January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Janine Fraser’s book Portraits in a Glasshouse was published by Five Islands Press, Series 10 New Poets. She has also written numerous books for children, including the Sarindi series published by HarperCollins. She lives in Riddells Creek, Victoria.
Red Tulips (1)
Tight brown
Fists shoved in dark
Earth pockets
Latent with
The rage of life’s
Short round
Put up their
Leather-red dooks
And deliver
A knock-out
Pummel of punches
In Spring.
Red Tulips (2)
Cut
They continue
To grow in glass
Adding
To themselves
About an inch a day
As reputation
Growing on decease.
Outrage
In the mouth
Of the water jug
They pour out
The peculiars
Of their common
Trouble
Voluble in
Their predicament
As Plath––the ink-
Blot of
Their throats a dark
Puddled jotting
Last fevered
Poem got out on
A gasp
The flame
Going out in them
Putrefying water
Petal drop
Shocking as blood
On the hearth.
Remembering Stonehenge
Mid April, there is this fractal of a second
Hand sweeping the clocks bland face,
Through a day whirling with wind gust
Swirling the parchments of elm
Into a mushroom circle dotting the grass
Beneath the slow grind and twirl of
The clothes hoist hung with a rainbow
Line of briefs, line of socks you peg in pairs,
Stripe of shirts cuffing your cheek.
You know a mushrooms natural history––
Science of spores dropped from the hem
Of the circular skirt, the minute
Mycelium rippling out in the eternal
Pattern of water disturbed by a smooth
White stone––know the rings expansion
Is nothing more than the law
Of urban sprawl, the vociferous animal
Eating out its patch. All the same,
This mythic round of pithy plinths
Pushing up on stolid columns, is as magical
As muttered lore of faery,
Mysterious as Stonehenge. There
Last year in a fine mist of the weather,
You circled the great hewn rocks
Along the gravel path, the guide in your ear
Making a monument of date and data,
Dismantling the mystic. The sky
Gave up its clouds. Huddled under
Your black umbrella, you surrendered
Your ear-plugs and let the grey stones
Speak for themselves––of the ground
They’re rooted in, the light they melt into,
The trembling spaces between.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Eileen Chong is a Sydney poet. She was born in Singapore where she studied and taught before moving to Australia in 2007. She is currently completing a Master of Letters at Sydney University with a focus on poetry. Her writing has been published in literary journals such as Meanjin, HEAT Magazine, Mascara Literary Review, Softblow, Hecate and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, with a poem forthcoming in Overland. Her work has also been selected for Black Inc’s Best Australian Poems 2010, to be published in November 2010. In 2010 she was awarded the Poets Union Youth Fellowship for 2010–2011. A chapbook of her poems will be published in mid-2011 with the assistance of Australian Poetry Ltd.
You went to Rome on your own
all those years ago. Your maps sat
on the shelf in your mother’s house,
creased, yellowing. We lay
on your old bed that afternoon
and you traced a flight path
down my arm. It’s not somewhere
you want to be alone, you said.
We took a room on the top floor
of the hotel. There was a balcony
that overlooked the cobblestoned lane
that rang like an ironsmith’s
each time a woman strode past
the shops towards the piazza. We
stopped for coffee but did not sit.
You clutched a map but didn’t need it.
I was here, you gestured
at the fountain, it’s for lovers. I looked
to see its beauty but saw only
tourists fingering cameras, myself
included. I let my hands drop
into the flow and laughed
at how cold it was. You kissed me
on the side of my salty neck.
In the darkness of the providore
we stood and breathed in
the brine of the meats, the ripeness
of olives. We learnt the true names
of prosciutto. We drank warm
oil. The man behind the counter
asked where we were from. Paradise.
You should visit one day. He shook his head.
At the markets we bought
red-stained cherries. I carried
them in one hand and your
years in the other. Each step
we took overlaid each step
you’d taken. In our room, I washed
the fruit in the bathtub. They floated
like breasts, free and heavy.
What Winogrand Said
“I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.”
So we write. We write
not because we don’t know
what it is we’re writing about,
stuck in our rooms at our desks
with a window facing
the park, the sea, a bricked-up
wall beyond which neighbours
scream at one another well
past midnight. We write because
we’re finding out what
the woman with the cigarette
on the bus felt when she was told
there was no smoking on the bus. What
the young man on the street corner
really wanted with his outstretched
hands and naked, vulnerable neck.
