April 19, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
William Byrne is a South Australian poet in his twenties. He has always lived in rural and coastal townships, excluding an urban interlude for university study for degrees in architecture and design.
Aspergers
Water dries so fast
on my fore and index fingers
once I leave the chiesa,
that foreign place of incensed marble.
It evaporates
as soon as I see the sun
and basking in it, the smooth shoulders
of the lane’s cobblestones. I trip
in my penance, later, while seated
in the brassed café
as my lips part for vermouth.
Again I see Rome’s dark shoulders
then her leather heels and passing souls,
then half smoked cicca,
their pale ghosts hanging in the streets,
then smooth, tanned Roman fingers.
Chiesa water dries so fast on my fingers.
The vermouth is also dry.
Wheat
In my old car, tyres wet, we spoke
black over green like a Rothko painting,
the young crops startled in our headlamps,
their fronds thrashing in the yellow glow.
You too were startled when I turned the headlamps off,
even though we had pulled up aside the field.
The lamps were deadened, yet the radio hailed
in a distant AM. Ice crystals formed on the window,
shading thinly the edge of the screen.
Beyond the glass, grey clouds brushed past the moon
rising on the curved horizon beyond
wheat past further than sight from two sets of eyes could see.
Afterwards, we drove to a town
at the edge of the wheat, leaving the earth
on the side of the road where we parked
a dry-ish print framed in rain craters
and shallow puddles bleeding into its soft sides.
We laughed so hard that night as we spoke and tried to see.
April 17, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Hazel Smith is a research professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney. She is author of The Writing Experiment: strategies for innovative creative writing, Allen and Unwin, 2005 and Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara: difference, homosexuality, topography, Liverpool University Press, 2000. She is co-author of Improvisation, Hypermedia And The Arts Since 1945, Harwood Academic, 1997 and co-editor with Roger Dean of Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, Edinburgh University Press, 2009. She is co-editor with Roger Dean of soundsRite, a journal of new media writing and sound, based at the University of Western Sydney.
Hazel is a poet, performer and new media artist, and has published three volumes of poetry, three CDs of performance work and numerous multimedia works. Her latest volume of poetry, with accompanying CD Rom, is The Erotics of Geography: poetry, performance texts, new media works, Tinfish Press, Kaneohe, Hawaii, 2008. She is a member of austraLYSIS, the sound and intermedia arts group, and has performed her work extensively in US, Europe, UK and Australasia. She also had a previous career as a professional violinist. Her website is at www.australysis.com
Smoked mirrors
AJP Taylor thought Dylan Thomas was a charlatan because he replaced simpler
words with obscure ones. But then Dylan was his wife’s lover.
Technique, like misunderstanding, holds it head high, accused of decapitation.
Just as I think I will never hook an idea, that I will have to give the commission
money back, just as I have signed off, I know I will never write again, the surrender
of hope flames the messenger.
My father was a chain smoker and would light one cigarette with another. But he had
a cacophonous smoker’s cough. Its assault began in the morning, once he
started he couldn’t stop. Then one day he decides he’s giving up. Just like that. He never
smokes another cigarette again but the cough remains, every day that demented coughing.
Who is that young man my mother says, pointing to my father in a photograph. He’s
very handsome, as if adjudicating a stranger.
Perhaps she is slowly passing away the doctor says in her hearing. She is asleep but
her ears are twitching.
Meanwhile I decisively hit the keys and dispose of an ailing poem. But
the dead persist in listening, sometimes more carefully than the living.
Afterwards I spoke to my sister, who said that the doctor seemed a bit of an idiot.
SnowTalk
the seasons are talking to each other
we pick orchids in the snow
as if the world’s thermostat
was programmed for cross-weathering
fairylights frame the Hindu temple
shops sell gift-wrapped buddhas
they gorge themselves on Christmas day
then purge at Ramadan
did you know that snowflakes are irregular?
that words shiver when they boil?
as the white wind fills its tiny lungs
it hears black trumpets blowing
shall we rewrite the brothers Grimm
so Snow White is mottle-skinned?
the reindeer is exhausted
the sun burns up the sludge
April 17, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dimitra has a Bachelor of Performance Studies from the University of Western Sydney – Theatre Nepean, and a Master of Letters in Creative Writing from University of Sydney. She’s had poems published in Australian Poetry’s Members’ Anthology, Meanjin, and Southerly. In 2012 she won the Australian Society of Author’s Ray Koppe Young Writers Residency.
