Adam Aitken

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Adam Aitken is the author of four collections of poetry and a new book is forthcoming from Giramondo Publishing next year. He is currently living in Cambodia. (Photo by Juno Gemes)

Fin de Siècle

Between two climates she’d be waiting, the slender young émigré
so dark and delicate the wind passed right through her,
always there before you, the bright architect of love
who knew her way around the café chairs, the Latin lovers.
How she’d inspired that horizon, the penthouse, the tower.
Greek, French, Ukrainian, all of the above? No-one knew for sure
what drove her south one winter, a whim or a storm?
Her age or why she had promised to see you again,
or why she always promised, sighing, mood wracked,
hat wide-brimmed with daisies and gliding towards you
through the fun palace colonnades before sunset – no one knew
why she always promised to be there
under the whitewash crumbling that left its stain
on your waiter’s apron and in your hair, as if you had emerged
unscathed from its collapse, the blast driving you back,
grasping your last tip.
She would arrive after work (though no-one knew what she did),
complement your menu, then a final swim
before the chill shadows enclosed the beach.
Statues murmured in the dusky shadows, mascara dusk
and in the golden bracelet of a rockpool children sparkled
among their castles, before they flooded at high tide.
Were they her children? If so they could never be too careful
building their moats, before she moved to a bench in the sun.
The Latin lovers waved and she didn’t wave back.
She was the pleasure of the world passing, about to shake
her wings free of the disaster, and take off, and leave you
once again thinking this had been the best century ever
and you were haunted by what she could not forget,
already beyond your knowing, what she is and was.

Fable

That year they rode low in the water
on ballast of oaths and convicted emotions

moved on to springtime ports
past the Pig and Sows reef
and the ridiculously expensive prison
lost steerage in a lull of unconcern
and absent-minded fishing.

In those days an invasion
was a kind of plague jellyfish,
laid back remorae, or cold front
that blew in early, unseasonal.
Everyone was hitching rides.
When someone entered
new seasons of exchange– fluids, fire,
language and metal–
someone else exited.
They were what they made, and what they couldn’t
someone else did.
Another’s lack seemed
no more than their own.
All land codified
as the visible
scoured and clearfelled,
the land
of the forever language.

At Rozelle Hospital

At Rozelle Hospital, his final destination
some quartermaster who’d cracked
drew
on a sandstone pier
a worldly fish, a navy frigate in its port,

a tropic bird of seed.
Full sails, great promise,
a kind of escape
from a madder Captain.

King’s botanist inside
who made the book for all
engraved, exotic
with his names – each new flower and tree

and new stiff Latin, the whole evolutionary kit,
the iron bars of  genealogy.

Doctor, I ask you: what inky blot liberates
or draws together us
between the covers of hand-bound books
when you want your name
a legacy to crown the sky?

Fig trees, for instance, just
appear between the stones, green
as immigrants or refugees
hidden by the dark?

Are they natives now by instant decree?
You wear their leafy heads, and see
yourself once again,
historical footnote, crazed misfit

scattered, afraid, frozen
in unseasonal rain.
Or are we wasted now, due to
lack of name or use: seedy fruit
scattered in the grass,

imports that multiplied?
                    What of the bigger machines, like
                    destiny, meaning, sanity?
The fork and divergences
of who we want to be?
                   The rigging
on that ship
will catch the breeze,
then what?

Ionian

“are war and peace
playing their little game over your dead body?”
Jorie Graham

If, Eastern Asian time, you arrive
at the cove
to begin your holiday,
small figures camp in ruined hills,
waiting to advance.
Luckily we have
a Western point of view:
all timetables and maps: each hill,
the coordinates to fame
the minefield, the track
to that strategically useless
hilltop village, a tour guide,
and parking for buses.

Now, the snipers (retired codgers
your great-great grandpa couldn’t kill)
fish on the quiet beach, sipping
hot mint tea.
The winning cavalry
ride scabrous donkeys
and  for a nominal sum
escort you through the ruins.

Tides regroup like armies
and the opalescent waters
whet your Byronic taste
for filigreed pistols, severed heads,
slavegirls, broken columns. 

Filling the boats with trench-bootie:
proven property, like heritage,
gorgeous sunsets, or the exact
scent of victory –
too subtle for my words.

