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.
October 4, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Angela Costi has four poetry collections: Dinted Halos (Hit&Miss Publications, 2003), Prayers for the Wicked (Floodtide Audio and Text, 2005), Honey and Salt (Five Islands Press, 2007) and Lost in Mid-Verse (Owl Publishing, 2014). Her full-length play, Shimmer, has been remounted at several South Australian secondary colleges, 2016-17.
Her poetry, essays and reviews have been published in Australia and overseas, including Hecate, Southerly, LINQ, Meanjin, Tattoo Highway, Alternative Law Journal and Peril. In 2009-10, with funding from the Australia Council for the Arts, she travelled to Japan to work on an international collaboration involving her poetry and the Stringraphy Ensemble. Her essay about this collaboration, and performance text, A Nest of Cinnamon, are published in Cordite, 2009 and 2013.
The Weed Eaters
Flower beds, veggie patches, nature strips, paved courtyards
you are all under attack, the weeds have arrived in droves
deep-rooting themselves in your clay-based soil
they pretend friendship but you know they are here to compete.
I search for my tools of decapitation and with my trusty glove
begin the ritual of tearing them out, they may sting, they may weep,
they may resist the tug, but I have no sympathy for their resilience
despite their appeal to my heritage of peasant foraging and eating.
Baba with his weak knees and ailing joints continues the ritual
of picking them selectively from his yard of green excess,
with his large plastic bag, seductive swing in his grip,
each nettle, thistle, dandelion, creeper and clover are his.
He offers me their contents as the world’s source of wisdom
but regrets with a ragged look not knowing how to cook them like
‘your mother’. I stare at them and can’t see the scripture
or verse of Cyprus yet promise to keep them safe in my fridge.
At night, I can hear her robed in her silence opening the fridge.
I know what she’s up to, feeding her hunger for nostalgia,
she has them cooking in my non-stick pan, then slides them
onto two plates, squeezes the lemon liberally, drizzles the oil.
Paused in the hallway, I almost return to my bed, but
her bitterness seeps in and I long for the horta of childhood.
Mama is waiting. We eat as one, ravenous for what was.
The Good Citizens of Melbourne
Trams are the good citizens of Melbourne… There are nearly 700 trams on Melbourne streets. Looking after them takes a lot of men: cleaners, overhaulers, tradesmen of all sorts…
—Citizen Tram, a 1960s film by the Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board
Sitting next to my young mother is Deena, her sister
with eyes men fall into.
She’s older and focused on
getting them to work,
making sure they don’t miss
stop 20. Facing her
but almost falling into her lap is Thelema, her cousin
with arms and legs that don’t stop talking:
did you hear about Effie? Yes, you know her…
she’s the one with the glass eye,
the one that works the zipper machine…
She’s fifteen, younger than me – she looks fifty.
She has a proxenia,
he’s at least thirty,
her parents want to get rid of her
because of the zeemia
with the gelato shop boy.
With a slight lean of her head
away from the window
Deena intervenes:
Effie shouldn’t be forced,
it’s criminal, her parents are vavaree!
Then my mother, who is a mere fifteen herself
says: Maybe she’s better off,
who wants to be sklavee
for the rich man
and his needle and thread machine?
Deena, Thelema, Young Mum are
a trio of handbags, lunch boxes,
orange, apricot, lavender skirts,
shirts with wide white collars
showing neck bones, smiles
of modest pink lipstick,
earrings that clasp the ear tight,
knees protruding with pent up
bursts of freedom as they speak
in a flurry of Cypriot-Greek
on the busy tram
heading to a factory
where young women
make fashion
for others.
The tram
halts
before stop 20,
the Driver
turns his mouth into a fist:
on this tram we speak English
if you keep up with your gibberish
you can get off at the next stop!
The language hovers over their heads
like a thought cloud of orexee,
darkly spiralling,
sending them down into a well
where there are no windows to see
the plum trees, the magpies, the milk bars…
Each day they caught that tram
they renewed their vow
of silence.
October 4, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Carolyn Gerrish is a Sydney poet. She has published five collections of poetry. The most recent The View from the Moon (Island Press, 2011). She enjoys performing her work and is currently working on her sixth collection.
Disconnect
at my new apartment block (circa 1935)
in the suburb where everything has
happened & is set to begin again there’s
only three flats (plus mine) & no one watches
T.V. (reception unavailable in the building)
Bin Night is an urban mystery Sorry
she says from behind her chained door
I think it’s Tuesday then again it could
be Wednesday & how effective are your
phone and internet connections? a nest
of fraying wires above the unlockable
letterboxes in the lobby
where a scissored gesture from a jaded
prankster could render you perennially
incomunicado
October 4, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mark Anthony Cayanan is from the Philippines. They obtained an MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and are a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide. Among their publications are the poetry books Narcissus (Ateneo de Manila UP, 2011) and Except you enthrall me (U of the Philippines P, 2013). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Foglifter, The Spectacle, Dreginald, NightBlock, Crab Orchard Review, Cordite, and Lana Turner. A recipient of fellowships to Civitella Ranieri and Villa Sarkia, they teach literature and creative
writing at the Ateneo de Manila University.
