January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Anne Elvey’s poems have appeared in journals, including most recently Blue Dog, Cordite, Island and Westerly and in The Best Australian Poems 2009 (Black Inc.). Her first chapbook Stolen Heath was published by Melbourne Poets Union in 2009. Her research and writing is supported by the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, and Melbourne College of Divinity.
lacing and unlacing her song
The ear is a window where she transfers
a blue wren. Her song
is a cat’s tail curved
round the air when her fingers
bend to the strings. And her bow
is an oar, striding a river.
She ties up to a she-oak, shakes
its raindrop chandelier. The rest
becomes a body, composed
to chocolate and wine. Bread.
A magpie. Weeds trodden into
loam. A stump
where insects trace their graffiti.
The perfume of fennel. Wild.
Her touch says wood and gut.
***
At home the frame bends.
With use a string frays.
All night she will play
shadow puppets on a wall.
They disappear when the day awakens
beside her score.
And unlacing her song, she laces
her song with the remembered scale
of her years.
memento: the manuscript under may hand is/not written
The verse etched on a tree selects
a variety of media to represent itself.
On the smooth trunk where the bark has peeled—
such a robust street tree, thick
and rugged, not that I’d lean into it—
is the kind of word this land leaves
on things, neither exodus nor crucifixion,
but a slow tapping into soil, a writing outward
of time that was rock and clay and an everywhere
sky. With its dense foliage this is not a tree
for a clearing. Cars’ fumes create their own
mass and insects travel woody
roads eeking through age, so that I wonder
do they hear the tree as it makes itself?
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Claire Potter was a Poets Union Fellow in 2006. She is author of two chapbooks, In Front of a Comma (Poets Union, 2006) and N’ombre (Vagabond, 2007). Her first full-length collection, Swallow, will be published this October (Five Islands Press). She lives and works in London.
Our Lady Of The Cave
From the ancient tale,
the miniature cries come to me
and I see what the monk saw
in the folds of the woman’s cape:
hundreds of young birds
in a maze of warm silence
and her arms stretching out
into the blue timbre of morning
The woman softly
ushered the birds away, said they were
no longer sleeping, promised the anxious monk
that the swallows would return and fill his hallowed
parish with the credence of vagrancy––
for what is unsettling in nymphs
is celebrated in tiny birds
Genet Lesson
Three metres apart It’s snowing & tiny fronds of ice zigzag
between us I reach across to you but knock a mirror––
realise you are on my other side turn
right–– you are not there left and you are blue,
from out of the
hand from the mirror takes mine & you reappear
this time dressed in Chaplin frill of dark mist edges you
nicely & I’d like to take a picture but have only an umbrella
decaying flowers, violets of which the bouquet, lest we forget, becomes
an umbrella, and vice-versa: the umbrellas are like bouquets,
and the bouquets are like umbrellas…
Suddenly, loss of order & receding Is, is
as is whatever really right?
Three metres apart but never so well expressed
of open air
O my rose you whisper
tap-dancing to curtain fall
encore?
The Tea Leaf Party
My fretting friend & I
we’ll go slow tomorrow morning
not wasting any time––
We’ll trampoline trivial love
off the city pitches, spit
sugarplums and
heckle daisies with
ears pressed firmly to the ground
We’ll girdle all bleached
histories, skip
outside the radiation hoops
and below bad-mannered moustaches,
bray in raspy voices
to scare birds who open fire
from diamonds cut from sky
––Francis, come let me cradle
the qualms of your rocking suns
darn your memory pockets
with skeins of tightrope pulled
from a far-off star
and to the banksias who raise their
fiery brushes, the thurifers
will resurrect light
across our barren ground
to a clearing of the Sound
where ribaldry and tea
are taken not instinctively
but to catch leaves before they brown
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Yvette Holt heralds from the Bidjara Nation of Queensland, born and raised in Brisbane, Yvette is a multi-award winning poet, academic and feminist. She has lectured on Aboriginal Women Studies and Australian History in an Indigenous Context at the University of Queensland and the Australian Catholic University respectively. Her research has been in Indigenous Australian literature with a particular focus on Aboriginal womens’ poetry, Yvette is also a passionate advocate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and their leadership on a state and national level.
Her prizes include the Scanlon Prize, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing for her collection, Anonymous Premonition, and the 2010 Kate Challis Award.