We write because all things
are writable. Nothing
is sacred. Not even the memory
of your mother’s pale leg
propped up on the wet stool
as she washed, you, too young
to turn from the dark flower
at the juncture of her thighs. The scent
of her breast: pillowy, milk-full.
The first time you reached down
and put him inside of you,
even though he, seventeen
and bare-faced, said for you
not to. We don’t know
if all things in our poems
are beautiful, but we do know
that things can be beautiful
in our poems. Or cruel. Lies,
all lies, some say, but really,
we write because it’s not about
what the thing is, at all.
It’s about what the thing becomes
in the poem. It’s about the poem.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Sridala Swami’s poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Drunken Boat, DesiLit, and Wasafiri; and in anthologies including The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (ed. Jeet Thayil, UK: Bloodaxe, 2008); Not A Muse Anthology (ed. Katie Rogers and Viki Holmes, Hong Kong: Haven Books, 2009) and in First Proof: 4 (India: Penguin Books, 2009). Swami’s first collection of poems, A Reluctant Survivor (India: Sahitya Akademi, 2007, rp 2008), was short-listed for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award in 2008. Swami’s second solo exhibition of photographs, Posting the Light: Dispatches from Hamburg, opened at Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad, in November 2009.
Chromatography
Give sleep a chance and know while you do
that very little separates it from death. Rent
your language by the night. Pay your dues:
Filter
plant your dreams and watch them grow. Consent
to their eventual departure and separate view
of you from where they stand. Discard resentment:
Diffusions
wear your vocabulary like a badge. Few
dreams can survive their naming. Fragments
of your days dissolve and separate into
Separations
impossibilities. Try not to prevent
whatever happens. What happens is, you
will find, your days and nights are never congruent.
Of Clairvoyance
Squelch is not a word heard
under water. Elephants
sink and suck their legs out
of the mud their bellies arches
and beyond, a new world:
green-grey, tenebrous
weeds float like visions
behind the eyes of drowned
bodies or like harbingers of
lost sight.
The ground beneath their feet
not yours.
Breathe, breathe
beyond the last breath.
Tumble into the amphibious.
Clear and buoyant is the sky:
the elephants know this with one
half of their bodies.
With the other they see through mud
and see it for what it is.
All visions begin upturned and colloidal.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Jo Langdon lives in Geelong and is currently completing a PhD (creative thesis plus exegesis) in magical realism at Deakin University. She writes poetry and fiction, and was shortlisted for the 2010 Whitmore Press poetry prize.
Garlic
I’m reminded of a time my mother
chased garlic down my throat with
spoonfuls of jam & honey,
ousting a broken fever, her face
stitched tight with worry
over my penicillin allergy.
My Dorothy shoes kicked softly
against the polished doors
of the kitchen cupboard.
She’d sat my doll body on the bench
hours before, crimping my yellow hair
for the party we left early.
This morning, she relates the details of a dream
in which I fall pregnant with six babies,
my stomach filling out like the moon.
As a child I complained she never wore
her wedding dress or rings. It took uncounted
years to see how she wears her love.
I accepted it from the spoon, counting
cloves that glowed like white-eyed stars
as she wore worry on her wrists,
a bracelet of lines, tense as a watch.
Night story
The is day still with winter,
the water brown & duckless.
Before showing stars
the sky turns
blue as the pulse
hidden in your wrist.
You drive me home &
the lit vein of highway
streams with cars like columns
of iridescent ants.
The city fills the windscreen,
moves like an aquarium.
Lights like neon fish & somewhere
a little plastic castle.
I’ll think of how,
sometimes
you wear your heart on your face
like a child.
Tonight your reflection fills the windows,
holograms the swimming traffic.
We assign an easy currency
for thoughts.
You ask for mine &
the ones I’ll give you are,
stars curled around Earth
in a seashell spiral of galaxy;
a little red planet
floating in my eye,
& a pond I want to fill
with coat hanger swans.
Walking to the Cinema, the Weekend it Rained
I watch the rain curl
your hair as we spill into
the black river road.
