July 29, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Lindsay Tuggle is the author of The Afterlives of Specimens (2017), which was glowingly reviewed as a cover feature in The New York Review of Books, American Literature (Duke UP) and American Literary History (Oxford UP). Her debut poetry collection, Calenture (2018), was one of The Australian’s Books of the Year, shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature’s Mary Gilmore Award and Australian Poetry’s Anne Elder Award. Her work has been supported by numerous international grants, including the prestigious Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress, and a Travelling Fellowship from the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2023, Lindsay was a Writer-in-Residence at Château d’Orquevaux in France and Bundanon Trust in the Shoalhaven of Australia.
Read more at http://www.lindsaytuggle.com
The Arsonists’ Hymnal
Our story starts in the field
and ends in the bath
or vice versa.
I can no longer remember when things came full circle,
when our endings and beginnings began
to eat their own tales.
In the middle, there is fire.
Summer was not yet the vast,
burning thing it has become.
Arson is a form of prophecy.
Flames have tongues, and so do we—
whether we use them or not.
The fires were warning us,
all this time.
No one believes a prophet,
until it’s too late.
That night, we lay on the grass,
watching for heat lightening.
We cannot sleep without seeing
that jagged rupture in the sky,
a tangle of stars and satellites
discernible only by blinking proximity.
After the lightening
our adolescent
poison quickens, then recedes.
After, we sleep.
But not tonight.
Tonight, we speak again in our mother tongue,
a dual fluency we alone share.
At first, we don’t hear the shift.
Slippage is like that, both sudden and gradual.
They forced it from us long ago
or so it seemed.
We remember the doctors’ creeping hands
encircling our throats,
probing the wet insides of our mouths.
A needle. A parade of arms.
Slowly, we learned to speak
the Queen’s tongue.
We forgot to remember
the poem unfurling
in the air between my sister and I,
the slow dance of our exhalations.
Then,
at thirteen,
a murmuration escaped.
Our bodies begin
to stretch and swell.
Our marrow aches.
We are always hungry.
Games over who can eat more, or less,
then dance til exhaustion.
Our limbs crave sleep,
but are too long for our narrow beds.
So we lay in the field,
waiting for the heat to break into light.
We didn’t set the fire.
Not with our hands.
We dreamed of burning for so long,
at last the lightening answered our call.
We lay still as the grass flumed ever closer,
let the dying embers kiss our skin.
In our secret tongue, we agreed
to remain, unmoving,
to let the ending write itself.
Did we wake in the bath
or the grave?
I can no longer recall
which of us resides underground.
Oracles and fire-eaters share fatal tendencies.
It is a dangerous business, prophecy.
Paralysis is innate, in the face of extinction.
Fawn response on a global scale.
When ashes fall from your mouth,
remember, you asked for this.
Swallow hard, sister.
One last time.
June 10, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ben Hession is a disabled writer living on Dharawal country, south of Sydney, Australia. His poetry has been published in Eureka Street, the International Chinese Language Forum, the Cordite Poetry Review, Verity La, Bluepepper, Marrickville Pause, The Blue Nib, Live Encounters: Poetry and Writing, Antipodes and the Don Bank Live Poets anthology Can I Tell You A Secret? He has reviewed poetry for Verity La and Mascara Literary Review. Hession is a music journalist and is involved with community broadcasting.
Cemetery Visit
Sun-faded synthetic flowers adorning
the name plates – flourishes of petals, each
touching on personal, paled memories
of good works that had abounded
in life’s now abandoned field.
One day, their visitors will return, I guess,
to these living artifices of fidelity,
in hope – that plastic, resisting hope –
against our impermanence:
we’re seeing today, remaining in bloom.
April 25, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Chris Ringrose is a poet and literary critic who lives in Melbourne. His poetry has won awards in England, Canada and Australia, and he has published critical work on modern fiction, literary theory and children’s literature. He is the co-editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and a poetry reviewer for the Australian Poetry Journal. His latest collection of poems is Palmistry (ICoE Press, 2019). Creative Lives, a collection of interviews with South Asian writers, was published in 2021 by Ibidem/Columbia University Press. His poetry website is http://www.cringrose.com
Widow
She listens all day
to the flapping of sheets on the line
the banging of the barn door
At evening, unpegs
the sweet-smelling washing.
