Toasting an Honorary Jet and Okay Son-of-a-Bitch by Luke Johnson

lukejohnsonLuke Johnson’s work has appeared in numerous journals and been shortlisted for such awards as the 2014 Josephine Ulrick Prize. His novella Ringbark was published by Going Down Swinging in 2015 as part of the Longbox series. He lectures in Creative Writing at UTS and UoW.

 

 

 

Toasting an Honorary Jet and Okay Son-of-a-Bitch

What a circus. Old people wearing red-rimmed wayfarer sunglasses and riding scooters, bums getting around in toupees made from real human hair, ugly teenagers dressed in t-shirts that say, so fucking ugly! so fucking what! I stopped in Newtown once before, to look at a sofa bed for sale. The man selling the sofa bed said to me, I can tell you it’s the most comfortable sofa bed I’ve ever screwed on; that’s a fact. It was his guarantee to me against discomfort, I guess. He was wearing a vest and I thought comfort was clearly not his big thing. I looked at him in his vest and asked him, Have you ever let somebody fact check you with that vest on? I tried pronouncing the word the way he had pronounced it, fact, with my nostrils forming a diaeresis over my vowel of a mouth. He flattened out his chin and said, Go back to the north side, arsehole. I said, Don’t be so sore. He went inside his apartment and left the sofa bed on the street out front with only his dog to look after it. I have a suspicion the mutt might have been named William Carlos Williams after the poet William Carlos Williams. At least, it had the initials WCW engraved on the pendant attached to its collar and when I petted it and asked it to tell me something interesting it barked in an offbeat, syncopated sort of way.

That was a year and a half ago. Today it’s, ‘Sir, we are trying to raise money for racism.’ Yes, reluctantly, but sure enough, I’m in Newtown again. Not looking for furniture but to help honour my father with a bronze cast in the foyer of the theatre where they staged his first ever play. Of five children, I’m the only one to have followed in his decrepit, artistic footsteps. My participation is expected. Something in the order of, ‘Yes, he was a tyrant to live with—but didn’t he know how to pull at the heartstrings.’ Maybe even an elaboration on how my own writing is going after that. Provided there’s some genuine interest, of course. Often hard to tell. But I’m getting ahead of myself. See, before any of this conjecture can take place, the man walking in front of me needs to drop a dollar into the girl’s bucket for racism, so that I can slip past without being harassed and the world can become the stupider, albeit slightly more tolerant, place she dreams of. ‘Against racism,’ he corrects her, impatiently putting his hand into his pocket. He’s black, she’s white—he should know, I guess. I’m tempted to ask him if he’s sure. She nods her head enthusiastically and in it goes. And on I go.

Past the red and white barber shop where dad used to get his beard trimmed and neck shaved. Of course, it’s a café now. The kind that expects its patrons to bring their own chairs. Not completely true: there’s a pile of dirty red and white cushions on the footpath out front. Then again, I suppose people who drink their coffees at places like this—places that have their web address built into their clever, lower-case titles, t h e j i t t e r y b a r b e r . c o m—probably don’t have any major prejudices against parking their skinny-jeaned derrieres directly on the asphalt anyway. They can watch to make sure their pushbikes aren’t being stolen while writing in their journals (they write with pencils in this suburb) or working on their MacBook Pros (and process with three-thousand-dollar Macs). What’s the wireless range like? I wonder as I pass. Not really; I know it’s excellent—I can see the simultaneous looks of contentment and annoyance. Actually, what I really can’t help wonder is what happened to the old barber who used to have signed photos of the ’51 and ’53 premiership winning teams on the wall of his shop and who drank cider and listened to the races while he was working and who’d dash out of the shop mid-shave to place a bet at the last minute. He used to think of my dad as an okay son-of-a-bitch too. At least, he never cut open his throat and let him bleed out over the floor after one of his horses got picked at the post. I’d call that an endorsement.

