Goirick Brahmachari lives in New Delhi. He hails from Silchar, Assam. His poems and articles have appeared in various journals and magazines.
Evening
An old building near Adchini with a warning sign that reads, “Danger” in black
probably speaks my mind. As the world around counts time, I lick the garbage bin clean
and it rains.
Only sometimes, a lonesome training center for the deaf and dumb
can illuminate a smile through the strangers’ lips and fingers and tongue through the glass windows without a sound and eat magic for lunch.
I see the moving faces of government employees who have always gone back home together, in the same bus, year after year, for all of their lives; starting for office, at the same time, early morning,
with some fried potato and few rotis, packed in their steel lunch boxes, and their sullen faces, each framed within the square glass windows of a bus which overtakes yours.
I see the coaching centers and those spoken English institutes where students are still dreaming. I hear the laughter of young girls carrying document tubes; see a few urban potheads who smoke by the private film school which morphs into a Yoga training center by morning. I pass by the stupid, stupid academic council where, every day, at least a thousand school books are raped and slaughtered.
But when the evening comes, I spread my wings and jump into the well of darkness of my room, in liquid dead hunger, in search of the night.
Candy Royalle is an award-winning performance artist and poet who fuses cinematic storytelling, poetry and unique vocal rhythms with confronting, political and heart thumping content. She tackles topics ranging from sexual obsession to social injustice, illuminating the darker areas of the human psyche for her audiences. Few who see her can forget her intensity, her combustible blend of intellect, imagination and heart. Recent accolades include being awarded the 2014 Marten Bequest Traveling Scholarship for poetry, a highly commended award for the Queensland Poetry Filmakers Challenge, and winner of the 2012 World Performance Poetry Cup as well as the AIPF Excellence in Poetry Award in both 2012 and 2013. She has won numerous competitions and has been nominated and highly commended for a number of awards. Her work has been published and featured both in publications and online including Overland, Australian Love Poems, Radio National’s Poetica, AIPF’s Diversity anthology and many more.
In Australia, Royalle is a festival veteran – from the Woodford Folk Festival to the Tasmanian Poetry Festival, the Sydney Writers Festival to the Adelaide Fringe Festival to name just a small few. Her Butch Priestess Tour sold out in the UK and the USA.
Candy says:
“Through the art of poetry and story telling I have a unique privilege to rehumanise not just my own story, but the story of others.” (ABC Radio Interview)
“I’m very pleased that you would like to run with “Stained”, it’s an important piece for me. I think the theme “Between Black and White” really speaks to me. I have always existed on the fringes – never quite Arab enough, never quite “Australian” enough. It’s like an embraced purgatory because I get to choose the parts I identify with. It also means I am comfortable being critical of both.”
Ivy Alvarez is the author of Disturbance (Seren, 2013) and Mortal (2006). Her latest chapbook is Hollywood Starlet (dancing girl press). Her poems appears in many publications, including Best Australian Poems, with several translated into Russian, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. Born in the Philippines and raised in Australia, she lived many years in the UK before moving to New Zealand. www.ivyalvarez.com
What Clara Bow Stole
Walking through Kowloon Park, I blow
to cool my gai-daan-jai — steamy treats
crunchy-sweet. Ooh, that fool director’s so beastly! Don’t speak, he’d said, look pretty.
Too easy. Winking, I opened wide,
facing his one dark eye. Boop-boop-be-doo!
We knew. I won. Plunge fingers,
twist off pastry pieces and chew. A man,
his wife, sit, leaning on each other in the dark.
It scratches my heart. When I stole
my mother’s coat, after she held the butcher’s
knife to my throat, it scratched like that.
One more bite. Just like her, I’m committed
to my paper bag, my asylum of sweetness.
What Ava Gardner Delivered
Under the bridge, a dim lagoon.
Slow notes from a saxophone
glow in the trees. The pool
becomes a black sky, fallen leaves collapsed stars.
Angel, he calls me. Frankie’s name for me. I remember how he
stroked my skin, his wedding ring scratching my chin
as I stood to deliver us from the second gift
of my belly. Afterwards, he gave me jewellery.
Here I am a raven calling out to borders, guards,
the staring crowds: goodbye.