Station
After I’ve spent the night being someone else, and going home –
wriggling out of that alien face like an old skin – I like to walk
all the way to the end of the platform. You know, how it tapers
to that thin wharf of concrete? With the one fluorescent light
on its high pole, and the sign that says, Staff Only Beyond This Point.
From here, you can just make out the glitter of the next station.
At this time, no-one will walk the distance through the dark to get here –
the platform’s lights are sparse, dull beads on the night’s chain.
Across the tracks the fence hangs slackly, a gaping jaw. Stillness
clings to everything like frost. A woman’s laugh, the clink
of glasses – the city’s noises are padded here; a siren wails
like a half-asleep child. Then a whip of wire, a spring-loaded lash.
The train pulls up, groaning in its metal.
Sun
It’s dusk, and I’m listening to an old
Indian devotional, the woman’s voice is a coil
of plum honey. As the sun slips down the empty
western sky, the tiles of houses are silvered
in light. At some angles the sun
is forked by newly budded branches. I’ve stared too long
at its gold-lash pinwheel, the quills of starfire.
When I turn my gaze away, its brightness clings
to my pupils, and I think: she’s singing about love.
Her voice winds, and slides, and slips upwards,
and falls, honeycombing through the notes.
But it’s the sun she’s singing about, waking the buds
with white fire, hard as crystal.
December 2, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Richard James Allen is a poet, choreographer and filmmaker. His books include the critically lauded The Kamikaze Mind (Brandl & Schlesinger) and the NSW Premier’s Literary Award-nominated Thursday’s Fictions (Five Island Press).
His forthcoming collection Fixing the Broken Nightingale will be published by Flying Island Books, an imprint of ASM (Macau) and Cerberus Press (Markwell, NSW).
The Optics of Relationship, or
With this Poem I Thee Wed
For Chee and Stephen
Who I was in the past,
Who I will be in the future –
What distractions these are
From who I am now.
Who I am now,
Here, with you.
In this moment,
You have rewritten my past.
You are rewriting my future.
What I don’t understand about
Who I was or will be
Doesn’t matter now.
Whoever that is
– As we stand before the shimmering altar
Of the unfolding lights of our lives –
I know that we will find out together.
Because this is what a marriage is,
This is the optics of relationship,
The coming into focus of two lives.
The Secret Language of Border Guards and Those Who Wish To Cross
1. The Secret Language of Border Guards
What we dream we might say to each other,
if the roadblocks all came down
and the checkpoints disappeared.
If our language were not a secret one
we might share it with you.
If we had not already given up
on your ability to hear,
we might open our mouths
and allow that magic expectant
breath we
all share
in and then eventually out
with some words for you.
If we had any faith left
in your capacity to listen, to think, and,
on such basis,
to act,
we might hope
for you to understand.
But you give us no reason
to believe.
Faith starts
with small things.
2. The Secret Language of Those Who Wish To Cross
Do not speak to us of faith.
Faith lingers like smoke, drifting
through the rubble you have left
of our homes and our children.
But deep below, nestled
like burnt seeds in the soil,
the embers of the fires
you have planted fester.
We do not dream,
we glow.
Even if the roadblocks all come down
and the checkpoints disappear,
the road between us will never be open.
December 2, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Carolyn Gerrish is a Sydney poet. She has published five collections of poetry, most recently The View from the Moon (Island Press, 2011). She runs creative writing workshops in the community and at WEA adult learning. She is currently working on her sixth collection and hopes that one day satirical writing will save the world.