An arrowhead of migrating geese
stirs a longing for elsewhere
Their honking
drifts faintly down, breath
speaking Earth’s subtle logic
Two years have passed
like the backwards shuffling of pages
as one searches for forgotten lines
She has shut down the news, knowing
that when the big thing happens
someone will knock on the door
Notes the silver trail, leading upwards.
Last night the snail scaled the wall
that the hound could not leap.
The way things are
The rain is talking to the night.
It’s blustered on the farmhouse panes
for centuries, and never blown itself out.
The trees are reined back by gales
then plunge their heads like horses.
Our farm is manhandled by the seasons:
plunged into an icy bucket of winter
hauled out spluttering into the towel of Spring
summer bristled in an upheaval of grass, crops and weeds
shaved by the blades of autumn.
Our cattle dung the earth;
the clouds scamper across East Yorkshire
to the North Sea or glower through the drizzle.
This is the way things are, year after year.
Tenants of earth and sky, raisers of stock,
we walk the bounds at evening with dog and gun,
smell pine resin in the place where we began.
Christmas Day’s a work day
when the grass beneath our feet
crackles like the icing
on the massive cake indoors.
Future farmers conceived to the sound
of hail that volleys on the bedroom wall
as the farm hauls itself
from season to season
and we run to keep up.
We speak to the trees.
The woods are slow to answer.
Servants of the soil,
we gather the eggs,
shoot the foxes and crows,
and walk into summer.
Sap pulses in the stalks, below
disintegrating dandelion clocks;
they, too, have to hand on life.
Pigshit and steam, and
this summer’s swallows
bolting from the stables
to wheel up and around
the insect-laden air.
December 18, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Joanna Cleary (she/her) is an emerging queer artist. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The /tƐmz/ Review, The Hunger, Gordon Square Review, Apricity Press, Digging Through The Fat, Typehouse Magazine, The Gravity of the Thing, Funicular, Canthius, and Queer Toronto Literary Magazine, among others. Follow her on Instagram @joannacleary121.
Tree Poem
Today, my ecology professor starts class by asking
what a tree is and all I know is that they’re hulking,
impenetrable things I could never climb: my palms
breaking on bark and my body stuck stupidly below
while my brothers clambered from branch to branch,
but occasionally I catch myself thinking of the time
when I almost did it—clung to a low-hanging branch
and lifted my feet off the ground, found my footing
on the trunk, allowed myself to become suspended
in air—until my arms gave way and I dropped down
like all the other times before, my face red, the tree
unmoved as I leaned against it in either silent prayer
or defeat, waiting for the poem I started that moment
to end, though it wrote and rewrote and rewrote itself
even after both my brothers outgrew climbing trees
and the hours they spent hoisting themselves higher
became memories, even as a pretentious grad student
raises his hand to say how we can find god in nature
(like it’s that easy), and I could reply saying I haven’t
but perhaps I once did: in that moment above ground,
no longer standing on tree roots, I could’ve believed.
November 18, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Marcelle Freiman’s poetry collections are Spirit Level (Puncher & Wattmann 2021), White Lines (Vertical) (Hybrid 2010), and Monkey’s Wedding (Island Press). Her poetry has appeared in anthologies and literary journals that include Antipodes, Axon, Cordite, Mascara Literary Review, Meanjin, Meniscus, Southerly, StylusLit and Westerly. She is an Honorary Associate Professor at Macquarie University.
Camera Lucida – photograph of my mother as a child c.1931
A few seconds of time, a day
when you were four, maybe five –
your gaze intent
towards the camera’s lens –
and it’s only in the way
the light is caught by the right side
of your cheek, your white socks
and bedroll held on a shoulder,
silver birches alongside, pathways
crossing behind you lit between shadows,
the far shimmer of a lake beyond the trees –
that you were there
that moment, that day – the click
of a shutter, your mother? your nurse?
who had cropped the dark hair
framing your face – your clear eyes
seem to see into facets of a future
you could not possibly envision, then.
