Accessibility Tools

Skip to main content

Author: mascara

Mike Ladd

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

0 (2)

Mike Ladd lives and writes in Adelaide. He produces Poetica each week on ABC Radio National. Mike’s most recent book is Karrawirra Parri: Walking the Torrens from Source to Sea published by Wakefield Press in 2012.

 
 

Gasoline Flowers

Mohamed Bouazizi,
wanting living space
and a little justice,
became an orange-yellow orchid

Tich Quang Duc,
a wavering lotus of flame

Palden Choetso – a smoky iris,
deadly bright at its centre.

For his land of snow
and a spinning prayer,
Tsering Tashi was a gaping petro hibiscus.

Fever Dreams by Manisha Anjali

Written by mascara on . Posted in Fiction.

Fever Dreams by Manisha Anjali

IMG_6017 - Copy

Manisha Anjali is a folk story writer based in Melbourne, Australia. She has also lived in Fiji and New Zealand. Manisha won the People’s Choice Award for her short story Goldie the Turtle in the NZ Writer’s College Short Story Competition in 2012. She was awarded a Hot Desk Fellowship by The Wheeler Centre in 2013. She is currently working on her debut novel, Peanuts.

 

 

Fever Dreams

Aji has put me in a small cupboard. I am to lie here in the darkness with the hots and colds until it all goes away. My eyes are sticky. They have glue coming out of them. It hurts to keep them open. But I am afraid to close them completely in case they glue themselves shut forever. Then Aji would have to cut my eyes open with a knife. I have big red spots from my chinny-chin-chin down to my ankles. They itch like a bastard but I am not allowed to touch. Aji will smack me if she sees me scratching. The hots and colds keep me awake and put me to sleep. I am somewhere in between real life and a scary dream. I can hear my brothers and sisters playing hide-and-seek outside among the trees; and my pussycat is scratching on the cupboard door because she is worried about me.

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please . Not a Member? Join Us

Continue reading

Lionel Fogarty

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry, Featured Writer, First Nations.

66464_291304850944496_75448536_nBorn on Wakka Wakka land at Barambah, which is now known as Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve,  Lionel Fogarty has travelled nationally and internationally presenting and performing his work. Since the seventies Lionel has been a prominent activist, poet writer and artist; a Murri spokesperson for Indigenous Rights in Australia and overseas.  His poetry art work and oral presentation illustrates his linguistic uniqueness and overwhelming passion to re-territorialized Aboriginal language culture and meaning which speaks for Aboriginal people of Australia. In 2012 he received the Scalon prize for Connection Requital and his most recent collection is Mogwie Idan: Stories of the land (Vagabond)

 

 

