were writing the walls
tighter around us.
That we were writing
toward a full
stop.
Now–
As I write a new cage
for my memory of you–
The last echoes of alexia
have dispersed into
the open universe &
The drunk stars still sing:
(103) “The Pit”
Jill Gientzotis’ “Amsterdam” draws the peripatetic to an inner physical landscape, with images of fragility:
Where you are is not foreign.
Where you are is home.
(91)
Many of these poets seem to be at odds with the arbitrary closures and the propagandas of nationalism. Paul Giles’ “Australian Sonnets” interrogates the utopian ideals of Australia as a country of beauty and rich blessings. The poem is a harshly cynical contemporary rendering of AD Hope’s “Australia”, reworking the images and tones from a migrant, and more significantly a female perspective:
what does “pullulate”
mean anyway? what is history
but the sweep of shifting sands?
what place is left to dare?
it’s neither Cairns nor Perth.
if she hopes to survive,
she must find a home
for a battered mind,
a lonely, aching breast.
(97)
In Carol Jenkins’ “White Poems” a process of intelligent and sensual moulding of subject moves towards specificity and identity in the poems about potato, optics, or skin.
This is what gives the words
room to think. I beat in soft wads
of butter, warm milk and cream, pyramids of salt
and anticipation, all the cloud air puffs out at me
its warm potato breath, I am balancing, perfectly
all the white potato space in between
the scaffolds of real potato.
(156) “White Poem No 4: Ode to the Potato”
Her poems complement the lexical layers of “Knitcap Sutras”, a preceding sonnet sequence by Peter Minter. Minter’s highly inventive rural excursion is transformed at the outset by syncopated urban riffs, the enjambment leaving one sometimes breathless.
I drive in a dust pile, Tank Girl shambolic through early evening paddocks, steel wire coat hangers and polyester string looped & shuddering clots past the milkers, bright static radio & duco bent in panels where city chunks of 80s pop & supermarket fluorofoods bounce on the back seat along the gravel bolt beside the Gloucester river, all hot-headed
i (149)
Yet this allegro slows to more solemn movements where time is “ silently/ unfurling in the late sun’s gravity ”(153). There seems to be a desire to test and tease; to make of the landscape something more complex. Another youthful variant of the bucolic myth is found Ashley Burton’s poem “Swimming in the Murrumbidgee” with its unpretentious idiom.
Gospels of an entirely different nature are to be found in Peter Boyle’s “Apocrypha”, where crickets, shells, turtles and fish are personified with a surrealistic renouncement of the real; where the visual image surrenders wholly to the mind’s eye.
Above the sand
Spirit fish spin in the rivers of air.
A fish knows how to carry coolness deep inside its body,
How water glides
Even when it can’t be seen
The spirit fish are whispering the names of all the stars
(37)
Diversity and freshness aside, the hallmark of this anthology is a series of insightful essays by, and interviews with, guest poets. Judith Beveridge’s essay “How Poets Write” is a deeply personal account of her development towards greater receptiveness, towards a heightened attention to inner and outer worlds, and what she describes as “the ordering principles of the poem.”
Feeling the world give and give, one thing opening up to another, is what I enjoy most about writing. My poems don’t start from ideas, but are very definitely derived from sensory experience. (28)
This is interesting given Beveridge’s meditative observations of sense-impressions as a form of aesthetic and spiritual practice in her poems. Jill Jones in “I Want To Be Available To The Moment” acknowledges a similar phenomenological debt. She writes of her awareness of space, and of writing from the body; of breathlessness, vertigo and sound. Like Beveridge there is the need to be open and receptive.
I see what I do as exploratory, responsive to the pressures of language and my own intuition and memories as they converge in the moment, in going places, in observing and being part of experience. (145)
Both Jones and joanne burns, in her essay “Click” describe an interest in the physicality of writing. Jones, with her collage narratives confesses to her reliance on accretions, associations, taking notes in cafés, buses, even meetings, and of her stationery fetish. “It can get a bit pervy,” she writes, “but a lot of art practise is like that, I suspect.” (142) joanne burns speaks of the “technologies of writing”, and of their potential to create random correspondences. Writing as a practice, she admits, can be ritualistic, playful and surprising.