That was then. When even the gutters smelt like they’d run with Brut. Even Brut couldn’t save this suburb now. What it needs now is one big long moving walkway. The kind with glass panels down either side. High glass panels. You could stroll from Darlington to Enmore without being licked by some bohemian’s gypsy dog that way. On this occasion the mutt in question—not at all like the dignified beat-mutt I met the last time I was here—and its owner are standing at the stairwell entrance to one of the street’s many sex shops, two doors down from t h e j i t t e r y b a r b e r . c o m (or is it just the jittery barber, dotcom implied, like PtyLtd?), trying to argue their way in. For a moment I’m not sure which one of them has been refused the entry. ‘Come on, if she was a seeing-eye-dog you’d let her in,’ the mutt’s owner is defending his right to bring his non-seeing-eye-dog shopping for pornography with him. ‘Blind people don’t buy pornography,’ the shop keeper is arguing back, ‘they jerk off by sound, like whales.’ There’s your answer, I tell myself, feeling sorry that the dog should be discriminated against on account of its able-bodied mammalian jerker owner. I consider offering to stand there and hold the leash so the owner can dash upstairs and buy some new DVDs—or magazines, if it’s the sound of pages crinkling that tingles his blowhole. But I don’t want to be late to the theatre do, so I just pant my tongue at the poor mutt and press on.

Jesus, the theatre do. I can see it already. A soiree of handsome actors and actresses milling about with scarves wrapped loosely around their uncollared necks, volunteer drama-academy students playing the roles of waiters and waitresses (black-tie costumes borrowed from the department wardrobe), celebrated choreographers appalled with the pitiful range of vegan alternatives, and one or two professional bar staff—the poor RSA-trained sons-of-bitches—acknowledging shom-payne orders with the tiredest of nods. If there is time to elaborate (returning to an earlier thought, circa paragraph two), then I’ll state now that I intend to bite down on my lip, look them in the collective eye and respond, ‘Difficultly.’ Let them lower their heads then and understand how tough things must be for me—the talented bastard’s untalented son. ‘But we find a way to go on,’ I hear myself filling the awkward after-silence, signalling the end of my dismal blessing. ‘Hard as it is. We find a way, right?’

And between you and me, I must say, it gets harder every day too. The writing, that is. The letting go part was decisively easy. My father let go of us long before we ever had the chance to let go of him. He was an expert in letting go. First he let go of us and then he let go of himself. When it came time to grab hold of something again, the patch of chest covering his heart was about all he could manage. Even the number 0 at the bottom of the phone’s keypad was beyond his reach by that late stage.

A word on my dad, as I pass by a schoolkid with his socks pulled right up to his knees in a way that was squarely unpopular in my heyday: he hated the theatre. My dad was meant to be a famous rugby league player, not a divorced playwright. He trained with the Newtown Jets’ reserve-grade side in 1982. That was the year the first-grade team played their home games in Campbelltown in preparation for the merger. Dad probably would have been a second-rower for the rest of his life if the alliance hadn’t failed and the Jets hadn’t been booted out of the competition. As it was, dad fell in with the theatre crowd and never played rugby league again. This isn’t as dumb as it sounds. Well, it is, but we’re talking about a period when the players still held regular jobs during the week and worked out in public gyms at night and on Saturdays and held diplomatic immunity against DUI charges. My dad worked out at the Newtown gym every night and was the second strongest bench presser in the suburb. (By the time us kids came along he could lower the thing right down onto his sternum plate and shoot it back up with such force it felt like a special gravity ride you paid to go on.) Only one person in the gym could out-lift dad in those early days, and he was tied in with the theatre as a stagehand. That’s where dad started. With Roger. In the day Roger worked as a cop, at night he shifted props. He was a prop cop. Shifting props with the cop: that’s where dad met mum. And then some. (Like I told you, difficultly.)

Meeting mum was one of the stories dad didn’t wait till I was old enough to tell me. ‘Your mum, she was trying to be an actress,’ he liked to start, thinking I’d enjoy the bawdy rhythm he used to inflect it with right from the opening. ‘But the thing is,’ he’d whisper, ‘she was terrible. No matter what it was, they only used to give her background roles—usually playing the part of some piece of scenery, a tree or a rock or a farm animal or something. Then one day I see her waiting backstage, getting ready to go on and I say, “Hey, you’re too good to be playing a tree again. I’m going to write you a lead part. How’d you like that?” “You’re a stagehand,” she says. “Hey, I’m a stagehand like you’re a tree,” I tell her back. “I’ll write you a lead role but you gotta promise you’ll go out with me.” A week later, I finished Willow and when they cast her in the lead role, not only did she go out with me but she gave me a suckjob on the first date. Midway through she stopped and looked up and said, “I can do it like a tree if you want?” I just looked at her without saying anything and she went back to it, waving her arms about and making whooshing sounds as she did.’

