May 17, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Kenneth Steven’s tenth collection of poems is appearing in the summer of 2012. He’s from Highland Scotland and much of his work is inspired by the wildscape of the north and west of the country. He’s also a widely published writer of prose for adults and youngsters alike, and he translates the work of many Norwegian authors.
www.kennethsteven.co.uk
A Green Woodpecker
The day is like dead wood –
No colours, only shades of grey,
The gentle breath of my steps
Leaves a ghost story written in the grass.
A stillness like that when snow falls
Except there is no snow, and none all winter –
Only the river in its silvering among the trees
Whispers the same old journey to the sea;
Only the moon, low above the hills,
Frail as a ball of cobwebs.
On moss feet, I go into the wood
And a great door closes behind me:
Little quiverings of things
Quick among twigs;
Two deer, their eyes listening,
Flow into nowhere in a single blink.
I look up, into a pool of light
And hold my breath:
Swans stretching north
Swimming the open sky –
The silence so huge
I hear their wings.
And I think,
As I begin to go back home;
I came here searching one bird
And found all this instead:
How like my life.
Otter
light swivels on the night edge:
the full moon’s eerie beam
wobbles like a child’s balloon, huge, and breaks
upwards at last, into the clearing dark
otter trundles over wetscapes, crying
as points of milk-white stars shine clear;
he curls into himself in seaweed
through the swell and ebb of tide until
the oystercatchers drip their calls across the sky
and orange gold the dark melts into day –
then he’s off, a scamper on the sea edge
scenting, searching, circling –
flowing into river edges, a thousand streams
sewn inside the silk of him, for ever
May 17, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Gillian Telford is a NSW poet who lives on the CentralCoast. Her poems have been published regularly in journals including Blue Dog, Five Bells, & Island & her first collection Moments of Perfect Poise was published (Ginninderra) in 2008. Longer poem sequences have twice been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize & published in anthologies The Honey Fills the Cone (2006) & The Night Road (2009). In 2010 she worked in collaboration with choreographer Francoise Angenieux & composer Solange Kershaw on Poetica: Five Arrivals which featured as a regional event in the Sydney Writers Festival.
displacement
(i)
From the incoming tide
I rescue a stone—
deep olive green
tinged with yellow buff.
Its colours bring echoes
of old growth forest, as though lifted
from leaf-litter, moss and fungi
but stranded here
among the pastel shells,
the bleached and silvered grit,
it’s a misfit
dumped on a tidal surge.
I roll it in my palm, turn
and stroke it with my thumb,
rub away each grain of sand
and hold it till it warms.
(ii)
In waves of harassment, the hostile
natives dive and shriek—
From the fig’s leafy head,
crouched in defiance— a red-eyed
intruder, huge and pale, keeps
them at bay with great snaps
of its bill and raucous cries.
When we’re talking of birds
it’s a summer migrant with many names—
stormbird or fig-hawk, rainbird or hornbill;
a channel-billed cuckoo, flown south
to breed and find hosts for its eggs.
As I watch it struggle against the flock,
I think of its journey
across the ocean, grey wings beating,
hour upon hour—
driven by instinct and drawn
to our plenty,
each year they find nurture
despite the clamour.
(iii)
Across theTimor Sea, the boats
keep coming.
Some we hear about, some we don’t—
Some will wait quietly, others won’t.
the third bridge
for my mother
It was a clean, sharp day
cut through with winds
from the Southern Ocean, so we wrapped
her in rugs and pushed the wheelchair
along the boardwalk, through rushes
and reedbeds, the grieving swans
the calling, circling terns.
At the third bridge, we stopped.
Beneath us, a tidal high,
the wind-dragged, surging estuary,
its sun-flecked surface.
And there we took turns to toss
him over— handful by handful,
back to the river, back to the ocean.
But caught at first
on gusts of wind, his ashes
lifted against the light
then circled and swirled in exultant loops
before the final fall—
the quiet passage beneath the bridge.