Lowing is to be credited for her skillful interviewing of the guest poets, particularly Stephen Edgar and Peter Boyle, whom I suspect would otherwise be taciturn about their writing habits. What results is an inquiry into the ‘how’ of writing, an arguably more interesting question than the ‘why’. Equally impressive is Stuart Rees’ inquiry “Can Poets Change The World?”. Rees dismantles the manifestos of one-dimensional institutions, or the use of power ‘which tolerates no critics and values only compliance.’ (224) Citing poets like Octavio Paz, Oodgeroo Noonuncal, and William Stafford, Rees asserts that poets can indeed confront the basic humanitarian struggle for home, dignity and identity:
If poets breathe life into the premise that the personal is the political, they will inevitably confront these issues of identity, which are at the hub of destructive conflicts. (219)
Nicolete Stasko reminds us of this in “Ashes”, one of the book’s closing poems:
All over the world
poets are going up in flames
leaving
little piles of ashes
in the shape of mountains
it seems we do no notice
their going
so much else is ablaze
but the darkness
is growing and
it is not our eyes
(244)
Ilumina strives to resist this ‘darkness.’ It’s a book to read on trains and buses, or while ever you are waiting for glimpses and sparks. The poems and poetics in Ilumina make the issues of space, time and perspective more complex and inclusive. It’s a collection that mostly sidesteps the ‘sludge’, to quote Rees, in the hope of making a difference.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Reid Mitchell lives in New Orleans. Following Hurricane Katrina, he refugeed one crucial year in Hong Kong. There he and a Hong Kong poet began work on a series of dialogues, some of which have been published in Admit2, Barrow Street, Caffeine Destiny. Poetry Monthly Magazine, and Poetry Superhighway. [http://www.sighming.com/dialogue] Mitchell has published some short stories as well as the novel A Man Under Authority. He has also published several books on nonfiction.
1. Sanctuary
Two and two-thirds red columns, roofless
House left unfinished?
Mansion in ruins?
2. Singapore River
(An answer to Mingh)
A word misconstrued
does not necessarily lose
all value
a path obscured
by leaves and words
may lead somewhere in the end
two people lost
in dark woods
may wander in circles
two lifetimes.
3. When I Imagine Us
When I imagine us
I see you, golden in Italy,
your small face peeking through Umbrian green, Tuscan dust, Sienna sienna, as
in an excited way, excitable you run ahead, one finger pointing.
Didn’t we walk, hot and dry, between blood orange and olive?
Didn’t we look down on the sea blind Homer promised would be wine-dark,
and the beach that slaughtered Athens,
and where we nonetheless smiled and kissed?
You watched me eat artichokes with garlic.
We strolled from ghetto to Pantheon,
past the Mandarin restaurant
and you announced you would kiss no more foul foreign mouths?
No, sad no.
The South China Sea does not lap Sicily
and those fish will not swim to Hong Kong to be sold in Causeway Bay.
And you? You were fighting with your sisters, washing your hair on the street,
finding out that words, even more than boys, could be playthings.
I was by myself, with passport, poetry I forget, and faint, unquenchable hope.
But when I imagine you,
I see us in Italy, between orange and olive,
your head glistening, your feet dusty.
You run with index finger pointing toward a miracle I cannot yet see
just ahead.
4. Ghost Bodies
Seducing a woman twelve time zones ahead
is like bringing a ghost to bed:
a nice thing to write about
I do not want your body without your mind
nor your mind without your body.
But seeing I may have the attention of one
I would like to swap briefly for one night,
seven years,
or most likely one long sunny afternoon
spent in Singapore or other southern port
“Physical intimacy?” you say.
I don’t want an abstraction.
That patch of dry skin,
the crooked toe,
the ears that don’t quite match,
your breath gone sour, hair hot with sweat.
I want to touch you all the places you hope that men don’t notice
in Saigon, Singapore or some other southern port
one long muggy afternoon when sweat refuses to dry.
I want your body,
perfect in its imperfection.
5. In Praise Of Youth
Show her no mercy,
younger children.
