Bag Man

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Luke Sole

stepping outside, the police are arresting a man with plastic zip lock bags, turning his pockets inside out like his pants had ears, we’re against the marble columns and he tells me that since Lenin died he’s worn through two jackets and a pair of pants, something about the embalming fluid, and how once a year they strip him naked, swab black spots from his body, I nod, but it’s too dark for him to catch the gesture, and the shorter cop has dropped his fur hat and they’re both kicking the fuck out of the zip lock bag man, and did I know that his jacket goes to the dry cleaners in a motorcade and when they shake it off small clumps of skin fall onto the floor

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

I Gave My Love a Cherry that Had No Stone

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Daniel Biegelson
The marble façade of the apartment building appears pear in pollen light and then orange. The peach ripens. Even the pit from which the green leaves unfurl is not a beginning. Imagine a time-lapse. Terracotta pot. Vermiculite. Promise us telos. Fold each of us into each other. I’m having trouble locating. The night sky sifts down darkening a small dot of trees. Go down. Come down. From the loft. Onto the sidewalk to discover the green tempered shards of the GM station wagon window. I should have flown to my Aunt’s funeral. I’m quarreling with myself again. I’m writing and using words like quarreling. I’m second-guessing my predilections. The Holy One smote the angel of death, who slew the slaughterer, who killed the ox, that drank the water that extinguished the fire that burned the stick. This time I have traveled through the whole day without touching its darker permeations holding still in preparation. The sky persists—opal or pearl, rose quartz or turquoise.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Feel Like I’m Somehow Related to Everyone on the Internet

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Toby Fitch

I am outraged / have been as long as I can remember
The sky’s a projector & the moon was brought here by aliens
To keep us informed of the shitstorms going on
I am outraged / been a member for as long as I can
Crushes are nice until you realise how hard you’re crushing
On the shitstorm that keeps you informed of
Slang for political or social awareness
Crashing at night till we realise how hard we’ve crashed
Zeitgeist moves all the way down
Slang for political or social airyness
Intending to automate replies to those who
Drowned in the waves of a zeitgeist
R we just gonna ignore the fact it’s been raining 9 days straight
Intoning an automated replay to those who
When you want to get trashed get recycled instead
Today we’re just gonna straighten out the rain’s 90 ignorant facts
The government uses the lottery to catch time-travellers
You want to recycle but trash it dead
White beatniks appropriating black culture
The lottery of time-travel caught the government out
Continued to bubble to the digital surface for the next 50 years
White beatniks appropriating black culture
In both ironic & non-ironic ways on all platforms
Continued to bubble to the digital surface for the next 500 years
The sky’s a projector & the moon was brought here by aliens
In both ironic & non-ironic ways on all platforms
Feel like I’m somehow everywhere / relegated to the internet now


(sources: #staywoke, Twitter)

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Pilgrim Brother

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Adam Aitken

My Other reminds me of a Viking prince
piloting a hot air balloon
in Central Desert cumulus.
Currency-lad come good,
no need to spend his rent on a nicked Beemer.
His old mates take the prize for mayhem.
I see him barefoot in the weekend market,
selling silver charms, and does it charmingly.
In lordiness he has taken up a Device.
Though it burns his fingers he can’t give up.
Sleepless all night he sleeps post noon
in a director’s fold-up chair
in a quiet style that impresses everyone, but
on waking nothing’s guaranteed.
In a re-make of Ned Kelly.
Military talents? The portraitist finds
an Irish lilt in our genes, in his grey blue eyes.
He slaves hard for a rest on Sunday.
A statistic diversity, a fishing rod
with a Kelpie on long term love, slathering
for a chase a bone a biscuit.
Winters he works another 50 mutts for cash
in some western desert town
fond of trailing afterthoughts.
Post-human? Maybe. My little bro
chewing a chip or an apple
5 thousand feet in the air.
His mother held him a long while, and turned the key.
Fluent as a green leaf in a local forest,
total strangers embrace him in the park.
in his garden, and within it sky-gardens of recall.
He sees a beach down there in Lake Eyre
invented just for him.
He will never grow sad, even without me.
He prefers to laugh. He finds it easy.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Mysteries of the South Coast

