October 8, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jonathan Hadwen is a Brisbane writer whose poetry has been published in Westerly, fourW, and Stand Magazine, as well as other publications in Australia and overseas. In 2013 he was named runner-up in the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for an unpublished manuscript. He recently had a prose poem sequence published in Writing to the Edge, published by Spineless Wonders.
In the neighbourhood
I drive out to see a friend. He lives out west in a suburb that was brand-new about thirty years ago, but is now a bit run-down. I drive through 60 zones, and 80 zones, a school zone, intersections, and roundabouts in the more modern areas. On every side I pass streets lined with houses. I have lived in this city my whole life. There are so many streets I will never drive down.
*
A plane sinks into the suburbs. A cloud reaches out like a great claw.
*
There are more birds around than I ever knew, and they fight all the time, and some of them even sing. Some of the birds are regulars – a pack of noisy miners, a couple of crows – but occasionally there are lorikeets, or rosellas, and even more rarely, a song-bird. I can never see him, only hear him, there in the trees, no matter how long I stare and study each bough and branch. He never sings the same song twice – he is like a composer trying out melodies, a perfectionist, who is never truly satisfied with the tune.
*
I never see the old couple downstairs, except on bin night. They keep their place locked-up tight, and the air-conditioner is always running whether it is hot or otherwise. It is the man who takes the rubbish out. He totters down the few steps from their first floor apartment with his walking stick, and one small bag of trash.
*
The old man is coughing again. It is bad today. My throat catches just listening to it. The sun is out, in its merciless way. The birds are happy – it is early summer – there is always enough to eat.
May 23, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Vesna Goldsworthy (1961, Belgrade) lives in London and writes poetry in English, her third language, as well as her native Serbian, in which her poetry is much-anthologized. Aged twenty-three, she read her poems at a football stadium to an audience of thirty thousand people. She moved to Britain soon afterwards and did not write a line of poetry for over twenty years. Her Crashaw Prize winning debut poetry collection in English, The Angel of Salonika (Salt, 2011) was one of the Times Best Poetry Books of the Year.
Yalta
Everything in the world is really beautiful, everything but our thoughts and actions…
A.P. Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog” (1899)
After they made love that first time
She still felt distant enough to use the formal you
In the first question she posed.
He contemplated the heavy Japanese scent
He helped her choose the day before.
Something less overwhelming, with more zest,
Would have suited Yalta better, now he knew,
Than the red spider lily.
That flower grows, so legend says,
Along the path on which you meet
Someone you will never see again.
He was still naked when he got out of bed
And sat down at the table to cut a slice of watermelon.
His testicles rested on the chair.
The lacquered wood felt pleasantly cool.
They stayed like that for thirty minutes at least.
Her little Pomeranian dog was there too
Watching his mistress, then him,
As he chewed the red flesh in silence.
The two pairs of eyes
Seemed similarly moist in candlelight.
If she were not naked – or not shy –
If she could only fling the window open,
Would they still hear the crashing
Of the waves
In the darkness below,
Like earlier that evening,
A century ago?
Sanssouci
I am old enough to remember
The appearance of Akhmatova’s Requiem,
The ambiguities of Brecht, Brodsky in his prime,
The Wall before it fell, the sound of planes
Taking off and landing. Nearby, another country.
On our long ride to Potsdam
We carved a crescent, a Cyrillic S,
In the first snow of the season,
As we wound our way across
The white spaces on the map,
Along the streets which echoed in Russian
And smelled of coal, cabbage, and wool.
It took years to reassemble
The memory of winter love-making
Undone on the parturition table,
In the encounter of metal and flesh.
The nurse returned with a pack of wadding.
It will cease in a day or two, she said
As though you were, already, absent. Do rest,
Drink some Georgian red, forget.
She straightened the shawl on my shoulders.
Under her uniform, the smell of sweat
Was just like mother’s, the night she was taken.
Our bicycles remained padlocked at the gate.
The brushstrokes of white powder
Emphasised the elegance of bars and chains,
A trail of lines in virgin snow,
To but not from, never returning;
So much blood and nothing
Conceived from so much love.
Of all that betrays us, the gentlest is memory.
Leaving the Party
We walk in silence bearing westwards
Along the towpath, against the current.
The Thames slithers and shimmers
On its slow way to surrender
Exhausted and spread-eagled on the sands of Essex.
Bicycle lights approach and frame us
In milky stills of gelatine silver.
Runners pound by in sweat and lycra,
Their footfall like strange amphibians’ heartbeat,
Mosquito buzz of music rises from their ears.
They give a wide berth to the couple of elderly clowns
In dinner jacket and sequins, carefully treading
With patent leather shoes unsuited to water’s edge.