War of Nerves
sometimes the feeling nothing can harm you
the dizziness of freedom where anxiety’s
a useless passion & there’s no vigil waiting
for the end to begin you’ve lost the fear
life could just haemorrhage away or that the
mobile phone tower could morph into a Transformer
& ruin the suburb & there’s plucky Bette Davis
who after receiving a negative prognosis from
the handsome doctor claims I’m young & strong &
nothing can touch me
every exit
is an entry
somewhere else
but why are there so many security guards at the
Mall then there’s the worry of wrong weather
(this year summer was autumn) & those nimbus clouds
painters’ inspiration or evidence of Apocalypse
& that shadow just resting on the road becomes a
suspected portent & please note the asteroid
passing by us if we collide could certainly
take out a medium-sized continent so with
Armageddon averted for now one antagonist
is missing but the 24 hour news cycle never
stops as a rogue Afghan soldier kills
Australian troops
the disaster
takes care
of everything
Ground Zero
the omniscient narrator peers down the air
stoic rather than heroic no ignorant armies
(that) clash by night & Stendahl would find
nothing to swoon about it’s just a mess of stuff
detritus of the city’s zeitgeist & are these
your pets? dogs? camels? a baby in a backpack
on the way to Kindergarten Adventure Travel &
objects Jung would love to discuss a key for
no particular door residences are generic here
a torch to search for your neglected self a
globe of he world beginning to shatter after
ignoring all the warnings a lady’s hat housing
no skull & sheep & goats wander the street & he
shall set the sheep on his right hand but the
goats on the left a decaying apple brain in
cognitive decline when I am dead & doctors know
not why a life-size doll with attitude & paint
brushes that achieve an extinguished palette
but unfolding unfolding as being emerges
from concealment
After Rita Lazauskas, View from the Ramparts # 5
(drawing in charcoal, gesso, conte)
December 1, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
A J Carruthers is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney and the author of The Tulip Beds ( Vagabond, 2013).
His work appears in Southerly, Cordite and Contemporary Asian Australian Poets.
Three Pathemes
patheme no. 7 (inverted bouquet)
by blind metonymy line (nonlinear &
horizontal) cuts flower, goes straight
thruit. curious about that stand – on the
same ground as it were – as the
inverted bouquet, as hard as it is to
imag | rays crossed ast a corresp | ine |
onding points of, quite easily, a sound
-box – sound-box possibly invocatory
patheme no. 18 (two mirrors)
you & I? don’t fool (us)! spherically
combine inadequates the correct feeling
| “I’ll have none of reality, thanks!” |
the subject’s on the edge of the mirror,
so this mightn’t end well. VS, that’s
you, code for virtual subject captured
from a young age in the secret contours
of an actual mirror
patheme no. 19 (simplified schema)
if you’re not sure just give me depth
psychology. can’t be on this see-saw
of desire forever! colorless green
ideas slip fervently read as careless
musicians sleep forever | “I read among
my disordered books” (Yü Hsüan-chi)
| let us be quite plane: your whole life
will unfold in O . . . . . and in O’
November 26, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Christopher Pollnitz’s Little Eagle and Other Poems was a Wagtail publication in 2010, and his six “American Idylls” were in Mascara 11. He has written criticism of Judith Wright, Les Murray, Alan Wearne and John Scott, as well as D. H. Lawrence, and been a reviewer for Notes and Queries and Scripsi, as well as The Australian and Sydney Morning Herald. His edition of The Poems for the Cambridge University Press series of Lawrence’s Works appeared in 2013.
Satin bower bird
He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not
watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter . . .
Sartre
Black Prince of the undergrowth, to me his crackle
and hiss seem off-station, but you and he have a
thing together. As I finish each two litres
of juice, you put the lids out in the garden
and your pretty boy comes again and again carrying
awkwardly off in his beak the royal blue baubles.
So intense, so intellectual. I see him sitting
at a sidewalk café, trading Gitanes and banter
with Jean-Paul and Albert, him in lustrous leather
while Simone looks on askance from another table
or eavesdrops for news of post-existentialism
and clues on how to pick up. Smoke and mirrors . . .
It doesn’t do it for him, the bum-fuss and fluster
of hens flouncing in their pastels. Deep in his bower
blue-lit from below, magnified by his comb, I imagine
him preening, and know who it is he preens for
—him with his satin cloak and his rod of amber
his necromancy and his dark effulgence.
Subterranean cool that burns out—is this what maleness
amounts to? Brilliant fencer, prince, philosopher
or Freddie Mercury? Noting the uncollected
lids, you say He’s moved on, disappointed
but not surprised. You’ve other things to get on with
while I rack my brains conjuring up some witticism.
Kookaburra
Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius.
Anon.
Whom the gods would destroy, they say, but isn’t it rather
since the gods are mad, their devotees drive them crazy?
That one at the barbecue, proper clever feller
left the bread roll in your hand, still with the sauce on
and stole the fire for his people, as well as the sausage.
