January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Johanna Featherstone is a Sydney-based poet and founder and Artistic Director of The Red Room Company: www.redroomcompany.org.
After the Funeral
Family space vibrates with Grampa’s past effects;
to the left shoulder of an elegant desk, a square
gold frame holding the smile of his son,
dead at twelve year’s old. Toiletries, wallet things,
collected from the hospital, weigh down the single
bed that recently held his butterfly body.
On the dresser, pollen flakes from a posy of blue
cornflowers, pulled from their garden plot.
Dust particles through light, fuzz forms atop
rubbish bags, packed with his clothes, for the tip.
The Fernery
Ferns shroud the bench where I sit.
Each frond settles in its own moist corner,
a rivulet trickles beneath the simple teak bridge.
Moments grow. Then your shape enters the
miniature jungle. Our bodies cowled in vines;
plants and ants witness our licks, until tourists
with cameras snap open the yielding bodies –
and we run from the radiance, leaving behind
(for next time)
the filtered light and vanishing faces of mist.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Andy Jackson lives in Melbourne, Australia, and writes poetry exploring the body, identity and marginality. He has been published in a wide variety of print and on-line journals; received grants from the Australia Council and Arts Victoria, and a mentorship from the Australian Society of Authors; and featured at events and festivals such as Australian Poetry Festival, Queensland Poetry Festival, Newcastle Young Writers Festival and Overload Poetry Festival. Most recently, he was awarded the Rosemary Dobson Prize for Poetry, and is currently a Café Poet in Residence for the Australian Poetry Centre. His most recent collection of poems, Among the Regulars, is scheduled for release by papertiger media later in 2009.
Ghazal
Why do you smother your soul in that fist still?
This wound will open and heal itself – just sit still.
Sheer will’s not enough. Floating past like dropped pollen –
all these tree-borne thoughts your intellect has missed, still.
The country doesn’t care for you, the earth craves your bones.
All your machines will only make you an atavist. Still,
who are you but your tics and eruptions, your prosthetics
and open holes? A flower is much more than its pistil.
Sand is not ground but a crowd. The ocean knows this.
However bitter the wind, the shore must still be kissed.
Press your thumb into these bruises, your forehead
to the earth, and face the unbreakable tryst. Still
water? A trick your mind plays, persuasive as a mother
tongue or god. Beyond the city’s grid, thick mist still
waits in the deep valley for your water-logged body.
Dream of becoming bread, oh grain – you are grist, still.
Not the smoke or the wick or the shadow on the wall,
moth, but the flame, which cannot exist if still.
Something else
Since the door was locked, I’ve learnt so much.
A face can feel the sun yet forget what it’s for.
Bars obscure the world, shrink the room
to stand up, take a few steps. Legs buckle
under the weight of a body with no soul.
At intervals I’m fed, given medication. The walls
absorb the smell of those who arrived and left.
Only the press release escapes.
I have no desire to lash out. The voices are calm
and impersonal – the risk to the public
still not low enough. These wings
are withered and pecked to the bone
and see the future, like the sky, is an open
lie. Everything is a weapon.
Refusing food, speechless, I speak
the only dialect left. Outside are people
who say they wouldn’t treat an animal like this,
their faces averted like statues, ideal humans.
My life depends on us becoming something else.
Comfortable
My instinct’s to curse myself –
the shore is a wall of fire, my city sings
its people into fuel, the rotten pillars
of the jetty creak their warnings, while
this boat of bones tugs at its moorings.
Yet each rope I approach with the knife
has become a throat my heart can’t cut.
Instead, alone, at night I pace the hull
and scrutinise each knot – these twisted
lines, old stories which hold me here,
a half-brave face raised, my fear
the sea could be a mirage.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Eileen Chong is a Singapore-born, Sydney-based writer and photographer. An essay of hers was published in Hecate in 2008. Her poetry has appeared in the first issue of Meanjin this year. Her Polaroid photography has been featured in D2, a Norwegian arts magazine. She lives with her husband and two moggy cats.
What a poem is
A poem is a heavy thing. It weighs
as you scrub the potatoes,
rub them with salt, then decide
to boil them instead. A poem
is a heavy thing. You carry its strain
as you lay plates on the table, as you set
out cutlery. A poem is
a heavy thing. Even the brownness
of the chicken’s skin reminds you
of your grandfather’s hands
in the dirt. Of his feet on the deck
when he caught the fish. A poem is a heavy
thing. You’d wanted greens
but instead bought beansprouts, pale
with their arching necks, tails intact
because you couldn’t bear the smell
of your grandmother’s hours
at the sink: plucking, washing, plucking.