Street lamps & taillights
reflect & shimmer like flares
or tropical fish.
In the foyer we
lose beads of water to the
salted star carpet.
A constellation
beneath our feet: popcorn &
yellow ticket stubs.
We communicate
wordlessly; sideways gestures
in the cinema.
Pictures on the screen
fall on our skin, colour us
as we crunch candy.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Alan Pejković was born in 1971. He has three university degrees in Sweden: an MA in English language and literature at Gävle University, a BA in History of Religions at Uppsala University, and he holds teaching degree from Stockholm University in English and Swedish language. Presently he works on the last phase of his PhD dissertation on liminal figures in contemporary American novels at the English Department in Uppsala, Sweden. Besides academic work, he works as a freelance writer, translator, and book reviewer. His poetry has been published in Swedish, English, and several languages in the Balkan area. He is also widely published in theoretical and literary journals in the Balkans. For BTJ (a leading supplier of media services in Sweden), he regularly reviews books from ex-Yugoslavia as well as books on literature, language, religions and other similar areas.
Sentimental Street
The memory dropped sharply overnight. A freezing point.
Give me a drop of my old street.
Time haunts me, fills me with doubt.
The image of the aged boys, ruined girls, gardens in bloom.
The image flows backwards, changing prisms, transparent crystals.
I stand at the parking place. I sit at my office. Just a point in time.
The street is still a valid point in God’s report on me.
The street punctuates my future.
My Mistress and I at the sunny Afternoon
I am extramaritally yours, my mistress of the erogenous zones.
I stand in your shadow.
You play the violin, I adore your high heels.
Your stocking blasts a hole in my eyes.
Nylon sea. I am drowning. Whistling wolves in my ears. Air rushes from your mouth.
Enclose me in the space between your teeth.
A Boundary Lover’s Poem
I love your fence surrounding me, your words shutting me in, your staying with me till morning fires build up a wall.
I adore that you contain me, insert me into your love.
You have me inside you like a screaming fetus.
You include me in your collection. You form my boundaries.
You add me to your gallery of destroyed borderlands.
You burn my limits to unrecognizable geometrical patterns.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Tricia Dearborn is an award-winning Sydney poet and short-story writer whose work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies in Australia, India, the UK, the US and online. Her first collection was Frankenstein’s Bathtub (2001). She was joint winner of the 2008 Poets Union Poetry Prize.
Fig
I’m stunned by your dimensions
and your presence—
no less impressive than if a brachiosaurus
stood in the park before me.
As I walk around you, gazing up,
your branches weave patterns
that dissolve and form before my eyes.
There are wrinkles at the bends
of your giant limbs, the tip of you
sixty feet above the ground, your lowest
branches curving gently down
to my chest height.
I breathe on a leaf and wipe the city grime from it
with my palm, startled to discover
its faint scent of milk.
Mapping the Cactus
I used to worry when you wilted,
dipping your spiky head
to the edge of the bowl
until (the laboratory years
stirring within me)
I charted your movements
over months, and saw you
in time-lapse
rise and swing and fall
like tides. Whether you followed
sun or moon
or shifting magnetic pole
I still don’t know
unable to decipher
your slow-motion semaphore.
But clearly you didn’t droop
with thirst—bowed
to a power greater than
my small green watering can.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Aidan Coleman teaches English at Cedar College in Adelaide. He is currently completing his second book of poems with the assistance of an Australia Council New Work Grant.
Astrocytoma
like the worst thing you ever did at school
the news comes steep and ashen
brisk mind to hurt mind
face to broken face
the pea
uncancelled by forty mattresses
clicks the past into place
leaves the future (whatever that was)…
Void
It was one of those restaurants where fish with heads like buses
were bumping against the glass.
I found myself stalled on annihilation;
of things going on despite me, of you alone.
Amongst the talk and laughter of others,
I stared and stared, and couldn’t blink.
Post-op
The head I wake in is airy and painful.
There’s still work going on in there.
Last night, a circle of numbers
and hammers,
forever
slanting away.
I clutched my bowl and sat it out;
thought about another year.
This morning: birds and fair-weather light;
a calm I can’t meet
with my eye.
Meat, sick, disinfectant on/off through the air.