A soldier looks into my eyes, murmurs
something low and kind to me.
I fold into my dark coat,
say thank you.
Geoff Page’s 1953 (UQP) was shortlisted for the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for poetry. He lives in Canberra and has published 21 poetry collections, as well as novels, memoir and biography. He edited The Best Australian Poems 2014 and 2015 (Black Inc.)
The Back-off
for two good friends
Forty years or so ago
the same straight back of conscience had them
fleeing the police.
The war was wrong. They wouldn’t go
though both had army fathers.
One torched his card in public;
the other did a week in Goulburn
before the draft was dumped.
Today, here in our group of five,
they’re meeting over coffee,
one, flat white, the other, black,
one still fresh from picketing
some notably obnoxious mine,
the other fired with new results
disproving warmist claims
from vaticans of scientists who
will brook no heretics.
Each man is well aware the other
knows his slant on carbon.
Their temperaments are of a kind.
One starts to talk about the forest
his open-cut will tear away.
The other counters ‘Well, you know’
but finds he’s trailing off.
They share a slow, reluctant smile;
we’re all too old for this.
Minds at our age don’t shift much.
They both look round to check the weather:
two of them and three of us.
The argument they’d planned to stage
would probably have proved uncivil.
Seamlessly, without intent,
we move to something different.
Emily Stewart is a poet and book editor based in Sydney. She is the author of Like (Bulky News Press 2015). Some of her recent poems are published or forthcoming in Overland, Cordite and The Age.
Memory palace
Crisis of affection—a tulip, the flower—artificial yellow
composite on weekend. I saw the crush—early stream—
then never without you, on remix, on repeat, this heart.
Midday’s haze worsening into pale linked cubes.
A soft texture resisting folds. Like weekend or song
yellow repeating its shape. No vice in voice alone. Yellow’s
cold clock accenting nude lives—layers heaping
over at lapse—spinning to thread then yawning dot.
Flower—a sunflower—the yellow memory.
Long bright afternoons in afterimage.
Assembled in Singapore with parts from Hong Kong and Malaysia, Tse Hao Guang is interested in form and formation, creativity and quotation, lyrics and line breaks. His chapbook is hyperlinkage (Math Paper Press, 2013). He graduated from the Masters of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago in 2014 with a concentration in poetry and creative writing, and co-edits the cross-genre, collaborative literary journal OF ZOOS, as well as Unfree Verse, an anthology of Singapore poetry in received and nonce forms. His first full-length collection, Deeds of Light, is forthcoming. www.tsehaoguang.com.
Gongs, Alarms
I am from the high rise bomb shelter.
From the Speak Good Singlish Movement, red as plum,
where the joyful grammarian worms. I am from nameless
noodle stalls with frowny uncles, from palm copy-paste
plantations, from the ice-stoking wilds of Torontonian
suburbs. I am from the strut and peck of hao gong ming. I have a badge. I am from the policeman who drove
me to school, from the lawyer’s letter, the leaving.
I am from muddy tea stretched to a metre and a half as we
looked for its heart, from the black nut that oozed and invited
fingers or silver spoons. I am from the are you from China?
I am from the gongs of Imperial China. From each love
letter of the alphabet, crisp, incandescent. I am from
Asian Values. I signed a pledge to outlaw the water vapour
stirring in air. I am from the thing that spits and spits.
I am from the itch to sugar the split.
Toby Fitch is the author of Rawshock (Puncher & Wattmann 2012), which won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, and Jerilderies (Vagabond Press 2014). He lives in Sydney and has a book of poems forthcoming, The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau.
Ordinance
massive black & blue Hoovers
\ suck the tortured moonbeams off Ebony street /
the pitted canopy of night
\ like a coffin amassed with consumables /
this urban pastoral for the kids
\ a twenty car collision of bloomin’ flowers /
amazed at the animals men are
dappled / ungoverned
\ faces download a horse & lead it to the /
caucus drink-tank
\ vicious moons thinking surely the /
lemonade witch is dead
\ a polls charade in the shade of /
purple lizards who
\ frack their way through slippery /
slopes / the right
\ angle for a carpark dawn /
in the vapoury
\ wake of summer’s /
groove
\/
Alex Skovron is the author of six collections of poetry and a prose novella. The many public readings he has given include appearances in China, Serbia, India and Ireland, as well as Norfolk Island. A bilingual selection of his poetry translated into French was published in 2013 under the title The Attic, a volume of Chinese translations is underway, and his novella The Poet has been translated into Czech. His most recent book is Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems (2014), and a collection of his short stories is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann.
