October 8, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
S. J. J. F. Rutherford is a pen name of Simon Patton’s. He lives with his partner, two cats and Sealyham the Terrier near Chinaman Creek in Central Victoria, and translates Chinese poetry. He spent five months working in Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong last year, and lived near the Tai Hang Tung and Nam Shan Housing Estates.
Cafe (Tai Hang Tung Estate大坑東邨)
Ice in the tall glass cloaked with cola jostles bubbles of fizz, and
I feel this heat tell only the hard wood under my tail-bone. The
TV is mute: it addresses the room graphically, in fluent Chinese
characters, beneath perfectly made-up faces lip-reading “news”.
The kitchen, for its few orders, roars industrially out of the
wok, while — in the centre of his Imaginary Loungeroom — a
man chats through a smart hair-cut deeper into his mirror.
October 8, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jonathan Hadwen is a Brisbane writer whose poetry has been published in Westerly, fourW, and Stand Magazine, as well as other publications in Australia and overseas. In 2013 he was named runner-up in the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for an unpublished manuscript. He recently had a prose poem sequence published in Writing to the Edge, published by Spineless Wonders.
In the neighbourhood
I drive out to see a friend. He lives out west in a suburb that was brand-new about thirty years ago, but is now a bit run-down. I drive through 60 zones, and 80 zones, a school zone, intersections, and roundabouts in the more modern areas. On every side I pass streets lined with houses. I have lived in this city my whole life. There are so many streets I will never drive down.
*
A plane sinks into the suburbs. A cloud reaches out like a great claw.
*
There are more birds around than I ever knew, and they fight all the time, and some of them even sing. Some of the birds are regulars – a pack of noisy miners, a couple of crows – but occasionally there are lorikeets, or rosellas, and even more rarely, a song-bird. I can never see him, only hear him, there in the trees, no matter how long I stare and study each bough and branch. He never sings the same song twice – he is like a composer trying out melodies, a perfectionist, who is never truly satisfied with the tune.
*
I never see the old couple downstairs, except on bin night. They keep their place locked-up tight, and the air-conditioner is always running whether it is hot or otherwise. It is the man who takes the rubbish out. He totters down the few steps from their first floor apartment with his walking stick, and one small bag of trash.
*
The old man is coughing again. It is bad today. My throat catches just listening to it. The sun is out, in its merciless way. The birds are happy – it is early summer – there is always enough to eat.
October 4, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture
by Gaiutra Bahadur
HIRST
ISBN 9781849042772
Reviewed by NICOLE THOMAS
At the heart of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, is Gaiutra Bahadur’s personal quest to discover one woman’s identity amongst the mass of people relocated during the period of indenture. Born in Guyana and immigrating to the United States at the age of six with her family, Bahadur, a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 2007-2008, is an American correspondent and book critic. With journalistic scrutiny, Bahadur embarks on a journey in search of her great-grandmother, Sujaria’s story; one of many women buried deep in the history of colonial discourse. Curious about her Indian origins, with desire to understand how her great-grandmother’s decision to cross the Indian Ocean in 1903 helped shape her destiny, she returns to India to engage with a past that has impacted on present perceptions of identity. Her exploration of the past excavates the injustices and degradation suffered by immigrants under the power of colonial authority.
Following the Abolition Act of 1833 that ended slavery in the British Empire in 1834, the system of indenture was introduced and thereafter became a second form of servitude. Over a million Indians were deployed and spread across the globe to work on sugar plantations, half of them transported to the Caribbean. Surviving the horrific journey was just the beginning of a life of inequality, mistreatment, and dislocation. Emigrants were stripped of caste and kin and turned into an indistinguishable mass of plantation labourers, forced into sub-standard social and contractual arrangements. Unruly recruiters misled and schemed in order to induce labourers and preyed on the vulnerabilities of desperate women to serve the over-population of men. A gender imbalance among the indentured contributed to the breakdown of families, igniting jealousy, which often lead to violence and the deaths of many coolie women.
The term “coolie” derived from the Tamil word kuli, meaning wages or hire. Over the eight decades that “coolies” were ferried across the globe the word evolved into an ethnic slur, and spilled fluidly from tongues of plantation managers and overseers as a reminder to indentured labourers of their menial origins and lowliness in the race hierarchy. It was “A subtle challenge to their claim to belong”, Bahadur states in the preface. The author re-inscribes the c-word, explaining that while it may be offensive and painful for some, it is true to her subject. “My great-grandmother was a high-caste Hindu. That is a fact. But she left India as a “coolie”. That is also a fact. She was one individual swept up in a particular mass movement of people, and the perceptions of those who controlled that process determined her identity at least as much as she did. To them, she was a coolie woman, a stock character possessing stereotyped qualities, which shaped who she was by limiting who she could ever be.” (p.xxi)
The struggle with identity emerges on the first page, when Bahadur takes a retrospective look at her point of departure, from her home in Guyana to a new life in America. At the impressionable age of six, still connected to the memories of home in Guyana but disconnected by the act of leaving, Bahadur describes her sense of displacement as being severed in two. This severing of self relates to the nature of diaspora, and a motif of connection and disconnection weaves throughout the narrative, drawing parallels to the experiences of indentured labourers severed from imaginary homelands, religion and culture. Bahadur’s personal severance reflects on the lives of the women who were physically dismembered by acts of violence from their men. Juxtaposition of the outside and inside spaces she inhabits expresses the diasporic struggle of trying to locate the self in the interior and exterior of new world culture. The memory of a distant home is the vein that draws her back to the Caribbean as a young woman where she describes her arrival as “a tingling fusion of inside and out, an electric union of outside and in, a sparks-flying soldering together of the soul” (9). The sensation describes a physical memory, expressing a psychological essence of belonging, whereby a return brings forth an imagined wholeness. As a whole, the narrative is a process of identification that oscillates between boundaries of culture and place, exploring the uncertainty of self and belonging.