She showed no mercy to us
calling this love dry
and another fat.
Pointing out teeth that have yellowed
worse than old photographs.
Let her be humbled before she turns thirty
by teenage girls gawking on the escalators at Kowloon.
Let them say, “What does she mean by wearing that?”
as she passes down with bare midriff and blue velvet cap.
Let young girls’ eyes be her only mirrors.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Tammy Ho Lai-ming, aka Sighming, is a Hong Kong-born and -based writer. She is the editor of HKU Writing: An Anthology (March, 2006) and a co-editor of Word Salad Poetry Magazine. Tammy’s creative works appear or are forthcoming in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Macao, New Zealand, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, USA, and Great Britain. More at www.sighming.com.
In This Massive Hallway
In this massive hallway the mahogany
reception desk is guarded by a woman of
mixed ancestry. The owner of a well-trimmed
moustache, an old man, told me he
has been hanging out there for more than five years:
too long, indeed, too long for his original to wait,
and he died of lung cancer. The old man has five
poems: three on canoeing, two
on the Canadian poet-cum-singer Leonard Cohen.
I am newly sent to this New York journal armed
with three petite prose poems: one on fishing,
two on post-postcolonial Hong Kong. My original,
naive and expectation-laden, is sending numerous mes
to different magazines, e-zines and whatnot. Us –
all of her invisible outer doppelgängers –
carry her manuscripts and wait, sometimes for days,
sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, for
responses from editors. We haunt waiting rooms,
store rooms, nearly-empty rooms, forgotten rooms.
(This poem appeared in a different form in 21 Stars)
In The Summit Of Greying Snow
A poet died in the summit of greying snow.
He wrote about the realistic unordinary angst
of ordinary families, or vice versa,
and the human’s subconscious wish to be short-lived,
fast-mated insect (no mid-life
crises). Some envious poets thought aloud
to each other: oh it was wonderful to die
in the sacred cold, don’t you think? The icy weather
effortlessly formed a natural tomb for the sealed
and healed spirit. Other poets took up the task
to console the poet’s wife: her cream marble face
scarred with two non-parallel one-way tear tracks.
At the funeral, the wife asked the poets
to recite a poem of her husband’s – any poem
from any period of his writing career would do,
she said. Even the insect poems, she added.
The request drained away all sounds in the hall
in which the coffin was appropriately centred.
No one present, except the wife, had read
the poet’s poetry, and they called themselves
members of the same community of practice.
They spent too much time complaining at meetings
about the shrinking of the reading public
in the junk-layered village and being jealous
about other more successful writers –
mortal enemies.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Stephen Oliver’s latest collection of poetry is titled, Either Side The Horizon, Titus Books, Auckland / Sydney, 2005. His next collection titled, Harmonic is forthcoming from IP Interactive Publications, Brisbane, in 2008. IP is to release his CD recording of poems read by the author, to music composed by Matt Ottley, November, 2007. The CD is titled: KING HIT Selected Readings.
An Avenue To The Sea
Knowledge comes by indirect paths,
found addresses, by moonlight’s note left on the
back doorstep, molecular puzzle
of pigeons (brown and white potsherd)
in the high air at mid-day over this raucous town.
By panels of light cantilevered off cloud
that signal the departure of angels to earthly realms.
City of property investors, real estate mania.
City of rack renters and home renovators.
City of bladed light and blue-grey harbour.
City of broken contracts and sybaritic compulsion.
City of up-front rip-offs and council rorts.
City of jasmine and the eternal summer party.
City of shimmer dreams-sans-memory.
The most famous of living poets remain anonymous
and unrecognized in foreign towns,
ghosts before their time.
An avenue of artists, philosophers, poets, musicians
leads from the city square out through suburbs,
past terra cotta, yellow, and liver-brick villas –
(smoke twists through pine and laurel grove)
an avenue wide enough for a phalanx of soldiers
or two tanks grazing side by side.
Flags of spiritual battles won and lost adorn poles
set at intervals, diminishing
whitely into distance,
where it is observed that a central point at the close
of the avenue, bright as diamonds streaming in
the light, (barely larger than your pupil) is the
sea burning in its cauldron of watery fragmentation.