One among
Who gets off backpack heavy with sweaty clothes tired but ready to supply their name
at the front desk one of the unremarkable many
who before this was seat 27A kept asking for gin and ginger ale from a flight
attendant who during her stopover hired a catamaran for the day to go snorkelling
four days later a passenger will grow livid when she can’t give him his order
whiskey on the rocks no ice and who upon entering a cab that smells of
grease and farts will crack open a window
the driver snickering as the streets even out into oiled anonymity and the midnight
DJ on the radio harangues a heartbroken caller who’ll take his dead heart with him
to work and while in line for the train overhear a girl telling her friend about her
sister a performance artist who used to snap
pigeons’ necks on stage she’s since quit her imagination limited to feats of
borrowed depravity now she’s one of the 1.6 million of her kind in the country
working five days a week 11 hours a day she sweats
shallots and ginger in a pot that spans two burners and adds among other death
sentences two pounds of butter the invitation to hunger
wafts across the street toward a bank with a guard who has no history of violent
behaviour but who’ll six years from now
hold a gun to his wife’s temple five straight days without sleep
today his wife applies Subtil Crème
to a customer’s cheeks using an angled brush that’s more than her daily
salary a customer who hums a song from the jeepney a college student who’ll decide
to spend her allowance on tickets to the Ultra Lotto Jackpot P1.18 billion
the body once mastered must have no need
for food she bums cigarettes off her best friend his phone constantly vibrating
who just wants one thing grows impatient
with those who refuse to send dick pics
wind rattling the windows of the empty classroom
October 4, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Natalie D-Napoleon is from Fremantle, Australia. Her writing has appeared in Southerly, Westerly, Meanjin, Griffith Review, and Australian Poetry Journal. In 2018 she won the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. Her debut poetry collection First Blood will be released by Ginninderra press in 2019.
Black Swan
Dedicated to those who continue to fight for the preservation of the Beeliar wetlands
I pluck from my
ribs one black feather
then another three
arise in its place.
I remember feeding bread
to the black swans with
my father as a child
at Bibra Lake, how ripping
off one chunk would bring
a bank of swans; a
magnet through the
sand to attract iron ore.
My shoulders itch,
spines of feathers
spiking through skin.
I flap my arms, not yet
ready to fly. The Noongar
throw a handful of sand
into a body of water,
speak language,
let the Waugal
know we are here.
Now, we live in the time
of the Mass Forgetting.
Now, bulldozers come
to scrape and wrench
the earth clean for
another road-to-nowhere,
road-to-nowhere, road-
to-nowhere…Fists full
of sand pour into the lake
but there is no ceremony,
only the low din and vibration
of con-struction/de-struction.
I remain the good wife;
I whistle to my cygnets,
I flap my wings three times,
honk and hiss at the
golden demon —
rara avis in terris
nigroque simillima
cygno. My fleshy lips turn
into a keratin-skin bill,
flag-red, a memory:
eagles wrenching
arrogant white feathers;
falling, falling, falling.
A sepulchral cloak of
black loaned from
a saviour of ravens.
The white tips remain
on my wings, tracks of
my fall marked by stars of
flannel flowers. Kooldjak,
gooldjak, maali you will call
my Name. Even if you deny
my existence I continue:
a wedge of obsidian wings
beating beneath the
land’s surface.
*Kooldjak, gooldjak, maali — “black swan” in various Noongah languages.
August 1, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jill Jones has published eleven books of poetry, and a number of chapbooks. The most recent are Viva La Real with UQP, Brink, The Leaves Are My Sisters, The Beautiful Anxiety, which won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry in 2015, and Breaking the Days, which was shortlisted for the 2017 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Her work is represented in major anthologies including the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, Ed. Nicholas Jose and The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry. In 2014 she was poet-in-residence at Stockholm University. She is a member of the J.M.Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, University of Adelaide.
Patience Without Virtue
Everyone loves the female voice.
Am I forgiven for having one?
I wait patiently, hoping it’s only
to do with simple flowers. It never is.
I dissent again, the moon goes as it came.
There’s nothing transcendental within reach.
What must I do amongst sweat
grey flannel, car parks, and theories?
I can only be a certain kind of lunatic
and women are vaster than history.
It’s the way I don’t step forward politely.
No point sitting on the fence.
It’s the way I have to fix things
by painting a sign. ‘I can’t believe
I still have to protest this fucking shit.’
I can’t put the leaves back.
My affinity is always a question.
I can’t recall when these things didn’t happen
in my cells or beaten-up memories.
I’ll never be as dead as a man.
April 23, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Claire Albrecht is writing her PhD in Poetry at the University of Newcastle. Her current work investigates the connections between poetry/photography and sex/politics. Claire’s poems appear in Cordite Poetry Review, Overland Literary Journal, Plumwood Mountain, The Suburban Review and elsewhere. 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 and she edited the 2018 Cuplet Anthology The Clambake.
hay fever
I want to break my own wrist
into the curve of my blundstone boot
no farmer, just a subscriber
to the trade aesthetic
[if only we knew all we needed to do
to support drought affected Aussie farmers
was shop at Woolworths this Saturday]
but I never could stand watching Landline.
I’d rather buy a bale of hay
spread it around the house
and propagate hayfever.
is this cynical? am I unfeeling?
I’ve watched this country die
I’m not afraid of fire
my bones are fine ground dust
a whirlybird out the car window
my breath the last clean water in the dam
bring your buffalo. put a gold coin
on its tongue. you’ve done your part.
April 23, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Autumn Royal is a poet and researcher. Autumn’s poetry and criticism have appeared in publications such as Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, Overland Literary Journal, Southerly Journal and TEXT Journal. She is interviews editor for Cordite Poetry Review and author of the poetry collection She Woke & Rose. Autumn’s second collection of poetry is forthcoming with Giramondo Publishing.
Culmination concept / for Philomela
Why does signalling
towards an end always
need to shudder
within the curvature
of a climax?
Must you kneel & crouch
down with beak
to throat — then chest?
The thrust & brine of evening
burrows under feathered
pleas — as if orange sparks
will burst directly over
pulsating shoulders
& you’re almost in a state
but still unaltered —
with fingers & palms sticky
above the loam you might lapse
lower into — if it wasn’t for
these lines & the way
they break off & against —