Always My Lover
my lover the colour of candescent brandy seducing an Indian summer/
my lover the reason I leave diamond kisses scattered across an auburn, morning waist/
my lover, skin sweeter then Belgian chocolate dusted with perfumed spices/
my lover amethyst fingers endlessly melting every breath behind my sigh/
my lover the reason I read poetry to our unsuspecting goldfish/
always my love, forever my lover/
Motherhood
(Dedicated to Cheyenne Holt)
I love my suburban backyard and sharing it with you
lying on the trampoline just mother and daughter
and making funny animal shapes out of the soft marshmallow clouds
then when night falls we begin to count the twinkling stars on our hands and feet laughing at the passing
red kangaroos flying high above our mango tree
I love watching you transplant a leaf from our garden as you impatiently wait for it to grow
sometimes I squint while trying on new clothes in front of her though because no matter what I buy or choose to wear I always seem to
end up looking like a six foot-tall full-figured Barbie doll or maybe even a Ken
I like playing big sissy with you and rolling around on my bed, begging you to stop tickling me until I fall hard
onto the floor then I get all too serious and fed up but you just laugh hysterically and say ‘C’mon mummy that was
fun let’s do it again’
I look forward to dancing with you every Sunday morning and singing ‘I am woman hear me roar’ karaoke style
with my tired and worn-out hair brush
I love calling you from interstate and telling you I’ll be home tomorrow
there are so many things I love about motherhood but we keep it real and have our fair share of difficult moments
too like homework time, always radioactive in our neck of the woods, or asking her to clean out her bedroom for
the umpteenth time because I’m unable to see the carpet
and yes I know I totally freaked out when you told your school friends that Mr. Bean was really your father
because at the next P & C meeting I felt like the black adder
but through it all if motherhood were a mountain then you’ve taken me to the highest peak and if daughters were
flowers growing in the garden
you would always be me one and only sweet
Trippin’Over Your Tongue
The littering of literature fills my living space
I break and enter like a thief in the night
Selling my words on the black market page
Pawning my thoughts for a night on the town
Then peeling the label from a bus shelter wall
Trading my soul for a leather bound classic
Collecting collectibles
Like a crazed butterfly
Embracing your tongue
Before you have spoken
Recycling your dreams
Triggering my pen
Before I commence
Exchanging your whisper
For a reloaded quill
Sifting through texture on
The black poet’s corner
Moulding your ideas
Into something more or less
Bringing to boil
A melting pot of languages
Simmering over time
Sprinkling through the ages
To be or not to be
Obesity of our words
Gathering up the pounds
Charring the midnight ink
“Motherhood” and “Tirppin’ Over Your Tongue” first appeared in Anonymous Premonition, (University of Queensland Press, 2008)
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Deepika Arwind, 23, is a poet, writer and journalist based out of Bangalore, India. Her poems have appeared in Indian poetry anthologies and poetry journals. She has also read poetry at festivals like the Poetry with Prakriti Festival in Chennai, and won several poetry prizes. She is currently working on short fiction.
The heart is a child
sings the man with the voice of
a sinking boat. Hear, how water
ruptures him.
On the lake-fringe, between us,I am bored –
even with my foot on your crotch and your
lips syncing lullabies of romance.
Our hearts are expanses, not organs
like the Indian railways are an experience,
not a network of trains? you say.
But I’d rather eat up the city’s old charms – than your
clever metaphor –its barrage of baraats, the sound
of tomorrow’s kites in the wind. I’m so bored.
And you, between stomach and thigh are limp.
You begin: But to love is to be –
I listen (as if) unaware of the mild
backlash of our love.
(baraat: marriage procession)
The Studio (I)
Where the riot began
The man I will remember –
dull turban, pleated eyebrows,
black spectacle frames, the eyes that spit
the Bhagat Singh variety of courage, that look –
he ousted the topper of the class
the look that says: I will be alive at 69, because
I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, and I will only cry when
Saira Banu dies.
Scanty beard of pubescent modesty
with it – the fear of being reckless
the heart through the thin polyester shirt
and pocket-tucked ink pen
the heart through the polyester
shirt, narrow chest, its inevitable broadness
the heart through the shirt
the boyish arm, slim kada,
the heart that knows these are the 60s,
his belly burning with fireflies –
that taut heart ablaze in his eyes.
The man I will remember is agog in
a clear day’s monochrome.
But the man will remember the studio,
much later a cycle garage.
(kada: a religious bangle worn by Sikhs, Saira Banu: a famous Hindi film actress of the 1960s, 70s, 80s.)
II)
It may be Bilaspur. But we may never know.
She sits before a flattened tin of odd things –
safety pins and bottle lids –
in which chocolates were brought to her from Denmark.
(from a member of her feudal family, now dissolving into
the modern-moneyed world.)