A poem is a heavy thing.
When your husband comes
home from work, you think
man, labour, dust, evensong
as he kisses you and asks
how your day was. Heavy,
you tell him. Heavy.
Blue Velvet
I bought her those shoes. I was the only one
who ever bought her shoes. I knew her
size. I knew what she liked. She’d always
picked on me, but I was the only one
who ever bought her shoes
in her size that she liked.
She had told her oldest son
that when death called
for her, she wanted to be wearing
those shoes. He said
they were house slippers, too flimsy
for her walk in the other world.
Yet in the end, afraid, he gave me
the shoes – hand-embroidered
with phoenixes decked out
in sequins, gold thread, green
beads for eyes – I sheathed
the old lady’s cold, rigid feet.
Thank god I had bought them
in blue, not red. She would not
have been allowed to been buried
in anything red. Not unless we wanted her
to come back from the dead, shuffling
in those slippers, going to the courtyard
to beat the night’s blankets
in the dawning sun.
Summer in London
Summer in London is not
to be experienced without
a raincoat and an umbrella.
London cabs are big and black
but their drivers are not. The British Museum
is a collection of loot. The pubs
are the same as English pubs everywhere. The food
is awful. The train stations are beautiful
with their skeletons of efficiency
and clockwork hearts. Trains coming
and leaving like lovers, disgorging passengers
like bile. The Underground is exciting, but only
in name. The warrens smell
of pee. The streets have the same names
as the streets in Singapore, in Australia.
We’ve all dreamt
of Piccadilly Circus. Mine is complete
with horse-cabs, bobbies and whips. It turns out to be
just a rather large roundabout. The hotel
is not grandiose. The bed
has broken springs. At night I turn to you
but, your back hurting, you face
away. I close my eyes
but London calls. My London
with its clocks and castles and
the will-o-the-wisp shimmering
over the moonlit moors.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anindita Sengupta’s full-length collection of poems City of Water was published by Sahitya Akademi earlier this year. Her work has previously been published in several journals including Eclectica, NthPosition, Quay, Yellow Medicine Review, Origami Condom, Pratilipi, Cha: An Asian Journal, Kritya, and Muse India. It has also appeared in the anthologies Mosaic (Unisun, 2008), Not A Muse (Haven Books, 2009), and Poetry with Prakriti (Prakriti Foundation, 2010). In 2008, she received the Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing and in 2010, she received a writer’s fellowship from the Charles Wallace India Trust for the University of Kent, England. She has contributed articles to The Guardian (UK), The Hindu, Outlook Traveler and Bangalore Mirror. She is also founder-editor of Ultra Violet, a site for contemporary feminism in India.
Entropy
(to grandfather)
A fuchsia scatter in the courtyard:
the bougainvillea dishevels.
Sheila and I squat on the back porch
where the clothesline frays in the wind.
Elephant grass gnaws at cement
and a spider silks the windows shut.
‘Weeds have outgrown
mangoes this year,’ she says,
rubbing her sheared head
with one hand. I light a cigarette.
We drag quick and sharp,
as if you’ll still tap down
the garden path, find us there,
grown-up children,
shame us with a frown.
The house falls in flecks—
our clutch of childhood
now wasteland, warm dust,
wormhole.
Storm-Chasing
I came to find the essence of it,
to taste on my tongue its whiteness
like sugar crystals.
I came for the blur and hurry,
the blurry hurl, the hurly-burly
of devastation.
I rattled up in a red jeep, battling
eyes open against wind.
Past my window flew bits of paper,
tin cans, a shirt from a forgotten clothesline.
I hunkered down, gripped the wheel,
and pressed my big toe
on the accelerator. (Speed was essential.
It would distract me from fear.)
I came for the infinite moment.
I came to chill the tornado’s coil
around me like a giant python.
I came to risk blood.
I came to inhale the un-breathable breath
and fill up like a balloon.
I came to burst or rise,
to dazzle through air like Dorothy,
to dissolve like stardust.
I came to find that one moment
when nothing mattered. Not sex
or sin or ache. Not even love.
There are things a storm can do to you, darling,
that you wouldn’t imagine.
We left Bombay to start over
We left Bombay to start over.
It was tumbling rain and vegetarians.
Strings of sausage, once hung like rosaries
at grocery stores, were replaced with rows
of frozen peas. Orange flags had gagged
lesbian flicks. Between polls and pools,
we didn’t know which was dirtier.