In the next room people are talking about me.
They’re talking inside of my head.
Steroids Psalm
I am fearfully and wonderfully made
The delicate thread of each breath become rope
At night I glow with a Holy insomnia
In the ripe air I taste your promise
So many plots and schemes
So many plots and schemes
Now back from the dead
I have to tell you these things
I have to tell you all of these things
The walls of my room are effervescent
Shakespeare heads and butterflies
I walk through doors and mirrors and walls
Because so much is tied to earth
So much is tied to the earth
I am Henry V on the eve of battle
The guy who is in on the prison break-out
I’m Francis, Churchill, Robin Williams
People stare unconvinced
and I tell them…
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Philip Hammial has had 22 collections of poetry published, two of which were short-listed for the Kenneth Slessor Prize. He was in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris from August 2009 through January 2010.
Affair
We should concern for this affair. Affair
of there ought to be some in kind who refuse to accept
a stand-in (not the first killing that dumped its government)—
white public lovers who dealt as best they could with the spellers
who encroached upon Madame’s overly-ripe sensibilities & were not
in the least bit successful, for, look, there, a naked someone
actualised so close you can smell her as though
she was dead but in fact is still alive, just back
from a holiday in Egypt, or Senegal, or China (Clarity,
some help here) like one of those debutantes who extract privilege
with impossibly dainty fingers, morsels
tidy, morsels teeming with, Thanksgiving just
around the corner blowing its horn, strutting its turkey, “When
the saints come marching in” it’s Madame who leads them, baton
twirling, bobby socks dream girl, 1954, I wasn’t in that marching band;
if only I had been I might not have come to this: my life
as a fetish not what it’s cracked up to be, can’t just
walk up to someone & ask for a good spanking, call it
one for the road or one for the angels in the fountain who fall
like hail on the replica of my hard-won grace temporarily won
when I took the hand of a gentle killer & we slipped through
the gate, eluding the Big Boys, the thugs who guard
the Chocolate Farm, a bouquet in my other hand (how
it came to be there I’ll never know) for Madame who refused
to accept it, our affair long over she insisted with a smile
that she’d acquired in Egypt, or Senegal, or China (Clarity,
some help here).
Sartorial
I’ll have it—the courage to wear what I kill. It
being difficult if not impossible to say at this point
in the proceedings when I ended up in bed
with the wrong family because my admirers
(that motley crowd) are demanding one of my fly-ups. Molly,
have you seen my wings? Now that I’ve finally mastered
the art of remembering where I’ve left my glasses
I keep losing my wings. At least with glasses
I can see to find them, no more groping around
on the floor on my hands & knees. Wrong, as in family?
Wrong. Wrong as in now that I’m up & away (she found
my wings in the oven where I left them to dry) at 30,000 feet
the oxygen masks have dropped & begun to sway
hypnotically, a dozen passengers in a voodoo trance
dancing obscenely in the aisles & the rest engrossed
in a past lives therapy session from which they’ll emerge
as clean as scrubbed boys for Sunday school. Me,
I’m with the voodoo mob, ridden, as we all are,
by Mami-Wata, the mermaid who, when she’s finished
with me will leave me with a small token
of her appreciation—the courage to wear what I kill.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Brook Emery has published three books of poetry: and dug my fingers in the sand, which won the Judith Wright Calanthe prize, Misplaced Heart, and Uncommon Light. All three were short-listed for the Kenneth Slessor Prize.
The black hill looks to float straight out to sea.
Cars incline. But the driver’s eyes are raised
to an unvarying wash of night.
For a moment, just an instant, his gaze
is arrested by a tree beneath a streetlight,
a lean, straggly, unkempt bottlebrush he thinks,
and strangely, beneath the light, it is the focus
of his thought. It’s almost two dimensional,
as though it were the section of a tree
pressed between two sheets of glass
for microscopic examination. It stands for nothing
but stands as something, its shapeless branches
and drooping leaves as nondescript
as any failure of a man, any thought
whose time has come and gone and gone again.
He’s nearly home. It’s about to rain,
the wind is getting up and he can sense
an approaching chill. He’ll be home before the storm.