For Night To Roll Its Camber Over
The ruddy glare,
yellow, blurs its palette in rain,
at the boundaries of vision
flaring to white, blindingly, passes on (reassuringly)
into darkness, a rubbery hiss.
August is the windiest month,
west, sou’ westerlies rattle the Sydney basin.
Light beams search down through underside
of cloud where planes lower unwaveringly toward
North East, South West runways.
A machine screams slowly backwards over rooftops
(a sound that moves away-and-toward)
pushing space apart, seemingly swallowing itself.
Reverberations directly overhead wrap around
the room you’re in and rooming under
for night to roll its camber over.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Gareth Sion Jenkins: writer, performer and digital media artist. Gareth currently teaches creative writing at the University of Newcastle, the University of Technology Sydney, and the University of Wollongong where he is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Creative Arts. His theoretical work focuses on art-makers who have experienced schizophrenia and he has presented his research in Australia, Europe and the U.S.A. Gareth’s creative work explores poetry, prose, digital media and performance. He has performed and been published in Australia and internationally.
Corfu
Swallows loudly in ancient architraves wake me
diving onto cobbled stones washed each morning.
The motion of my mind towards you,
lips bent and feeling no thing, no thing
finds me.
Swallows loudly.
I remember every dream in which you sing,
your voice a hedged rustling;
aural snow drifting into the Pyrenees rift,
your breath moves me breathing –
breathe,
breathe me in.
I remember every dream in which you say:
“My heart is four chambers singing your name.”
Come stand with in me.
Watch the morning light bright with Swallow’s wings uncoiling.
Premonitions
I looked for you on the subway and in Washington Square;
thought I saw you wandering through Central Park
as the light fell into the ice.
In Brooklyn there were rumours of your movements
spoken at the edges of basketball courts,
amid the crumble of brownstones.
I waited for days outside Printed Matter at 195 10th Avenue,
I was sure you would come and read their hand-made books.
Descending into Tahir Vintage Clothing Boutique at 412 & 9th St
I thought at last I had found you
chatting with the warm-smiling creature behind the counter.
You turned and morphed, striding away into another life,
leaving me seduced by a loosely-woven scarf.
“Premonitions,” said the psychic at 1091 2nd Avenue,
her ringed finger coiling the curtain.
I listened to the passage of feet on the pavement outside,
hearing you again and again stop to check your watch, straighten your hat.
I have left my breath for you in Manhattan’s subterranean steam,
my fingerprints in the American Folk Art Museum,
my footprints in the tangled subway,
my laughter in the budding Central Park trees.
Skin Drink Rain
I ask her if she minds me smoking, holding before me a packet of rolling tobacco
as explanation. She holds up her own and as the carriage blunders the length of Spain
we fill the air with smoke. It soars forth between lips parted as if to speak,
though silence reigns;
clouds of silence fill the air, more convincing of a union than any words could be.
She runs out of paper and I lend her. Each time I set out to smoke I offer,
each time watching her hand as it reaches over,
veins rearing up under her skin.
Morning comes with mountains, waking me from an unknown sleep.
The wind is back, drawing dead leaves from trees.
Rain, hard against the metal roof, blurs and magnifies the world.
After the changeless weather of near Sahara, upper Africa – this blessing,
the air is laced with ice.
I take off my shirt and press my chest against the cool of the glass,
hang my head out of the window,
let my skin drink rain.
She sleeps, immersed in a pool of dreams. “Come in the water’s beautiful,” she says
without moving her lips.
I wake later and she is gone.
Not even the depression of her weight marks the spot where she sat.