From Guyana’s national archives, Bahadur exhumes an artefact that catalogues only a few details of her great-grandmother’s indentured life. In 1903, Sujaria, four-months pregnant and travelling alone, sailed with 560 adults on The Clyde, from Calcutta to the Caribbean. Bahadur’s exploration shifts from the potholed roads of Bihar to archives in England, where she locates a documented plethora of coolie sufferings from the shadowy repository of history. While the narrative exposes the power struggles that existed between indentured men and the repressive legal system that convicted and imprisoned them for minor labour violations, it engages a wider focus on the more nuanced stories of women; those who escaped the oppressions of their country and their men, for the social leverages that immigrating offered, only to meet with adversity. Through invoking place and reconstructing the trauma of indenture, the voices of coolie women speak against the colonial context and act as a collective narrative for subalterns who have been written out of history. We hear of Maharani, who at the age of five married a much older man, and was widowed at the age of twelve. Forced to cook and clean for her in-laws, she endured eight-years of beatings before escaping and crossing oceans to flee India: And later, from Doolarie, a remarried widower whose new partner beat her with a hoe for talking to another man, scarring her for life. Sujaria, however, remains silent, but her absence is a defining presence in the narrative. She appears fleetingly as an apparition. Bahadur attempts to locate her with the summoning of rhetoric questioning, “Did she look back over her shoulder as she boarded the ship? Was there regret in her glance?” (47). Through Bahadur’s speculations and conjectures the reader is able to imagine Sujaria, shifting between the alternate scenarios, inhabiting the shared spaces and experiencing similar injustices of indentured life, though this is only speculation on the moments that make up Sujaria’s life. While her exploration fails to excavate her great-grandmother’s story, her journey and research finds the suspended voices of other coolie women, who like Sujuaria, left their villages and travelled the middle passage, to reinvention in a new world. This new narrative gleaned from research and the stories of other coolie women is restorative literary practise, re-addressing the histories of coolie women suspended and forgotten. The writing functions as a restorative and reformative agent for memory, preventing the history of coolies from vanishing with the past.
The book shifts the balance of power from official colonial archives, to the unauthorised versions of indenture told by the memory keepers whose stories descended generations. Bahadur articulates the relationship between stories and the unreliable nature of memory. “The will to remember the past is undermined by an equally formidable will to forget” (18), and the stories that did descend often reveal as much about how families choose to see their histories as they do about the actual histories” (48). What emerges from the narrative is an exploration of story and its power to shape identity. “Unravelled, they began, ever so slowly, to spin the threads of a novel identity” (62). The style of the narrative relies on metaphor and figurative elements of language to weave what rests on the bare skeleton of story. The Ramayan, an ancient Hindu epic with religious and allegorical meaning, coursed through the veins of displaced Hindus’ and was their “lifeblood”, says Bahadur. “The epic, like the diaspora that identifies with it, is preoccupied with women who break the codes of accepted sexual behaviour” (108). While the adoption and telling of The Ramayan forged a sense of belonging and provided a social life for the indentured, it may have influenced men in their actions of violence against Indian women, serving as a powerful reminder to women of consequent punishment for uncontrolled sexuality. The stories that Bahadur weaves into her narrative show the power of story and language to generate meaning and provide a sense of reality.
Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture traces the history of Indian migration, down the Hooghly river, around the Cape, and across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, trawling through the complex lives of a generation of Indian women who sought exile from their country and their men, and delving into the depths of Indian diaspora and the struggle for identity. Gaiutra Bahadur does not return with the story that belonged to her great-grandmother but she brings home the acknowledgement that identity is as much about lived experience as it is about self-creation and what one believes to be true. The narrative proffers that the self is forever adapting, that identity is not anchored to the past but is perpetually shifting in order to belong.
NICOLE THOMAS lives on the South Coast of NSW and holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts with Distinction from the University of Wollongong. She was awarded The UoW Centre for Canadian Australian Studies (CCAS) Award.
August 12, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
White Coins
by James Byrne
Arc Publications
ISBN 978 1908376 47 3
Reviewed by CYRIL WONG
White Coins by UK poet, James Byrne, is a collection that operates zealously across the rich surfaces of semantic interconnectedness and imagistic playfulness. Not unlike more conventional lyric and confessional voices, perhaps, the poet here begins at “a ransacked house” or a home from the past, serving as a familiar starting point for segues across time and dimensions of meaning. The first poem, “Historia,” as the etymology of the title also suggests, is a concerted attempt to gain new knowledge or renewed insight through poetic investigation. There is a vulnerable acknowledgement of once being “six and made of violins” or having experienced how “love blunts.” But there is also a rejuvenation of perspective, such as when a singular leaf becomes a “scapel-like finger”, simultaneously revealing the speaker’s humility at not taking credit for a space of lofty detachment (the leaf “not pointing towards a balance-act”) but yet achieving (“balancing”) that serendipitous equipoise, nonetheless, between an intense emotionality the past evokes and a present opportunity for imaginative reinvention.
The following poem, “Economies of the Living,” a series of dictionary-like entries of aspects of our world refracted through a surrealist lens, furthers the strategy of sustaining a balance between startling description and emotional expressionism. From lyrically sweeping comments on violent mothers, word-portraits of animals to imperative statements about eternity, Byrnes reveals himself to be aligned with the Romantics in their connection to nature and in that yearning to rejoin the spiritual sublime. In the section addressed to “Immortality,” for example, the speaker promises: “I will watch the raked light of sunset over Shardeloes and find you via memory.”
But first and foremost is the poet’s faithfulness to an unceasing concatenation of expansive associations and symbolisms. Take these lines from “River Nocturnes,” for instance:
labyrinth trails in a sonical stormlash
pronged overexposure of lightning
a skybull stamping out spherical thunder
Byrnes’ priority or clear sense of artistic glee is clearly in the description of the thing. Personae introduced through the poems are more ideas than characters, even if they include family members, as the sustained strategy across the poems is to paint an enriching textual layer that generates ever-revealing semantic outcomes. A deliberate emphasis on descriptive playfulness does not, of course, mean that deeper and ethical urgencies are absent. As the poems progress, the experience of which is analogous to moving through a museum of surrealist art, laser-like criticisms regarding political and social ills can unexpectedly arise. In this section (“To Measure Another’s Foot By Your Own Last”) from the long poem, “Phrase and Fable,” the writing becomes denser with meaning or more compact with moral urgency, without at the same time losing the rhythm of the poet’s imaginative segues already generated elsewhere:
Like politicians first-footing on humanitarian issues,
foreign policy is a butcher, reflective as its blade.
