R.D.Wood

April 11, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments

R. D. Wood is of Malayalee and Scottish descent and identifies as a person of colour. He has had work published or that is forthcoming from Southerly, Jacket2, Best Australian Poetry, JASAL and Foucault Studies. His most recent collection of poems is Land Fall

Watching the Curry Van at Margaret River Mouth
 
watchsprings
                cleared
                the council dousing
                the frailty of
                cretaceous acne,
the river effervescent
          looms, bodies bristle,
          defiant
                sharp
                unwavering
                lifting
where our identities pale

Anne Walsh

April 11, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments

Anne Walsh is a poet and a story writer. Her work has been published widely in print and online. She has been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize twice and for the ACU Prize for Literature. Her first collection of poems, I Love Like a Drunk Does, was published by Ginninderra Press (2009, Australia). Her work has also been published in the U.S., including a short story, ‘The Rickman Digression’, by Glimmer Train. Her second book of poems, Intact, is forthcoming with Flying Island Press.

Depart

Your death is a soft, green wing. Velvet spun by sun.
A parrot’s wing. Just one more thing, one more shade of impossible
for grief to jump into like a souped up car. Electric lime.
Vegas neon of a Lorikeet. Your death dresses old school big time.
Ridiculous feather, the pink paisley of a pimp
in a 1970’s detective show I can’t take my eyes off of
such great clothes, so out there.

Memory is a record breaking blizzard.
Colours all the maps SES blue in the breaking newsroom
of this evacuated body. This weather woman, under paid, caught
for the duration on air in the studio.
Just out of frame, the storage closet it really is.
A stiff mop. A bucket with a bit of throw-up water.
I don’t believe my own predictions.
Hope is the unfillable toothless gas tank
of a Buick iced-in two blocks down.
Oh the belaboured point of her non-existence.
Hope is like god now.

Closures, detours, no through roads.
Slippery roundabout this. Again and again:
once I slowly invaded the privacy
of that part of your neck usually reserved
for your shirt just under your collar.
Oh! I was your shirt briefly so briefly.

And now I kiss your neck under the collar of the world
over and over
I kiss and kiss and kiss you.
I’m so drifted with the feel of you
which didn’t leave with you that nowhere do I belong.
Everywhere I long.
Not being able to talk to you is its own language.
Some kind of sign. A way of not moving. But flowing.
Lake glottal. Snow cuneiform.
I’m walking across the tops of cars.
Some souls that are still here but gone
go to the weigh-station where things already gone go.
And that’s inevitably when they take the picture.
Like of the last Tassie Tiger.
Her back hyper bent, so unlike her living self.
So bent with the lack of bending trees at evening,
those steeples from which everything
called her people to prayer.
She’s not looking at the camera
because it takes everything that isn’t her.
She’s looking at the dead body of her language.
Nothing is able to be said.

I miss your chest. Your Renaissance Jesus chest.
Your El Greco treasure chest a giant firefly
in the backseat of your car lighting up
like a cigarette with wings
when you unbuttoned your shirt.
I took in a lung full of light.
I miss the sky-when-I-was-six colour of your eyes.
The defibrillating blue of when the swing tips up
as much as it can and you become sky.
Now my heart is stopped by hooker boa green everywhere,
the diamantes of summer grass.

Death doesn’t wear mourning clothes.
She’s New York fashion week.
Bright streaks.
Unbelievable heels.
She’s toucan-nosed.
Bright as a fish.
And everything alive dances with her.
Real Rhumba.
Hips pressed together under open fire hydrants
in the middle of the afternoon.
And she doesn’t run when the cops come.
Never before did trees dance salsa or want so badly.
Everything is alive except for the lover whose love has died.
She’s the deadest thing living.

Paul Munden

April 11, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments

Paul Munden is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Canberra, where he is also Program Manager for the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI). He is General Editor of Writing in Education and Writing in Practice, both published by the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE), of which he is Director. He has worked as conference poet for the British Council and edited Feeling the Pressure: poetry and science of climate change (British Council, 2008). His collections include Analogue/Digital (Smith|Doorstop, 2015) and The Bulmer Murder (Recent Work Press 2017). A new collection, Fugue, will be published by UWAP in October.

  
Venetian Lullaby

You gaze from your cot at the belltower
of St Mark’s. It seems only yesterday
that your mother was as small
                        but tonight
she holds the wooden lagoon in her palm—
twists the lumpen metal key, winds it tight
until the miniature gondolier
is released in an operatic mime,
gliding under the Rialto bridge. Our
frail memories are in his custody
like a circling dream
            and in the minute
it takes for him to falter, stall,
                you fall
for his solid, inscrutable charm,
                steer
your own course through our commotions and let
your heavy eyelids close like a secret.

Four Poster

The frame was hung with tapestries. If he lay
on the bed and stretched his arms and legs
towards the corners he could almost imagine
a quartering of himself, a bloody severance

*

and what possessed her ? the time she scattered
rose petals in between the sheets, so that when
they regained their senses they also reeled
from the crimson stains that suggested a gross

*

bereavement, and since none of the four
children could house the legacy whole, the bed
was dismembered, the individual, equal limbs
allotted to separate homes, like orphans,

*

this one drilled for a red and black flex to run
through its hollowed mahogany core
like an artery, powering the electric light
where I sit at night and witness its first flickers.

Angela Serrano

March 21, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments

Angela Serrano is a Filipino-Australian nonfiction writer, art model, and circus beginner. Her work has appeared in The Lifted Brow, Overland, Kill Your Darlings, and elsewhere. She is writing a memoir called “How Not to Jog In Place.”

 
 

In Australia, it rotates counter-clockwise

 
Plok! And a galaxy of yellow brown muck splashed into being. No longer pristine, the water in the toilet bowl had become a kind of primordial soup. And my ass, that shrill sphinx of a sphincter, transformed into went into full-on telenovela. A million minutes later, a clean swipe was nowhere in sight. A full excavation had to commence. Johnson’s Baby Wipes clung to my digits like the memory of a fiancé at home while my point guard, lone infantryman, set out to do his duty. It slipped in so easily it almost felt like nothing had happened, even though the universe had changed; when your own finger deflowers your bumhole in a non-medical situation, that’s the sensation of a new galactic order taking shape in ways your mediocre consciousness can’t even begin to comprehend. In, out, in, out, it looks like fucking – and feels slightly better – except when you fuck, white should be the only colour you see on the wet stuff exiting your orifices.