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.

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

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.

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.

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.