Hide history’s measuring tape, the battlefield chemists
and dioxin hotspots, the attics of clumsy gas masks…
Foreign policy dictates to always find one’s own feet
before putting the boot down upon the neck…
Later in “Soapbox” during the part of the book now marching towards including more implicit to explicit social commentary, Byrne breezily sums up, mockingly decries or satirically categorises metonymic objects or ideas that point to fundamental human fallacies, pairing each object or idea to a specific country in both provocative and evocative ways. This is executed with verve and vim bordering on delirium and the comic. But the poet still manages to seduce the reader into pondering meaningfully over every liberating rapid-fire connection:
Egyptian chevrons / Saudi princeships / Kazakh autocracies /
Greek dawns / Russian hooliganism / Burmese chalkboard /
Singaporean spyglass / American liberties / Israeli intifadas /
Nigerian Shellsuits / Japanese waterworks / Chinese whispers
Imagist, social commentator or symbolist, the poet acknowledges and pays stylistic tribute to literary influences from symbolist poets, Verlaine and Rimbaud, to Ashbery in the poem, “Rimbaud Villanelles,” by revealing next-to-nothing about his literary heroes (only that Rimbaud “popeyed on absinthe” or that Ashbery’s Illuminations go delicately on Scarborough”) and focusing instead on banalities, sense-impressions, the passing gossip and white noise of urbanity these poets must have confronted to fuel their work, etc. Surrealist painters and symbolist poets repeatedly subvert expectations to demonstrate that truth-making is never certain (thus permitting endless possibilities for meaning across the canvas or page) or that there is always room for an unusual interpretation. But one must be reminded that play, in such artistic contexts, is never just play. Byrne demonstrates, for instance, that the grumblings of one’s political conscience can–or should–be woven (consciously or otherwise) into any bewildering tapestry of symbolist presentations challenging the knowable through aesthetic subversion and reinvention.
Quoting ironically from Jeremy Paxman at the start of “On the Ordinary” about how poetry has “connived at its own irrelevance,” Byrne proceeds to show how his own brand of poetry, even in its seeming “irrelevance”–interpreted here as literary jouissance at the level of aesthetic effects and imaginative flourishes–can quickly turn “serious” or “relevant” when hard-hitting questions float to the surface of the poetically meandering mind: “How do an entire people lose themselves?” A more implicit answer might be (in my own mind): “By allowing oneself to be easily categorised.” And as Byrne writes in his poem, half-quoting, half-asserting: “Art is not the ‘fixed or regulated sequence…customary; usual’. We are mysterious to ourselves.” It becomes a matter of conforming to social class and elitism, from which poetry should break away in order to wrap itself authentically around our deepest mysteries, the unknowability at the core of existence. The poem ends with this: “All people are either ordinary or extraordinary maniacs.” It is clear which the poet prefers to be. To be a “maniac” in this case is to forge one’s original poetic voice while still remaining reflective (even as the primary stylistic urge is to deflect, subtly destruct, delight in disorder) of humdrum to harsher realities.
At the same time, however, I keep returning to an earlier sense that after the enjoyment (for both writer and reader, I’m sure) of unpacking or merely delighting in startling word-play and the sometimes mysterious connections between ideas, I am still moved centrally by that Romantic imagination operating (I’m convinced) behind this scintillating surface of ever-shifting language. That quiet acknowledgement of the Romantic sublime as presented through nature is evident throughout the book, waiting just beyond the unceasing layers-upon-layers of meaning; as if given a chance, nature provides not just a boundless source of metaphors, but also respite and a curiously embracive calm beyond human-made uncertainties or semantic fragmentation; as when the book closes with a line like this to remind the reader of that which is all-encompassing already abiding in us all:
all these lives of sea
filling out in our ears
CYRIL WONG is the Singapore Literature Prize-winning author of poetry collections such as Unmarked Treasure, Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light, The Dictator’s Eyebrow and After You. He has also published Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me and Other Stories and a novel, The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza. Cyril has served as a mentor under the Creative Arts Programme and the Mentor Access Project, as well as a judge for the Golden Point Awards in Singapore. A past recipient of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award for Literature, he completed his doctoral degree in English Literature at the National University of Singapore in 2012. His poems have been anthologised in Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (W. W. Norton 2008) and Chinese Erotic Poems (Everyman’s Library 2007).
June 29, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sabrin Ahmed is a 17 year old Somali girl currently held in Australian Immigration Detention. She has published in The Arrivalists. Her work has been read at poetry gatherings. She is currently writing her life story. She is an honorary member of PEN International.
surroundings of sadness
i see nothing but a fence of tears
young and old are a shadow of life
i can’t go back to the world i once lived in
where bullets and bombs were shared
where many mothers lost their first born
and last born
where many girls were raped
by several men
where many children become orphans
where i lost my dear mother
where my life was threatened
where days and nights my tears came pouring
like rain
where i didn’t have a choice but to run away
with out any guidance
where I put my self in a humble boat
my life at risk again
where i thought i was heading to the right place
at the right time
where my thoughts were full of hopes
and happiness was knocking at my heart
i did not know that i would be locked up in detention
for so long
what have i done to deserve this situation?
is seeking asylum a crime?
what i was looking for is peace and freedom
but now it is far from me
it is like the distance between earth and sky.
Dear Bird Send My Message
Send my humble greetings and love
to people who are struggling
days and night,
who are in every street
protesting,
who are moving earth and heaven
just to help us.
Dear bird send my message.
Send an image of my eyes-
to Abbott-
where tears
are rolling like a river,
send my heart
full of sorrow,
send my mind
full of thoughts,
send him images
of why I came.
Dear bird send my message.
Send my emotions
to Morrison
who is enjoying my pain,
who does not think
that I am a human being
like him,
who thinks
that i am just a number
the waste of population.
Dear bird send my message.
Send my appreciation
and gratitude
to lawyers who fight
for my freedom,
who give me hope
that someday
I will be able
to sleep.