At one point this evening we seemed unbearably close.
I raised my right hand to touch your temple.
Your hair, your fine hair, your fine white hair
Moved towards my fingers in static electricity.
There again was that question I was about to pose.
Then something behind your unquestionable goodness
Suddenly scared me, like ormolu and woodworm.
The cup of my palm still carries that faint fragrance,
The smoothness of black silk where the hand fell in defeat,
The soft woollen cloth, the white cotton underneath,
All those conspiracies of loom and thread
Expensively constructed to shield and to protect
Your skin, your warm skin, in all its unfamiliar creases.
Mine always feels porous, a layer to be shed,
Though I forever shiver — needing a cover, a shawl, a shelter —
Like some short-lived species of insect, a devil’s darning needle.
The darkness grows. The heat’s abating. I’ll hold myself together.
May 22, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sam Langer was born in Melbourne, in February 1983. He lives in Berlin. He edits Steamer and has published a chapbook, Law You Can Eat, with Munted Beyond Press. A second chapbook, Topaz, should come out in 2014. Recent poems have appeared in Otoliths, Southerly, and Outcrop. Contact: samuel underscore langer at yahoo dot com dot au.
Horizon Drinkers (after Pierre Reverdy)
Venomous dregs girt by sea jails
Vicious pearlers in boated collars
these men who shut their eyes in the warm cruise blood
these suspect men whose love lives on water
their eyes open like cages
staggering under blokeish cenotaphs
they go home in hollow bungalows
they hide themselves
and exile and bile and boredom share out
their hearts and minds like overripe fruit
The warm breaths on porches at thresholds
against the boulevards and the currents of night
the ports and beaches
the dead adventures
the flame badge detaches itself, ferments, and is rotting
the nostrils full of savage aftershaves
givings up
bestial fights
unseen agonies in the table shadows
the Tummies rolled under these tomb plaques
the ear sagging with obese words
and too beautiful names
under the frozen forehead arch sharp arrows of desire
this evening the spirit was troubled by an irritating task
to book departure
the world’s blank verso on freshly constructed roads
on hopeless quayside strips toward sudden returns
to leave this type of leaf, always to leave
to run
May 21, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Chris Wallace-Crabbe is an octogenarian metaphysician whose generous accolades include participating in a reading series with Iraqi poets Fadeel Kayat, Jamal Al-Hallaq, Sudanese poet Afeif Ismail, and Chilean poet Juan Garrido-Salgado. Thereafter, he was anthologised in a ground-breaking transnational collection, Poetry Without Borders Ed Michelle Cahill (Picaro, 2008). Having conferenced with the legendary likes of Andrew Motion, Alastair Niven as well as Mulk Raj Anand, Kamala Das, Raja Rao, Eunice de Souza, G.V Desani and Raj Parthasarathi, he describes himself as a post-colonialist with history being the ultimate arbiter. Carcanet published his New and Selected, while his latest collection is My Feet Are Hungry (Pitt St Poetry) and Afternoon in the Central Nervous System is forthcoming with Braziller, New York.
Cardamom Country
Well, yes, I’ve always been intoxicated by India,
a rich Everywhere which can’t possibly resemble us
(except in playing cricket, either straight or bent),
let alone the notorious gravity of beer-drowning Belgium and Wales,
being a technicoloured macro-country of hill station and spice
plus devilmaycare characters like Babur and Kimball O’Hara
and at best reminds me of every adventure I relish,
not excluding the nursery land of green ginger which
may well have been Cathay.
It could be that India is a collective subconscious,
but I can let that one go through to the ‘keeper
tricked out in glorious silks and golden bangles.
My dad lived there through years of war;
I love the way they sustain the English language,
though why we call it that only the Krauts will know,
(bespectacled, growing esteem among literate historians);
a tongue that tricked wryly past Norman bastardisation
holding hands with a lovely Latin of inkhorn learning
in order to produce dinky-di oxbridge Australian
or laboured essay prose from catholic schools,
but which in their spicy landscape is melodiously
delivered from high up the oral register.
On my very first visit to those curried shores
I flicked my passport open to an inclining clerk
who cut to the paper chase quickly and demanded,
“Who is the greatest English poet?” and when
I roundly demurred at Shelley, proffering Shakespeare,
He could cope with that, riposting blandly,
“He was not for England , but for all mankind”.
He passed me on to the dodgy taxi-drivers, Hanuman
and Petrolpants, into the southerly smileage of Madras
with pluncake in Spencer’s emporium.