A stampede was due.
We left because there was money to be made
in a city with thighs of steel. We left
because hope is tiny and lodges
between a man’s ribs like cancer. But mostly,
we left because we were promised things.
We flew south like geese, twigged a nest
in the outsider neighborhood.
Flyovers flayed the city
but none would hook us across.
We didn’t know that then.
I sat in cafés, scrabbled for love,
stashed postcards like stamps,
tried to stop sneezing.
There comes a time
when home and home
begin to sound the same.
That hasn’t happened yet.
But I’m told a decade’s
too short.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Vikram Teva Raj is a 24-year-old Singaporean in his second year of a Bachelor of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. These two poems are his first published pieces. “An Old Vintage” was inspired by a Chinese rentmate, while “My Turkish Rentmate at 37” was about a Turkish rentmate, now 38. He lives comfortably, on account of never having shown them the things.
An Old Vintage
For Tony
A bird is long dead by my pathway home,
frosted over in the humidity of spring and stiff,
a crumbling baseball glove sloughed down to just the dark palm
and a taut white finger pointing down the road.
Here is our garden with the pruned tree
that in its day never failed to raid our laundry,
its green scissor-fingers now excised,
ghost limbs capped by beige fingernails
tight around a new feathering
like the shattered telltales of a more meaty diet.
The clouds are crossing like crazed yarn on a dark loom
that promises cold fire tailing up the breath of the road
right through my balcony door: a sliding grille under strong fabric
that you might expect to keep the rain inside down to a vague dust
but which is more like a fan leaning water in out of the wet.
Now I see a hand forming in the sky,
a long, ornate jester’s cap twisting slowly
like a compound whale, wrung by an invisible fist
to spout from each teat a slow, heavy liquid,
decanting the length of each belly
to filter down muslin miles to land.
As the rain’s curtains snap in the wind and the ground outside
trembles like a tight sail, I see again through unformed crystal
my Chinese father, pouring warm wine out for my new family,
pledging a dowry of close-smelling currency
sealed by the ancient unlit tallow
that melts between changing hands.
My Turkish Rentmate at 37
Reminiscent of NatGeo pics
of that sea eyed Afghan girl
before and after ten adult years,
her face clearly once magnificent
ravaged by her Turkish life spent
designing Renault dashboards
and famous brands of fridge.
She stutters around in English
asking our rentmate the unhappy professor
horrible, tactless things he patiently answers
like she was his wayward first son
paying attention again.
Coming in, she didn’t hide her disgust
at how moth-eaten the place was.
She gave up and then a week later
everything was new and she’d got herself a TV,
silently mouthing along with old Hollywood.
She was going to learn accounting
but her own balance meant a bad job now
but she thinks a hairdressing course
would be hard money in the long run.
The other day her door was open.
Table, toiletry bag, carpet, window,
it was all grey save her white down jacket
and black TV: dust-free,
her own Gone With The Dead
of windrows of ash neat enough
for answering machines.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Liam Ferney is a former poetry editor of Australian online magazine, Cordite. His first collection Popular Mechanics was published by Interactive Press in 2005. He lives in Brisbane, Queensland.
“Room 14, please.”
Apparently Singapore is an island.
At the expat bakery
desperate for a macchiato.
It has been years since mangoes
& I wonder if too much rice
leads to forsaken cereal
while Obama wins a primary & Rudd says sorry.
The days between dispatches
have grown long & I can’t
gurney the dust from my knees.
& the noise from next door,
as unlikely as it seems,
a muezzin’s call to morning prayers.
Portraits of Famous People
“Even when the subject is different,
people paint the same painting.”
Andy Warhol
for Luke
It was supposed to have been a gift. When she asked for it back he had turned to stand in the doorway, as elegant as an apartment block. As rugged as William Holden he held secrets like trump cards. There was a right time for martinis but that had passed. “You were always going to leave,” she said. As wistfully as an unbeliever’s incantation. And he looked beyond the Bugatti appliances, out towards the balcony. This city was no grid. The characters: just imagined. And when the hour passed it disappeared. A click, indistinct from the 3600 that had proceeded it.
Houses of Neglect
A door ajar, the louvered window
through to a retreating brown roof,
the tips of the gums fingerpoking
into the oil paint perfect blue sky.
To win at this game you’ve got to lose;
every jazz man propping up a bar
scatting along with Trane about the one
that got away attests to this.
