August 30, 2020 / mascara / 0 Comments
Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet. Her first collection, Even in the Dark (University of WA Publishing), won the Mary Gilmore Award in 2014; her second collection was Unexpected Clearing (UWAP, 2016). She is currently working on her next collection At the Point of Seeing.
She is also a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate Research Centre at Victoria University
Family Portrait
Van Dyck, c. 1619
In their best Flemish clothes –
lace ruffs and jewelry, brocaded fabric –
this young couple gaze
intense and hopeful
out of the canvas;
they lean toward me as though
all this
were as fast as the shuttering
of a lens;
their bonneted child,
dandled on her mother’s knee,
looks behind and up –
she has no need to look my way;
Her parents are vibrant with
youth and prosperity,
their connection to each other,
their pride in the child;
like every family –
holy in their ordinariness –
they hold the unfolding generations
squirming
in their richly upholstered arms:
Look! we have made this future –
it belongs to us.
Only consider –
(and here the benefit of hindsight)
their willingness to pause,
to sit while a painter
composes
studies
takes their likenesses
in pigment and brushstroke,
placing them
lovingly
within the rushes of time –
Look carefully –
hold fast to the slipperiness of this moment –
it will not always
be like this.
From Mallaig
Heaving out from the harbour,
its narrow lean of wooden houses,
salt-weathered in a cloudy light –
a ferry clanks and judders
picking its way past little boats,
their tangle of nets
and out into the slap and wash of darkening water:
stink of diesel and fish swim
in freshets of air,
rubbing cheeks into ruddiness;
until the hump of island
sails into view –
its possibilities of destination,
palette of smudged greys and greens
flickering through the glass;
the angular spine of the Cuillins
scrapes against
a loamy sky,
writhing in channels of wind;
while, deep in boggy fields,
something
shifts,
restless in peat –
These tannin-soaked fields,
this permeable membrane,
this elongated moment when a boat might
clip and ride,
a shoreline in sight.
August 24, 2020 / mascara / 0 Comments
Amanda Lucas-Frith lives on Wangal land in Sydney’s inner west with her partner and two children. She’s a communications and publishing consultant, and is currently completing the final subjects of a Master of Strategic Communication at UTS. She attended the 2019 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a member of Youngstreet Poets. Her poems have appeared in Snorkel and Cordite Poetry Review.
Border Protection
My life in lockdown looks
the same as it did before—
I search for my daughters’
hats, make snacks and play-
dough, and lavish colour
on each letter of the alphabet
just to tickle my tongue
to yellow, lilac, vermillion.
So many ways to make
bright things brighter
now the days close
and open like paper
fortune tellers. I write
to silence the chatterbox
to a single answer
and in this imaginary,
wage my Machiavellian
war against the diminutive
queens that surround me,
nesting between bathroom
walls or fortified around
the cubby house. The pest
control company kept
its social distance and said
they only use natural
chemicals, but at this stage
of the pandemic, I’ve lost
my organic moral advantage
and crave the kind of
annihilation only pesticide
can give. In the face
of diminishing freedom,
it’s curious how much
I desire to tame the dissenting
rattle, to be listened to
and obeyed as the single
absolute power of my
house, not minding at all
the cognitive dissonance
of wanting my daughters to
only do as I say, and never
as I do.
A Bright Room
When you arrived, I snapped
open like a purse and the surgeon
lifted you out, one sleek penny
at a time. He held you
level to his gaze and assessed
you like a rare coin, while a wake
of midwives pressed their fingers
to your mauve flesh.
Your father cut the cord
connecting us and we waited
for your cry in the bright room,
under the theatre light, where nobody
had mouths and every pair of eyes
held mine. I looked up to see,
reflected in the light’s mirror,
a kaleidoscope of myself
separate to my body—a ruby smile
from hip to hip—not mended
but altered by a blanket stitch.
Born again in a sea of sedatives,
I saw you there first: pools of black
gusting the surface to glass.
You arrived as a southerly wind
howling to the bright room,
your squalling cry cooling to my
touch, as I held you skin to skin.
July 11, 2020 / mascara / 0 Comments
Debbie Lim was born in Sydney. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies including regularly in the Best Australian Poems series (Black Inc.), Contemporary Australian Poetry and Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (both Puncher & Wattmann) as well as journals such as Cordite, Mascara, Island and Magma (UK). Her prizes include the Rosemary Dobson Award and she was commended in the Poetry Society UK’s 2013 National Poetry Competition. Her chapbook is Beastly Eye (Vagabond Press). She is working on a full-length collection.