Chemical iridescence
as negative turns to image –
it’s in the captures of light that day
that I am given your confident stance
the sassiness of your gaze – transformations
of light – the way that overlapping scales
of a butterfly wing
will come alive and multiple
with falling angles of the light –
you, in a deep shaded forest
November 14, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dorothy Lune is a Yorta Yorta poet, born in Australia & a best of the net 2024 nominee. Her poems have appeared in Overland journal, Many Nice Donkeys & more. She is looking to publish her manuscripts, can be found online @dorothylune, & has a substack at https://dorothylune.substack.com/
Author photo: royalty free picture of a ladybug
Terra nullius
The concrete
foreground is italicized, it lifts,
the first to die in the sun is my Phoenix,
she incarnates as a rifle—
protector of all placeholder-kind,
I send an inquiry to the Australian government
& it reads: why do I
burn before I tan, perhaps it’s true
that it’s the same with death— death of skin,
death of language,
something inexact comes to be
a spokesperson. I enshrine my unbelonging as a
self invitation, my
unbeknownst to Australasia,
despite this I’m identified as unfurled. My womb
rose up & the
insolvent babe dried away
two thirds of its material— I was the last to break on
a screed, damp &
pale like an English settler,
the ivory turret strayed from his castle— there are no
English crowns here.
I aestheticise my identity
with maroon knit turtlenecks & buoyant hair that curls
upward like a
beach’s evening crest—
enclosed yet open & furled in public winds.
November 10, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Raised in a family of step-siblings and a procession of stepmothers, Ellen soon learnt the art of resilience and the importance of finding her own voice in the world. From early on, poetry was the
language she used to align the uncertainty of her world. Delving around wires of disconnect, her words find strength from wherever she calls home at the time. Ellen’s work appears in The Canberra Times, on a footpath in Adelaide, Cordite, Manly Ekphrastic Challenge, Australian Poetry Collaboration, Woman of Words, Rabbit, Australian Poetry Anthology and Westerly. Out of the Blocks is out with Puncher and Wattmann.
crashed
it rained and the tv went numb
the atmospheric antenna
dialled-in the wild
then fogged up the bulb
i wanted to be more than my surrounds
to be
unaffected by storms and poor reception
but my fortress of rock collapsed
from being
too much
they gave me a test
and labelled me antisocial
pegged me to a journey
to define the triggers inside
an answer to the speeding
an explanation to the experimental
too ready too reactive too risky
i harnessed heat
to weld the friction
and still i strayed
fast cars
and boys
those stark corners of acceptance
my hands reaching
for the physical attributes
of a connection
October 2, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Priya Gore-Johnson is an Indian-Australian poet, writer, aspiring academic, and textile art enthusiast based in lutruwita/Tasmania. Their work tends to focus on grief, liminal spaces, and fragmented identity and the ways in which these topics are often intrinsically and intricately linked. They are deeply passionate about translation and reception studies, especially when concerned with classical Sanskrit literature and the contemporary “so-called Australian” diasporic experience. You can currently find their work in the University of Tasmania’s student magazine, Togatus.
Polaroid of a Girl with a Sparkler
Happy New Year!
Is it though?
The world is ending and everyone is dancing.
Faces awash in the yellow glow of sparklers, bodies moving freely to the slow syncopated beat.
The air is full of the impenetrability of youth, the apocalyptic glory of it all.
Each note, each breath, bursting and scattering like fireworks.
Happy New Year!
I am in it.
It’s all around me, I can’t escape it.
My body moves against my will, my hands engraving gold into the air.
I smile. I laugh.
I am so sad I feel as though I cannot hold it all within me.
It could spill out of me at any moment,
saltwater running through my hands.
Mindless chatter.
Endless dread.
You are gone and my world is ending.
Everyone looks through me
but never at me.
My sadness flashes back at them like light off a mirror.
It blinds me too.
My world has ended!
I want to scream and scream until they understand it,
the way it sits twisted and brittle inside of me.