Back in those days even when the street beggars laughed
and our hotel drummer wanted to eat the cook; no,
it was the other way round, like sari-bright India:
that bulky chef was devoured of all. Whatever
passed by meltingly became him: or her.
and I suffered only once from Akbar’s Curse,
but that was in a posh quarter of Delhi,
not on the elephantine Great Trunk Road
in some lean-to-café with hot sugary tea.
I filled the shower with shit for a couple of days.
Trivandrum was another story again,
literate, breeze-laved, anticipated from childhood,
a southwest version of rapture’s roadway far,
while necklaced with glinting lagoons.
(2012)
May 17, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Brenda Saunders is a Sydney poet of Aboriginal and British descent. She has published three collections of poetry, her most recent, The Sound of Red (Ginninderra Press, 2013). Her work has also featured in anthologies and journals and was included in Best Australian Poems 2013 (Black Inc.) In 2013 she was awarded a Resident Fellowship to CAMAC Arts Centre in France where she worked translating into her poetry into French.
Skin
He’s suddenly there on a platform at Central.
With a voice like a teacher, he bends to ask.
Where are you going today, my dear?
What is he saying? He’s leaning too close
long teeth, chin, a grey fedora.
I think of red-riding hood, ‘stranger danger’.
Spittle gathers at the edge of his mouth
I say nothing, wondering will he bite?
I’m taking the train to Grandma’s I say.
But we’re not in the woods and I don’t have
a basket, so I show my schoolbag, just in case.
And who are these ladies? he cries even louder,
Watching my Aunties, dark hands holding mine.
He’s eyeing our faces, from one to the other
Waiting in silence, to find an answer.
Everything’s still, but they don’t say a word.
Their eyes look down to the dusty ground.
Searching for something they fear they’ve lost.
As he turns away, he yells to the crowd.
Never can tell with these Abos today,
mixing the blood will lead to disaster.
I don’t understand, but I hear the threat, feel
the pain in familiar faces. I look around
reading the signs. Anxious to find a new way out.
Taxi!
I met her at the lights with her plastic bags
food bought at Woollies
with a Salvo’s card
making for the taxis on Pitt and Park
She’s used to cabbies, knows the drill
never mentions high-rise
The Block or Waterloo
Goes to the first one waiting in line
Calls through the window
asks ‘Are you free?’
Waits, as he looks up from the ‘Form’
Suspecting trouble, he hedges his bets
says he’s booked
The man in a Silver Cab examines
his windscreen, has no answer
to her open smile
her missing teeth counted against her
It’s clear round three is up to me
I demand a ride from a waiting cab
while she dumps her stuff
and jumps inside
‘I’ve got their numbers, I’ll follow through’
I yell to the street, as she moves away
Her strong voice trails a defiant response
‘I always ring, but it don’t change nothin’
Same old story with this black skin’
May 17, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Joel Ephraims lives on the South-East Coast of NSW. He studies creative writing, philosophy, and literature at the University of Wollongong. In 2011 he won the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize and in 2013 his chapbook of poetry, Through The Forest was published as part of Australian Poetry and Express Media’s New Voices Series.
Vipassana Frog Pond after Meditation and Dawn
Dragonflies synch in misted dawn air
around mutated fingers of a dried dog turd white ash
tree; through the hyperbola your tea cup
spoon-end makes with the unseeablely starlight lipped sun.
Pond new birthed as a biologist stirred mid-dream,
usual as his motions vacuuming up fondue fountain crumbs.
Lilies lie green Pac-men recovering nonchalantly
from heavy drinking with mouths still open for ghosts.
Ripple of rain’s pear explosions programmed
by Blue Mountain weather intermittent in petroleum
tinctured water where larvae by gradations form.
All ghosts long eaten their eyes hover in room at bottom
unseen by orange fish mothers amongst their eggs.
Frogs reincarnated Pali teachers sing final chorus chants
echoing morning pond before Nirvana incognito;
Pac-men power pellet nourished drift over digesting sankharas.
On wooden tree walk rail your elbow crooked
player’s hand splayed toward clock and hushed breakfast hall…
Anicca Anicca Anicca…
Breakfast in the Hall of Shadows
blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue
blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue
attentions tune to metamorphosis of steams
mists movements of underworld personalities
lugubrious gods unravelling vista hides
raisins rice grains floating volcanic islets
mirage filmed tongues oasis held spoons
curling yogurts water machine clarity
sighing form behind green mesh glides
melody of beasts burning in nestled forests
blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue
blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue
May 17, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Beibei Chen is currently a Ph.D candidate, who came to Australia in 2011 to study in the English department of UNSW at Canberra. She is interested in representations of history, memory and identity in Chinese Australians fictions. She spends her spare time writing essays and poetry related to life stories of Asians in Australia. She has a passion for representing diversity of life, dreams and memory.