The Year of Contagion
In times of virus
each cough hangs
visible,
a dark afterthought.
Every touch
leaves its tingling
on the skin—
Still air can turn
treacherous.
Better whipping winds.
It remains unofficial
whether tears are effective
transmitters.
Certainly coalescence:
they keep urging us
to move on. We wear our days
with a new caution,
learn different ways
of caring.
Strangely naked,
riddled with porosities,
we trail microclimates
like small habitable clouds.
Our peripheries burn.
June 17, 2020 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dani Netherclift has been published in Meanjin, Cordite and Verandah. Her work was nominated for the 2018 Judith Rodriguez Prize and highly commended in the Cliff Green Short Story Competition.
At once vivid and spare in its delineation of a physical, material world, ‘Haunted Autumn’ attends to both the tangible and elusive (/allusive) particulars of place in ways that confirm the collective nature of a setting or site as invariably experiential; a temporal space shaped by sensory experience; by encounters; by context. In accord with Michel de Certeau’s oft-cited line in The Practice of Everyday Life that ‘space is a practiced place’ (1984, p. 117), place becomes space here in the sense that it is never singular or fixed, but invariably collective: multiple and subjective, comprising various vantage-points, and complicated by contexts of the past/present.
Via lines of striking observation and through deft negotiation of the (digital) page itself as space/site, Netherclift’s delicate yet incisive prose poem also calls attention to the often-invisible labour—rendered evident, in the past months, by questions around what work, whose labour, is ‘essential’ during ‘unprecedented’ times, and at what costs (physical and emotional; personal and collective). Notably, the ‘indelicate revelations’ this prose poem calls to our attention also remain, in broader representations, largely obfuscated or overlooked: most figures citing university-sector job losses (to date or to come) have not included the loss of work anticipated by vast numbers of casual employees, upon whose insecure labour these institutions have relied. Concurrently, international students, upon whose fees universities have also depended, have been mostly excluded from government support. Through these precise lines and luminous images, Netherclift shows with both clarity and nuance the university space as one of many sites in which the effects of the pandemic are felt unevenly, even as student bodies remain/return/endure, ‘haunting’ liminal junctures and uncertain futures.
This is timely, compassionate writing that we are excited and grateful to publish.
—Jo Langdon for Mascara Literary Review
Haunted Autumn
X marks distance. We never used to know this. X was golden, treasure. X was illicit. X marked the spot. X was kiss, was marked wrong answers. One might rush then, towards X, before, or take it as a lesson. With X, we erase time before.
Autumn leaves from the rows of ubiquitous plane trees drift and settle across university entry roads, piling deep in concrete gutters and banking in the unopened doorways of the gym. These leaves are as big as a large man’s palm, outstretched. They have their own susurrations, whispered ephemeral languages possessing no word translatable as absence.
One Sunday a half-grown black cat basks in sun on a bench on the Barista Bar deck. Seeing me, it dashes into the unknown black space beneath the slatted wood.
On Tuesday music is piped through the entry building—then, too loud, into the library.
Spiderwebs have gathered, dew-settled across the unopened hinges of the red mailbox outside the main entrance.
It grows colder.
Purple swamp hens arabesque across cement outside, beneath the coloured glass panes of the library study space.
On the lake ducks glide and duck, flaunting evergreen of underwing, motifs of things we cannot see or predict. Hope without context.
All day, rows of buses arrive & leave, leave & arrive empty. Denuded of passengers, the bus stops are periods, punctuations. One morning a driver asks me when I disembark if I am okay going into the university. I assure him that it is still an inhabited place, despite outward appearances.
Another time, leaving, I walk from the library to the main building on a perfectly blue-skied day and a fine mist of water falls from the edges of the building, cloaked in motes of sunlight and the deep vibration of mysterious unseen machines.
The revolving doors are stilled, marked unusable with narrow ribbons of red-and-white pandemic tape delineating the scene of an unimaginable occurrence. Abandonment—
as though they have given up the ghost.