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Michael Farrell

We all need a methodology to live by
To take just one example, Catholics are
rarely ashed on on the sports field, but
public life is another matter. Such
unfortunate exhibitions are not beyond
the episteme of The Sorrowful
Cappuccino, known locally as the
Foamo (and by the next town’s residents
as the Sad Flat White), either. Their own
eateries are nothing to skite about. The
area is known as a place, and as a way
of being, for a number of prelates, Irish-
Italian doyennes, anarcho-royalists …
They are if you like, the local memes
living like goats while hiding their elitism
under a glaze of pseudonyms and
nicknames. Much is projected onto the
local stock. Darth Vader for example, is
a bull possessing his owner’s
temperament (he is referred to as In-Joke
by his owner). He himself only answers to
calls which include the names of food, or
cows. Roan Sarsaparilla is his favourite

When do we get back to the people, I
imagine exasperated readers fuming
sagging like wet matches in anticipation

Get there we will – once they’re out of
their shiny robes and we have paid our
dues to the district geese which patrol
this imaginary outpost of meta-colonial
Europe. Is it dream or allegory?
Marsupial geese!? (Yes they exist. More
strongly than we do in fact.) The
congeries of readers rouse, I like to think
at this point, pushing their catosaurs to
the floor to lick at hair and make their
terrible, but quiet music. We have been
here before of course: ritual is nothing if
not repetition; the geese as white as milk
flung on car ice. (Do I feel anything? Am
I frigid, too?) Geese exact tribute and
take it in their pouches, flying like
winged puddings or possums over
eucalypt orchards with their amazing fruit-
leaves. (So jammy!) What miracles we
live by and under on the south coast
made mundane by the poets, who must
beat it into our heads so our heads have
something to think with. This can only
be an overview, which much
fragmentation can also be read as. Geese
time has such a lovely wing-beaty quality
whatever the dropped young say. A
former pope lies on a couch by a window
(actually a bunch of quilted orange crates)
and reads Dumas to the other furniture he
has made. The pathos would be stronger
if decontextualised, and we saw not Darth
and Sarsaparilla going at it like pistons of
love on a float demonstrating emotions or
perhaps the wrong way to find a snake in
a hole. Not by just sticking your arm in. I
feel it is worth overstating, given the
chance of saving a life. But popes and
candlestick makers and dental floss
merchants from Cork all die more often
by falling out of trees and breaking their
falls with ropes, or trying to dry up their
uncried tears with pills and so on, any
wren will tell you humans don’t wait for
someone to knock on their front door
with an axe. If you’re human you already
know that. It’s not usually part of the
intro but something morbid’s gotten hold
of my tongue tonight, maybe a little ghost
peg. Maybe a little grey pear moth trying
to have its say – but a good spit should
send it on its way. I’m really just trying to
evoke something of the life on the green
hills or ridges, I don’t mean to exaggerate
the slopes that wind to the houses that
have no reason for being there really
except that people live in them. Anyone
would think they were castles or chapels
the way people hold onto them, and give
them names like Chartres, or Medici
View. As indeed the Medici Creek does
run by this address. It’s known as the
Bloodstream to the school kids, who
like to mock. Medici is a local
abbreviation for medicine, and the
waters are miraculously healing when
consumed in sensible amounts, and if
sourced upstream of sickening bathers

A Duchess, who had a Milanese aura
some said, and was in hiding from some
love affair of another century, or
flirtation with devil worship, or perhaps
was sensitive to the fumes of cars, or the
sounds of punk bands and pooper
scoopers on city cement, and who liked
to while away her leisure hours making
badminton rackets from leftover chicken
coops or unwatched apple trees, was the
owner of Sarsaparilla, but luckily had no
drama-generating notions of keeping
Darth and Sars apart. ‘Lettuce sandwich’
she would call, ‘cheezels’ and the two
would come jogging in her direction to
be fed, not necessarily on those things
cited, but whatever was handy and vego

You see how, if we carry on long
enough, the mysteries fall away, and the
monks come out of their collective
wombat holes. Their disregard for money
illustrated by the bags of ducats and
doubloons that are stored and go
untouched in the area’s damson trees. A
word I once thought was the male version
of damsel, and whenever there were
lightning storms, and the counts – and
countesses – went slashing with their
cutlasses through the gardens and yards, I
would giggle to myself, damsons in
distress! damsons in distress! Readers
may wonder why I never touched the
moneybags, or presume I was scared to
but that would be to misunderstand the
different realms that we inhabit. Or to
put it another way, it would disorder
everything. When I go into The
Sorrowful Cappuccino and talk to the
waiters, whose names are Mark and Jo
but are known by rather vulgar
nicknames, and call themselves Pablo
and Dora, I don’t let the food items
know that I can hear them complaining
or that the chair supporting the cushion I
sit on would rather be reading Ferrante
by the absorption method: I stay strictly
within the fictonormative bounds
because tentative new, or fantastically
old realities are fragile, and I want the
geese to stay put in the sky and the hills
and ridges, and the phony, or time-
travelling analogies, with their midnight
chess matches, and their Borgia cuisine
competitions, and their spontaneous foot-
path lectures on gruel etiquette and crypt
aesthetics, to stay alive, in all the poetic
senses of the word