Behind her, the ornate wallpaper,
from which she can dress a thousand dolls.
It must be early evening.
Before the jalebis are fried outside the studio.
Before she moves her darting eyes lined with kohl,
she lights up the street for Amma, with the
light of every mosque and sweet shop in this small town,
before she says to Amma, I want to go, but you can’t see,
she is told to run along
she lifts her ferozy frock to avoid
soiling its frayed crocheted piping,
Before Amma screams a murder of crows in high-pitched chorus:
“Firdaus, bhaaaag!”
Before the mob sweeps her in a swift moment
leaving behind a small round of ochre and the flies around it.
But we may never know.
(Amma: mother, Jalebis: An fried fried sweet, ferozy: turquoise, “bhaaag!: ruuun!”)
After the torso
comes longing. The odd rocket of desire
that picks up and loses orbit, but not at will.
Do you remember –
how aroused you were when you brought your feet
home, bleeding from hanging too long on bus footboards?
Then we pressed like jigsaw.
(After that we would never be pre-torso.)
is a gentle road. The universe of
the lower limb, the use in desperation to leave to run to come
back fill full circles stretch in love and sun to sweep with slippers
on filth to snake through sand and water.
There must always be afternoon after the torso and the creak
of a bone, sighing, like a novel at its end.
is a deluge of carnivals in the sea, swaying to the
sound of a slow fuck. A tireless hole of cum, its drip,
enunciated by your hips.
After the torso is defiance, a very brief
critique of authority.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Oscar Tantoco Serquina, Jr. currently serves as an instructor in the University of the Philippines-Diliman, where he finished his BA degree major in Speech Communication. He was a fellow for poetry in the 10th UST National Writers Workshop and the 49th Siliman National Writers Workshop. His works have been published in several online journals, like Writers’ Bloc, The Houston Literary Review, and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. He maintains a blog, http://lettersinthedark.wordpress.com
One Can Be So Sure
The feel of our bodies locking
on each other—that is everything
we know about ourselves, as these days
are scaled down to their ultimate
sensation. We are snug with such relief,
such release, having shared all this
in numerous places: in malls and cafes,
in bars and cheap inns, in the accommodating
rooms of our parentless houses. And how,
in the endless hours of mourning over
our losses, romance rescues our beaten
lives, like a common alibi. Nothing
is gravely given—not our careless actions,
nor the labels in which we are nastily
forced into, nor the acerbic arguments
we have the mornings after. And if only
we could avoid the appetite of a touch,
the appeal of a private hour, the startling
slipping into showers. But there, at the end,
is our full surrender, arranging itself
like a tempting foreplay. We have known
better, of course. That when we talk
about these matters, with crassness
or caress, they end up as casualties
of our brazen indifference. If this becomes
our one and all, the huge wall that separates us
from the rest—so be it. Let the real
and the fake be blurred and blundered,
let the rumors stale in the grimy sink,
let the stink of our week-
old clothes concretize inside the hamper,
the unanswered calls summarize what we
shamelessly mean. Unfazed, we are left with this
sincerity: you, assured, me, assuring.
It Has To Be Done
Trying to make sense of things, he remains
With her in a park, under a gunmetal sky,
In a terrain that collects and collapses itself
Like a heap of debris. He is attempting to be one
With her, to position himself in the boundary
Of owning and letting go. I’m having a good time,
She says to him, expectations chaining together
In every syllable she makes, as if unready to accept
A pending sorrow. But what does it mean
When he finds no vigor to unlock her
Understatements, always furtive, always adrift in air?
He stares at the bunch of roses being sold
At the corner, their redness saying something
To him—a ridicule perhaps, or a conscience
That needs to be welcomed. At sundown,
The obligatory strolling down around the area, the fingers hinting
On intimacy. After a while everything recedes
From the view: the gush of delight, the urgency.
And all at once the conclusion dawns on him,
Cause after cause, effect after effect.
He is no longer lying to himself.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
In 2009 Stuart Barnes’s unpublished memoir, A Cold Decade was shortlisted for the Olvar Wood Fellowship Award; and his poem “Solomon” was shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. He lives in Melbourne.
Blood Taken
God’s grey waiting room
eyes like stray cats’
stench
of rotting compost
patients spin between doctors
like coloured tops between children
a transaction:
questions,
answers
tests specified on paper
in puzzling Latin
roll call: the nurse
hums a golden
oldie like a vampire
blackout
Observations
The men are perfect:
Sargasso Sea eyes,
shoulders square as Spanish villas,
chests like polished bronze breastplates.