Diminished Light
The little girl in the laundromat
is sitting so still
she could be a mirage. What
is she thinking, watching a sky crawl
with purple? Soon its shell
will crack, and rolled umbrellas
under everybody’s arm will billow
into their mushroom shapes,
and her mother watching the porthole
where a world spins will take
her by the arm, and soon she’ll fall
into her usual
late-afternoon haze as they cross
the glistened street, no less
and no more distant than before,
the wind clouding her face
the way the shopfronts suddenly share
diminished light, the way no voice
could say her sadness,
make real the little girl
hopping alongside, hungry bird.
Jill Jones’ book, The Beautiful Anxiety, won the 2015 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. A new book, Breaking the Days, is due from Whitmore Press in late 2015. She is a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, University of Adelaide. Her poems have been translated into Chinese, Dutch, French, Italian, Czech and Spanish. For five months in 2014-15, she was poet-in-residence at Stockholm University.
Bright Yellow Black
The papers are burning.
There are several dialects.
The wind rises with helicopters.
People below accept that now.
How, without precision
things fall apart in the dry.
The black box tells nothing
nor do autopsies.
The recounts tell nothing, again.
There’s shark blood on the shore.
Someone is recycling videos and tears.
Soon there won’t be enough.
Soon there’ll be more replicas.
On bright yellow farms the grain is ticking.
Clouds drop seeds.
People accept that now.
The black box tells nothing.
Omar J Sakr is an Arab Australian poet whose work has appeared in Meanjin, Overland, Cordite Poetry Review, and Tincture Journal, among others. His poems have been translated and published in Arab, and he has been shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize as well as the ACU Poetry Prize.
Dear Mama
Don’t preach to me, mama, don’t tell me stories
about some holy book or other, about angels, demons and jinn –
I’ve already learned too well the religion of your fists.
My body has drummed its song, the gospel choir of bruises
so often it knows no other, and at night I still mumble
the chorus: sharp gasps interspersed with bass, with low moans.
Your god is capricious, strikes without reason – some days
(the days you had gear, I later knew) you’d smile and order us pizza
and we’d sit in the smoky temple of the lounge while your silver screen
apostles entertained us, spat & bled & fucked & loved & died
for us. Those days were best. Others were Nails-On-Chalkboard,
a kind of screaming at the edge of hearing – your cheekbones, jaw,
elbow, everything was knife sharp and cut against the air
even though your teeth were set, lips locked prison-tight.
Like tinnitus, I knew only I could hear it but I swear
your body screeched in warning those mornings, and we learned
to read your augurs in cigarette smoke, the signs prophesying pain
if we didn’t become paragons of stillness and silence. Later, you
told me you saw my treacherous father in me even as a boy,
that you hated the sight of my face, the reminder
that his sins were burned too clearly in my skin.
I remember the day the locksmith came, his confusion, then pity,
when he asked ‘you want the lock outside his door?’ He hesitated
but took your petty cash reward to seal my cage. If only
you knew how I made that cell my world, so expansive and free –
hundreds of books, each one a key. How could you think
walls would contain me? I ought to thank you, dear mama,
for the prayers I memorized, for the blessing of hunger, the urge
for independence you sang into my bones, percussion-deep,
and the need to travel, to roam across the lands and seas and discover
all that can be seen. I ought to thank you, dear mama, for your piousness,
for showing me the cruelty and beauty of God and godlessness
all at once, for teaching me that holiness is no more
than moments shared with those you love whether bonded by blood
or not. Especially not. I ought to thank you dear mama, but I can’t.
The mosque is empty, and I’m all outta prayers.
Goirick Brahmachari lives in New Delhi. He hails from Silchar, Assam. His poems and articles have appeared in various journals and magazines.