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

OzPo(st)

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Liam Ferney

our rock music might be shit
but we invented the 21st century
out of our favoured delusions.

mid-thirties &
the weekend’s dopamine
costs more than the coke.

we are the shrinkage
& our favourite movies don’t come true,
instead we tune the last analogue radio

to other people’s music:
it was what we wanted
when we wanted it.

our phrasing follows the degradation of the space bar.
in boom i asked where is my jetpack?

the seller’s already marked it posted
but daily the posty just brings junk.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Summer Meditation on Autumn Meditation (3)

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Lachlan Brown

after Du Fu

Thousands of apartments honeycomb these towers, lit by angled
sunlight and increasing valuations. I sit on the hill of our GDP.
In the harbour the fishing boats return from exhausted seas, floating
in bewilderment. China Southern expands its routes, directing
the world through Guangzhou. I’ve not yet been profiled for an in-flight
magazine or been asked how I’d spend 72 hours in Copenhagen.
But all of us have that one friend whose start-up goes nuts, whose modest
business is now risky and infinite. Auction this scene to the highest bidder.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Cloud Mountain

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Tim Carrier

At night there were lines of fire along its mid-horizon.
Morning & then in the evening, it was moving around, with the others.

The third voice—  behind my right shoulder, & all the way back—  said,

‘Do not think that this is sad.
 It is not sad. Even sadness is not sad.’

On the zinc roof of the little white house, whitewashed cinder block & mortar—
with the evening goats down in the dirt yard, chewing on their tongues—
I was real fucked up.

It felt just like I imagined, to be rejected by the past.

One of my teachers says, You must dislodge a deep hiddenness. The sky was opening for Orion,
across the valley, over the mountains. The standing out mountain drew in its own dark blue energy.

My grief was humiliating.     The walking state of having climbed out.

Have you ever questioned trauma, asks a friend?     Yes, I say. No one doesn’t live there.

I rolled the pale tobacco in fine white paper on the roof. The blue gums across the barbed wire were rustling in their rows.

My friend had died, his head in my arms & my lap,
in the glass & the gravel, & yellow grass, on the edge of the road.
On the backs of our necks & sun. Plenty of people were shouting.

On the zinc roof, what felt a long time later, as the moon came up on the mountain to follow Orion—

The Wounded Healer stepped forward, from the night sky memory palace.

Like the third voice like my teacher like my friend—  he was wanting to impart tone
to my body. Tonify. A very particular flutter. I cannot be a person, was my weeping.
The tone, very clear, was, Comply, comply, comply.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Joseph Banks Sees Smoke

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Jen Saunders

1770 It was a day of pleasant weather and fair wind when Joseph Banks
on the ship ‘Endeavour’ watched penguins swimming alongside
keeping up and while they were at it making noises something like
the shrieking of a goose.
Diomedaea demersa? he wondered
on the 4th of March – I cannot be certain.
Three weeks later, having read his Abel Tasman, Joseph Banks recorded
At night came to an anchor in a Bay
in some part of which
it is probable
that Tasman anchor’d.
Another three weeks and
they were sailing with a brisk breeze of wind and cloudy
unsettled weather. Joseph Banks saw Land again.
He watched as three waterspouts formed and dissolved
moved to each other and
away, all between us and the land.
The pipe itself was perfectly transparent
and much resembled
a tube of glass.
On April 20th at noon
Joseph Banks saw smoke again.
The country this morn
rose in gentle sloping hills which had the appearance
of the highest fertility, every hill seem’d
to be cloth’d with trees of no mean size
a smoak was seen
a little way inland and
in the Evening several more.
The next day Joseph Banks, after seeing
smoke again and again, concluded
the land was rather more
populous than first thought.

That night
five fires.