The problem is familiarity,
slipping in and out
of it’s private school uniform
forgetting that every star
is for someone a setting sun.
To avoid didacticism and melodrama
you play like a politician and keep it obtuse
not letting on, you still don’t understand
what it was you did
to leave everything as busted as a Nissan Pulsar
the colour of curdled milk, weeds pushing
through the floor in late summer humidity
like oil in a Texas dirtbowl.
The neighborhood cottoning on
and the parts start to disappear,
first the radio, then the battery, the alternator
some hoon strips the tyres before
the last cheeky monkey flogs the engine.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Alex Skovron was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and came to Australia aged nine. He is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Autographs (prose-poems, 2008), as well as a prose novella, The Poet (2005). Awards for his poetry include the Wesley Michel Wright Prize, the John Shaw Neilson Award, the Australian Book Review Poetry Prize, and for his first book, The Rearrangement (1988), the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore awards. His novella was joint winner of the FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction. He lives in Melbourne and works as a freelance editor.
The Mist
We chased each other, childish, hilarious,
Round and around the lit kitchen table
That multiplied for cardgames, meals, painting
Of eggs at Easter, shelling of beans.
As I swerved laps of tablecloth – the mirth
Of the occasion as much a mystery
As a measure of the reason for itself –
A futileness, strange but convivial,
Passed like a limpid mist across the memory
Of something I had yet no right to know.
As if you think you could catch me, is one way
The mist translates itself. As if it matters …
It was a moment of pure insight, distilling
A recognition sharper than wisdom –
Bright as a giggle, its closing ellipsis
Muffled in the frenzy of our running.
The point, it laughed, and I understood:
Whether or not they caught me round that table
Was not the point. What mattered
Was the clamour of their wanting, the complicity
Of wood, the night at the window, the clock
And the crockery trembling above us,
The playcards scattered, our conspiracy
Of laughter – and most precious of all,
That shiver of a question, fleeting, permanent,
As if it could ever let go of me …
Night-Errand
A man lies awake gazing
at the curtain into the past
that hangs in front of his eyes.
He can discern shifting images
beyond the delicate gauze
and the ache in his diaphragm
Is pleasure and regret,
the silent curlicues of desire
trapped in the chamber’s gloom.
The future is hurting
but he knows nothing about the future,
he traces the trembled outlines
Of each dancing apparition
(for each dancing apparition is
himself), and struggles for focus.
He strains to re-enter
the cathedral of the past, it is prayer
(the past is prayer)
And he could worship there
if only the gauze would clear
and he touch the flesh
Of history. Because he needs
to know again, know
again, he needs to touch
The outlines, pry them apart,
push his entire being
into every last one of them
And maybe then, maybe
then he would know
why the curtain is forever
Stirring in the breeze
of his desires, why the gauze
shimmers like reprimand,
And why each curlicue
of the music that breathes him
is singing the irony of time.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jenny Lewis is a poet, children’s author, playwright and song writer. Her last collection, Fathom, was published by Oxford Poets/ Carcanet in 2007. She has been commissioned by Pegasus Theatre, Oxford to write a verse drama, After Gilgamesh to be performed in March 2011. She is also working on a linked collection of poetry, Taking Mesopotamia, for which she has received a generous grant from Arts Council South East. She teaches poetry at Oxford University.
Photograph by Frances Kiernan
Maker
for Pedro Bosch
this is the place where broken
things come to rest from their brokenness
they can’t get the taste of terracotta
out of their mouths
they know they came from mud,
only yesterday
they were a substance
to be walked on
now their bridles, palms, trunks,
wings hold unexplained shadows
the moon
eyes the world from their jagged holes
above them, peacocks roost in the trees –
Neem, Arjuna and the Banyan
under which Krishna sat
scooping butter
the bark’s twisted textures
are ropes going into the earth
resting before the spring burst
of growth, green after green
reaching for the sky with its
shattering light.
Silver Oak
Instead of heat and light
grey shrouds:
each morning a burial
we fight our way out of
grevillea robusta –
a sentinel of stillness
seen through muslin –
would look at home
snow-covered
among the tundra’s herds
and frozen, sea-lapped edges:
yet this is India too,
her private winter face
cleansed and secretive
in her dressing table mirror
with thoughts of spring
a world turned away from –
the make-up and saris,
the razzmatazz of blossom.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Indran Amirthanayagam was born in Colombo. He migrated to London and then to Hawaii with his parents.