Judith Beveridge

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Judith Beveridge has published three books of poetry all of which have won major prizes: The Domesticity of Giraffes (Black Lighting Press 1987); Accidental Grace, (UQP, 1996) and Wolf Notes (Giramondo Publishing, 2003). She is the poetry editor of Meanjin. In 2005 she was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature. She currentlyteaches poetry at post-graduate level at the University of Sydney and at post-graduate and undergraduate level at the University of Newcastle. She has edited UQP’s The Best Australian Poetry 2006 as well as co-edited anthologies from the Newcastle Poetry Prize, Sunweight (2005) and The Honey Fills the Cone (2006).

The Book

There is a fish called flower of the wave
and a fish called the hardyhead. There is
the parrotfish, the pineapple fish, the boarfish
the bullhead shark. There’s the rough flute
mouth, the toothy flathead, the two spot
bristle tooth and the yellow sabretooth blenny.

At night I study. At night I learn sixty-two
types of wrasse. I learn there’s the glass fish,
the globe fish, the goat fish and an eastern
and southern gobble guts, both left-eyed
and right-eyed flounders, a rhinoceros
file fish, a racoon butterfly fish, a grub fish,

a tear-drop sleeper goby, a robust pygmy
star-gazer and a half and half puller. There’s
a fish called happy moments. But I haven’t
found it yet. I haven’t found the right one.
The name I can throw back at Davey when
in a voice flat as oil, he calls me: “sweetlips”.

Despite

Despite a headache, stationary all day, unable to decay;
despite these reels ticking again into the gradient

of each throb; my eyes feeling as fragile as snow-domes
in the hands of a fractious child; my head grading all

the grains of sand shunted southwards again by a week
of black katabatic winds; despite the yachts tinkling,

calling like knives on goblets for silence as the tide
dumps another load of kelp around my head – I feel

happy, calm; and for a moment I love the feel of hessian
weather on my arms and legs. I love being with Davey

who smells like an old fish trough, stubble on his chin
sharp as wrasse’s teeth. I love the lighthouse on the cliff-top

as it holds the stupefied position of a pocket chesspiece.
I know another distress flare might soon find its passage

through the nerves my head manipulates, that an onshore
of jagged air push isobars back; that lightning’s filamented

pulse rig more cordage for my head. I know the veins
in my head will tighten, distort, bend again like lines

trying to dislodge a snag, that nausea will head for a dry
berth in my throat – but now, I fix my bait, spit out my beer

as if it had become as tasteless as the brackish Baltic
and I reel my line in. I know the creels must come in despite

blood on the charts, the pounding of cruel encephalitic winds.
I drag the rod back, it arcs like a dolphin scudding on its tail,

and I’m happy, calm, fishing again here with Davey.
We’re almost doing the limbo bringing our lines in.

Todd Swift

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Todd Swift is one of the leading Canadian poets of his generation (those born since 1960), and his poetry was included in two recent major anthologies of Canadian verse, Open Field (Persea, 2005) and The New Canon (Vehicule, 2005).  He is Oxfam GB Poet In Residence and editor of their best-selling poetry CD series, Life Lines and Life Lines 2.  He is poetry editor for Nthposition online magazine.  He lectures in creative writing and English at the graduate and undergraduate levels at Kingston University, and teaches at Birkbeck and The Poetry School, in London.  He has edited many international anthologies, such as Short Fuse (Rattapallax, 2002) and 100 Poets Against The War (Salt, 2003).  His own poetry has been published by DC Books in four collections, most recently Winter Tennis (2007).  He is co-editor of the major new study of contemporary English Quebec poetry, Language Acts (Vehicule, 2007).  His poems have appeared widely in such journals as Agenda, Cimarron Review, The Guardian, Jacket, London Magazine, The Manhattan Review, New American Writing, Poetry Review, and The Wolf.  His reviews appear widely, in places such as Books in Canada, The Globe and Mail, and Poetry London.  He is doing his PhD at the University of East Anglia, where he also took his MA in Creative Writing.