May 23, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Vesna Goldsworthy (1961, Belgrade) lives in London and writes poetry in English, her third language, as well as her native Serbian, in which her poetry is much-anthologized. Aged twenty-three, she read her poems at a football stadium to an audience of thirty thousand people. She moved to Britain soon afterwards and did not write a line of poetry for over twenty years. Her Crashaw Prize winning debut poetry collection in English, The Angel of Salonika (Salt, 2011) was one of the Times Best Poetry Books of the Year.
Yalta
Everything in the world is really beautiful, everything but our thoughts and actions…
A.P. Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog” (1899)
After they made love that first time
She still felt distant enough to use the formal you
In the first question she posed.
He contemplated the heavy Japanese scent
He helped her choose the day before.
Something less overwhelming, with more zest,
Would have suited Yalta better, now he knew,
Than the red spider lily.
That flower grows, so legend says,
Along the path on which you meet
Someone you will never see again.
He was still naked when he got out of bed
And sat down at the table to cut a slice of watermelon.
His testicles rested on the chair.
The lacquered wood felt pleasantly cool.
They stayed like that for thirty minutes at least.
Her little Pomeranian dog was there too
Watching his mistress, then him,
As he chewed the red flesh in silence.
The two pairs of eyes
Seemed similarly moist in candlelight.
If she were not naked – or not shy –
If she could only fling the window open,
Would they still hear the crashing
Of the waves
In the darkness below,
Like earlier that evening,
A century ago?
Sanssouci
I am old enough to remember
The appearance of Akhmatova’s Requiem,
The ambiguities of Brecht, Brodsky in his prime,
The Wall before it fell, the sound of planes
Taking off and landing. Nearby, another country.
On our long ride to Potsdam
We carved a crescent, a Cyrillic S,
In the first snow of the season,
As we wound our way across
The white spaces on the map,
Along the streets which echoed in Russian
And smelled of coal, cabbage, and wool.
It took years to reassemble
The memory of winter love-making
Undone on the parturition table,
In the encounter of metal and flesh.
The nurse returned with a pack of wadding.
It will cease in a day or two, she said
As though you were, already, absent. Do rest,
Drink some Georgian red, forget.
She straightened the shawl on my shoulders.
Under her uniform, the smell of sweat
Was just like mother’s, the night she was taken.
Our bicycles remained padlocked at the gate.
The brushstrokes of white powder
Emphasised the elegance of bars and chains,
A trail of lines in virgin snow,
To but not from, never returning;
So much blood and nothing
Conceived from so much love.
Of all that betrays us, the gentlest is memory.
Leaving the Party
We walk in silence bearing westwards
Along the towpath, against the current.
The Thames slithers and shimmers
On its slow way to surrender
Exhausted and spread-eagled on the sands of Essex.
Bicycle lights approach and frame us
In milky stills of gelatine silver.
Runners pound by in sweat and lycra,
Their footfall like strange amphibians’ heartbeat,
Mosquito buzz of music rises from their ears.
They give a wide berth to the couple of elderly clowns
In dinner jacket and sequins, carefully treading
With patent leather shoes unsuited to water’s edge.
At one point this evening we seemed unbearably close.
I raised my right hand to touch your temple.
Your hair, your fine hair, your fine white hair
Moved towards my fingers in static electricity.
There again was that question I was about to pose.
Then something behind your unquestionable goodness
Suddenly scared me, like ormolu and woodworm.
The cup of my palm still carries that faint fragrance,
The smoothness of black silk where the hand fell in defeat,
The soft woollen cloth, the white cotton underneath,
All those conspiracies of loom and thread
Expensively constructed to shield and to protect
Your skin, your warm skin, in all its unfamiliar creases.
Mine always feels porous, a layer to be shed,
Though I forever shiver — needing a cover, a shawl, a shelter —
Like some short-lived species of insect, a devil’s darning needle.
The darkness grows. The heat’s abating. I’ll hold myself together.
May 23, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Louise McKenna was born in the United Kingdom and studied at the University of Leeds where she completed a joint honours degree in English Literature and French. She now lives in South Australia. In 2010 a short poetry collection, A Lesson in Being Mortal, was published by Wakefield Press. In 2013 she co-edited Flying Kites, a Friendly Street Poets anthology, also published by Wakefield Press. Her poetry has appeared in Mascara Literary Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Red River Review, Eureka Street and Poetrix. Her work has also appeared in Light and Glorie, an anthology of South Australian poetry published by Pantaenus Press. This year she was longlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize and she was shortlisted for the same prize in 2013. This is her first published piece of fiction.
Fall of a Bird
The bang makes her spin round as the bird hits the paving stones outside her lounge room window. It’s a honeyeater, tiny and beautiful in its gold and black plumage. Jen goes out into the yard and cups the insensate bird in her hands. It’s warm as blood and she can feel the rapid vibration of its heart. There is no time to nurse it. She feels a pang of guilt at the thought of leaving it, but she is running late already. She lays it in the shade.
Its wings have made a ghostly impression on the glass door. Strange, how this draws a tear from her. She does not normally weep over such things; having worked as a nurse for ten years has shored up some emotional ballast, yet this small tragedy moves her. Her mug of coffee sits on the kitchen top, but she feels a sudden repulsion for it and slings it in the sink. Another wave of nausea breaks over her. She feels depleted, a little down. This is a virus taking hold, she thinks, although she’s been like this now for over a month. She hopes her GP will shed some light from her blood results on Monday.
She glances down at her fob watch. Ten to six: that sparrow-farting, heart-sinking hour on Saturday before the early shift. Passing the open door of her daughter’s bedroom, she glimpses Polly, one arm splayed across the doona, the other thrown back on the pillow, the way she used to sleep as a baby. In a week’s time she will be four. Despite the celebration, Jen will silently grieve once more for the anniversary of the day she was told that no more children were possible. When they opened her up and lifted Polly out, there were ripples visible on the uterine muscle. She was told her uterus had been about to split apart, that it was perilously frail and inelastic. Then it failed to contract after Polly’s birth, resulting in massive blood loss.