His first book The Elephants of Reckoning won the 1994 Paterson Prize in the United States. His poem "Juarez" won the Juegos Florales of Guaymas, Mexico in 2006. Amirthanayagam has written five books thus far: The Splintered Face Tsunami Poems (Hanging Loose Press, March 2008), Ceylon R.I.P. (The International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2001), El Hombre Que Recoge Nidos (Resistencia/CONARTE, Mexico, 2005) El Infierno de los Pajaros (Resistencia, Mexico, 2001), The Elephants of Reckoning (Hanging Loose Press, 1993).
Amirthanayagam is a poet, essayist and translator in English, Spanish and French. His essays and poems have appeared in The Hindu, The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, El Norte, Reforma, New York/Newsday, The Daily News, The Island, The Daily Mirror, Groundviews (Sri Lanka). Amirthanayagam is a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow and a past recipient of an award from the US/Mexico Fund for Culture for his translations of Mexican poet Manuel Ulacia. Translations of poet Jose Eugenio Sanchez have appeared online. Two other Spanish collections and a collection of poems about Sri Lanka are under preparation.
Bomb Picking
My friend says
that where ashes
fall from the grill
nothing grows,
not even weeds,
for a year. Imagine
recovering land
from artillery
shells, cluster
bombs shattered
and multiplied,
the sheer slow
picking up
of signals
with metal rods,
mistakes,
explosions.
I heard today
that removing
the world’s
unexploded bombs
would take
five or six or ten
thousand years,
I don’t have
the exact number
–an elusive target–
don’t know how
many more devices
will drop in 2009.
Smoke Signal
The sense
of a life,
dousing body
in gasoline,
ablaze
before Lake
Geneva,
brought back
to London
for burial,
sacrifice
conducted
in exile,
a funeral,
valued
news item,
drawing
attention
to burning
of family
in Vanni
while
numbed,
comatose,
Tamils
wake up
abroad
to light
stoves
to make
coffee
and read
about
their pyre
burning
crisply
in Swiss
air
outside
UNHCR
The Big Eye
When Orwell wrote that war is peace
literature may have solved hypocrisy
once and for all, and new generations
of politicians learned his lesson
in their graduate programs, or on the job,
paying heed as a result to eyewitness
accounts of atrocities committed
by the good army liberating
the Vanni from Tiger devils.
The fact that the same eyewitnesses
speak of convoys of wounded
and dying blocked by the devils
gives their accounts an appearance
of impartiality, seriousness,
but as the man in charge
in the capital said, there are only
four of these international observers
and the rest are locals and all
are subject to Tiger pressure.
Locals certainly cannot be trusted.
They speak Tamil and live
in harmony with cousins
in Chennai and are suspicious
of detention camps where
we welcome entire families
to eat and live, watched,
protected, in peace.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Carol Chan is Singaporean. Her writing has been performed and published in Singapore, Edinburgh and Melbourne, including Meanjin, WetInk, and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. She’s currently researching her honours thesis in anthropology at the University of Melbourne.
Two Drifters
There is no room for adventure
now, you say. Everything
has been discovered. There is nothing left
that hopes to be found; we were born
too late to be heroes now.
But the British were not the only dreamers
and explorers; only think
what India must have known
before the British claimed this knowledge
as their own. This history was lying
there all along, safe in the precious day.
India was not an imagined country,
nor have we invented the other.
What I’m trying to tell you now, love,
is that there is still room enough
for us to be heroes yet.
Getting to Vienna
The night we missed our flight to Slovakia, we lay
in Edinburgh, thinking of the still pair of empty seats
on the plane that has always been leaving;
those two unslept beds that will never know
the weight of ourselves;
the unwalked streets, unembraced cold of Slovakia
in the morning that will come.
That morning came. We caught another flight to Prague
instead, not to get to Prague, but to find ourselves
on the Vienna-bound train, back on track,
why we meant to go to Slovakia at all.
This wasn’t how things were supposed to be.
It is only now that we remember who creates the world
by the second. This train moves no-one but our bodies
towards a place of our dreaming.
This world, these possible worlds, are in our hands,
at our feet. On the moon. Somewhere,
a phone is ringing, and the news depends
on whoever there is to answer it.
What We Talk About
How to brew coffee. With a kopi-sock,
or a press-pot. What a press-pot is.
In winter, we talk about winter.
Anthropology. Poetry.
Suppressed sentiments in Bedouin desert tribes.
Identify these in our own.
We talk about scientists trying
to make things work, though not so much
the trying. How we brew coffee.