English Words

Badge me and badger me,
Catch me and calliper my skull,
Suck out the phonemes, sip
The allomorphs. Automata, loci,
Imprudent, implants… put me on
Compound parade and glue
My ablative: stick a synthetical vowel
Up the lexical layer with a trowel
But build that system with interplay.
 

The Unidentified Man

So I went down to the fence where the jobs were,
Put my face against the wire, and yowled Hire me
To the boss-men whose job it was to hire two men,
When around me stood maybe two hundred men;

My hands gripped the wire, framing my yowling,
Too clean by half.  I wanted to have something to do,
You see, in your world. The gates parted for no one
I knew.  All I did was have a small way with words,

Of no use to the high chimneys that smoked above us,
To hang on the old tree where language yellowed.
Two men came and lugged me low, inside the gate,
Dropped my body in with the slow horses for meat.

Fado

To sing fado
is to open the barn door
before the horses.

Singing fado is to set water
spinning so it tires the storm.

Fado means teaching fire
to climb itself in flame, a rope.

Fado throws the wind away,
kisses the stars farewell
in night’s lost stairwell.

To sing fado
is knowing love’s torn dress
sold to sailors to buy
back your heart’s secret share.

Fado is leaving
nothing on your nakedness.

Fado is touch singing to skin.

Map Of Love

You are not on my map of love, you said
And I the cartographer of all things lived,

The device so curled and aged it had faded.
Sweep away those pins and flags, heart,

And come here to divide these spoils
On this bed where we surround and fall,

Fighting our way out of poppy fields
Consensual as battle, squabbling over power

Or Nepal.  The answer is we’re artists or lovers
Pursuing night’s cherries in a spring campaign.

Ravi Shankar

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Ravi Shankar is Associate Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat. He has published a book of poems, Instrumentality (Cherry Grove), named a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards and co-authored a chapbook with Reb Livingston, Wanton Textiles (No Tell Books). His creative and critical work has previously appeared in such publications as The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, Time Out New York, The Massachusetts Review, Fulcrum, McSweeney’s and the AWP Writer’s Chronicle, among many others. He has taught at Queens College, University of New Haven, and Columbia University, where he received his MFA in Poetry. He has appeared as a commentator on NPR and Wesleyan Radio and read his work in many places, including the Asia Society, St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the National Arts Club. He currently serves on the Advisory Council for the Connecticut Center for the Book and along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, is co-editing an anthology of contemporary South Asian, East Asian Poetry, due out with W.W.Norton & Co. in Spring 2008.

Indian Elephant

Under date palms and a towering gopuram
studded with carvings of deities in acrobatic
sexual congress, it’s almost easy to overlook

the dark, mustached mahout in khaki shorts
leaning against a crooked stick, murmuring
in Malayalam to the ornamented purveyor

of blessings beside him, bedecked in marigolds
spirals of white paint outlining wistful eyes
and plummeting down a trunk that swings

to pluck a rupee from the devout, to bless
the bent-headed. In one practiced motion,
the prodigiuos converted into the propitious.

Box Turtle

Jeweled egg in the middle of a twisting
path tamped down by footfall, darkened
in the shadow of tall pines, I pluck and put

it to my nose. Gradually, like arousal
rousing by degrees, a blunt head extends
from an uncircumcised prepuce to glare

red-eyed at how earth has been removed
from under it, how it flails three-toed
in space, until abruptly, a hinged plastron

snaps shut. Gathering itself in, domed shell
concentrically radiating orange and black
in a mantra: hermetic, tantric, self-reliant.

Jumbo Jet

Such scale manifest in juxtaposition:
like a pod of echolocating whales
fuselages roll, immense, silhouetted

on taxiway tarmac by blue edge lights
and halogen green center reflectors
to aprons serviced by motorised ramps,

fuel trucks, baggage carts, flag wavers,
all turning in synchronicity to words
emitted from the Sphinx-like control

tower. Approaching aircraft moving
from skies through its own length
so progressively, it appears to hover

Jill Jones

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Jill Jones’s latest books is Broken/Open (Salt, 2005), which was short-listed for The Age Book of the Year 2005, and three chapbooks: Fold Unfold (Vagabond, 2005). In 2003 her fourth book, Screens, Jets, Heaven: New and Selected Poems, won the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize. She has collaborated with photographer Annette Willis on a number of projects. She has been a film reviewer, journalist, book editor and arts administrator.