Advance Those Asian An Pacific Writers Poets

As an murri writer pitch fee in carvings
Asian unity we need is most important
They are the beings on top of us an on the side of us.
At our arms is the Pacific of knowing
We need to unite for rights in all writing powers.
Our Asians are on our earth if we walk under the seabeds we sleep together
Think were there’s no sea the waves of our humanity is the same.
Most of this Asian Pacific is in fights just like love’s that was taken from them.
Most times the spirit of unity is not walled or housed but air free smell free and giving a shared stories.
Life at all times shown must have no different, but there are the bright lights, when we are blind.
Asian is not cassation
Pacific are not anglosacktion
The peace of mind was a balance in space respect the times of the once timeless minds.
Can the truth of Asian Pacific writer give us justices of causes?
Yo if they don’t get out work in their community’s then the pushishing world is at a lost.
So black fell writers this sacred future timing is important.
Remember in school we were taught they whites run them.
Will not true, wave have tunes
Our dancing not same, yes but thing can say and feel.
Our looks are not same but we see in painting art looks don’t mean we apart.
Just see them real reading our stories our culture of what a fight makes to be right.
Asian we can love on open eyes
Pacific we can love on open arms
They weren’t our oppression
We know here lot bugged like the white man’s peoples.
But that not the ones on homeland
Our skies in outback here beds and houses their skies.
The rain of road ships trucks all the days off all foods.
Delightment nights in fashion of opposite
Many souls wants to be unhurt unsafe offences of the desire to unity of the heart to art writing our Asian mobs have done in reply.
Our bodies spill the tempers but the spirit is one.
The moody Pacific mingling in our
Countries are negative at times
Yet these shinning sail them away says are sometimes can’t stand their own peoples.
All people of Pacific Asian are star travelling poetry, but the destination get contemplation.
All Pacific Asian needs our first Australia words to fill their emptiness.
A thousand pages in the food dish will feed the mind body as one.
Require our bush land sea sky without a cost to cut your bloods.
Reason now Asian Pacific letters to us natives down under not of sorry uncountable.
Capture our song mouth lip in our written sweat drop off the spear pen we given.
Let Asian knowledge refinement to out first Australia writers.
Make our books be the beach to lay on.
Make the millions turn the pages our, Pacific Brother Sisters writers learn and action to us, Asian as not drafting a trees felling over
pain sad and down and ousters.
Scream to the injustices quieted by birds in flying over the perpetually aggravation.
Don’t like the lit bug Aussies,
Hum began to like the Asian Pacific forgive but don’t forget.
Don’t like the collar reserve sir to the loudly thunder statures.
Pacific some trash our calendar histories,
Yet most of them know savagery is a wall-to-wall things.
And the sea makes all inland the body of man and women’s.
Asian history must be on our side for future frail fake are not civilianise.
The words here is to rib the rid of bone requiem deceit in the rackets.
Asians are not my or my people’s root yet flowers grow eye for an eyes.
Pacific are not my feet to eat, yet praise be it, to the writers not white in minds + bodies.
Coming back to poems over seas, yes the Asian Pacific touches our fingers without we know.
Half the write it’s not gods or goddess just same as land love, when a rainbow is felt by the two people’s the down under people
walk and talk sing and dance the dust on the pages of histories futures.
We cut the trails off for the smell to be tongued all around the Asian Pacific worlds.
They were never boat people but cues to cuss and shared to share.
The Makassar came then stayed so we live equal passion and ate blood on blood drank the earth as writers to today.
Some kill we had in need not for power over powers that be.
Bourgeois Asian sits a write poor at the doors life’s still die
Bourgeois Pacific sits on grass head thinking their freedom is the tongues they speak, well-written word must unite our respect too.
Mocked as nothing off shores, we last strong winged sails from shores to shores epics anew to write.
The warm beat on ward unawakened the sense in clearer washed skies.
Asian Pacific stories of the homesick
Aspire the creation unstained.
Asian Pacific attains our noon moons recoiling colour crews to be lacerated by our mythologies.
Banished now those ambush settlements away from a chained writers fears.
Bewail our progression painted to sing dance the one possess in peace over wars of grief.
Bound and adore our call for our poets to condemn flack fades of history awaking.
Monument the trust of patient and see our races unbridled.
Reappeared the repeated memories were no games are drop to knee.
The Asian Pacific volunteer are payed by the society vaporises.
We crawl not the injustices to arm our fingers and hand on legs for we yearn face on face rhyme to fierce any dodges of our writers.
Long lives the history of the struggle funny or wild to attack conditions.
Asian Pacific you all are the originality
Enfold the valleys in lust and rages
The country on earth is all that gives generation the chance to write and arts.
Shape our unity with perfect visionary give maturity to the immaturity other writers are old in the wall of racisms.
Mountain the unseen Mountains in our writer’s poet to rich on every Aborigine wish.
From the dawn of futures to the Australia dedicated longings,
We still must affectionate our Pacific Asian writers quarrel darkest mining to suddenly give hope over fury kept.
Fortune are moved by famous gallantry to stop genocides,
We must dominate all authority
Never surrender prophetic to the reflection of oppression
We must courage our welcomed one on number so high.
Customs are to carry on more so than the drunken stupor older chiefs.
Now speak of the harmony Asian Pacific’s
Bungalow all poor and unrest the brigade,
Harvest the learners even grabs soil in all barefoot victorious to rejoice rein in return.
Blunders those evil when the writers are burial; in shroud to justices by poets not massacred.
False people’s say they are ministers not the truth of people’s on peoples,
So stirred the ancestral emotions.
Let the Asian Pacific warriors live message UN broken.
Let the Asian Pacific warrior’s faith the barely crawled belly of mischievous.
Come Brothers of the Asian Pacific writers pleasant our pride for a truce in a thousand devour years, no colony can con.
The tall tales are Europeanism to blame for steering hopeless taste and treaty’s surprises.
Dreamtime multiple declare all mistakes be a past tears for those unfriendly warpaths.
Familiar our write-to-write together now Pacifica Asian’s narrow and bigger……….