And now this one, time and again dive-bombing
in the kitchen window his own adolescent image
—demented. We worry about him and the damage.
We tape up tabloids over the glass to distract him
but still he comes, kamikaze seeking his crystal.
One day it’s different, he approaches his rival close-up,
childish anger morphing to inquisitiveness.
You tell me I should speak to him more nicely
but my every word is laced with the mordant satire
reserved for watchers of reality television
or addicts of cooking shows who are just as stupid.
“Look here,” I say, making a chicken sandwich.
“This bird came in yesterday. His name was Hansel.”
Unperturbed he inspects the preparation bench and oven
—he doesn’t tweet but his eyes are bright with banter.
He peers in like Satan at this weird domestic Eden
little realising in his innocence what he’s seeing.
But hang on, if he’s innocent I’m the serpent
long, lithe and upright to his stocky Adam
and remembering how a kookaburra tackles
a six-foot common brown (a good yard dangling
each side of the beak, snake head a bloody tulip)
that gaze could terrify. No, no, forget it
—he’s a creepy bird, but he’s a bird for all that.
Comes another day, another stage of intimacy
—beak to the pane, and perched on the ledge of the window.
When I move towards him, he cranes even closer
when I step away, he edges back. Is he seeing
me in himself, outlined in his own reflection
Or is he seeing the greater Self ascending
to Nothingness with the ghostly Kooka Spirit?
I put the knife down, I fidget about the glasshouse
of my insecurities, my every move filled with
self-consciousness and loathing. I can’t bear his devotion,
he gives me the creeps, he gives me the creeps absolutely.
On the third day, you blow him a kiss through the window.
He pecks the pane and is off, to join the bush chorus.
He’s growing up perhaps, losing his religion.
White-bellied sea eagle
of ryal egle myghte I telle the tale,
That with his sharpe lok perseth the sunne,
And ys the tiraunt of the foules smale.
Chaucer
The Little Wobby eagle in my father’s death year
I remember like an incandescence burning
to burst from casuarina darkness, trawl the river
then flip back, and up again, with a wasp-like talon.
Had I been another Christopher I might have adopted
that estuarial Hawkesbury bird for symbol,
although, in hindsight, I’d rather take the little
smouldering wicks of the she-oak for my image
for there’s another candle that can light me:
us in the car park, the great swoop of coastline southwards;
their beaks like butcher’s hooks, gannet after gannet
mindlessly crashing into the cup of sorrows
that suddenly empties, as the eagle pulse-glide-pulses
overhead of all; and you in the car repeating
details of your friend’s cancer prognosis. All I could think of
was getting away overseas on leave and a conference;
and you—would she still be here on our homecoming?
Reviewing, Promethean eagle, your outstretched scalpel
drawn over the grey breasts and belly of the waters
I don’t yield much to my fear of you, nor do I take much
heart from your liverish victim. Given pharmacological
aid I can dispense with a demigod’s foreknowledge
(or doctor’s) of what I can endure for what duration.
Now it’s dementia I fear, particular losses
of others, and having no busy mind to distract me.
November 26, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Benjamin Dodds is a Sydney-based poet whose work appears in a variety of journals and magazines. Two fun factoids: (1) Benjamin collects Mickey Mouse watches, and (2) his first collection, Regulator, will be published by Puncher & Wattmann in early 2014.
Unsheathed
Split up the back like dirty
slips, the ghostly cases
stand unmoving in the heat.
They mark the places from which
these prawn-eyed death-rattlers
have lifted themselves
on broad leadlight blades into
summer’s ripening dryness.
A far-off version of
me holds one up close,
Yorick-style.
The alien skin balances on
up-turned palm, primed
to catch even the slightest breath of breeze.
It’s hard not to wonder
just how it might feel to peel oneself
from within a congealing shroud,
to leave a pair of crystal domes
where obsidian eyes
once nested
unblinking.
November 21, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Chandramohan.S is an Indian English poet/writer/social activist based in Kerala,India. His writings deal with the social struggles of marginalized identities of the world. His work has appeared in New Asia Writes.