What Is This?

While we’re talking light passes, though it’s easy to ignore
its radiant shift. We’re neither passengers nor eternal,
though we trip on each other’s recall, there’s another history
being rearranged in shades drawn on ground.
I say, it’s how you think in circles, wanting to merge rather than mark.
(The four corners of a centre tremble as they touch space.)

Our argument may ignite small layers or return to its great elasticity,
it’s no more than extending a mirror into the existence of zero.
But I can do nothing unless I lose my own track in land that made the curve
neither fleeting nor continuing, but always shown on ground.

Here are the difficulties – of clusters, pebbles, mind moon, that great
vacant sign, an eternal jewel, the head’s empty bucket, containing
all things, yet without rearranging itself within clarity’s blue shadow.

The light     of your fingers     skin under sky.

– after Lightpool series, Salvatori Gerardi

Matching Colours In a Flame

Is it the way silence peels away the hours
or light inches too near to death?
(It gets closer to take hold of my hands)

I will not worry over the heat
but go out into the angle of a demand.

How a door shouts or afternoon is lacking
when meanings double and nights increase
or clouds break your face, imperfect and happy.

Bottlebrush

City birds are living on their coast
of roads and industrial cranking
among the blinking dive of motors.
It’s all leaky rather than transparent
like the earth hum’s low and constant herz.

An unknown screech comes
from middle distance
and means little from a window
even if you’re well.

There’s been turnover since the shooting
the café now sells furniture
and amongst papaya, cardboard boxes
limp greens on pallets, the pickings
are as daily as the leaded and diesel
descending those old forgotten miles
above. In the midst
here’s king pigeon, sparrows, starlings
the old world rubbish sticking
in the claw, buggy feathers and shit splat
dodging all the colour of skies.

And parrots hang from spring
when ancient honey
sings within a callistemon’s
brief and red hours.

Andrew Slattery

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Andrew Slattery is a Communications graduate from The University of Newcastle. His poems have appeared in literary journals, newspapers, magazines throughout Australia, Europe, North America and Asia. His awards include the Henry Kendall Poetry Award, the Roland Robinson Literary Award, and the Val Vallis Poetry Award. He lives in Berlin.

The River Winter

It’s no use counting water with time
if it’s going to freeze up every year,
solid from bank to bank, the river set

flush with the surrounding plains
of ground snow. And don’t rely on heat –
the sun is an alloy of silica and static blue.

Floating branches have stilled
and now shadow the surface
like the underveins of a cloud.

The river is an allegory, better than most –
universal and exacting; an ice-tray; die-cast
in element season; depth indeterminate.

A group of deer stroll across the river,
seeming not to raise their knees, but to skate
the surface, to maintain a share of weight.

The river turns like a worn claw.
The river is a box of jammed water;
neither flowing nor permanent.

The babydeer trips on a rift where a stream
moves contra to the main riverline;
where meltwater slows and forms along the pelt

of seamed ice. The deer holds to its hoary legs,
steadies the cardinal point of its mind and shifts
orderly across this neither land nor water.

Blackbirding

Before dawn, little girls play with knives,
walk over the grass still grey with damp
before a sun swells the ground and all

the living in it. Two girls out with paring knives,
at dawn – you’d think a play duel was afoot!
Every Saturday before breakfast, two girls out

with an undertaking to collect the dead,
or those close to it. After Dad sprayed
the night before. “Off me vines yer little bastards!”

He’d long-lobbied to kill them en masse.
“Bloody pests!” as he swivels his bald-mad eyes,
a persistent “pink pink pink…,” a thin “peeeeeeee”

and a low “tuc tuc tuc” send him running
down the grape rows with his rifle
shooting black rocks or any spot on his eye

that puts a blackbird in his mind. So most are dead
by dawn if the spray has got to their hearts.
The girls are civil mystics and farewell

the last star to blip off the sky.
Before dawn it’s as still as a seed;
everything sharp clicks the air. Like the snakes

which have been out all night, slimming along
the trellis channels under the vines, the girls
have exacted their process. They pick off

any beetles around wounds and openings,
lift off the wing bars, the upper-tail covers
and unclip the wishbone from their shoulders.