I run out of paper and curse her for hours, trying to read –
trying to ignore the tapping of my foot,
voice in my mind, restless tight rasping
demanding to be fed.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Heng Siok Tian has published three collections: Crossing the Chopsticks and Other Poems (1993)My City, My Canvas (1999) and, Contouring, (2004). She has been published in Harvest International (2006/2007), Idea to Ideal (2004), Love Gathers All: A Philippines-Singapore Anthology of Love Poems (2002), No Other City: An Anthology of Urban Poetry (2000), More Than Half the Sky (1998), Journeys: Words, Home and Nation (1995), The Calling of the Kindred (1993), Singapore: Places, Poems, Paintings (1992), New Voices in Southeast Asia (1991) and Words for the 25th (1990). One of her short stories has been translated into Italian for a collection of Singapore short stories published by Isbn Edizioni (2005). Her short play, The Lift, staged in 1991, was selected to be read at the Third International Women Playwrights’ Conference in Adelaide in 1994. Siok Tian holds a Master of Arts in Literature from the National University of Singapore and a Master of Science in Information Studies from the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. In 2000, she attended the Iowa International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, USA on a National Arts Council Fellowship.
Sayang Airwell
Airwell
in the centre of a baba home
shows me
a mosaic of blue.
Like a pre-hologram,
glimpsing an early sky:
I see amahs in samfoos
in their time and space
squatted here,
washing, working within the marbled tiles,
for big master and mistress who slept above,
for little masters they would sayang and love..
Where was their half of the sky?
next to babas and nonyas twirling, whirling with a gramophone in an upstairs dance studio
which became the play den of fruit bats when owners upgraded,
now
layered with droppings, so decomposed they become
earth.
To first lose the turquoise of mosaic-blue, then the shapes of carved zodiac animals,
to leave them with the wings of bats,
to touch again these losses
as I linger on the airwell,
so sayang,
sayang.
Carnivalesque
My noise won’t stop.
Elephants howl for no reason
I could not get
my clown-act right
and the master trainer
threatens to whip me.
I fear so much
I wish so hard
he begins to change from pumpkin to marsh-mellow
I stop believing I have a wand
to magick away
unpleasantries
baking them into cup cakes
which I serve my audiences,
as they reach for them,
the cakes become bubbles,
they become angry at my alleged deceit.
Did I ask
to cruise into midnight
to meander into side-alleys,
to be led
into labyrinths
where cobwebs become
fishing hooks
that sink into dry flesh,
shooting stars
cannon balls
running through my head
lines of a chair
become dancing skeletons
that slip near to me?
I lost my posture as a chimpanzee,
broke my brittle back with stilettos,
rectify with surgery, pilates, yoga…
only to find myself
fetal-like in bed,
licking words off the edges
cursing Caliban-fashion
the knowledge of names.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Margaret Bradstock is a Sydney poet, editor and critic. She is an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of NSW, a long-term committee member of Poets Union and co-editor of Five Bells. She has published four collections of poetry, the most recent of which are The Pomelo Tree (Ginninderra, 2001), which won the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry, and Coast (Ginninderra, 2005). She has also won Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson awards. Margaret was Asialink Writer-in-residence at Peking University, Beijing, in 2003.
The Butterfly Effect
(after Decompose, by Gaye Chapman)
‘Is the moon not there unless I can see it?’
– Einstein
Back home, but never back,
exploding like ectoplasm
across the empty rooms,
the decomposed gardens.
Old responsibilities, seasons
rise up, numinous
as Christmas ghosts, this space
that once took us in.
For the cabbage nymph, or neophyte,
it’s chaos theory.
Dust on the snooker balls
might change
the moment of collision,
the dense stars wheeling
in the firmament,
or the response.
In Albert Brown Park
The night-stroked suburbs,
flare of occasional street lights
holding us in shadow,
and drought-starved gardens.
Downhill, past the Alsatian
revving up behind meshed wire
patrolling his square of concrete,
past the corner park, more
strip of green than park.
On the signpost
something hunches
(frogmouth or nightjar),
a soft churring
shaping its gentle breath.
We douse torches, so close
I might have touched it,
flight-feathers pinned,
waiting for prey.
Light plane over Sydney Cove
(after Brett Squires)
Crossing the Blue Mountains
soon after dawn
the air like torn canvas
you stretch the limits of reflected light
promontories reaching out
the Harbour glimmering.
Those Dubbo mornings
flying back from Emergency
the nightshift routine
of work, sleep, eat, repeat . . .
broken and restless for harbours.