During those first ten, sacrosanct minutes in which they worked to stem the haemorrhage, Jen prepared to face death, and she clung desperately to the edge of consciousness, determined not to fall into a pelagic darkness where she would not find her baby or partner. Afterwards they told her and Mark how Bandl Rings were the cause, the phenomenon indicating impending uterine rupture, first discovered by Ludwig Bandl. During those weeks of slow recovery, Jen had googled the nineteenth century obstetrician, and learned how he had spent his last years in an asylum. Her specialist had been straight with her. She remembers his eyes, bloodshot from too much work, or alcohol, when he recommended sterilisation. A rare problem. Very rare, her womb was dangerously thin, he said. Another pregnancy might kill her.
There is a violin case propped up by the door, and she thinks of Mark, how he will be up in a few hours preparing Polly’s breakfast in time for Dora the Explorer. His career as a music teacher allows her to work weekends for the penal rates that come in so handy. He’d played some Beethoven for her last night, the notes spiralling off into the room with a mellifluous sadness.
‘God, you look as white as one of those sheets,’ Sue tells her at the nurses’ station. They’ve just finished handover and are waiting for an eighty-four year old with a fractured hip to come in. Sue sets some tea before her on the desk before Jen feels her world tilt again, black snow dotting her vision. She sinks on to the chair and waits for it to thaw.
‘Have you got an appointment yet?’ Sue asks, searching her colleague’s face.
‘Yes, on Monday.’
‘Good.’ That is all Sue has to say, and the word trails in the air as she goes off to her duties. Jen has to delete an unbidden image of a tumour slowly rotting her away.
After her appointment late on Monday, how does she open the car door in the health centre car park, turn the ignition key and manoeuvre out? How does she drive home through the city’s craziest hour? She pulls up behind a ute, a demonic looking dog menacingly dripping strings of saliva over the tailgate, and vomits into a supermarket bag.
She arrives home almost disorientated. Her limbs move mechanically, as if her brain no longer communicates with her body, and she is swimming through air. She takes a shower. Afterwards, naked and dripping, she stands still and drinks in the emptiness of the house.
Mark’s text still shows on her phone: At Woolies, hope everything OK xxx. She throws on some clothes then walks through to the lounge room. Polly’s pink blanket is spilled across the sofa. There are two of her books on top of it. An arrow of grief enters her.
The bird is still there, motionless, under the garden fence. She walks out into the yard. The impossibly small engine of its heart ceased, perhaps hours ago. Its eyes are glazed and soulless. She kneels down, takes it once more in her hands. This time it is cold. She sees honeyeaters almost every day, darting back and forth among hedges and power lines, where they briefly arrange themselves like notes on a stave. She takes a trowel from the shed, scoops a hole in the humus beneath her roses and gives it a burial she hopes is deep enough to deter the neighbour’s cat.
Come and see me next week, her GP advised her. He spoke with some emotion, being fully versed in Jen’s medical history. How could she have known, that as an afterthought, perhaps acting on professional instinct, he had called the lab and requested a pregnancy check in addition to the other tests? So now it is on paper, the report confirming the incontrovertible evidence from a few millilitres of blood. Nausea, overwhelming tiredness, spells of dizziness. Not the symptoms of a tumour, but an eight-week old foetus struggling to make its presence felt.
A very small chance of pregnancy. She remembers signing the consent form for the sterilisation, the smaller print insuring the hospital against all those highly improbable risks and complications. A very small chance. All life needs. She has a week to think things through; another week while the baby grows, swimming in the warm dark.
As she steps back inside the house, she sees herself in the glass door and above her, a perfect cloning of clouds in a blue sky, the same forgery of heaven that tricked the bird. The print of its wings is like the spread, phantom fingers of a minute hand. She reaches for a cloth.
May 23, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Gabriel Don received her MFA in Creative Writing at The New School, where she worked as the chapbook and reading series coordinator. Her work has appeared in Westerly 58:2, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Brooklyn Rail, The Saudade Review, The Understanding Between Foxes and Light, Yes Poetry, A Minor and Statorec.com. She has appeared in visual poems such as Woman Without Umbrella (vimeo.com/55691171) and Unbound (vimeo.com/54545554). She started several reading-soiree series including Pies and Scribes and Dias Y Flores in New York City and is editorial staff at LIT. She is a #bookdress and can be found on Amazon @ tinyurl.com/aq9ll8c.
The Chicken Coop
The chicken coop was outside, to the left of the house, down the side stairs, tucked away in the corner, opposite to the downstairs sliding glass door, that opened into a big room with grotty carpets and piles of oil cans, old tools, across on the other wall a topless poster of Pam and a door to where I slept on a water bed with my dog Scar. Dad liked to keep chickens. He installed the large wired cage as soon as we moved in. We got our eggs daily and chopped and roasted a chook for special occasions. We didn’t live on a farm or nothing. Sure, it’s not the biggest town in Austra’ia―it wasn’t something people did, keep chickens. If they wanted chicken meat or eggs, they’d go to Coles. Dad was just like that.
His dream was to own a prawn trawler. When he eventually saved up enough to buy one, days laying brick, digging holes, slabbing walls, he took it out on the river and got sick as a dog. Ah nooooooo. Mate, it was gross. He turned green and spewed for days. He chucked a sickie from work and spent the rest of the week at the pub drinking ginger ale and beer. I was working with him at the time and since I wasn’t old enough to drive the truck myself, I sat next to him, bony legs dangling over bar stool, sipping on a fire engine. I was eleven when I dropped out of school to work with Dad. We woke up at the crack of dawn and climbed up and sat down in the only seat: one long bench with three seat belts, up the front of the ute. Dad and I would argue over the tape deck. He wanted to listen to Kenny Rogers. I wanted to play ACDC. Best way to wake up mate, on a long drive to the work site. We’d go back and forth, until we’d stubbornly, cutting off our noses to spite our faces, listened to AM radio. The truck didn’t have FM.
