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David Murray

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

Dave Murray, 44 yrs old. Still studying (Masters at Newcastle Uni) between full-time work as a Public Servant. Married to Michelle. Two children:  Joe, 24; Shani, 11. Two Russian Blue cats. Likes reading Shakespeare for the words, gardening, drinking beer on Fridays and  supporting The Sydney Swans. Dreams of surfing the North Coast one last time. 


from “The Passenger”

The photos are mostly from my mother’s side: cousins, a great-grandmother, aunts, uncles with half-remembered names grouped in backyards or on “days out” at the beach. The eyes have a trapped-animal-gaze, caught in that moment freezing out death. Some of the faces are beautiful, some contorted from squinting against the sunlight. I look for inherited noses or lips, any gesture connecting the silence of ancestry – but find black & white uneventfulness rather than any dark secrets: labourers, compositors, housewives, nurses, teachers. Teetotallers or drunkards, prone to underachieving. All British, all intimate with depression and wars. The great-grandfather and wife in a Tasmanian portrait after the ship from Ireland in 1802; he was a shoe-maker. His face is severe. Victorian. His grandson (Mum’s Dad) followed the Newspaper trade to Newcastle after returning from French trenches dragging a six-pack Catholic family and a body (like so many) restitched and recycled in a front-line field hospital. He survived with medals and a belief in struggle, worked hard and gambled, a long shot in the 4th at Broadmeadow covered a cash down payment on a Blackalls Park block – a quiet Lake Macquarie backwater, protected by eternal gums, the penultimate stop on the Toronto line. The house my grandfather built sloped gently all the way to the forty-foot long jetty, that through certain angles disappeared into the still water, broken only by silver mullet flashes, confused by predators in the shallows. As these things go, it was sold after Nan carked it, the new owners replaced it with a terracotta, two-storey, mock Italian seaside villa, with uninterrupted water views.

 
* * * 
 
The bodies are lithe from basic training and austerity rationing, just thicker than scrawny gums pinning the landscape in place. It is Dad’s first time away from his fucked-up violent soak of a father. He is Joe’s age. Half the men will not return, will never replace the mud and blood of Borneo followed by a future of prisons, disasters, marriages or working. Just over my father’s half-hunched shoulder – is one bloke rehearsing this, squatting down to shit in a hole. Dad’s eyes subconsciously avoid the lens. They suggest his private nature but also the eternal imperviousness of youth – no thinking of families, financial planning. No women. No future indicated here: hauling goods trains up the Hunter Valley after the war to the barracks at Werris Creek, the dislocated existence at the whim of the car I heard pull up out the front at night, the call boy’s feet trampling on the concrete stairs, as he slipped under the door the godforsaken wake-up call for Dad’s next shift. We wouldn’t see him for weeks at a time; he kept his homecomings low-key. One stinking furnace of morning I heard him ghost on the floorboards, got out of bed and spooked him through the house, following silently to the kitchen, watching as he quietly poached some eggs, leaning over a frypan, appraising them as they floated in simmering water, fresh eyes staring at the ceiling.             
 
* * * 
 
Dad avoided carpentry in the shed, reconditioning pushbikes, home handyman work. We were a mechanically inept family in a utilitarian town – never daring to understand you sometimes need to pull something apart to find out how it works. We kicked and slapped at machines that would not work. This instilled a misguided belief in magic and the potential for disaster. Dad’s training notebook from the war therefore seemed a fake: class notes on learning signal code phonetics, map reading, how to construct a mobile telegraph, use Morse code, work the Trembler bell, set up mobile aerial cabling. They are a family betrayal, a confirmed relationship with the world of things, the metamorphosis of electromagnetism into language; or a roundabout means to silence, power, breaking the connection – turn it off at will. The notes were the easy looping style of his day, where the pencil never left the page. No spelling errors, no mess of scratched syntax expected from 4th class schooling. Another Great Depression child. Dad also had a violent, growling drunk of a father to keep John Bull. Pop Murray’s reclining-Buddha seriousness betrayed the brass razoo in his pocket. Pop Murray’s World War One service records report three instances of losing two days’ pay for being drunk in a place called Zagazig (somewhere in the Middle East); one of verbally abusing a sergeant, and a week in some camp hospital for VD. My Dad on the other hand took to wowsering and gave up smoking at war’s end. His War Gratuity of 81 pounds, 15 shillings arrived a week before his marriage – he got a wife and the Catholic church for this investment. This released his latent Jesus gene, doing for others without reward, something useful, selfless and stoic – the full two-bob. It complemented his loner silence, cultivated in overnight train-driver barracks. He was his generation’s silence: coping, the denial of pain, the guilt of survival. My father doesn’t fit within the Aussie tradition as far as working class toughness – he accepted the boredom of local destinations but was never wounded by loneliness. He groaned about his country’s generation of lost cricketers. Wog Ball gave him a weekend acceptance of refugees and their hatred of Communism . He cut his hair American matinee idol fashion, if only to save on Brylcream. He travelled thousands of predefined kilometres sitting on his arse in trains. Always in the present while moving forward, or returning home in the rear cabin after a shift, his back to the future, half-awake, staring into where he’d just been.     
   