Cupping the city
in the curve of your hands
you photograph the moment
the propeller’s beat.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Brenda Saunders is a Sydney writer and artist. She is a member of the Poets Union NSW and the Round Table Poets. As an urban Aboriginal artist and activist she is also a member of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative. Her poetry and articles have been published in journals like Thylazine and Poetrix as well as being broadcast on ABC Radio National. Brenda was selected for The Red Room Company’s Poetry Crimes, and more recently for Poetry Without Borders ( National Poetry Week 2007).
Dark Secrets
Truth can spill out
with little hooks
of questions,
caught in photos
stuffed at the back
of a drawer.
Families of black people
camping in tents
faded to sepia tints.
A loving couple
one white, one dark
uneasy in a boat on a lake.
And the negatives
give nothing away.
Vanished frames of secret lives
pale squares on wallpaper
whisper denial.
In the silence of the old house
my fingers leave traces
in the film of dust.
Untitled
Dark hands
beat the silence.
Curled tight they hold
the anxious moment,
let others slip by.
Years of blackness
spread across the palms
– rivers dispossessed,
tributaries
going nowhere.
Time runs out
with the present fear,
a lifeline held
in metal cuffs
caught at the wrist.
Black-out
‘Sista girl need money to get home Native title
case ‘Big time!’ she raps, edgy.
Some story.
She’s young, black and living in the city:
‘Gimme a dolla
Pay the Rent
whitey guilt
easy street’
Up in court, on the run. Stealing stuff,
could be.
‘This is a refuge’ I say, ‘OK? For Koori women at risk
Rape and violence, you know.’
– RIGHTS FOR WOMEN pinned to the wall,
a poster men don’t read,
(after the rage he’s blotto on the bed.
She plays dead.)
I give her money, refer her on.
Now I hear she’s working
on the Block,
tradin’ for cuz
speedy in the fast lane:
Live for the day.
Locked in jail,
singin’ up country.
Dreamin’s free
… cuz: cousin, friend, singin’ up country: remembering tribal land
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Carolyn van Langenberg is the author of the novels fish lips, the teetotaller’s wake, blue moon and sibyl’s stories (Indra Publishing). In 2000, fish lips was short-listed for the David T K Wong Fellowship, East Anglia University, UK. After many years of writing prose, she has returned to poetry, recently publishing on the net and print journals like Shearsman (UK), Cordite, Aesthetica (UK), Antipodes (USA), Staples, Macau writing and Poetando. She is co-poet with Shé Hawke of the chapbook tender muse (Picaro Press, 2007).
The Tricky Light
Coles Bay, Tasmania
i) At Freycinet National Park
unusually bathed in sunshine
how I stood on the rough path
above the still composition
–aquamarine fastness,
ochre rocks and rubble,
brown tussocks bristling up
sand like pale, crushed shells.
Time stopped where my heel sank.
When I pointed my camera,
how I clicked the shutter on beauty.
Or was it breath taken away.
ii) Home with holiday snaps
how I studied the nature pics –
white banksias and orange moss
under whisked shadow of flight,
wingspan wide across sunned air –
then her face staring, straight
hair pinned off broad forehead,
hand shielding eyes from glare,
dressed in a calico pinny, black smock,
body wedged between rocks and grass
below the high-tide line of the cared-for shore
fetched up in conjuring gold.
Saucer
(for Leonie)
White saucer snagged in reeds
gleamed under watery green
for the slide of long-fingered curiosity
to fit with story and cup.
A mouthful of sky empty of nothing,
it leads an unremarkable life,
no name to lose in riversand,
no dream to hold in mud.
Vanished for years without a word,
the flooding currents of the river
sank unwritten history
at the bend near the big red house
where the date palm widened midday shade
and pink begonias flushed the lawn, the favoured spot
for the clean-up blitz when orange flames licked
waste paper, empty tins, cracked saucers.
Dumped, eventually, in the back of a boat
with scavenged things, it found
a mismatched cup, but no cloth spread
over the roots of a sprawling tree,
no table set for afternoon tea.
An oar knocked silence. The saucer trembled.
A cow with its tail frisked flies from its back.
And a spoonful of sunshine slipped upstream.