Less than half a block from the theatre I come across dad’s old pub. This was where he used to go after each performance. Often he wouldn’t even bother with the show, he’d come here and get drunk instead and threaten to kill himself by driving his car across to the Sydney Football Stadium without stopping at a single set of lights regardless of the colour. This feat was one he famously achieved during his internship with the Jets. It’s what made him a club legend without having ever even sat on the reserve bench for a first-grade game. Another time he reversed his car all the way to the top of an eight-storey parking garage. They were set to inaugurate him for this. Then the collapse.

I decide to stop in for a drink. I tell myself it will help me with those questions which require an answer beyond difficultly, or the condolences which come in the form of tedious stories, beginning, ‘You know, I never told anyone this, but it was a performance of The Brave they put on at our university which convinced me to drop out of my degree in the final year and pursue fulltime acting…’ ‘You don’t say?’ ‘See, arts-law was the dream my parents had for me, not the dream I had for me.’ ‘What about your student loan debt?’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘Never mind. How about swooshing your arms like tree?’

What shall I drink to? I ask myself, taking a seat at the bar. Besides me there’s only two other people in this hotel. One’s a permanent shadow on the wall of the poker machine room, the other’s the bartender. Maybe it’s too early to expect a crowd. On the north side anything before eleven-thirty p.m. is too early. I thought this was the suburb of premature crowds. What about those pagans I crossed coming out of the train station? Camped out with their sleeping bags like dedicated rock fans. Their toupees might have been made from the hair of the prophet Kurt Cobain, the way they shone up at me. The girl trying to raise money for racism could have learned a great deal from the way they went about their business too: head shamefully down, letting the sign do the talking. ‘To dad,’ I say, charging my glass.

After four beers and four toasts I’m just about ready to front the scene awaiting me, when a very unexpected thing happens. Russell Crowe comes into the bar. I know it’s him straight off because tucked into the front of his tracksuit pants, with the flap that contains his licence and Medicare card hanging visibly over the drawstring crotch area, is a South Sydney Rabbitohs wallet. That is, a bright-green Velcro wallet with a big Rabbitohs emblem on its front and red hemming. Before I can say anything the son-of-a-bitch comes right up to where I’m sitting and orders himself a beer. He doesn’t just order himself a beer, he leans over the bar and pours himself one. A stout. At first he drinks from his cupped hand the way we used to drink water from the taps when we were down at the netball courts kicking the soccer ball around. When he’s taken his fill that way he grabs one of the dirty glasses sitting on the sink top—could even be one of my lager glasses—behind the bar and fills it, leaving no room for head. He doesn’t sit down to drink either, but stands with his hairy forearms soaking the spilt beer back out of the soggy bar mats.

‘What’s your story, morning glory?’ he says to me.

‘My dad used to play reserve grade for the Jets,’ I say.

‘Then your dad’s a bloody legend,’ Russell says back.

‘My dad’s dead.’

‘Yeah, cheers to that,’ Russell nods his head, decent son-of-a-bitch that he is.

 

 

Coats by Aaron Peysack

aaronpeysackAaron Peysack is a Melbourne writer who has lived and worked in Japan. His fiction has appeared in Antipodes journal and will be featured in upcoming editions of Page Seventeen and Filling Station. He is currently working on a collection of short fiction.

 

 


Coats

It was July, the coldest month of the year, and I had no winter overcoat. I sat in my room for an hour thinking about the cold, trembling with indignation. I’ve always been sensitive: the slightest change in temperature or pressure upsets me. In that tiny room I longed for the tropics, for the heat of Angola or Brazil, some burnt-out island where life is slow and undemanding.

When the hour was up I left my room and headed downstairs. On the second floor I met a tall, lean man with lovely blue eyes.

‘Give me your winter overcoat,’ I said to him. He refused, so I grabbed him. For several minutes we struggled, right there in the stairwell, a silent, deadly struggle that could only end in defeat for someone of his slender build.

But he was one of those people who are stronger than they look and he used his long arms to advantage. It was like wrestling an orang-utan. Halfway through the struggle I knew I was going to lose—I felt like a chess player who has lost his queen—but I wouldn’t concede. Keep fighting, I told myself, at least you’re warm. Eventually he threw me down and fled into one of the apartments. It wasn’t meant to be, I thought, dusting myself off.