It’s not that I want to stop the party
or break the illusion
that allows them to revel in the ambrosia of their youth.
I just want them to look at me.
Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.
Can you see it?
The sharp teeth of loss?
The cavern of grief?
The swirling, endless, void
filling me up and up and overflowing
down my cheeks and arms and belly?
I used to be one of them.
The weightlessness, the pure unbridled joy, the drunken haze spinning reality to unreality.
Now I can’t imagine it.
Reality sits balanced on my first rib, poised to drop like a rock to the pit of my belly.
Nothing is the same
as it was before
and it never will be
again.
My world ended last year. How can theirs keep going?
Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.
Tell me that you see me.
Tell me that you see that I’m not the person I was.
Tell me that you love me anyway.
I feel the immense weight of what I’ve seen and felt and lost pushing down on me.
The grey uniformity of hospital beds.
The monitors keeping rhythm with our drowning hearts.
The profound horror of it all.
And your soft voice in my ear:
You’re going to have to cry about this, I’ll tell you that one for free.
I love you. I love you.
And theirs, a gentle echo of yours
moving across worlds.
Happy New Year.
September 24, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
joanne burns writes poetry, prose poems, short fictions and monologues. She has been active in the Australian Poetry scene since the early 1970s. Her most recent poetry collection is apparently, Giramondo 2019. She is currently assembling a new collection rummage.
cataloggia
the aperitivo antipasto
hour slidels into view
there’s something in the air
verando aperolicks
proseccutions muebles wickeramas —
organic or synthet why not just
click/collect
raj meets gatsby in the lumen
of a hubble bubble no unnecessary
toil or trouble a wicca wonka
spelling bee pollinates in the furnished
suburbs of the blest
flock
her white as rice gown
just fitted not the best
choice for an elongated
heatwave her white as rice
hem grazing her diffident toes
where was her hair brush the audience
was waiting somewhere out there stranded
commuters in a summer delirium larks hidden
in the crimson braid that ran down the sides of
her costume like vascular complacency were
refusing to sing she couldn’t locate the lyrics
to any of her songs, just petite hums where was
janis when you needed her or florence her long dead
godmother who looked nothing like a fairy that sprawl
of teryiaki tofu squares on the floor of the train should
have been a warning in that lingering afternoon & all those
enigmatic tattoos on the arms and shoulders of the texting
harpy opposite no point wearing those snazzy new shades
if you can’t read the tracks
September 24, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jo Langdon lives and writes on unceded Wadawurrung land. She is the author of two poetry collections, Snowline (Whitmore Press, 2012) and Glass Life (Five Islands Press, 2018), and was a 2018 Elizabeth Kostova Foundation Fiction Writing Fellow. Her recent writing is also published and forthcoming in journals including Cordite, Griffith Review, Island, Overland and Westerly.
Performance
Sure—there were flowers then
petals where they’d trembled
their own lovely heads loose. I wrote
in thanks & the reply came, ‘Is that it?’
I guess it was—an ending signalled
well before the roses’ demise.
We offered each other nothing
of consolation—the flowers & I
at odds, though they might have told
that they wanted no part
in this production, that it all came down
to hyperbole and waste, whatever
there was left to feel rotten about.
The flowers were worn out
like similes—contrived
in the roles ascribed to them, parts
I confect for them even now, long gone
though they are. I am sorry
only that I neglected
their certain beauty, neither exchanging
their fetid water nor giving
much mind to their final
dignity—how they towered even as
they came undone.
Lindsay Tuggle is the author of The Afterlives of Specimens (2017), which was glowingly reviewed as a cover feature in The New York Review of Books, American Literature (Duke UP) and American Literary History (Oxford UP). Her debut poetry collection, Calenture (2018), was one of The Australian’s Books of the Year, shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature’s Mary Gilmore Award and Australian Poetry’s Anne Elder Award. Her work has been supported by numerous international grants, including the prestigious Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress, and a Travelling Fellowship from the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2023, Lindsay was a Writer-in-Residence at Château d’Orquevaux in France and Bundanon Trust in the Shoalhaven of Australia.