 

Sort of Sorry

Sort of sorry tears on drops
Were no eyes?
Sore cries
Walk pass the changed season
Sing passion to the changed leavening.
Mouths lay at the below eyes of beds.
Now writing is unwritten
So ear in took raw deals.
Then as a stood sorry people
Said no more tears.
Smiles embraced the truth for saddest
Wiped an extinct body.
No sorry business changes things
No loaded crying stops crimes
Walk pass the changing seasons
Walls seek space for the lonely faces
She saw pain in a lane of flyaway planes.
He sewed rains drops fallen by
The baby’s unborn restrings.

Belle Ling

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

belleBelle Ling is a university graduate from the University of Hong Kong, and later she has completed a Master of Creative Writing in the University of Sydney. She has a special interest in writing poetry. Her favourite novelist is Haruki Murakami, and her beloved poems are those which can capture insightful images with in-depth philosophical meanings.

 

 

A Good Morning in the Crowded Train

Upon the window of the shuffled train, the sunlight eyes are churned white.
Eyes closed, heads grinding in circle, heels tap balance, disturbed by an awkward
halt—then resume their momentum as the train reels, as if smoothing all the angular

shoulders until they are as round as the river-washed pebbles—any uncertain frictions among
shirts, any unnoticed nudges, any sharp pokes of noses are harmonized
in the hypnotic back-and-forth of our heads and our heels. No ruins, no cries, no

surprises intrude when the space between one another is tied by the repetitive
rhythm. Sweat behind my ear, nearly tiptoes onto his shoulder—drops and is swept
by an unbuckled cuff, air-probing, of an unknown face—my vertebrae are chained,

his half-zipped fly slides over my thigh—fingers collide, chime—exchanging unborn rhymes.
His yawn—sour milk and leftover tuna—unsettles my dream of a Sultan’s perfumed verandah.
My forehead, rimmed by his chin, begs his collarbones globe

as a soft-fat pillow, as willows sway across the window—that gradually-eased hiss,
that deep ebb, zips our long-missed dreams rolling in our laces and fabrics. In-depth,
severely-pressed—his shoelaces, etched into my soles, don’t tussle. My jade-rabbit

pendant, that vivid verdant, is unconsciously-locked in his creamy collar,
as a green bean-sprout entwined in cotton. The wheels keep tracking the rail left-and-right, my
eyes trail his ribs, that strain and slack—as aligned handrails

surface and vanish, hardly held. Hot air curls my eyelashes, flicks my mind’s haze—
“Excuse me”, I say. “I’m sorry,” he beams. The door closes—
hard as husk—I look at the train until it’s reduced into a dark dot in the dense green.

 

Aussie

Dust, grit, ash,
keen sheen in lashes
of weeds;
your sweat appears
as a solid glow.

An eddy of rose
in your fist
draws in the winds
of all directions,
fast, firm, not fierce.

 

Impression

“Take it back,” I call,
I recall—petals in the winds. Rippling,
the church bells, remind me
of the air, the water, the light
and—the blue sky—all the basics
for a decent day,
for the first day
a human starts to breathe, or for—

the moment that time
is first numbered as days,
which, unfortunately, can’t outlast
the time of universe in reverse—
my undated calendar,
and your watch ridded of hands
are the most reliable.

    I haven’t noticed
the tree outside—
my balcony is Jacaranda until
the sunshine determines to rinse away
the densely-vivid purple:
those blurring whites.

    The strong shine on the apex
of the cross—that sharp
and cold point is hardly tamed, not even
the sisters’ buzzing lips:
regular amens can’t prop up
three trampled daisies.

“Take it back,” I call,
yes, I recall—the remains in your pocket—
ripped cloths, molten honey and several
unclassified name cards
plus a familiar scent that’s long
been forgotten, or—
long been hid
for being forgotten.

   Red tea and ice, as clouds
pass over, turn dim and gleam again—
a colour, between cool and warmth,
beyond exact depictions of all kinds,
doesn’t know how to cheat:

we’re just two ordinary passers-by,
who can’t afford to lie.