Outside, I dragged myself along the street, past law clerks and meat packers and men in half-price suits purchased in pairs … All the wreckage of humanity washed around me … An hour later I was near the sea and the wind was cutting me open. A boy of twelve or thirteen was standing on the sand looking out at the water. A philosopher, I thought, one of those unpleasant children who are old before their time, not quite human. I was one myself so I know what I’m talking about. I walked over and stood beside him.

‘Why are the crests of the waves white?’ he asked dreamily.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, watching them fall, thinking of horses in old movies. ‘Give me your winter overcoat.’

He looked at me curiously then shook his head.

‘It was a gift from my grandmother.’

‘I won’t tell her.’

He smiled and shook his head again.

Children are not as weak as they seem, plus they fight a lot, which makes them dangerous opponents. The boy landed a few punches but was helpless against my knee. As I pulled the coat over his head, he grabbed at it violently, tearing it along the seams.

‘Look what you’ve done,’ I said, ‘you’ve torn your winter overcoat. Now neither of us can have it.’

‘It’s better that way,’ he answered with eyes full of sadness.

I left him there and made my way across the river. It was almost dusk by the time I found the warehouse. The place was filled with coats, hundreds of them, in every size and style. I entered the room where people change and stood in front of the mirror, entranced by my own reflection. He has the face of a tsar, I thought, looking at the man in the glass.

Outside, the sun went down and evening came on, tugging at night’s shoulder. The owner locked up and went home and the sound of the city faded like snow falling on a frozen river. All night I stayed in that winter palace, surrounded by coats, and by morning I felt almost human.

 

 

 

Christine Regan reviews Heat and Light by Ellen Van Neerven

0003383_300Heat and Light

by Ellen Van Neerven

UQP

Reviewed by Christine Regan

In Heat and Light Ellen Van Neerven tells us stories exploring ancestry and identity and the experiences particularly of Aboriginal women and girls in small Australian towns or dwelling on the metaphorical fringes of Brisbane and the surrounding regions, where its young Yugambeh author is based.  As its title (taken from the Tracy Chapman song ‘Smoke and Ashes’) signals, Heat and Light is interested in the elemental, particularly sexual desire and familial bonds, the dangers, hopes, and sense of identity and place sought through these relationships, and the harsh natural environment on Country. Heat and Light is a book in three parts written in a simple, spare colloquial prose and has a tripartite formal and temporal structure, with ‘Heat’, ‘Water’, and ‘Light’ respectively focused mainly upon the past, the future, and the present, and the presence of the past in the present is one of the unifying themes of the collection.  While ‘Heat’ and ‘Light’ contain a series of mainly realist short stories, with some mixing myth and reality, ‘Water’ is a speculative fiction novella with elements of satire and political allegory, in a collection that traverses genres. Van Neerven’s achievement with Heat and Light has been recognised by receiving the David Unaipon Award for an unpublished Aboriginal writer in 2013, and in 2015 both the Dobbie Literary Award for a first-time author and the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelist Award.

The strongest writing in Heat and Light is mainly in ‘Heat’, which is comprised of interrelated stories about incidents in the fractured history of three generations of the Kresinger family, told from different narrative viewpoints and shifting between different times and places. The stand out story in the book is the first story, ‘Pearl’, whose eponymous protagonist is a free-spirited agent and object of desire, existing outside black and white codes of morality, and a mystical outcaste, both victim and shaman-like avenger.  In ‘Pearl’ disrupted family histories and the search for identity – a major theme in heterogeneous Aboriginal Australian writing – is the consequence not of official state policies of the removal of children, but of the pack rape of an Aboriginal woman by white men.  The itinerant Pearl gives the baby conceived in rape to her married sister Marie, who presents the boy as her son, while Pearl’s name disappears from the Kresinger family history.  ‘Pearl’ is alternately narrated by an old woman in the local store, and the young Amy Kresinger, to whom the woman tells the true story of Amy’s ancestry, that she is the granddaughter of Pearl not Marie, disclosing family secrets and local historical silences.