May 17, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ali Alizadeh’s most recent books include Ashes in the Air (UQP, 2011) and Iran: My Grandfather (Transit Lounge, 2010). With John Kinsella, he has edited and translated an anthology of Persian poetry in English, which is forthcoming in 2012. Ali is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Monash University, and has a website: http://alializadeh.wordpress.com/
Words
I can’t find my phone. Plato
couldn’t find the Beyond, denounced
Word vis-à-vis Voice
as inherent poison. This weekend
the planned occupation of Melbourne
by activists, to announce the end
of ‘corporate greed’. I dial a number
and burn the Other’s ear with irony
of hidden envy. No, Word isn’t
the perpetual deferral of a signified. Void
is Truth misnamed, a-voided. ‘Greed’
the very tip of the most visible iceberg
of Capital’s glacial matter. I can’t
stop talkin’, talkin’, don’t care who’s hearin’
the repetition of unfulfilled urge; tomorrow
a song may ‘unite the human race’. Marx
the only dead thing I can’t speak ill of
(who hasn’t sensed a ‘spectral’ Real?)
which makes me hang up the phone. Use
written words to formulate the unspoken
and the unspeakable. Yes, I’m out of credit
and too stingy to finger the alphabet
and text-message bored friends. Capital
-ism may be its own undoing.
Thus Capital
Capital is the Real of our lives.
—Slavoj Žižek
I’m here for an encounter
with Power. Can’t accept It
has nothing to offer but ice-cream
and pink lingerie. I prowl the mall
to catch Its sordid eye. Never mind
the sales, reduced symptoms
disguised as fetish. What haven’t I
disavowed? I’ll serve in the society
of disrobed spectacles. I’ll see
the naughty bits. Ethical consumers
fumble with fig leave; not fair
trade indulgence, what I seek. I aspire
to bow before Its grisly form, kiss
the slimy rings on the all-too-visible
hand of a festering market. Then relish
the stench of Its anus. So free, so real.
May 10, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Nicolette Stasko has published five volumes of poetry. Her newest UNDER RATS is forthcoming this year with Vagabond Press Rare Objects series. She currently lives in Sydney.
Arachnology
There’s a spider silk thrown
all the way across
my neighbour’s yard
catching the sun
perhaps four metres or more
a trapeze the acrobat
still waiting in the wings
I realise suddenly
that the engineer
of this Glebe Island bridge is
one of those tiny creatures
never actually seen
hiding in its curled up leaf
a miniature gondola rowing
through the air or
idling precariously
in a moonlit bay
This morning the net is stretched
across my garden
at one end the tracing of a Spanish fan
the other anchored
as if by steel
gleaming and
blowing in the wind
how was it done?
in the secret night
the lone rider spinning and flying
to span such distance
strong enough to stand
the constant battering
strong enough
to hang a week’s laundry
I look in vain to find the architect
of such a grand design
Coming up empty
I have just seen the Queen pounce
from her observation post—
from her sacred stance
on the rooftop
elegant as Egyptian tomb sculpture—
into a hammock of honey suckle
then her departure
out of sight no tail dangling
from triumphant mouth
an embarrassed gait
suggesting wounded dignity
the light is like butter
I imagine her fur
will smell
like blossoms of wild flowers
May 7, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
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May 5, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Lindsay Tuggle’s poetry has been published in HEAT, commissioned by the Red Room Company, and included in various journals and anthologies in the US and Australia. In 2009, her poem “Anamnesis” was awarded second prize in the Val Vallis Award for Poetry. In 2012, she is the recipient of an Australian Academy of the Humanities Travelling Fellowship. Lindsay grew up in the Southern United States, and migrated to Australia eleven years ago. She now lives in Austinmer, where she is working on a book of elegies.
The Arsonist’s Hymnal
wake to see if the trains are still running.
the beloved ones coalesce
in the gloaming,
almost persuaded.
in the afterglow of mall glut,
her veiled alien
hastens farther down
this last bathed hall.
have you seen the vapors?
all dead arrive
unborn as lighthouses.
our eldest unfurled below
the stairwell under the baptistery
elevated as a drowning chamber
whose guests have vanished.
her alias is stark. loose-limbed.
summer is almost a covenant.
before darkness
she’s intent on devouring parables.
all others fall away
the consequence of habitual neglect.
ghosts die without ceasing;
guard trendsetters against
the perils of walk-in-closets.
as soon as she’s finished washing her hair.
her materials form only metric tongues.
with solemn vigilance
we can’t be seen
underwater
echoes are laughter.
only these rituals endure:
all night in dreams he sets fire to her eyes.
Anamnesis
1.
She dreamed a cemetery of glass tombs.
The perfume bottles were her favorite.
An estuary arsonist
(eluding self-harm):
she refuses to bathe alone.
River viridity is dangerous:
Honey locusts ghost the salt baskets.
Despite coastal housekeeping
tidal mouths breed
vertical striations.