* * * 
 
Water is the city’s compensation. After the war, some workers nomadically obeyed the summer solstice. Lake Macquarie in some places became a six month shanty town/tent city. Fathers drove into Newcastle each day to work; older kids caught the train to schools or stayed to fish, sail and swim. Jim Holes can still tell you about somersaulting off the bridge into Throsby Creek during the annual regatta. The council started learn to swim classes for women in the fifties. The beach was a freedom from self. My wife sniggers at her image of me with straw-dry hair, wet towel, red back salty eyes and a board-rider’s wax-rash on my chest. To her, my office hands are too soft, unreliable pointers to coastal secrets. They are clerk’s hands, made for tapping keyboards or replacing photocopy paper. She gets smug about her North Coast origins – little coastal hamlets dotted with modest beach homes lined by sandy paths, half-hidden away in subtropical bush; water tanks for showers, a shit and shave; time measured by shore dumps just outside a window. She mixes country and coast. Newcastle to her is essentially metal. Catching the bus to the beach was my first independence, a rite of passage starting as an egg with a surfmat at Nobby’s shore dump, hiding your pie-milk-and-bus-money – to a twin fin, and a local home-break at South Newcastle. It kind of didn’t matter what you did or who you were. You could even ignore school, where the shit-hot surfers expected deification. It didn’t matter. The waves were the ultimate judge, and the salt-encrusted, sunburnt skin peeled away like my self-consciousness. It was after all about learning to stand up straight by yourself. Like any democracy there was a class system and fuckwits, with the occasional chest-puffing gang wars. But the ocean was too big even for that shit – it forced you to shut up and listen. Beach time avoided time. Tribal but monastic, ironically communal, you watched, minded your own business and learned to talk turkey in a clipped, monotone, coded cool. The harbour had a reasonably steep right-hand peak that broke perfectly (in the right conditions) just inside the breakwall. Here I managed my first fair dinkum barrel  – pure adrenaline silence, stretching three or four seconds into minutes, with time to sketch the whole thing in my head. The sun miraculously flashing through the wall of water: its industrial-harbour-soup turned stained glass; its rush-and-suck dynamo hum; transfixed eyes on the exit; a sniper’s target site formed on a distant Kooragang smoke stacks; pimple squeezed back into the minor cosmos.     
 
* * * 
 
Stars eventually burn out and die. Your super massive stars do this quickly – millions of years, while smaller stars can take even longer. Nick went Red Giant in his late twenties and after numerous rehabs settled into a mild, White Dwarf. We meet occasionally –  black coffee has replaced beer. We shake hands like foreign dignitaries greeting each other for the first time. His huge laugh remains, and his once-a-sentence apology for everything. In his eternal black suit, torn at the arms, he tends to frighten children, who see a potential monster rather than a wild, rare teddy bear. He chain-smokes – ultra-lights, 4 mg. His nicotine-stained, Byzantine gold finger points at the sugar. He pours too much into his cup. His barrister father has finally died, lifting the suspended sentence of failure he imposed upon Nick. The Nick who had potential. School dux, an atomic laugh, he played his Dylan/Taj Mahal/ Lennon influenced music on pub slow nights. He searched out trouble as an antidote to his family, who manicured and frightened pain into dark corners, never to be let out. He got drunk in public in the day time, as preparation for the dark, nomadically sleeping on lounges and friends’ spare beds, paid for with Oscar Wilde routines. He was known as a bed-wetter. His mess of unwashed black hair and hyper-nervous politeness frightened everyone’s girlfriends. He was known to the local working girls. He once almost married a Christian – until she spiked his left eye with a broken beer glass when Nick suggested handcuffed S&M sex held the secret to spiritual liberation. He was arrested for drunkenly reciting T.S. Eliot on a public bus. He lost ten kilos living on Cornettos and speed in Newtown. He hated Les Murray and his White-Trash-Dreaming. He called me one night at three am, stuck at some party (unsuccessfully chasing a girl) somewhere on the Central Coast, wanting cigarettes and a lift home. I said fuck off. He apologised. I imagined him next day – another morning of empty bottles, disappearing, rattling into a Wiz Bin, that sound muffling the sharp edges of another day, waiting at a bus, or a train stop, or walking home Jesus-style when there was no shrapnel for the fare. The goddam sun burning his shadeless eyes. Our relationship had reached that point health workers advise on – the alcoholics must hit bottom by themselves; I stopped day-tripping him around town trying to find a spare rehab place or valium scripts somewhere in his garbage tip wreck of a housing commission flat. There was a reason   to this, removing the garbage meant passing his neighbours, skinheads who kept a bull terrier chained to their front door.

 

 

Brenda Saunders

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

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

Tammy Ho Lai-ming

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

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.

Ocean Vuong

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

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.