Interestingly, the story and character of ‘Pearl’ seem inspired by the Chippewa novelist Louise Erdrich’s short story and character ‘Fleur’, which is also adapted as a chapter in the novel Tracks.  There is no anxiety of influence here, as Van Neerven has commented that she was reading Erdrich when writing ‘Pearl’, and she employs the classical method of imitation well, adapting borrowed elements of language, plot, narrative structure, and characterisation to enrich a story that is her own.  Fleur and Pearl are both native women whose mystical powers, sexuality, and daring make them pariah figures, the subjects of malicious gossip and fearful mythologies generated by the locals who try to drive them out of town, and we learn about both characters indirectly through jealous narrators.  Fleur is a shaman believed to be the desired creature of the waterman monster of Chippewa myth, Misshepeshu.  She seemingly drowns in the lake twice, and is said to have caused the deaths of the men who pull her from the waters the first time, and the man who approaches her ostensibly dead body the second time.  Comparably, Pearl is a mystical creature of the wind, which seemingly takes her life twice when she goes out into wild storms and makes physical gestures resembling embraces.  She is wind-hurled first into the waters, only to mysteriously re-emerge two days later, while the man who tried to save her was drowned. The second time Pearl dies is when the windman lifts her into electricity wires, ‘and they curled into each other like lovers as she was jolted.’  The electricity that killed her is conducted out of her body and into the brother who touches her and ‘he takes her place.’

Fleur is raped by three men who work with her in a butcher’s shop and Pearl is raped by three men who come into the café where she works, and both women seemingly conceive during the rapes.  The attackers of both women die shortly afterwards in mysterious circumstances.  It is wild winds that destroy the town where Fleur is attacked and distract the townspeople from noticing the absence of the three men, who are found days later frozen to death. Pearl too is associated with the wind and later Kresingers continue to associate the wind with their spiritual ancestry.  The wind is also a motif in ‘Heat’ for the way the past pervades the present and history repeats itself.  The rape of Pearl is followed, two generations later, and in the third story ‘Hot Stones’, by the pack rape of Mia, a young Aboriginal girl.  The schoolboys’ savage attack is a more extreme expression of the hostility the schoolchildren routinely direct at the dark-skinned, recognizably Aboriginal Mia. There are of course many differences between the works including Erdrich’s lyrical prose and engagement with history.  Fleur, for example, attempts to save her tribe’s land and traditions from white encroachment in the era of the Dawes Act (1887) that served to destroy the Indian land base and in turn culture.  Van Neerven’s first book focuses mainly on individual odysseys and family histories that register social issues of racism, domestic violence and mental illness.

A light satirical engagement with contemporary Australian politics and history is presented in part two, ‘Water’, which imagines a fantastical future as a fresh way of talking about past and present realities, notably in its allegory of the imperial genocide of the ‘plantpeople’, who are revealed as Aboriginal ancestral spirits.  The final part of Heat and Light is comprised of ten stories mainly set in contemporary Brisbane and narrated by young, gay Aboriginal women finding space for self-expression and self-definition in the relative anonymity of the city, often having left small towns to attend university.  Another interesting literary influence evident in stories from ‘Light’ and recurrently in the book is the magical realist novelist Jeanette Winterson. The young loners narrating some of these stories are searching for sexual connections of different kinds with other women, and the recurring motif of oranges as a gift to a lover, and a desire that does not fit the received social expectation, alludes to Winterson’s North of England lesbian bildungsroman, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit.  Coincidentally, Van Neerven mentions that it was a mandarin Melissa Lucashenko handed to her to calm her nerves at an early book reading.  The support Van Neerven has received from Lucashenko and other Indigenous Australian writers, including through high public praise of her writing, is the beginning of locating her in a lineage of Aboriginal women writers.  Lucashenko’s literary influence is perhaps manifest in Van Neerven’s use of a light Aboriginal English in gritty, colloquially told tales of young working-class Aboriginal women in particular. Van Neerven’s influences in Heat and Light are Indigenous and European, local and cosmopolitan, and enhance the sense of her potential and readers’ interest in future publications.  

 

CHRISTINE REGAN is a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University and former Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

 

Tse Hao Guang

Profile-PicAssembled in Singapore with parts from Hong Kong and Malaysia, Tse Hao Guang is interested in form and formation, creativity and quotation, lyrics and line breaks. His chapbook is hyperlinkage (Math Paper Press, 2013). He graduated from the Masters of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago in 2014 with a concentration in poetry and creative writing, and co-edits the cross-genre, collaborative literary journal OF ZOOS, as well as Unfree Verse, an anthology of Singapore poetry in received and nonce forms. His first full-length collection, Deeds of Light, is forthcoming. www.tsehaoguang.com.

