Debbie Lim

Debbie Lim lives in Sydney. Her work has appeared in anthologies including regularly in the Best Australian Poems series (Black Inc.) and Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann). Recent work appears in Westerly, Island, Rabbit, Overland and the Willowherb Review (UK). Her chapbook is Beastly Eye (Vagabond Press) and she is working on a full-length collection. She was a Mascara Don Bank Poet-in-Residence in 2020–2021.
 
 
 
 
Captive
Hapalochlaena lunulata

You are the one who cupped death in the hand.
Watched it writhe in sunlight, tender-faced,

flashing its blue halos, more precise and smaller
than expected. A slow thrall of limbs rippling

away from itself. Everything might have ended
there: a far sea throbbing in your ear as your

own heart slackened, then subsided. Instead,
this sudden act of mercy as you tipped a palm down—

saw a life jettisoned to the shallows.

Anisha Pillarisetty

Anisha Pillarisetty is a radio producer and presenter at Radio Adelaide and a journalist at On the Record, living on unceded Kaurna Yerta. She is currently in her third year of university studying creative writing and journalism.

 

 

 

Remember to not talk gently when announcing the news, especially if you’re on radio

summers are long and the sky curdles                                                                   quick

a game:

splashes of cloud or congealing milk left in the bright                                          of the sink

skin circles back into itself
turning the colour of mud flaps on Dad’s old Maruti van                                     bogged after

                                         the                                         first                         shock of rain
radio says 2020 broke         records here

  1. 1. the third warmest
  2. 2. the fifth wettest
  3. 3. the eighth sunniest
  4. 4. the

radio also says there is                              a moon wobble

Zoom out to find the Indian Ocean on Google Maps and the searching

blue

is hurled against the window with the moon. The wind is torn between             remembering

the kind of rain that disturbs bird calls into                                                                 static
the kind of rain that is wanting

the Indian Ocean unspools
the tops of the gum trees like a tarp and it sounds like:

  1. 1. dripping stripes on a gourd                                                   sold cheap by the roadside
  2. 2. your fingers counting                                                                          the air
  3. 3. ballooning curtains when my hands

were still                                                                                                         small
your freedom –                                                                                           is it mine?
bigger than the cling-clang
at your waist
your laughter is tomatoes in hessian                                                       sifted through
1. too soft
2. too green
3. the coins are hesitant to leave                                                                the cloth

summer                               circles

skin.

Anonymous

Anonymous is a POC health worker and poet living in one of the LGAs on unceded Gadigal country. They write on the Covid delta strain crisis.

 

 

 

Let it RIP, Australia

The dawn of a new decade came with a sting
that became an explosion,
a sniff of opportunity.
And the powerful lined up to strut and pose
they got through 2020 by sheer luck, rising,
as they silenced and crushed all opposition!
They spun a smorgasbord of false narratives
to keep the masses asleep.
They reminded us in other countries
women get shot.

December 2020 Israel vaccinates, Australia is silent.
If there’s a goal, it’s secret and hidden.
Inside the dark wooden cabinet of white men
is a vaccination vacuum.

Strut, pose, wait and watch the world. It’s not a race!
Smiling and lying, they squander the gains,
strutting, posing and rewarding the sycophants

Only 4% fully vaccinated when Bondi starts
as it spreads to Walgett, and Victoria,
New Zealand even. A catch-up game
No intention of defeating this plague.

Deliberate, calculated spread
because when it is everywhere
there is nothing to lose in opening the borders. Ha ha!
1200 cases today and we smile and boast
dissonant, cheerful one-liners.

The price is paid in the hospitals of Sydney
by the beaten and battered clinicians,
falling one by one to radio silence.
By patients who came in for gallstones
but never left because of COVID.

In small country towns where there is no hospital
and no prospect of evacuation because Dubbo is falling
in the dark corridors of the prisons
and the forgotten people in Wilcannia
starving and unvaccinated

Is this planned genocide?
While the experts muse about global equit
While Pfizer is fast-tracked to the Eastern suburbs
So they can be free sooner

Strutting. Posing. The strong will survive and the weak….
Well they were unvaccinated. Ha ha!