The floor was filled with rolling stubbies, beer cans, soft drinks, bottles of old and hot Lift, greased wrenches and parking tickets. After Dad picked up the boys, I’d be squashed into the middle with the gear stick shifting between my legs. Boz, Dad’s dog, a beautiful black Doberman, was on the back, wagging her tail and slobbering her tongue into the wind. Dad didn’t want me to be a bludger. Had to earn my keep. I was always waggin’ school anyways, so Dad reckoned it was best I just tag along with him. Once, not even four years old yet, when my parents were out at a dance, all dressed up, I dismantled the living room cupboard with a screwdriver, all by myself. Mum threw a hissy fit. Dad looked proud.
When I was a youngin Dad would disappear for days, not come home. Mum would say he’d gone walkabout. Shrug it off, like it was normal. No biggie. She’d tell me to put my togs on and we’d go to Maccas for breakkie. The one that was right on the beach, yeah mate, it’s gone now. It was always full of surfies in boardies and no shoes, not even a pair of thongs. Mum looked like a movie star. She was in her early twenties, her black hair permed and her eyes hidden behind her big purple sunglasses. We’d eat pancakes, bacon and egg McMuffins and hash browns and spend the rest of the day at the beach. Slip slap slop. Mum would lie on her purple towel, sunbathing, reading a book and I’d body surf and climb rocks. Chase the bush turkeys. Sometimes she’d walk around the cliff hills with me. She’d show me the hidden waterfall and sing me a song to remember the colours of a rainbow. She had a song for everything.
Eventually Dad would find his way home, with a gutful of piss, stumbling and swerving, telling Mum he’d been working on a house in Brizzie, the words barely making any sense slurred and Mum would spit the dummy. She hadn’t even wanted to marry him, she’d cry. He chased her and chased her. He pursued her till he caught her, like a fish he’d throw back after he’d hooked it. I would sneak out the front door, run away from the smashing plates and loud screams, down the stairs on the side of the house and sit with Boz, his head in my lap, my legs curled and bent, my back leaning against the wall, looking at the chooks. They were funny little buggers. I’d watch them squabble, bobbing their heads up and down, pecking each other, fighting for a feed. Their cage, covered in shit, hay and rust, was always in need of a clean. Sometimes Dad would send me down there as a punishment with a slopping bucket of soap and water.
I remember the first time my Dad caught me and my friend Ben smoking. We had a nice big bowl of mull on my bedside table. We were lying in bed, vegging out, in our trackie dacks, playing video games, punching cone after cone. I thought Dad was away living on a building site while he did their renovations. Mum never told us off for getting high. She didn’t like confrontation or maybe she didn’t notice. Dad liked his grog and all but he down right hated pot. He came home early and smelt some smoke sneaking up the stairs. Mate, he was spewin’. I heard him punch a hole in the wall upstairs and tip over the television. Bloody oath. We could hear his heavy steps down the stairs and mate, we took off as fast as our legs would carry us. Luckily my room has a door into the back garden so we escaped outdoors and up the stairs and hid under the truck. He looked for us for ages, screaming he was going to kill me when he found me. We held our breath and nearly passed out from fright. I’m not a wuss and Beno is the biggest guy on our rugby team, a giant Polynesian who can tackle anyone on the field but Dad’s mental. We just hoped and prayed Dad wouldn’t get into the truck and drive to the pub for a schooner. We were under that truck till sunset when we finally, slowly and scared, popped our heads out and checked to see the coast was clear and legged it to Beno’s, where his old man didn’t care if we smoked.
I inherited my temper from my Dad. Poor Mum. She’s the sweetest, gentlest woman you’d ever meet and she had to deal with us drongos. I reckon in another life, without us, she could have been a prime minister or done something special, you know? She didn’t get a fair go. Mum loved to go to our club’s member’s draw every Thursday night. She was always hopeful, this was the week, she would win the large cash prize. Better than staying in, cooped up in the house. I loved driving in the car with Mum when I was little. She’d just take us for a trip, in any direction, no particular destination. She’d have Dolly Parton turned up to the top volume, singing, “I will always love you.” Or Tammy Wynette spelling out, “Our d-i-v-o-r-c-e becomes final today.”
We’d drive alongside the concaves and curves of the rivers, along the coast, past mangroves, through eucalypt forests; the thick smell of the gum trees entering the car. We’d venture into the middle of nowhere and in Austra’ia that’s not far from anywhere. If the car broke down, we’d be fucked. Not a light in sight. I’ve been taught since kindy what to do if I ever ended up stranded. How to gather condensation on cling wrap for water. Never drink from the ocean unless you want to go mad. The call that echoed: Cooee, Cooee, Cooee. It’s heaps dangerous on the roads. Wild life made their way across the highway, unaware the car had been invented. Kangaroos, especially, at night they become hypnotised by headlights and a big beaut of a thing, built like a boxer, not able to move, in the car’s path. It’s not that people care about killing a kangaroo, they’re hunted like pests here, cheapest meat you can pick up at the supermarket: a kangaroo can total a car and hop away. I’ve never hit a kangaroo, mind you. Worst accident I’ve ever had was when me and the boys were bored shitless on a Saturday so we decided to drive to the Bottle-O, fill up the esky with long necks and throwbacks and head upstate for a barbie. We got heaps smashed. My truck at the time didn’t have a door on the left hand side, next to the passenger’s seat, where I was sitting wasted on the way back and I rolled right out onto the road. When they got me home, I had to sit in a bath of Dettol, my whole body grazed.
My oldies kept at it―the screaming, the violence, the tears, the door slamming―my whole childhood. By the time I was bringing girls home, Dad had moved out. Mum and Dad weren’t divorced but Dad lived in an apartment on the main street of Coolie, above the pie shop, with a bogan, who had flabby arms and several chins, named Sharon and her daughter, Liana. He’d met Sharon at the pub. She sat with him, red nose with red nose, every day till closing. Mum was on the road a lot for work so I lived by myself most of the time. Only saw Dad at work. He’d invite me to join him and Sharon for dinner at the pub but I felt sick every time I’d see her. Once that bitch saw Mum sitting up at the bar with her friends at the Clubhouse and―so lucky I wasn’t there, Dad wasn’t there either―she went up and started talking shit and then pushed Mum off her seat. Poor Mum. Sprawled out on the blue carpet, in her finest clothes and jewellery.