Homesick
Two Sharp, Sydney,
Darkening, Conflicting, Yearning, Struggling and twisting.
Neither did I have strong ‘Aussie’ coffee;
Nor walk to the hill growing a gumtree.
I suspect myself being sick.
Lost my soul,
Spelt “scapegoat” wrong into “space-goat”
People laughed.
I cried for home.
The Intruder
He came from the unlocked backyard door,
And straight to my kitchen,
When I was standing still in the rented roof,
Suddenly prepared to salute:
For he is the general of this foreign land,
I am the stranger who is prepared to intrude.
May 17, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Changming Yuan, 8-time Pushcart nominee and author of Chansons of a Chinaman (2009) and Landscaping (2013), grew up in rural China and currently tutors in Vancouver, where he co-edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan and operates PP Press. With a PhD in English,Yuan has poetry appearing in Asia Literary Review, Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, London Magazine, Threepenny Review and 819 other literary journals/anthologies across 28 countries.
Calling
Like the little guy screaming to his own death
On the collapsing bridge in Edmund’s painting
My other self is constantly calling
At the very top of its voice from the deepest
Valley of my sub-consciousness, from
The most remote corner of my inner world
From the darkest spot of my dream
Although its calls are muted, they travel afar
Echoing even beyond a whole continent
Like the calls of a blue whale, whose salty voice
Has such a high pitch that no human ears
Can hear them here and now
Y
Yellow-skinned, and yellow-hearted, you seem obsessed with the first letter of the word…
Using my yellow tail
I yellow-swam
From the Yellow River
As a yeast of the yellow peril
Against the yellow alert
In yellow journalism
With a yellow hammer
And a yellow sheet
I yielded to the yellow metal
At a yellow spot
¼ million yards away from Yellowknife
People call me yellow jack
Some hailed me as a yellow dog
When I yelped on my yellow legs
To flee from the yellow flu
Speaking Yerkish* like a yellow warbler
I have composed many yellow pages
For a yeasty yellow book
To be published by the yellow press
Don’t panic, I yell low.
* An artificial language developed for experimental communication between humans and chimpanzees.
May 17, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Autumn Royal is a poet and PhD candidate at Deakin University. Autumn’s writing has appeared in publications such as Antipodes, Cordite, Rabbit, and Verity La.
Strained
I saw my heart on the airport terminal floor,
and gasped at how my misunderstanding bled
into fibres scarred by shoes and suitcase wheels.
My organ’s meatiness was too raw to keep in mind,
so I bought a New Idea predicting my horoscope for 20__.
I rolled up the magazine and squeezed,
hoping for a meaning to drip from the gloss.
May 17, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Saba Vasefi is a poet, a documentary filmmaker and human rights activist. She was a lecturer in Tehran, Shahid Beheshti University. She became a member of the Committee of Human Rights Reporters. She also worked as a reporter for the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. She was twice a judge for the Sedigheh Dolatabadi Book Prize for best literature on women’s issues. She was expelled from the University after 4 years of teaching due to her activism. Her documentary film about child execution in Iran ”Don’t Bury My Heart” has been screened for the BBC, United Nation, Amnesty International, The Copenhagen International Film Festival, SOAS university, University of Oslo, Dendy Opera Quays cinema and Seen & Heard Film Festival. She has published poems, research papers, articles, reports, interviews and multimedia about executions, censorship, and women and children’s rights. Her multimedia piece, “Shirin, A Soloist in the Silence Room” was screened in Geneva for the UN. She has also had work published in the anthology “Confronting the Clash: The Suppressed Voices of Iran. She was director of First Sydney International Women’s Poetry Festival (Woman Scream). Currently; she is completing a postgraduate degree in documentary at The Australian Film TV and Radio School (AFTRS).
Slap Fingerprints
Translated by Sheema Kalbasi
It is not without reason
that I no longer miss
Like the tea stirred in the cup
Haze dances around my temple
flock by flock
The Pimp
And the shameless
Scream their pain loud
It is still I
who expands like blood from
collarbone to
legs
But not
ripened enough to be picked from
the branch
The more the wheel turns around
the more confused I become
Like a reptile crawling handless and
Footless
Tell me where in this rotten hole I
should give birth to my daughter
So that the titmice paint her dress
Maroon
With ruby grapes
Now that in the long famine
Queues
I swallow rationed moldy bread
Where on earth should I entrust
Her
lest my imprisonment arrest the
motion of the Heaven
In the long term prison of life
Where is safe
For this out of circle baby
Who goes round and round
To find a face
Branded with slap fingerprints