Let’s go full Great Barrington today, Haha, they laugh.
Live with COVID, haha!

The children are the sacrifice,
held up to the money god.

The ultimate sacrifice in cringing worship of the UK
Desperate doctors whisper about whole wards infected
Hospitals crumbling
Emergency beds prepared in concrete car parks
Hastening death with morphine and midazolam
to allow new admissions.

Live with COVID, they say, as they strut and pose.
We have thousands of ventilators. Haha!
It’s just the Untermensch that are dying
Westies and Muslims.

Not the important people of Mona Vale.
In the rich suburbs a lady browsing in a non-essential shop
was heard saying “That’s not us. It’s just the LGAs”.

The experts who built their careers trumpeting their commitment
to the vulnerable and disadvantaged
are silent, still grovelling for small favours like obedient dogs

Servants to the state with one foot
crushing the heads of the dying, so eager to help
masturbating at the fate of the poor
as the carnage flows
as the merchants of death conduct their deadly orchestra
with glee

The complicit media who fawned and enabled this symphony of sorrow
are starting to fidget and fuss
Some sense belatedly they are stakeholders too.
Their children will be sacrificed. Oh no.
A few speak out and finally ask the right questions
Too little too late.

A small group of besieged warriors
fought for what was right
but were silenced and destroyed
by the despots and their fawning colluders
by laws twisted to punish
those who dared to speak truth
North Korea style.
The righteous painted as bad guys.
Black is white
And white is black.
Some lost their jobs for speaking up.
While the posing pretenders climbed higher
on the bodies of the dead
and the mountains of their profit
shouting out their propaganda

We have to live with COVID!
Death is inevitable!

Michael Aiken

Michael Aiken is a four-time recipient of a unique and delightful child, and the founder, owner and servant-in-chief of Garden Lounge Creative Space, Sydney’s only specialist poetry shop and licenced café. His first poetry collection, A Vicious Example (Grand Parade 2014) was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize, the Mary Gilmore Prize and an Australian Book Design Award. His second book, the verse novel Satan Repentant (UWAP 2018) was commissioned by Australian Book Review for their inaugural Laureate’s Fellowship, as selected and mentored by David Malouf. His most recent poetry collection is The Little Book of Sunlight and Maggots (UWAP 2019).

 
 
Artemis, the moon, and a handball: nightscape

Playing with the moon
blue in my shadow
while you, my little guy
smile about slugs, treetops,
old school or new,
proper service during King’s Revenge…

Practicing your Spongebob voice
Schwamkopf,
silberschein
mein kinderlein, lÖcken
running on the field again
            
in peace

 

Elegy

There are no accidents
Said the turtle to the panda
Said the panda to the giant panda
Said the child to the man

and the man realises
he is a man

and the child goes on
realising nothing, realising little
of everything.

Nothing will come of nothing
a serpent consuming its tail

like it, a queen
the people talking

the Odyssey on its journey through space
family all put to sleep, the world 

all gone to sleep
the world all gone…

blonde god

Steps into water
don’t emerge

There are no accidents
You’re a great dad
I’ll be your mirror

Now the glass is absolute
elegy

Nathanael O’Reilly

Nathanael O’Reilly is an Irish-Australian residing in Texas. His books include (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020); BLUE (above/ground press, 2020); Preparations for Departure (UWAP, 2017), named a Book of the Year in Australian Book Review; Cult (Ginninderra Press, 2016); Distance (Ginninderra Press, 2015); Suburban Exile (Picaro Press, 2011); and Symptoms of Homesickness (Picaro Press, 2010). More than 200 of his poems have appeared in journals and anthologies published in thirteen countries, including Antipodes, Anthropocene, Backstory, Cordite, fourW, FourXFour, Headstuff, Marathon, Mascara, Postcolonial Text, Skylight 47, Snorkel, Strukturiss, Transnational Literature, Westerly and The Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2017.
 