Security guards perform requisite rounds, enacting circles; each hour they walk once around the study room; I grow used to their attentions. They walk the perimeters of the university-emptiness, echoing inwards with hours and steps and an ironic loneliness. They are here because some of us remain.
They talk too loudly in the library.
Students sit apart without X’s denoting distance, our unmasked breath covenants of trust.
We keep our distance. We acknowledge each other with looks
signalling a collective new body of knowledge.
Meteors fly close to the earth. I remember those fragments of dinosaurs preserved in lava and Tektites in Mexico and America. The KT Boundary intersects time before time after.
The number 42 bus home tastes of antiseptic—red-and-white taped, its air hangs hospital-like, disinfected. Each day it is empty, carrying the driver and me and crowds of absence.
The books in the library are cordoned-off by locked roller doors, barriers like X’s that you never even knew were there, before.
The university indelicately reveals its inner workings; an army of tradespeople, maintenance workers who maintain the neat green grass, the sanitisation of tables, the cleaning of closed off spaces, puppeteers of vibrations/instrumentalists, rainmakers in miraculous spaces.
Cabbage butterflies limn the autumn trees.
The branches bare more skin with each day.
Tiny yellow-breasted wrens almost indistinguishable from butterflies flutter up from green like feathered golden raindrops reverse-flowing into coming winter.
More students return, spaced by unseen X’s; the trimester nears its end.
We are here.
October 21, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Maryam Azam is a Pakistani-Australian writer and teacher who lives and works in Western Sydney. She graduated with Honours in Creative Writing from Western Sydney University and holds a diploma in the Islamic Sciences. She is a recipient of the WestWords Emerging Writers’ Fellowship and has presented at the Sydney Writers’ Festival and the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. She is a member of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement. Her debut poetry collection The Hijab Files (Giramondo, 2018) was shortlisted for the Anne Elder Award and the Mary Gilmore Award.
The Ways I Cover
In summer I answer the door wearing a hoodie
because I’d rather look like a cold weirdo
than an NESB housewife
I bring Vegemite scrolls to the staff morning tea
and say I don’t eat chicken when I mean
I don’t eat machine-slaughtered chicken.
I wear beanies & berets in winter
and a scarf around my neck instead
I don’t even look Muslim
I shake men’s hands.
I say I’m not hungry rather than ask if the food’s halal.
I go to the beach with my hair tied up
and tucked into a baseball cap
and even swim in it
we’re all worried about skin cancer right
I say hey instead of salam when
I answer the phone on the train.
I skip dhuhr prayer rather than be caught
with my foot in the sink at work.
I breathe in the guilt.
October 8, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Simeon Kronenberg has published poetry, reviews, interviews and essays in Australian poetry journals and anthologies, including Best Australian Poems, 2017. In 2014 he won the Second Bite Poetry Prize and in 2015 was short-listed for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. Distance, his first poetry collection was published in 2018 by Pitt Street Poetry.
Window
1951
I stood barefoot
on cool boards
in the hot kitchen.
Overhead
fly paper hung
from a dusty bulb
yellow and thick
with flies.
She looked out
the window
stared into glare.
All was quiet
but for the relentless
hum of blow flies
trapped
between screen
and glass
and the low mutter
of a wireless
in the next room
as he listened
to afternoon news.
Aunt
An upturned grey mouth
green faded eyes
face and eye-lids
dry as dust on snake skin.
She managed
in a long brown house
that leaned
next to a woodpile
stacked by a son
reluctant, intermittent.
Mostly, she sat
at a table
a wireless tuned
all day to the races
as she scratched
at the forms
occasionally lurching
after whiskey.
Though she broke
a hip or two: Heard the cracks.
Tripped
on raised
linoleum
a snare across the floor
as she shuffled
a long
dark passage
to bed.
October 7, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Claire Albrecht is writing her PhD in Poetry at the University of Newcastle. Her poems appear in Cordite Poetry Review, Overland Literary Journal, Plumwood Mountain, The Suburban Review, the Australian Poetry Anthology and elsewhere, and she is the 2019 Emerging Writers Fellow at the State Library Victoria. Her manuscript sediment was shortlisted for the 2018 Subbed In chapbook prize, and the poem ‘mindfulness’ won the Secret Spaces prize. Her debut chapbook pinky swear launched in 2018. Claire runs the monthly Cuplet Poetry Night in Newcastle.