See the way the tendon lifts like a string
from the underside; the way their thumbs fit
neat in the cupola bone behind the eyes.

In winter, they hear the blackbirds
quietly “singing to themselves.”
This is their sub-song. They marvel

at tinybird architecture and how such quiet things
once made sky circles. The blackbird plays
a boxwood flute. When they find the air sac

it’s better than a boring chicken’s wishbone –
you can push the sac and see
if there’s any song left in it. The stitchbird’s

glomera bone brings luck in fives. They peel back
the duffled barbs, remove the pinions and fold
the wing back under the body, tie it with string

and clean their hands on the dewy watergrass.
They’re planning a whole day for the blacks
nested in the upland mangrove nooks

to listen for tacit coos in cavities and lowed stumps.
They imagine dismantling the head of an owl
and locating the hoots in its standing frame.

Or to the sea – the steep cliff sucks the grey sea
up against its chest, the young nested against the cliffs,
out of reach from the rats. For today, they are done,

they fondle the oddments deep in their pockets
and follow the horse-path home. At night they lie
on the blue grass. Around their ankles

are amulets made from birdfeet tied end to end,
scratching their skin “tuc tuc tuc.” If they hold
the tiny birdskulls up to any-shaped moon, look

through the eye sockets and there’s always
a round moon. The great distance between stars
contains the eye. They will grow up to farm the stars,

not in clean rows but thrown up like random seeds.
You can sharpen a tailbone to its quill-end
to draw a white bird on the night, or hold

longer wingbones up to the stars like a scaffolding
to the spotted flue; join them horizontal
as if collecting the universe in armature.

Yeow Kai Chai

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Yeow Kai Chai is the author of two poetry collections, Pretend I’m Not Here (2006) and Secret Manta (2001).He co-edits the online journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. He is also the deputy editor of the arts and lifestyle section in Singapore’s The Straits Times, where he reviews music and writes pop-culture commentaries.

Red and Blue

The accessory, zipped up,
awaits the blink-off.

Redacted, this could
just end up one jet-lagged lyre.

Keep soul, big stuff in the overhead
administration, says trolley dolly.

Here is what is: a suspicious package
with attendant implications.

It’s none of my personal vertex,
but we’re psyched for another

sexy spin, another hook
to hang civilisation on, like Equator.

Beyond allotted legroom,
degree of reclination and those

damp hot towels, we rise
and fall, aside from such plenitude,

terminal or tarnation.
Gazing out this sentimental window

into pitch dark, yanking soul
out of you . . .  to winnow these aisles

or suffuse every spore . . .
that’s what it should do, shouldn’t it?

If he can’t quite define it,
what hope the rest of us?

It isn’t the blue dress,
which doesn’t lie. It’s in the bag.

It is. Don’t get me wrong –
I like righteous peanuts and hot towels

that come all over my face,
the subject already taxiing

to a softly tick and what’s that slipping
from its side? A whiff? It’s time.

Hold that nip while the gentlest,
quietest one casually pulls a tiny red pin.

Quarterly Report No. 4: Pachinko Parlour Vending Machine
a reggaeton pantoum

Biorhythm pulsate baby crave
Slot plastic token slit
Pop David apple diorama
Tip on Renaissance palindrome

Slot Hoboken plastic slit
Karaoke queen light koan
Spit on Renaissance palindrome
Baby love caw macaw

Karaoke queen light kaftan
Secretary bird wind toy
Baby love paw macaque
Cool duck pop placebo

Secretary dirge toy boy
Work Geylang parlour breeze
Cool duck put Kanebo
Now perfect tongue service

Ice cream parlour breeze
Impostor take on hyperrealist
Now defect Foreign Service
Doppelganger slip crash mirror

Impostor take aurora borealis
Reverse phat spin lips
Doppelgänger slap dash traitor
Ream gleam soda fizz

Reverse fat pink slips
Drink up silver chalice
Ream gleam Lola fizz
Game for it kissogram

Drink up silly heiress
Pop Babel juicy melisma
Dame kiss o Gran
Biorhythm pulsate babbling slave

Gold In Them Trees

Gold my woebegone gill
In rays fill such lustrous haze
Them everything but these
Trees where no human will