 
 
From Ballarat to Brisbane

After Joe Brainard

I remember falling out of a pine tree
at number 2 Waller Avenue in Ballarat

I remember my eyes puffing up
after playing in waist-high grass
on the vacant block down the street
and the pretty nurse sticking
a needle in my bum at the hospital

I remember riding a black horse
sixteen hands high while wearing red
gumboots and red corduroy jeans

I remember burning my tongue
with tomato soup at recess
in the shelter shed
at Redan Primary School

I remember the neighbour’s German Shepherd
nipping at my arse when I scaled the fence
after retrieving a tennis ball from their backyard

I remember riding my red bike
into a puddle beside Lake Wendouree
sinking in mud up to my handlebars

I remember carving my initials
into a branch high up inside
the eucalyptus tree with a pocketknife

I remember breaking my mate’s thumb
while taking a mark playing footy
on the oval at lunchtime in grade one

I remember moving from Ballarat to Brisbane
when I was six – leaving behind my mates
and everything I’d ever known

I remember standing in the dirt driveway
of 50 Larbonya Crescent, Capalaba
on New Year’s Day thinking It’s 1980!

I remember my mate Ian finding a wallet
stuffed with eight fifty-dollar notes
at the shopping centre and buying
a dozen cinnamon doughnuts

I remember playing barefoot
lunchtime rugby and red rover
ripping uniforms and skinning knees

I remember the headmaster
summoning me to his office
giving me six of the best
for playing outside in the rain

Paul Dawson

Paul Dawson’s first book of poems, Imagining Winter (IP, 2006), won the national IP Picks Best Poetry award in 2006, and his work has been anthologised in Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013) and Harbour City Poems: Sydney in Verse 1888-2008 (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009). His poetry and fiction appear in journals such as Meanjin, Southerly, Westerly, Island, Overland, Cordite Poetry Review, Peril Magazine, Australian Poetry Journal and The Sydney Morning Herald. Paul is currently an Associate Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales.
 
 
 
Thanks for the poems, Covid-19

Here’s me, face-masked in a supermarket
swamped by white people, who are
angry all over again about the yellow peril
now an invisible airborne enemy speaking in tongues
through the inscrutable hospital-blue fabric
that obscures my features, that signals its silent intent
while I peer at the shelves, ensconced in the conch-shell

of my mask – until the bald, wobbly-eyed face of a
Woolworth’s worker appears suddenly beside me
and barks: ‘Social distancing still applies in here!’
Oh sorry, what was I doing? SOCIAL DISTANCING
STILL APPLIES IN HERE he repeats, as if I can’t hear
as if English escapes me, as if this is groundhog day
as if his words were a talisman to keep the threat at bay.
Yes, I say, but I don’t know what I was doing?

And then, from behind, a woman’s voice chimes in
to explain that she had complained because I
was blocking her path, now averting her gaze
as she swerves her trolley past, and I am left
with my own trapped breath, watching the worker
move on to stack shelves within hugging distance
of a white couple, within a whisper of their faces
as they contemplate trays of beef mince. I refrain
from repeating his talisman back to him

because really I want to scream it hysterically in his face
because I take it personally, because I’m not from, and have
never been, to China, because I know that’s the wrong response
and maybe this had nothing to do with race anyway
and why the fuck did I wear this mask in the first place?
And I can’t help but think of Pauline Hanson, circa the turn of the millennium
and all the incidents like this, which I thought had been eradicated

as if the trope of Asian contagion that lay dormant
while Islamic terrorism helped fashion Hanson’s comeback
has now been revived in a virulent new strain
that cannot be warded off by hoarding toilet paper
for this behaviour is every bit as Australian
as our coming together to battle the bushfires
that tear across the nation, and to be Asian-Australian
in a pandemic is – like hoarding – to be suddenly

un-Australian, where one minor encounter can unmask
the searing loss of belonging, the sense of
impotence, the persistent second-guessing
of one’s own thoughts, that typically present
as asymptomatic on all those inscrutable faces.

Vasilka Pateras

Vasilka Pateras is a Melbourne-based poet and emerging writer whose work is published in n-SCRIBE, Mediterranean Poetry, The Blue Nib and Poetry on the Move. She regularly reads as part of the Melbourne Spoken Word community.

