Judith Beveridge

April 6, 2025 / mascara / 0 Comments

Judith Beveridge is the author of seven previous collections of poetry, most recently Sun Music: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2019 Prime Minister’s Prize for Poetry. Many of her books have won or been shortlisted for major prizes, and her poems widely studied in schools and universities. She taught poetry at the University of Sydney from 2003-2018 and was poetry editor of Meanjin 2005-2016. She is a recipient of the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal and the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement. Her latest collection is Tintinnabulum (Giramondo, 2024).

Listening to Cicadas

Thousands of soda chargers detonating simultaneously
at the one party

*

The aural equivalent of the smell of cheese fermented
in the stomach of a slaughtered goat 

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The aural equivalent of downing eight glasses
of caffeinated alcohol

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Temperature: the cicada’s sound-editing software

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At noon, treefuls of noise: jarring, blurred, magnified—
sound being pixelated

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The audio equivalent of flash photography and strobe lighting
hitting disco balls and mirror walls

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The sound of cellophane being crumpled in the hands
of sixteen thousand four-year olds

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The aural equivalent of platform shoes

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The aural equivalent of skinny jeans 

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All the accumulated cases of tinnitus suffered
by fans of Motörhead and Pearl Jam

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Microphone feedback overlaid with the robotic fluctuations
of acid trance music

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The stultifying equivalent of listening to the full chemical name
for the human protein titin which consists of 189,819 letters
and takes three-and-a-half hours to pronounce

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The aural equivalent of garish chain jewellery 

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A feeling as if your ear drums had expanded into the percussing surfaces
of fifty-nine metallic wobble boards

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The aural equivalent of ant juice 

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Days of summer: a sonic treadwheel

Peppertree Bay

It’s lovely to linger here along the dock,
to watch stingrays glide among the pylons,
to linger here and see the slanted ease
of yachts, to hear their keels lisp, to see
wisps of spray swirl up, to linger along
the shore and see rowers round their oars
in strict rapport with calls of a cox,
to watch the light shoal and the wash scroll,
and wade in shallows like a pale-legged
bird, sand churning lightly in the waves,
terns flying above the peridot green
where water deepens, to watch dogs
on sniffing duty scribble their noses over
pee-encoded messages, and see a child
make bucket sandcastles tasselled
with seaweed, a row of fez hats, and
walk near rocks, back to the jetty where
fishermen cast out with a nylon swish,
hoping no line will languish, no hook
snag under rock, to watch jellyfish rise
to the bay’s surface like scuba divers’
bubbles, pylons chunky with oyster shells
where a little bird twitters chincherinchee
chincherinchee from its nest under the slats,
to feel that the hours have the rocking
emptiness of a long canoe, so I can relax
and feel grateful for the confederacies
of luck and circumstance that bring
me here because today I might spy
a seahorse drifting in the seagrass
with the upright stance of a treble clef,
or spot the stately flight of black cockatoos,
their cries like the squeaking hinges
of an oak door closing in a drafty church,
to walk near the celadon pale shallows
again where I’ll feel my thoughts drift
on an undertow into an expanse where
they almost disappear, and give thanks
again to the profluent music of the waves,
and for all the ways that light exalts
the world, for my eyes and brain changing
wavelengths into colour, the pearly
pinks of the shells, the periwinkles’ indigo
and mauve, the sky’s methylene blue.

These poems are published in Tintinnabulum (Giramondo,2024)

Alison J Barton

April 2, 2025 / mascara / 0 Comments

Alison J Barton is a Wiradjuri poet based in Melbourne. Themes of race relations, Aboriginal-Australian history, colonisation, gender and psychoanalytic theory are central to her poetry. She was the inaugural winner of the Cambridge University First Nations Writer-in-Residence Fellowship and received a Varuna Mascara Residency. Her debut collection, Not Telling is published by Puncher and Wattmann. www.alisonjbarton.com / Instagram @alison_j_barton
 
 
 
 
 
Mirror

Lindsay Tuggle

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.

Ben Hession

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.

Chris Ringrose

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.