The hard work is starting to pay off!
my husband and I follow the 49/51 percent rule and
enjoyed the view. I panicked, kept pushing the time
back, and now I am at work 1 hour and 15 minutes early.
I don’t have time to work
using the search words ‘women in science’, I completed
40 hours of work in 4 days (you make your client
mashed potato and leave the skin on. your client
throws a microwave at you)
my commute today – variety is the spice of life.
a rather narrow way of viewing how people make
a living. try saying you ‘get to go to work’.
it’s a damn miracle
you got one job, larry. one job. some people will never know
how much thought and care I put into (go to work, or stay
in the bath and keep topping up the aspirin?) this is in
the bathroom stalls.
unfortunately with both of us doing shift work
we haven’t been able to catch up for his
biggest challenge so far? getting the printer to work.
you gotta be shitting me.
*found poem from my social media feed
October 4, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sarah Attfield is a poet from a working-class background. Her writing focuses on the lived experiences of working-class people (both in London, where she grew up and in Australia where she lives). She teaches creative writing in the School of Communication at UTS. She is the co-editor of the Journal of Working-Class Studies.
High Rise
Who owns the view?
You don’t want our community centres –
bingo playing old dears
eating Rich Tea or
sticky carpet pubs
where pints are sipped and darts still chucked
barber shops
with men outside on chairs
righting all the wrongs of the world
youth clubs teaching kids to
turn the grime into bpm
You don’t want our mosques
noisy churches
pound shops
pawn shops
knock-off handbags down the market
our graffiti
dogs with muscles
cars cruising with bass turned up
You used to hurry past
(or never set foot)
couldn’t imagine
living like that
all Harry Brown to you
hoods in underpasses
broken lifts
suicide towers
But now you want our views
high-rise living is suddenly a thing
with murals on street corners
cafés not caffs
boutique art in railway arches
artisan bread made by hand!
(that’s what we just call cooking)
And if there’s any of us left
don’t expect a welcome
Retail Therapy?
She rolls her eyes when he isn’t looking
nods politely when he is
he points out the bleeding obvious –
she’s in the middle of doing
exactly what he tells her to do
she knows how to keep the counter clean
re-stock
greet customers
weigh measure fold
smile thank pack
ignore the comments about her
hair breasts skirt trousers face
smile
lack of smile
make-up
no make-up
suppress the need to pee
eat
sit down
stand up
get a drink
agree to stay back
start early
lift too much
work faster
not be cheeky
she is there to serve
the dickheads who ogle
the entitled who demand
and sometimes, the people just like her
who smile and roll their eyes on her behalf
she can laugh with workmates
avoid the boss
make up names for those customers
if she’s lucky she’ll get more hours
October 4, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Beth Spencer’s books include Vagabondage (UWAP), How to Conceive of a Girl (Random House) and most recently, Never Too Late (PressPress). She writes fiction, poetry, essays and writing for radio and performance. She has won a number of awards, including the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award in 2018 for her short fiction collection The Age of Fibs, now a Spineless Wonders ebook. She lives on the Central Coast NSW. www.bethspencer.com
Eating the rich
The first time I went to a restaurant was
the local Chinese place for Dad’s birthday.
We ordered steak and eggs and chips,
except for my brother who shocked us all
by ordering these strange things
called dim sims. When they arrived
we watched, a little horrified,
as he poured a dark thin
sauce in his bowl and ate them.
I’m not sure what I expected might happen.
The second time I went to a restaurant
was the new Pizza Hut at Ringwood.
Once again it was Dad’s birthday.
This time it was my sister
who assured us that yes, that’s right
we all eat off the same plate!
She also showed us the proper way
to bite into the slice then pull it out away
so the mozzarella cheese
made a long gooey satisfying river.
The third time (Dad’s birthday again)
was a French Restaurant in Mitcham.
Chosen out of the phone book
and the only one open on a weeknight.
We had fun passing forks full of rich
sauce-coated dishes across the table – try this!
(whoops, a big glob plopped into an unused
wine glass — no worries, the waiter whipped it
away without a single word) and we laughed
and talked at the tops of our voices.
Then the bill came.
We grabbed a quick look
before Dad picked it up.
The whole table went silent.
Dad’s eyebrows shot up, but he didn’t say a word.
Just pulled out his wallet and (lucky it was pay day)
placed way more money on the table
than at fifteen I could earn in a week.