He’s shut the door. Locked the outside
outside. The gathering dark, the gathering cold,
all the unhoused, creeping possibilities,
the distresses of the day, tomorrow’s fears,
wolves howling on the Steppe, hyenas
around the stricken cub, roaches, slaters, snakes,
the tubeworm deprived of light, no mouth,
no anus, dependent on bacteria
to process food, the nonexistent nameless dread
that nonetheless exists with rapists, goons,
gangs of untamed youth, the super-heated words
of presidents and priests, toddlers fastening bomber’s belts,
and stepping out in supermodel clothes, crewcut men
in sunglasses sweeping children off the streets
and banging on the door; the looming nursing home.
The heater’s turned to high. The television
splays its cathode light across the room,
a cup of tea is cooling on the armchair’s arm.
That stupid, ugly tree, he thinks,
the light between its leaves, its immobility,
then the way it twitches in the wind,
what is it that won’t let me be?
All morning it’s been difficult to settle, difficult to harness
energy or purpose for all the things
I have to do. Charged sky,
sudden light at the horizon, grey, then streaks of blue, then
grey again. An unsettled sea,
white water contending point to point,
waves like another and another avalanche, unceasing noise,
sand compacted to a crimp-edged,
man-high bank and I can see,
then can’t locate, a buoy like a white-capped head
sinking and floating in the rip,
wrenched from its deeper mooring,
now driven in, now swept back out, tethered there
by net and anchor that, for now,
have new purchase in the sand.
Conceivably, should I be silly enough to surf tomorrow
it could be me entangled, drowned:
mistake and misadventure; bad luck.
In Switzerland they’ve flicked the switch and particles
surge round and round a tunnel
in opposed directions preparing to collide
in an experiment to explain how the universe got mass
in the seconds of its birth,
why what we touch is solid.
We stalk the irreducible, the constant speed of light unfolding
though the eye can’t see and the hand
can’t touch such magnitude:
time may shrivel, outrun itself, sag under accumulated weight:
end in our beginning: red shift, white dwarf,
rotten apple on the ground.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
1981, Sam Byfield has published one chapbook (From the Middle Kingdom, Pudding House Press) and his first full length collection Borderlands is forthcoming through Puncher and Wattmann. His poetry has recently appeared in such publications as Heat, Meanjin, Island, Southerly, The Asia Literary Review, The National Poetry Review, Cordite and previously in Mascara.
Split Earth
Morpeth’s bulging river and rich
farmlands, the sky heaving itself
down in great drapes.
We browsed the bric-a-bracs
and lolly shops, climbed
an old steam engine and listened
to the rainsong of frogs amongst
the ferns and old stone walls.
The bridge rattled, its heavy presence
hanging on into its second century,
shading the flash of reeds
and river mullet. While the women
drank coffee I walked with Thom
to where the gardens met the river,
took a photo of us, arm-in-arm,
obvious brothers despite our
different hair lengths,
despite his axe man shoulders
and my clean shave. Our eyes
were an identical blue, though
not long since the accident his smile
didn’t reach them, cautious as
an animal crouched in barnyard
shadows, relearning trust; his scars
jagged and red, like split earth.
All this year I’ve carried the photo
with me like a talisman,
watched his eyes and mouth
telling different stories, as if I could
stop the world from hurting him
further, from taking any more
of us too soon.
Escaping the Central West
Out on the flat land, the yellow land,
driving from one country town with
a funny name to another, in the old
blue Cortina, the sun making wheat
of dad’s beard. John Williamson’s
singing Bill the Cat, about a moggy
who loved the budgies and wrens
and ultimately lost his balls.
Sporadic signposts, nothing
but sad little dams, wire and sheep.
One flock grabs our attention—
animated discussion in the front,
dad still refusing to unfold the map
before the realisation sets in that
it’s the same flock as two hours
and two hundred miles ago.
*
It’s a story that’s passed through
the years until how much is real
and how much is myth is hard to say.
We lasted two months out there.
My parents must have fought
like hell, though those memories
haven’t stuck. We headed back east
in the middle of a flood, the whole
Central West beneath a foot
of ironic water. Night time shut
the light out and we drove blind,
just hours of water threatening
to swallow us, to breach
the Cortina’s rust and rivets;
and a storm in Dad’s head
that wasn’t about to abate.