 

 

Pusteno oro1

The curve of my spine
I sway
with the clarinet’s call
I am in its grip
pure majestic phrasing
scattered gradations
time signature
12/8
3+2+2+3+2

a gentle hop step of feet
if there was a verse this would be it
if there was a curse it would be my love
for the life of notes that gather as we gather
in the oro
3+2+2+3+2
a step in unison
in memory
a circle’s embrace
this is our protest
of release in the rattle and clack of
the drum
catching me

I wipe the sweat from my brow

the clarinet’s hold
into the unknown
people unstitched
frayed across new and old worlds
trying to pick up the lost stitch
in this I am found
3+2+2+3+2

 

Melbourne how do I love you?

Wominjeka
at Tullamarine
blazing glass
industry, billboards stream
flat grey basalt plains of the west
into freeway channels
of fast fast fast

how do I love you
true wog wogness of north
Veni vidi vici
market square of Preston
multi-language
multi-faith
multi–tribe
an escape
from the ravages of war
to tamed lions, eagles
white balustrades
lemon trees lemon scented
bitter sweet
fruit of dislocation

how do I love you
endless endless suburbs of east
Metricon, Glenville and anon
faux Provincial, Federation, Bungalow Californian
the home beautiful of
low maintenance thinking
to the row row of hedge groves

how do I love you
southern white-burbs
foreign beige of aspen
dales and vales
that sonorous
lap of bay
against the hush hush hush
away

how do I love you
oh Yarra, smell of brown
waste replete
the glass sheen of Maribyrnong,
canals of Elwood
concreted Moonee Ponds creek
do I dare dip my feet?

how do I love you
oh big city heart
Victorian genteel
Paris end
playground of successive elites
huddled laneways of mystery
artisanal, literary, labyrinths
cannibalised by capital
that cannot been seen
once crane adorned
now pandemic forlorn

oh Kulin Nation
of Naarm
people, country, language
with stories of legend and lore
I hail the cries for restitution
of what was
and is yours yours yours

 

FOOTNOTES

1. Translations from Macedonian:
pusteno – to release/let go/set free
oro – folk dance

Gemma Parker

Gemma Parker is a poet and a teacher at the University of Adelaide. Her poems and essays have been published in Transnational Literature, Award Winning Australian Writing, Writ Poetry Review and the Tokyo Poetry Journal. She was the 2016 winner of the Shoalhaven Literary Award for Poetry. She is a PhD Candidate at the University of Adelaide as part of the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. She is one of the project managers of the Raining Poetry in Adelaide festival for 2021. She lives in Adelaide with her husband Guillaume and their two children.

 

Studies in Moonlight

The sparkle on hickory or white-oak leaves seemingly wet with
moonlight strikes one to the heart. One suddenly misses the capital,
longing for a friend who could share the moment.

– Yoshida Kenkō (c.1283-1350)

I don’t even know
what a hickory leaf
looks like. I yearn

to write poems about moonlight,
the wet darkness, solitude.
Far from the light-noise of cities,

to write in a place of true night,
in the medicinal north.
To compose more

than opportunistic poems
about the marginalia of life.
Doesn’t one also miss

the rush of loneliness,
and long for distance
from every capital?

Samia Goudie

Samia Goudie is a Queer Bundjalung woman currently living on Ngunnawal country. She has published widely both as an academic working in health and the arts, and as a film and digital story maker. Samia is a member of Canberra based UsMob writers and FNAWN, First Nations Australian writers network. She has received an AFC mentor award for a short award winning film US Deadly mob and has had four documentaries screened and toured at festivals. Her various digital story projects are available on line and archived with the state library Old and FNQ’S Indigenous knowledge centres. Samia received a Fulbright fellowship in 2006 based around research in creative practices using digital story telling as a method to archive oral stories using new media and as a curative healing practice in First Nations communities dealing with intergenerational trauma. She has had multi media/word/installations and exhibitions of visual art and poetry at various locations including the Wollongong gallery, M16 gallery Canberra, ‘Territories’ at Laboratory of Arts and Media (LAM/LETA) University of Paris. Her multimedia/artwork has been is held in private collections nationally and internationally.
Samia has been publishing poetry and short stories more frequently over the last several years and has works published in the Southerly, IWP Iowa press, Wakefield press, Norton and Norton, 3CCmedia journal, Aiatsis Press, Too Deadly: Our Voice, Our way Our business (Us Mob Writers anthology), Giant Steps (2019) and What We Carry (2020), Recent Work Press and Routledge press. More recently she was highly commended for her submission to the Varuna First Nations Fellowship which gives access and support to Varuna’s residential writing space in the Blue Mountains. She has also won support and runner up with the Boundless Indigenous Writers Mentorships, supported by the NSW Writers centre and Text publishers, which matched her with Melissa Lucashenko as a mentor for her current work in progress, which is a novel.