I reckon people in our town are jealous of Mum. They like to cut down tall poppies. Flock together. Mum is smart and a looker too and she always behaves like a lady. She was just raised that way. She doesn’t think she’s too good for you or anything. She never got angry with me, not once. She’s not the type to speak her mind. I think after Dad, she got scared to. She’d rather walk around things, tell white lies. Hide up a supermarket aisle from workmates because she hadn’t answered their calls. Tell everyone what they wanted to hear. She never told me off for being a wally or bringing a different woman home every night. Even after she walked in on us having a pash. She was polite to them. Made them cups of tea. Invited them to go shopping at the mall. Even remained friends with them long after we’d broken up, when I wasn’t on speaking terms with them. The girls in town were nuts for me. I had to fight them off with a stick. Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen.
At work, among the Bobcats, trucks and dozers, Dad and I got along just fine. Installing swimming pools, fixing floors, mending roofs. Drilling holes, swinging shovels, holding levels, watching the bubble move. On our smoko we’d sit together by the water and puff on a rollie, eat our meat pies with tomato sauce and drink a nice cold one. No need to talk about nothing. If it was a slow day and we had lots of boys on the job, I’d take off my big brown scuffed up CATs and have a snooze. Piece of piss. Dad would still come home with me sometimes. Have dinner with me and my sheila, Mum too if she wasn’t travelling. I’d go downstairs afterwards and watch recordings of RAGE with my girlfriend. Mum and Dad would chat upstairs: I could hear their voices murmuring down through the floorboards. When I went up to the kitchen to get another bottle of cordial and some snacks, I’d see them curled up together on the day bed, sleeping with the news on the telly. Dad wrapped around Mum, his arms around her waist, together, curved like a backwards c.
Sharon broke up with Dad and Dad came back to Mum. She was so happy to have him home but then we found out he was sick. One day Dad couldn’t walk straight, sober. He lost his balance. He was falling all over the place for ages before Mum and me convinced him to see a doctor. We thought it might be an inner ear infection or something. Turned out a lot more serious. Dad wouldn’t even tell me himself: he made me ring the doctor to find out. Sharon found out Dad was sick and wanted him back. Only when she knew he was dying. When Dad got sick, he deteriorated fast. One moment he was a capable man, working, driving, drinking; the next he was overweight, dribbling, swollen, in a wheel chair. Incapable of eating. Incapable of anything. That’s the worst mate. My hero. My dad. Not capable. Couldn’t do his hair, no more James Dean coif. Dad was vain. He wouldn’t have liked to go like this. Just wasn’t right. Lost the cheeky twinkle in his crystal blue eyes. When they started chemo his hair fell out. He’d been so proud of his hair. He used to tell me and Mum how his hair had been straight until he’d gone through puberty and then it went curly. I never believed him till I had children of my own and it happened to them.
It was hard for me and Mum to visit Dad in the hospital or talk to the doctors. Sharon was always there, the bulldog, pulling strings. That’d be right. When I did get the chance to see him, sit next to him, lying there barely conscience, it was hard. No one wants to see their dad like that. I hate hospitals. The whiteness. The smell of Dr Pepper. Adults turning back into babies, being rocked around in cots, being fed through sippy cups. Strangers forced to share rooms during intimate moments, birth, sickness and death. Doctors talking down to you. Pretending to care, scheduling you in so they can rush off to their golf game. Angry overworked nurses. Paying for parking. I got so many fines visiting Dad. I don’t think he even noticed me. He wasn’t there most of the time. Still I felt like it was my duty, to be there till the end. The hospital couldn’t do anything for him anymore. So we took turns taking him home, depending on his mood. Sharon insisted on keeping Dad’s new dog, Boomer, at her house. Wouldn’t let us keep Boomer at our house and Dad loved that dog. Sometimes more than me I reckon. So he’d go home to her apartment to see the dog.
Now Dad couldn’t come to work I was at the top of the pecking order. I’d oversee the boys on a job. Dad would have me fill out his cheques, forge his signature. Still trying to run the business from his sick bed. Pay for building materials. Sharon was the one collecting his social security cheques, taking all the money. I had to sneak him packs of cigarettes and a bit of money every time I visited him. Sharon’s sister was over during one of my visits and she said, in front of Dad, “Youz don’t worry. He’s not going to last much longer.” When Sharon found out about the cheques she tried to have me thrown in jail. Mum went and visited a solicitor and they said even though Dad told me to do it, it was still illegal. Sharon tried to convince Dad I was stealing from him. I never took one dollar off Dad. I only ever paid suppliers or contractors like he had told me to. Sharon was the thief. Mum had bought Dad a new wardrobe to replace his tattered shirts and pants. All brand new. Still had the labels on. Sharon returned them for the money. I confronted Sharon in the pub and told her she better not press charges against me. If she did she’d better watch out. She’d regret it. Sharon got all up tight and started whining to Dad, “You’re gonna let your son talk to me like that?” Dad said, “My son can talk to you however he wants.”
I didn’t know then but that day she’d taken him to the solicitors. He’d signed over everything to her. The land he bought with Mum’s money. He’d convinced her early on in their marriage to sell her shares in the family farm. With the money they’d bought a large plot together. Every year Dad had a new scheme of what he was going to do with it. Hadn’t done nothing with it yet. In his condition, Sharon had convinced him to change his will. A man who couldn’t even go to the bathroom by himself or remember our names. That was the worst part of hospital for Dad, he had told me they took a woman to the bathroom with him, in a group, the nurses took them all into the toilet. A lady had to go to the bathroom in front of him. He kept telling me how terrible it was. He would call me sometimes from Sharon’s and say it’s the milkman or a pizza delivery. Sharon was always there hovering and wouldn’t let him talk to me too long. She gave away the dog as soon as he died. To someone else. I don’t know who. I tried to look for Boomer but never found him.
Mum was away when Dad passed. I’m sure she would have been there every day by his side, taken time off work: if Sharon wasn’t there, growling and biting. After Dad died, everything was a blur. I’ve blocked most of it out to tell you the truth. He was only fifty-five. I was twenty-four. The funeral took place not too long after. I went with Mum and she was hysterical. All her incubating pain, at last hatched. I didn’t cry. Didn’t want to be a sook. Mum was still his wife when he died: they had never divorced. He was being cremated and Mum ranted on and on about her aunt’s cremation when she was a little girl that she still had nightmares about: a dead body on a conveyor belt, being rolled towards a curtain, dropped into an incinerator. Mum, who is a devout Anglican, summoned images of fire and brimstone. I wasn’t very useful to Mum at the ceremony. I got wasted and high and ended up at a brothel or strip club. Can’t remember.