 
 
 

Gongs, Alarms

I am from the high rise bomb shelter.
From the Speak Good Singlish Movement, red as plum,
where the joyful grammarian worms. I am from nameless
noodle stalls with frowny uncles, from palm copy-paste
plantations, from the ice-stoking wilds of Torontonian
suburbs. I am from the strut and peck of hao gong
ming. I have a badge. I am from the policeman who drove
me to school, from the lawyer’s letter, the leaving.

I am from muddy tea stretched to a metre and a half as we
looked for its heart, from the black nut that oozed and invited
fingers or silver spoons. I am from the are you from China?
I am from the gongs of Imperial China. From each love
letter of the alphabet, crisp, incandescent. I am from
Asian Values. I signed a pledge to outlaw the water vapour
stirring in air. I am from the thing that spits and spits.
I am from the itch to sugar the split.

Toby Fitch

Fitch photoToby Fitch is the author of Rawshock (Puncher & Wattmann 2012), which won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, and Jerilderies (Vagabond Press 2014). He lives in Sydney and has a book of poems forthcoming, The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau.

 
 
 
 

Ordinance

massive black & blue Hoovers
\ suck the tortured moonbeams off Ebony street /
the pitted canopy of night
\ like a coffin amassed with consumables /
this urban pastoral for the kids
\ a twenty car collision of bloomin’ flowers /
amazed at the animals men are
dappled / ungoverned
\ faces download a horse & lead it to the /
caucus drink-tank
\ vicious moons thinking surely the /
lemonade witch is dead
\ a polls charade in the shade of /
purple lizards who
\ frack their way through slippery /
slopes / the right
\ angle for a carpark dawn /
in the vapoury
\ wake of summer’s /
groove
\/

Alex Skovron

Alex Skovron is the author of six collections of poetry and a prose novella. The many public readings he has given include appearances in China, Serbia, India and Ireland, as well as Norfolk Island. A bilingual selection of his poetry translated into French was published in 2013 under the title The Attic, a volume of Chinese translations is underway, and his novella The Poet has been translated into Czech. His most recent book is Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems (2014), and a collection of his short stories is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann.


Diminished Light

The little girl in the laundromat
is sitting so still
she could be a mirage. What
is she thinking, watching a sky crawl
with purple? Soon its shell
will crack, and rolled umbrellas
under everybody’s arm will billow

into their mushroom shapes,
and her mother watching the porthole
where a world spins will take
her by the arm, and soon she’ll fall
into her usual
late-afternoon haze as they cross
the glistened street, no less

and no more distant than before,
the wind clouding her face
the way the shopfronts suddenly share
diminished light, the way no voice
could say her sadness,
make real the little girl
hopping alongside, hungry bird.

 

Jill Jones

berlin 5Jill Jones’ book, The Beautiful Anxiety, won the 2015 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry.  A new book, Breaking the Days, is due from Whitmore Press in late 2015. She is a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, University of Adelaide. Her poems have been translated into Chinese, Dutch, French, Italian, Czech and Spanish. For five months in 2014-15, she was poet-in-residence at Stockholm University.

 

Bright Yellow Black

The papers are burning.
There are several dialects.
The wind rises with helicopters.
People below accept that now.
How, without precision
things fall apart in the dry.
The black box tells nothing
nor do autopsies.
The recounts tell nothing, again.
There’s shark blood on the shore.

Someone is recycling videos and tears.
Soon there won’t be enough.
Soon there’ll be more replicas.
On bright yellow farms the grain is ticking.
Clouds drop seeds.
People accept that now.
The black box tells nothing.

Omar J Sakr

Omar SakrOmar J Sakr is an Arab Australian poet whose work has appeared in Meanjin, Overland, Cordite Poetry Review, and Tincture Journal, among others. His poems have been translated and published in Arab, and he has been shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize as well as the ACU Poetry Prize.