The next year we went Bowling
and had fish and chips.
October 4, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Erin Shiel has poems published in Meanjin, Cordite and Australian Love Poems. In 2018 she was shortlisted for the University of Canberra VC Poetry Prize. She is writing her first collection.
Grace Bros Miranda Fair Lighting Department
In my childhood home, three bedrooms
and the lounge room had chandeliers.
Not purchased in bulk from the coffers
of a French Noble, once lowered on feast
nights and lit by servants scurrying
before the guests arrived to drink claret,
eat suckling pig. Not made by Venetian artisans
blowing bulbs by mouth, twirling rods
in hot ovens until glass dripped like amber
sap. Our chandeliers were bought one by one
with five dollars saved from each pay week
for the best part of the year
I turned seven. Chandeliers need flock
wallpaper to accentuate their luxury
so my father spent weekends lining up
the patterns of one strip with the next.
Some of the houses of the brickies
he worked with were lined with Opera
House carpet, Regent Hotel tiles. Our
chandeliers were bought from Grace Bros
Miranda Fair lighting department.
On Thursday night or Saturday morning
we’d visit that hot cave glittering
not with seams of gold quartz crystal
or glow worms, but with chandeliers
(and their poorer, colonial style cousins
destined for country kitchens).
A thousand price tags dangled above our heads.
*After visual artist, Nicholas Folland, The Door is Open, 2007 at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. See image online at http:www.nicholasfolland.com.au/page23.htm
My mother, balancing
On the first day of my mother’s first job the boss
sent her out at lunchtime to order a toasted ice cream
sandwich. All the men in suits thought it was funny
when she came back with the sandwich dripping
through the paper bag onto her white gloves.
At her second job she got married and they held
a farewell party. But I don’t want to leave, she said.
They thought that was odd. My mother’s work was at a desk
with a large accounting machine with so many keys.
It had its own rhythm that I never understood. Cha Cha Cha.
She was always racking her brain for a missing invoice payment
of $36.20. At her third job she was allowed to work even though
she was married. When I was born they delivered the accounting
machine to her house so that she could find the numbers
that weren’t quite right while I slept to the Cha Cha Cha.
She had rubber thimbles on her thumbs so she could flick faster
through the papers looking for that number that wasn’t right.
She made friends at work. They shared recipes and diets
and stories about their children putting plasticine in their ears.
They paid each other’s children 50 cents on school holidays
so they could keep them quiet and bring them to the office
to file or organise rubber bands. In the lunch hour they rushed off
to the supermarket to shop for dinner or school lunches.
…. Mince…. Oranges…. Bread…. Milk….
My mother’s job was before work too. She would dust the house,
put a casserole in the crock pot and hang the washing on the line,
cracking in the wind. The cold singlets would flap in her face
as she said her prayers. She said it was the only time she had to pray.
The magpies and the cat hung around her feet until they were fed.
At her fourth job in the furniture factory, when she did overtime
she asked for cash but received diamonds and shares in uranium
mines instead. She sold them quickly to pay for my school
uniforms. When she lost weight she admired herself in the window
of her office causing trouble on the factory floor below as the workers
stopped making chairs to whistle. She walked over the sewerage pipe
at the Botany wetlands to save on bus fares. I remember lying in bed
watching her do her hair for work, still a bit sleepy and loving her
scent swishing by my bed. Twist, twist, twist it up into a beehive.
Tweed skirt, twin set. Perfect for the office that is air-conditioned
for men in suits. At her fifth job my mother paid doctors’ wages
and minded kids with disabilities so their mothers could have a break
and go to the hairdresser. She still managed to balance the books.
When she retired, the women she taught to balance books came
to visit her. There were funerals of the women who had taught her.
She found that missing $36.20 in the shower. In her mind she saw it,
in the wrong month. The credits and debits fell into place
and she felt easier. But that was just one part of the rhythm restored.
There was the mortgage too, the school fees, the meal planning,
the lunches for my father, the trolley shopping, the jibes from tuckshop
mothers about her latch key child. The day off when the child was sick.
The saving for the trip to see the in laws she had never met. The shiny
bloke in the office who made sleazy comments. The boss who kept
a second set of books. Her father’s angina tablet prescription, clutching
at her heart. Her mother who needed help choosing carpet… Cha Cha Cha…