 

Box

Won’t fit in The box

Hard edge
Cold steel
Sharp


Refuse, Resist

Don’t fit, won’t fit, can’t fit

Tried

Believe me I tried

Even the box rejected me

There must be something wrong

I contorted, twisted

My shape, my voice

My hair, my hands,

 

You even tried to alter my soul

I was never enough

Can’t fit

sit still

Move back
sit down
shut up

Refuse, Resist

 

Even when you medicate me,

debate about me,

label me,

Nah,

Aint nothing wrong

with my voice, my hands, MY shape

My gender, my colour

   who I am

I am large and round
have limbs bound with the roots of trees
I can touch the sky
Inhabit stars

Why would I give any of that up?

To fit in your box

It

There is fear haunting us in shadows

 Now walking amongst us in full sunlight

Unavoidable

My friend, tells me,

In her community nearly all the Elders lie dead.


There is fear haunting us in shadows

All those Stories gone
All the language lost

Who will teach the young?

Was it like this
When the tall ships sailed in?

Fear grips my broken heart

 

And now like the last cruel blow
her 11-year-old niece

                                               HAS
                                               It

 

There is fear haunting us in shadows

She attends funerals everyday

They drive hours to stand in long lines

hoping today they can get a Vaccine

Instead of body bags

She asks for prayers

Please pray for us

She always ends her posts,

                                               Miigwech

 

It’s raining here

I’m so far across the southern sky

Across the wide ocean

a dark afternoon

clouds brooding

Banksia’s dancing

                            oblivious

 

These days

On a good day

I spend time outside under open sky

 

Seeking solace where none seems possible

 

 There is fear haunting us in shadows

I choose to turn towards the sun

                                               Miigwech

NOTES

Miigwech means loosely, thank you, in Anishinaabemowin also known as Ojibwa. However, it has also a tone that conveys respect and request, recognition and integrity. Gratitude.

Marcelo Svirsky

Marcelo Svirsky is a Senior Lecturer at the School for Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong. He researches on questions of social transformation and subjectivity, decolonisation, settler-colonial societies and political -activism. He focuses on Palestine/Israel, and addresses these topics by drawing on continental European philosophy – particularly the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. He has published several articles in the journals Cultural PoliticsSubjectivityIntercultural EducationDeleuze Studies, and Settler Colonial Studies among others, and various books and edited collections: Deleuze and Political Activism (Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Arab-Jewish Activism in Israel-Palestine (Ashgate, 2012); Agamben and Colonialism with Simone Bignall (Edinburgh University Press, 2012); Collaborative Struggles in Australia and Israel-Palestine  (2014); After Israel: Towards Cultural Transformation (Zed Books, 2014), and together with Ronnen Ben-Arie – From Shared Life to Co-Resistance in Historic Palestine (Rowman & Littlefield International 2017).

 


Barren

Grown to provide
And for no other task,
That was the might,
Of those roses

On a shared soil,
They grew,
Just, and no more than,
To service life as roses

And when the spells changed,
Their house,
Forced by trade,
It was made barren.

Barren of a vile craving,
That sent you without regret,
Making the land a castle,
By giving harvest a name.

Of your tears and cries, barren,
Of your pain,
Barren, until your return…

 

‘Roses of Sharon’, refers to a field of roses in the Plain of Sharon in Palestine (Ottoman times). The photograph 1900-1905 was part of a collection that was initiated and published by Underwood and Underwood and was accompanied by the book Traveling in The Holy Land through the Stereoscope, written by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut. This photograph, was presented in March 2017 as part of the exhibition ‘Time Machine: Stereoscopic Views from Palestine, 1900’, at Brown University (US) and curated by Ariella Azoulay and Issam Nassar.