   
 

Dear Mama

Don’t preach to me, mama, don’t tell me stories
about some holy book or other, about angels, demons and jinn –
I’ve already learned too well the religion of your fists.
My body has drummed its song, the gospel choir of bruises
so often it knows no other, and at night I still mumble
the chorus: sharp gasps interspersed with bass, with low moans.
Your god is capricious, strikes without reason – some days
(the days you had gear, I later knew) you’d smile and order us pizza
and we’d sit in the smoky temple of the lounge while your silver screen
apostles entertained us, spat & bled & fucked & loved & died
for us. Those days were best. Others were Nails-On-Chalkboard,
a kind of screaming at the edge of hearing – your cheekbones, jaw,
elbow, everything was knife sharp and cut against the air
even though your teeth were set, lips locked prison-tight.
Like tinnitus, I knew only I could hear it but I swear
your body screeched in warning those mornings, and we learned
to read your augurs in cigarette smoke, the signs prophesying pain
if we didn’t become paragons of stillness and silence. Later, you
told me you saw my treacherous father in me even as a boy,
that you hated the sight of my face, the reminder
that his sins were burned too clearly in my skin.

I remember the day the locksmith came, his confusion, then pity,
when he asked ‘you want the lock outside his door?’ He hesitated
but took your petty cash reward to seal my cage. If only
you knew how I made that cell my world, so expansive and free –
hundreds of books, each one a key. How could you think
walls would contain me? I ought to thank you, dear mama,
for the prayers I memorized, for the blessing of hunger, the urge
for independence you sang into my bones, percussion-deep,
and the need to travel, to roam across the lands and seas and discover
all that can be seen. I ought to thank you, dear mama, for your piousness,
for showing me the cruelty and beauty of God and godlessness
all at once, for teaching me that holiness is no more
than moments shared with those you love whether bonded by blood
or not. Especially not. I ought to thank you dear mama, but I can’t.
The mosque is empty, and I’m all outta prayers.

Damen O’Brien

Damen O'BrienDamen is a Queensland poet, and has been writing for the last 20 years. He is currently working as a Contracts Manager for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle company. Damen has been published in Cordite and The Courier Mail, and has won or been highly commended in the Yeats Poetry Prize, the Nillumbik Ekphrasis Poetry Award, Ipswich Poetry Festival, the Philip Bacon Ekphrasis Prize, and the FAW Tasmania Poetry Prize.

 

 

What Poem Would The Mining Companies Tell Lionel Fogarty?

In between howls that could be poems,
Lionel tells us that he is teaching the black kids poetry.
To a bunch of white middle class mainstreamers,
he’s reciting poems in monochrome bullets
about hate, and guilt and history, and we don’t miss the irony.
In between the dressing-down that could be poems,
he asks us what will the mining companies teach
his black kids about themselves? Every other word
is the whip, and the blessing: black. Black, black, black
is the poem Lionel Fogarty tells the mining companies,
and the mining companies who know about holes in the ground
echo it back to him. Black, black, black.

Natalie Rose Dyer

NatalieNatalie Rose Dyer is currently completing her PhD in Creative Writing at Melbourne University with an Australian Postgraduate Award. She received a BA with first class Honours in Cinema (2006) and an MCA (2010) from The University of Melbourne. She is currently working on her first book of poetry. The title poem ‘The Butcher’s Daughter’ appeared in 3/2014 Meanjin Literary Journal. Her work is also published in 2014 University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize Anthology. Her first solo art exhibition was at Bokeh Gallery in Daylesford (2014). Her blog can be viewed at www.natalierosedyer.com

 

Haired

My bestial presence ever-present,
first noticed at primary school.
The other girls had unhaired legs,
mine outpoured like a simian species.
I wanted to run right out of the playground,
but was stuck there in my body
with awareness of myself half-manned.
Not just on my legs, later I discovered
black-weeded death above my lip,
the barnacled beard of stray hairs came later,
shower of dusty dark wired pubic tendrils
in my armpits, though not as thick as
the German girls witnessed in the change room,
shamed her for not shaving it off
to my friends later. But she was just like me,
covered in latticed thread to her mid-thigh,
hiding the underling, centre of blood
unmasked, which we all waited on expectantly.
There was even more hair knitted,
a furry rainbow that arched over my eyes,
fighting for my life against the insults
until I waxed it off, even then –
naked of hair, I hid behind my wintry coat,
an Athenic shield made invisible,
preparing to fight, sharpening, having
torn from myself the bushy blessing
through wanting to fit in, but never quite able
to take it all off, my furry blood
at the hinge of my sex, a creature stirring.