Nutrient densities render her blind,
hysterically.
Language is no longer a nomenclature.
Even her humming has meaning: a kind of
swirling guttural echo.
Something you knew once.
Thoughtless recovery
(habitual)
swarms against the sane
familiarity of lawnmowers,
the creeping grace
of unseeing.
2.
From New Madrid gully inland
we remember the day
the river flowed backward.
In the absence of coherent levees
shifting glacial loess
an unknown number drowned.
The measure of loss
is in the submergence of trees.
There’s an upside to angularity.
Sharpness invites reconstruction.
The moral is integral burial:
illiterate confinement
supernatural as filth.
3.
The madness of trees
ringed in brackish immersion.
Roots mark intervals
of barren impermanence,
hoard pollen traces
in vanishing silt.
The delicate erosion
of Kalopin’s eyes:
residual gladitsia in
backwater muck.
She’ll kind of ramble beautifully
her laughter like bells.
Water collects in
pockets of collarbone.
Divers burn in shallow
basins. One hundred
years later we hunch in
the elongation of aftermath.
She becomes fishmouthed
the obsession of swallowing
written beneath the soles of her feet
another angling glaze.
Assemblage data reveals
a cedar arboreal influx.
Lower soil analysis shows
ragweed is rare or absent.
Cicadas are reckless breeders.
Its been dry for so long here
we made ourselves gowns
from this dust.
Wake.
How to capture
the unison language
of insects?
She’s haltingly fluent
in the vanishing tendency
of the object
where descent
is watery and burns.
An acrid metallic sound,
translated, roughly:
The wet are pretty.
All this
beckoning comes at a cost.
Author’s Note:
This poem responds to two bodies of water in western Kentucky—an area called Land Between the Lakes. The first was formed by a series of earthquakes from December 1811 to February 1812. The second was created following the floods of 1937, and gradually expanded for the dual purposes of flood control and hydroelectric power. Many towns and farms were flooded and relocated. Some residents refused to evacuate, and drowned.
May 5, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Laurie Duggan was born in Melbourne in 1949. He moved to the UK in 2006 and currently lives in Faversham. His most recent books are Crab & Winkle (Shearsman, 2009), a new edition of The Epigrams of Martial (Boston, Pressed Wafer, 2010), Allotments (Wendell, Mass., Fewer & Further, 2011) and The Pursuit of Happiness (Shearsman, 2012). Forthcoming are The Complete Blue Hills (Puncher & Wattman, Sydney), and Leaving Here (Light-Trap, Brisbane).
Allotment #33
life in the margin:
spring, still winter-like
old men in trainers
walk on bunions
Allotment #34
back at The Sun
(beyond the . . .
I graph all this, with flattened accent
(drawn but not glottal)
(the test: ‘This is Illyria, lady’)
(I myself am a bracket,
a footnote
but this is as it should be
the smudge of a glass
set down on paper
this this this
Allotment #35
the impression of a bottle cut into a wall
above it a trophy (a crown or a hand,
hard to tell in the half-dark
Allotment #36
a morning frost, bent stems
then a clear sky,
ongoing chores
Allotment #37
shadows in the window
seeming people,
spaces between
a flame’s reflection
nails not quite hammered in
a rattle of cutlery
the mechanics of a worn philosophy
my work irrelevant as
an immense puzzle, lifelong
May 5, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Peter Dawncy lives in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne. He has an Arts Degree with majors in English and Philosophy from Monash University and is currently completing Honours in poetry writing. For his thesis, Peter is undertaking a study of Philip Hammial’s poetry through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. He hopes to begin his PhD next year. Peter has had poetry and fiction published in various Australian journals and magazines, and in 2010 he was the winner of the Monash Poetry Prize and came second in the Monash fiction-writing competition. His play, The Logue of Thomas P. T. Lawrence, was performed at the Arts Centre in June 2010.
logue
satellites coalesce / fold
the corners to the
belt above
triangles as
squid jigs
at the jetty’s end
in fluorescence by
the dried
white-bait clumps
snapper catch
gloves welcome
container ships with
coordinates
for salt meets sky
Melbourne woven in it
Eureka deep green
iceberg siege
seen from afar
by the
research vessel en route
to the Antarctic snowfields
saturnine
darkness
over floodwater
extends
smooth, wet pavement
over stars
murmur
as monkeys march
to flightless geese
flapping.