They dance, they do not speak.
Perfection is a crime:
like incest,
it cannot be forgiven.
The men are too perfect:
they are strange untouchables,
they slide over mortals
like oil over water.
Perfection is an anchor.
The men are imperfect:
they dance, but they do not dare,
and they do not think.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Zhuang Yusa lives in Singapore. His poetry has been published in Sargasso (Puerto Rico), ditch, (Canada), The Toronto Quarterly, Ganymede, The Los Angeles Review, nth position and elsewhere. His poetry has also been anthologized in Ganymede Poets Vol. One (Ganymede Books, 2009) and Smoke (Poets Wear Prada, 2009).
Thoughts In An Easier Time
Isn’t torture
at heart a refusal
to get used to
a compromised life?
The acceptance is not
the pardon:
the flesh is weak; the tormentors
hold the proof
by the joints of its limbs
and a hammer –
The mind is weak; the flesh
poisons with its blood
in easier times.
The spirit flees the body
with a scream
that isn’t heard.
The spirit enters the body
without pity
when it is broken enough.
You are dead to me, the beloved says
at the final parting,
for in my heart you live –
When my aunt chewed bark in China
to kill the hunger
of exile, who did she turn to
and did the memory
sustain her enough
to let it go?
A Suicide
Meanwhile:
Coffee is brewing.
The neighbour’s car engine.
Jason’s cat
steals back from the hunt, tripping past the shoes.
Somewhere a door. Somewhere else
another door –
The clean-swept pavements outside
once again
astonished by leaves, some still falling.
Off Day
A world without heroes, says the action hero
on TV, is a world without suffering.
Yes, it is tiring, I say to a friend
who bothered, but it brings in the money.
The past is a mirror
shattered: in pieces, like the heart.
We remain mysteries to each other,
even so.
In love, the heart
ticks
like a bomb –
And mother,
placing the autobiography back onto the shelf, says –
no one served time longer than he did,
for political reasons – as if refusing to say more.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Theophilus is a literature student in Raffles Institution, where he has the privilege of editing two school publications, and lives in denial that he be in Senior High before he knows it. He escapes by taking long and irrelevant walks; these occasionally translate themselves into photographs or poems, which he captures if he can.
Macpherson
i
I choose the longest path through
the afternoon, count blocks
radiating like stars. Those at the core
of each cluster are stained
a darker shade of sun, almost tooth-
yellow; theirs is not just an impression
of age. Newer sentinels guard each point
naked and imposing
while men slip between them,
scrub their flanks. Surfaces need
to be cleaned, smoothened:
time does the trick, but too slowly.
In the middle of nowhere is a
playground, one that still uses rubber tyres
for swings. They sway, spin gently
in the wind, mimic the somersaults
of children and fallen leaves. From afar
I hear the rattle of a pram, followed only
by a cawing of crows, then silence.
A silver of hair appears at the end of the path,
trundles slowly onwards. The pram is full
of groceries
ii
Later I sit to write
the floors above, all storeys
with characters scribbled tiredly
in each square. I picture fathers’ worn slippers
apart on cold doorsteps, mothers’
neatly arranged inside, half-lit marble.
Door-grilles swing open, shut, remain
closed, tessellate sunset, while doors
anchored to rubber door-stops
do not move. Beyond the reach
of evening’s fingers shadows flit
within these abodes, meet and part:
silhouettes miming the night,
except slower, with unhurried grace. Few lights
flicker on; our lamps are sacrilege
to movements so familiar,
and dancers quite blind.
Night falls at the same time
for everyone, two hours
past dinner, before midnight, between
dreams. Shutters tilt, catch moonlight,
close, become moist. There are
mornings where some are dry; unseeing eyes
crinkle and moisten in their wake.
These are not hard to imagine: faint
seasons and stories, they drift
naturally to fill this space
where I sit. It is warm
and spacious, even in the night, this
bed-rock of dreams, this void.
Police Report
There were no witnesses;
no knife-threats, gun-
points; only a sharp
burning like she was falling
in love, followed
(gently, hazily) by nothing.
It happened on Sunday morning,
this theft. Couldn’t possibly have been
me, was still abroad. Later when I
checked, there was no wound.
She recalled no face, no
scar, no guttural voice. In fact
none of the details were clear,
or mattered. Only when I returned
Monday night did she recover words
enough to say (gently,
hazily) that she no longer knew
my name.
departures
Strange, how we discuss death over dinner.
