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…
October 4, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Joseph (known to some as Butch) is a Western Sydney based poet and visual media artist, born to Filipino immigrants. He enjoys doing laundry, long walks through Kmart, and late nights at Mr. Crackles in Darlinghurst. His practice explores the varied experiences of the Filipino diaspora in Australia. His works have been published in UNSWeetened Literary Journal, UTS Writers’ Anthology, and the Australian Poetry Anthology. Joseph’s favourite word is pie.
Naaalala Ko
I remember Ate Maria, waking me up for school, I’d get ready, go to the corner shop
and get Dad the paper, pack my lunch and walk down to Torres.
I remember coming home, exhausted, but there was always a meal on the table,
and Manang would bring over her kids and we’d study together.
I remember on Sundays, we’d all rush out of church to get home for the family breakfast
every Lolo, Lola, Tito, Tita, Ate, Kuya, Pamangkin, Ninong, Ninang, Kapatid – we
were all there.
I remember meeting up with my barkada, we were the street’s breakdance crew,Enzo
would bring the linoleum and Jek would carry the boombox – we’d battle with
groups from the other streets at the rotunda where there was a basketball court.
I remember when Jepoy first got a colour TV – the entire street would gather round his
house, sit in his lounge room, peer through his windows.
I remember Aling Alice and the Sari Sari store she has at the front of her house – it
was the street’s centre – the easiest place to meet and you could get nearly
anything you ever needed there.
I remember Gagalangin, the safe side of the most dangerous, densely populated district
of Manila – Tondo. Smokey Mountain was on the other side. My Kuya Bino was
the gangsta of our area.
I remember Manila, crowded, busy, beautiful – cleaner that it is now.
I remember leaving the house I was born in, the last time I saw the stove where I’d greet
Mom each day, the last time I touched the floor where I’d slept each night, the
last time I closed the door.
October 4, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Bronwyn Lovell’s poetry has featured in Best Australian Poems, Meanjin, Southerly, Cordite, Antipodes, Rabbit, Verity La, and Strange Horizons. She has won the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award and the Adrien Abbott Poetry Poetry Prize. She has been shortlisted for the Judith Wright, Fair Australia, Newcastle, Montreal, and Bridport Prizes.
Working Girl
You and I can both get jobs
and finally see what it means to be living
— “Fast Car”, Tracy Chapman
i.
I trade time for dollars at the minimum
wage exchange. I wipe tables instead
of writing poems. I am well versed
in the cycle of reheating and eating
frozen meals in the windowless staff
room. I know my worth in hourly
increments. I have purchased property
with my body. I have a small patch
of grass the bank lets me mow. I live
within my fence, make my garden
pretty, iron my uniform to hang an
empty effigy to my hollow shape.
I am paying the bank off for a metal
box in which I cart myself across
suburbs pumping noxious gas exhaust
on my way to the shopping centre
where I serve the fried flesh of dead
animals to pigs who don’t think they
are animals. I scrape the waste from
their plates into the trash to be shipped
out to stink up some other place
where garbage piles like body bags.
ii.
I want to do the real work — I want
to write the world anew but that’s
not what companies pay me to do.
I am the overqualified unskilled.
I am the doctoral student you drive
-thru, that see-through counter chick.
Sometimes I wonder what lipstick,
wig, tit tassels and a spray tan might
do. How much could I make? What
would it strip from me and could I
break even, pay my way out? What’s
a small heart-sink for cash in hand?
iii.
I see how it happens — an overdue
power bill, medication for the cat,
funding cuts, no penalty rates, my
savings account stripped bare.
There isn’t a woman in my lineage
who hasn’t earned her keep.
Stripper me does not differ greatly
from strapped me. She’s just a girl
trying to make some money. She’s
simply more practical: writes off
fish-net stockings and pole-dancing
classes on her tax. It wouldn’t take
much — full body wax, theatre-thick
foundation, waterproof mascara
and a spine. The girls in International
House do it. Call them Asian beauties
or student slaves. Call me by my name
badge, ‘Love’, or something else entirely.
October 4, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Aiden Heung is a native Chinese poet, born and raised on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau; he holds an MA in literature from Tongji University in Shanghai where he currently works and lives. His poems in English are published or forthcoming in many online and offline magazines, most notably Literary Shanghai, The Shanghai Literary Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, New English Review, A Shanghai Poetry Zine, Aesthetic Apostle among many others. He is an avid reader. He can be found at Aiden-Heung.com or www.twitter.com/aidenheung
Ritual
The face I’ve put on for almost twelve hours is in terrible
need of repair. I take off my face and rinse it
in the sink scrub it cleanse it smear on some lotion
and hang it in the cool air to dry. I look in the mirror –
blank gaze of a man staring like a black bird before winter
who’s forgotten the migration routes.
Time urges everything into a mound
of dirty underpants in the hamper. The only
thing worthy of preservation is the face. It
should be charming again tomorrow when I use
it in the office, and I should be happy as one who can
easily fit in and leave no trace of recognition. You don’t
know me.