The next day, as the ‘Endeavour’ slapped across the waves
paralleling on port-side
the new coast, Joseph Banks
thought about the people he had seen and concluded
not much in favour of our future friends.
They didn’t make large fires
in order to clear the ground
for cultivation.
As the ‘Endeavour’ nosed for anchorage and bays
they drew closer to the shore near enough to discern
five people who appear’d enormously black. Joseph Banks
stood on deck and thought
perhaps so far did the prejudices which we had built
on Dampier’s account
influence us
that we fancied we could see their Colour
when we could scarce distinguish whether or not
they were men. The next day
April 23rd, was calm. Myself in small boat but saw
few or no
birds.
Being a man of science
he dipped his net into the new waters
and pulled out Cancer Erythroptamus, Medusa radiata,
Dagysa gemma, Holothuria obtusata,
Phyllodoce Velella and Mimus volutator
cornuta, strumose and pelagica.
Later, Joseph Banks wrote in his journal
a larger fire was however seen
than any
we have seen before.
A week or so later, in the place to be known
as Botany Bay, Joseph Banks saw the fires
(fishing fires as we suppos’d)
during the greatest part of the night.
In the morn we went ashore at the houses
but found not the least good effect from our present yesterday: in the house
in which the children were yesterday
was left every individual thing
which we had thrown to them and in the evening Myself with the Captn etc.
were in a sandy cove on the Northern side of the harbour
where we haul’ld the seine
and caught many very fine fish

more than all hands could Eat1

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Was

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Anton Hur

Woke
in a hospital bed

a glowing white room
a nurse checks my chart
by my covered feet

This wasn’t where I was before
I didn’t know where that was, but
this wasn’t it

“Am I dead?” I ask her with
a sudden flash of insight
I don’t even say hello first
The nurse scribbles something
briskly clips the chart and
looks at me. “Yes.”
She strode away.

“But who am I?” I asked the next nurse
“What am I doing in this bed?
What do I look like?”
“Would you like a mirror?”
“Am I a man?”
“I won’t offer again.”
I looked in the mirror
I looked ordinary
a relief
“As to why you’re in bed, why don’t you get up then?”

It wasn’t
a corridor or a hospital
(What was a corridor?
What was a hospital?)
I looked back at the bed
If I leave
I’ll never find my way back
I’ll lose every memory
all my words
like memory, my, words

Maybe find my mother?
But her job is done. She won’t
remember me by now
Who was she?

Oh bother
It’s not sad
it’s not even free
It just
is

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Tsarskoe Selo

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Donald Mager

by Velimir Khlebnikov

When the Tsars came out,
Because it was winter
Over the roofs of the palace,
Lifting their heads to the stars,
The royal regiment slunk along, like a wolf,
Behind the crowned head
On all fours through the square—
The favorite regiment of the Tsar,
For whom vodka
Was no cure for boredom.

1921


Tsarskoe Selo (the tsar’s village) is a complex of palaces outside Petersburg built by various
tsars to serve as a summer residence comparable to Versailles in France.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged ,

Krebs Cycle

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Amanda Joy

At the point of dissolution, I was wrong.
Anne Elvey

More augur and sere, bloodwood trees raft a mirage
Ahead in the road, a harrier resting on air is breve
not oracle, just resting on white sky filled with heat

Cicada’s rhythm shifts down from sharp staccato
to a dirge, until the whole world falls silent, as though
something has stepped too close and threatens

Tripping a shift, reek of dead kangaroo is its’ only ghost
Our eyes skulk, shadows creeping through shadows
openly flat and shockingly real. This isn’t poetry

You want me to slow down, I want to write to the quick
Space cleared overflows with another, some swarming
ant-like to the rotting eye of a trammeled snake

Tourists come in thousands to see Everlastings quicken
and end in pulsations of wind. Vans wall the highway
Define foreign, the tongue that will say it is your own

There seems to be no grass, until, while you’re not
looking a brushfire explodes and takes what you hadn’t
seen, leaving a smoulder, continuous and petering

In a roadhouse called Last Resort / No Man’s Land
a caged bird swings its legs above its head, ratchets upright
to drag its beak along the wires and a kid dances with it

A newspaper is splayed to a clipped story of the dingo
whelping its own death, poison grafted to a day
two years in the future and its’ dull rupture

Landscape re-mapped by jutting elbows of cats crouched
over blue wrens. No one here calls this place mythic
Voices buried by sound of passing trucks