pour further
wide and windless
a fleece
bobs by
saturnine
fishermen
hauling in mulloway—
take
a picture
and somewhere
a frame discards
its portrait
and searches for a
foreign landscape.
for now, moonlight
skewers a dog’s nose,
bogong moths whirl,
a shadow
opens the door, sneezes,
closes the door—
tap shoes
seem too polished
for a winter worn
underwater.
autumn storm
spiralling tongues
twirl, slash the billowing
gun-powder grit
beneath the blue gum and
above the clamouring
bracken. milk thistles levelled
as dogwoods sneeze, black-
birds dive for the pine copse
and ferns puff dust
from their beards as
they lean and squint. a black-
wood teeters and quakes,
topples as its feet rent
the earth
like a child shredding
wrapping paper. somewhere
in the composting depths
a little girl in a green
and white dress
gets her hair caught
and screams for her mother.
May 5, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Fiona Britton is a Sydney poet and writer. She was the 2010 winner of the Shoalhaven Literary Award and the 2011 joint winner of the Dorothy Porter Prize for poetry.
Imago
The tune of us
already exists
had I hands to write it
I would,
six-four time over a Balinese tinkle,
but I dream on, handless
inventing skip-beats (tha-rip) to pass the time.
I curve, acoustic,
for twenty six bars
of held breath —
the underground score
of an opera for insects:
my green grocer
my black prince, tap-dancer.
I tunnel out and count myself in.
Zeitgeist
Lowtide:
you made your way on mass
sideways like sandcrabs
a ragged collegium,
full of fight and righteousness
shouting fond arguments
tugging at each other, tumbling
towards the isthmus
across that line you wouldn’t cross alone.
Great numbers meant great courage:
you ventured together
and accumulated faith.
The sun — celestial diplomat —
shone down ultraviolet
and gilded upturned faces
(friends, your sweet lips split,
the fresh skin pinked and puckered).
The wind grew calm:
evidence, you said —
such small miracles
will soon be handed down as fact.
Differences extinguished in the noonday bright,
you stopped your yelling
and prepared for a single, quiet truth.
Back among the blackened mangroves
beside the grey teeth
of the broken jetty
the shadows grow long,
distances stretch.
At this remove
I hardly recognise you, friends.
Voices carry, high as baby birds’ —
gannet, egret, gull.
I listen but the wind snatches words.
Newborn and dismayed,
you turn in circles.
I grow mandibles; I digest things
here without a people,
unsubscribed,
I am bearded, brackish and alone.
New trunks thrust up
like stubby thumbs, from the mudflat.
Here I build a hollow for a heretic
where I can think,
knit fishnet,
kick the dripping boards;
dispute and come unstuck,
and let the biting insects
have my blood.
May 5, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ellen van Neerven is a descendant of the Mununjali people of the Gold Coast area. She is a recent QUT graduate in Fine Arts and lives in Brisbane.
Cousins
Taking a break from my usual weekend warfare
I drive with my mother through the shifting rain
into Mununjali country
a roo bounds across the road
we meet at the pub and I order an
egg sandwich, orange muffin and a newspaper
on the last ten years of your life
We are cousins
though we grew up on different sides of the axis
different sides of the moon
got to remember
same grandmother
same grandmother
We don’t share memories
You recall a football game against boys
you fell down and
I turned on the fella who did it
This violence sounds entirely
not like me at all
I remember you came to live with us
when your house burnt down
you were amazed at how many socks I had
and you asked me if you went to my school would
you be the only dark girl in your class
This was the first time I realised that
others could see us differently
We drive up to Nana’s resting place
in front of Mt Barney
You take the wheel where I am a passenger
My uncle says you’ll teach me in a paddock
He seems to know all them old stories
While my mother is quiet
Got to remember
same mother
same mother
Used to the flies now I sit under a gum
This land heals all my city blues
I haven’t the language for that
You read me after all this time
I haven’t the language for that.
How My Heart Behaves
My coin purse is lined
with receipts of women I’ve fucked and left
Last night on the bed of a lover
slipping a singlet over my breasts
about to leave
I find myself suddenly desiccated
with need of child
Will I always be
a stranger to the sound of webbed feet
a moon in the orbit of others
I untangle from her sleeping form
Leave all my change under the pillow.
Kenneth Steven’s tenth collection of poems is appearing in the summer of 2012. He’s from Highland Scotland and much of his work is inspired by the wildscape of the north and west of the country. He’s also a widely published writer of prose for adults and youngsters alike, and he translates the work of many Norwegian authors.