Nai-nai couches the passing of a loved one
as a walking away, as if someone
meant to join us for a meal
were caught up elsewhere. Aunty Fang
nods to herself; she was at the wake the night before,
and cannot forget how young the body looked.
Uncle Yang is his usual self, reserved,
but slightly quieter.
Father is last to hear the news. I watch him
mix regret with shock under his tongue,
shape a prayer waiting to be uttered.
He swallows a mouthful of rice, asks, how old?
Fifty-eight, nai-nai replies. She had cancer,
but was still active. So young! –
father exclaims; his voice has an edge
that brings new silence. Someone sighs,
can’t be helped. People
come, and quickly go.
Heads bob uncertainly, then in agreement,
as a bowl of fruit is placed amidst the unfinished dishes.
We each take a slice,
but delay clearing our plates. We have all
finished, but cannot bear to leave.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Geoff Page is an Australian poet who has published eighteen collections of poetry as well as two novels, four verse novels and several other works including anthologies, translations and a biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann. He retired at the end of 2001 from being in charge of the English Department at Narrabundah College in the ACT, a position he had held since 1974. He has won several awards, including the ACT Poetry Award, the Grace Leven Prize, the Christopher Brennan Award, the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Poetry and the 2001 Patrick White Literary Award. Selections from his work have been translated into Chinese, German, Serbian, Slovenian and Greek. He has also read his work and talked on Australian poetry in throughout Europe as well as in India, Singapore, China, Korea, the United States and New Zealand.
Classics
A few of them he’s seen already, arriving in the early dawn, staying in a small hotel not too far from the station. He’s walked their boulevards, their backstreets, the pathways of their parks; he’s strolled beside their rivers, those enigmatic swirlings, and sometimes on the esplanades, dressed a little out of season, wondering at their moody seas. He’s probably seen more than most and yet he’s not well-travelled.
Arriving all his life as rumours, as traveller’s tales or deft allusions, they line up as a reprimand, these classics that he hasn’t seen. Now, with just these ten years left (or weeks or hours) he knows a visit’s less than likely. He thinks about the schedules, the brochures with their gloss and colour — and thus to inconveniences, the quality of coffee, the noise on the piazzas. The weather, too. Autumn would be best. Spring, for him, ironic — the heat and cold on either side needlessly extreme. Neither is what he’s had in mind. He thinks, too, of the work that made them, fierce obsessions, dreams translated into stone. Or brick. Or glass and steel more recently. He thinks about those half translations, the ones he’s used so far — the photographs, the moving pictures, the acreage of Baedekers, milky slides in living rooms forty years forgotten.
He looks down at his cup; takes some water from a glass. Sometimes the coffee’s brought too hot — though never scalded. He wouldn’t be here if it were. He lets it cool and stares a while at what a blonde barista’s made with just one flourish of a spoon. This, too, is art. How easily it’s done. He folds his hands around the cup. Time now to begin. There’ll be a few more yet, he thinks, and sees himself in ticket queues, impatient at a counter or travelling in cramped compartments. He’ll walk the cobblestones and hear the slanting of their consonants, the strangeness of their vowels. How many more? Say three or four, the ones unseen already turning into myth.
Oblivion is the word he wants. Unique to him at first. And then.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Cameron Lowe lives in Geelong. A collection of his poetry, Porch Music, will be published by Whitmore Press in 2010. He is currently a postgraduate student at The University of Melbourne.
The Watcher
Under such graceful instruction
the surge of coral roses
in the vase
releases the porcelain lady
to be all that she can be,
Autumn days sliding over
the quiet child’s angel face—
he who watches
and watches in the drifting light.
So the morning is shaped
with a certain wonder,
sunlight joyfully
playing across green water,
seagulls ascending into a sky
of polished glass,
the quarter moon still hanging,
like a child’s charm,
over the silence of the house.
Soap Bark
Bees have made this tree their home—
through the pale June sunlight
they come and go, their dancing
flight a performance of belief,
an unbidden faith leading
them back to the hive.
The bee, to be, does not need
to know the inner bark
of the tree can be lathered
into soap, nor that the people
of the Andes, in Chile,
use extracts from Soap Bark
to treat the sick.
Bees do not make poems
out of trees.
A Sunday
The day is beautiful
Gig Ryan
The church cars have gone—
this empty street needs you.
Clouds gather in the west,
bitumen drinks the sun
and everything is slow;
the dog deeply sleeping.
Tomorrow there are bills
to pay, a house to plaster,
but this stillness lingers
in the naked limbs of trees,
on the green and yellow grass.
This empty street needs you—
its sun-drenched gardens,
its music of cars.