Crimson stains of caste honour
Gayathri Chatterjee
Gayathri Mishra
Gayathri Iyer
legacies of lineage
safely armoured
between her legs
forbidding her
to run
to climb trees
sit with legs spread.
eyes and ears of endogamic gaze
check out the gait,
eavesdrop on pissing sound decibels
to be attenuated by wifely docility,
keep the caste hymen intact
to be bartered away in yellow metal brokered weddings
bridal crimson stains of honour
dried and preserved to adorn the flags hoisted at caste rallies.
Lynched God
Purged from the annals of history
vestiges being excavated of fallen, broken, desecrated idols
entombed in violent memorials like Pokhran-II.
Tales of a great soul
lost in translation
from Pali to Sanskrit
scores of viharas
spiritually usurped
by vedic hymns.
Bullets from saffron terrorists
burned Bamiyans holes
in pages of medieval Indian history
tales of the vanquished race
erased from the fables agreed upon.
People of our race seek refuge,
in a lankan island,
like Chiang Kai Shek’s defeated army in Taiwan.
He used to meditate in
three posters
Padmasana, Abhaya, bhumisparsa
but before lynching
he lined up to the guillotine in Pranama posture.
He descended down
into the collective conscience of a
society as just one of the zillions of deities
without a capital first letter
India has become Brobdingnag for him,
the miniature Gulliver among saffron gods and goddesses.
In Malaysia
he occasionally gets his due
in a giant prostate deity
as giant Gulliver in the land of Lilliput.
His autobiography
diluted
divided deviated now sold as saffron history textbooks twice born editor refused to acknowledging the ghost writer.
First global Indian
almost has an NRI status now.
Beads around the bosoms
A chain of beads
around the bare breasts of our eves
a grim reminder
of the lynching of our god
November 21, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Linda Weste is a writer, researcher, reviewer, editor, and teacher of creative writing whose poems have been published in Best Australian Poetry UQP, and academic journals such as Westerly. Her second verse novel, an historical fiction for young adults, in progress, is based on the lives of German – Australians during wartime, and set in 1940s Melbourne.
Revelation
As I enter the exedra, Clodius waves a papyrus scroll:
‘It’s from Cicero to Atticus!’
His flapping hand beckons me to the space
Next to him: our ritual meeting place
On the fish pond’s rim
Clodius’ turn to read:
Like a nervous quail, his head bobs over every word.
He leans toward me, eyebrow raised:
‘Well, well, well.’
I try to peer around the mound
of his fleshy hands, but he stands and skitters off
Like a lizard caught napping on the sunlit paving stones
‘Ha!’ he guffaws,
and fixes me in his gaze:
‘Well, well, well.’
His face beams,
‘Aren’t you fanning his flames!’
I snatch the letter.
‘If Cicero only knew it was you, Clodia,
scrawling epigrams here and there,
Amusing all and sundry,
Making him the laughing stock of Rome …
… He’d regret slighting you
with that impertinent term,
Poetria!’
I’ve read enough:
Contemptuously I let the sprung cylinder recoil
To the marble floor
Where it drum-rolls its own significance
Intercepted Letter from Cicero: Soft target
‘I hope you’ve got thirsty ears!’
Clodius calls
over the fountain’s gentle pulse.
He strolls through the exedra towards me,
a papyrus half-unrolled in his hand;
it wilfully trails over spring blooms
inciting rise from a siesta of flies
He props a sandalled foot on the pond’s rim.
Strong; striking; ardent: Ehi tó chárisma, I smile to myself:
With his wild black mane; his long proud nose
Indeed the gods have graced him
Clodius strikes a pose I recognise: Cicero in oratory:
He thrusts out a shortened neck; winks at me,
‘Cicero needs
a thor-ough-ly
trust-worthy
mess-en-ger …
I can’t im-a-gine
why?’
Tears of laughter pool in my eyes
He’s mastered the nasally twang, the odious tone:
‘Of course …’ Clodius begins to read,
‘He wouldn’t want his letters
such as they are …
… to get into
a strang-er’s hands.
So he won’t write in his own name …
Or use his seal …
And he plans to invoke some
se-cret
code …
He’ll call
him-self,
Lae-lius,
and
Att-icus,
Fu-rius.’
Laughter ends the pillory.
Clodius loses his composure,
collapses next to me on the pond’s rim.
A chorus takes over with perfect timing:
Like Subura gossips, loquatious sparrows dash to this spot and that,
trills teeming through the jasmine filled air;
Heads together wings a-quiver beneath the hemp net.