When Mum found out about the changed will, she did nothing. She could have easily had it overturned. Easily have had the new will annulled but she wouldn’t. When I went to pick up Dad’s things from Sharon, the things she hadn’t wanted, the things that weren’t worth anything, she’d already thrown them all out. At least I had his truck. I went and picked up Dad’s ashes. Sharon didn’t want them either. It had always been Dad’s wishes to be sprinkled into the Tweed River, at its mouth, where it meets the Pacific Ocean. I walked out, along the rocky peninsula, alone with Dad’s ashes and began to release them into the wind. The second my fistful of ashes was released into the wind, the wind changed and I got a mouthful. I was pretty upset for a moment but then I saw the funny side. I reckon Dad would have laughed.
When I bought a house of my own and moved in with my wife and baby girl― finally out of Mum’s hair, she’d let us live with her, after I got married, after I had my first child―I built a chicken coop underneath my house, in the backyard, next to the pool. I finished building it real good; a bloody ripper, then I had a coldie next to their cage and watched the chooks. Funny little buggers. They’re fond of company, have their own little community in the chicken coop but they get real aggro every time I put a new hen in, have to be real careful, otherwise they beat the poor chook up. They’re real stubborn too. They like to sleep in the same space and if another chook took it, they just lay right on top of it. Once a hawk swooped down and picked up one of the roosters having a stroll around the yard. No joke mate. Picked him up and flew away. That rooster was the leader of the pack. The rest of the chooks got all confused after that. Took them a while to return to normal.
May 22, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sam Langer was born in Melbourne, in February 1983. He lives in Berlin. He edits Steamer and has published a chapbook, Law You Can Eat, with Munted Beyond Press. A second chapbook, Topaz, should come out in 2014. Recent poems have appeared in Otoliths, Southerly, and Outcrop. Contact: samuel underscore langer at yahoo dot com dot au.
Horizon Drinkers (after Pierre Reverdy)
Venomous dregs girt by sea jails
Vicious pearlers in boated collars
these men who shut their eyes in the warm cruise blood
these suspect men whose love lives on water
their eyes open like cages
staggering under blokeish cenotaphs
they go home in hollow bungalows
they hide themselves
and exile and bile and boredom share out
their hearts and minds like overripe fruit
The warm breaths on porches at thresholds
against the boulevards and the currents of night
the ports and beaches
the dead adventures
the flame badge detaches itself, ferments, and is rotting
the nostrils full of savage aftershaves
givings up
bestial fights
unseen agonies in the table shadows
the Tummies rolled under these tomb plaques
the ear sagging with obese words
and too beautiful names
under the frozen forehead arch sharp arrows of desire
this evening the spirit was troubled by an irritating task
to book departure
the world’s blank verso on freshly constructed roads
on hopeless quayside strips toward sudden returns
to leave this type of leaf, always to leave
to run
May 21, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Chris Wallace-Crabbe is an octogenarian metaphysician whose generous accolades include participating in a reading series with Iraqi poets Fadeel Kayat, Jamal Al-Hallaq, Sudanese poet Afeif Ismail, and Chilean poet Juan Garrido-Salgado. Thereafter, he was anthologised in a ground-breaking transnational collection, Poetry Without Borders Ed Michelle Cahill (Picaro, 2008). Having conferenced with the legendary likes of Andrew Motion, Alastair Niven as well as Mulk Raj Anand, Kamala Das, Raja Rao, Eunice de Souza, G.V Desani and Raj Parthasarathi, he describes himself as a post-colonialist with history being the ultimate arbiter. Carcanet published his New and Selected, while his latest collection is My Feet Are Hungry (Pitt St Poetry) and Afternoon in the Central Nervous System is forthcoming with Braziller, New York.
Cardamom Country
Well, yes, I’ve always been intoxicated by India,
a rich Everywhere which can’t possibly resemble us
(except in playing cricket, either straight or bent),
let alone the notorious gravity of beer-drowning Belgium and Wales,
being a technicoloured macro-country of hill station and spice
plus devilmaycare characters like Babur and Kimball O’Hara
and at best reminds me of every adventure I relish,
not excluding the nursery land of green ginger which
may well have been Cathay.
It could be that India is a collective subconscious,
but I can let that one go through to the ‘keeper
tricked out in glorious silks and golden bangles.
My dad lived there through years of war;
I love the way they sustain the English language,
though why we call it that only the Krauts will know,
(bespectacled, growing esteem among literate historians);
a tongue that tricked wryly past Norman bastardisation
holding hands with a lovely Latin of inkhorn learning
in order to produce dinky-di oxbridge Australian
or laboured essay prose from catholic schools,
but which in their spicy landscape is melodiously
delivered from high up the oral register.
On my very first visit to those curried shores
I flicked my passport open to an inclining clerk
who cut to the paper chase quickly and demanded,
“Who is the greatest English poet?” and when
I roundly demurred at Shelley, proffering Shakespeare,
He could cope with that, riposting blandly,
“He was not for England , but for all mankind”.
He passed me on to the dodgy taxi-drivers, Hanuman
and Petrolpants, into the southerly smileage of Madras
with pluncake in Spencer’s emporium.
Back in those days even when the street beggars laughed
and our hotel drummer wanted to eat the cook; no,
it was the other way round, like sari-bright India:
that bulky chef was devoured of all. Whatever
passed by meltingly became him: or her.
and I suffered only once from Akbar’s Curse,
but that was in a posh quarter of Delhi,
not on the elephantine Great Trunk Road
in some lean-to-café with hot sugary tea.
I filled the shower with shit for a couple of days.
Trivandrum was another story again,
literate, breeze-laved, anticipated from childhood,
a southwest version of rapture’s roadway far,
while necklaced with glinting lagoons.
(2012)