A controlled burn somewhere and I wonder how much
smoke it takes to cover an ocean. Over the road, two
girls with clipboards measure fuel loads by the acre

Soothsay and spate, as a child finding a natural
clearing in the forest, ground blue with radiations
of Leschenaultia, electric as mirrored sky

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Beneath a City

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Ohan Hominis
Hidden beneath main avenues, bright lights, storefronts, cars, and restaurants lies the heart of a city, the crowded hidden centers bustling to the rhythm of rubbed shoulders and busy feet leading to expansive shop crowded pockets with weaving entrances nestled in unassuming narrow streets, jagged with unplanned architecture, wardrobes and boxes expanding past the sills above the heads of traffic beneath lined with graffiti and fading bills. Each window a life, a struggle, a huddled existence with no personal space flooded with the smell of food, incense, and voices. The same long days laboring with few personal choices replayed in the same way with the sound of an alarm, or with the rising or setting of the sun. Aging furniture, dust, creaking floors, the sounds of adjacent lives in adjacent boxes separated by gaunt cracking walls. From somewhere an infant crying, children screaming in play, a student struggling to make it out from under the cement block among a school of them who will never get away. A single mother, a drug addiction, a suicide, the ding of a microwave, the whistle of a kettle, the din of a domestic dispute. Hiding between crooked doors and cracked windows are the loved and the abused, the wise and the deluded, the faithful and the hopeless upon whose backs the city is raised and who are razed by the weight of supporting ever mounting heights of a never improved view. Because romance lives in the truth, in intimacy, in lives that cannot afford a fictional sterility, lives lived among the early morning sweeping of shop owners and countless men unloading endless boxes of unnamed goods, their coordinating shouts echoing through still empty slanted streets as the fragrances of various kitchens begin to waft into their rightful places just above the noses of passerby. And the midday crowds, the odor of bodies, and the age old selling of wares. The trading of stories, the discipline of children, and the drinking of tea. The training of youth, the counting of tills, and the locking of stalls. And the nights of reverie and personal abuse, of alcohol and late night meals and prostitutes, of the settling of disputes, of the shouts of the overworked and the scurrying of the recluse, of two lovers beginning the cycle anew in shadows of crooked winding walls under thin slivers of sometime starlit skies. And somewhere a newborn cries, and somewhere a mother sister father brother lover child dies, and time passes in front of our eyes, and time passes in front of our eyes as time passively claims our minds and we leave behind a city, not its main avenues, bright lights, storefronts, cars, and restaurants, but its narrow streets and graffiti, aging stalls, winding walls, and its rhythm. And its people, deep, hidden beneath.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

To sink into a decade

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Anna Jacobson

It’s that unsettling uneasy time,
where everything is closed
and people go mad. I fall
asleep as though sinking.
In my dream I email my shrink.
We meet at the hospital.
Not the hospital that stole
my memory, no. It’s the one
that doesn’t lock its doors
and has a hot chocolate machine.
The bed looks comfy—
adjusts to my height. A nest
of baby spiders hatches in the mattress.
Crawl all over me. I am too tired
to move elsewhere. Brush them off.
They do not bite.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

We Make Lemons

Posted on May 1, 2018 by KA Rees

after Allen Ginsberg

You keep your dark light in jars of Vegemite, I keep my chest
air in cans of lemonade and only breathe it / in super

markets. Aisles of tinned goods, sugared cereal boxes
wrapped in all the world just like happiness, weekly

specials, flash sales! A woman smiles teeth—smash, grab.
You keep your dark light sealed in magazines

randomness / but a lottery, we’re not looking to win any. ‘Take it,
some more you want some?’ homogenised / pasteurised—‘Take it

while we’ve got some!’ We try to check it with tinned tomatoes
to take it back to make the cake, but the stuff is out of date

—late too late.

You keep your dark light in cans of mace, tracer arcs
explode fence lines / placards jut the sky—hold the torch

buy, by, bye.

We try to shelter from the rain, plastic bags hang limp from limbs
like magpies, our feathers drip. But our throats are closed to song.

We talk stale with muted breath, Did you see the baby in the sausages?
The poet shot by the watermelons? Did you choke on the – – –?

You keep your dark light in shaded cloth. You outline the moon
in pen and ink underneath the Next Neon Sign, you hide

a spill of rainwater pouring baptism
wet incandescence, mother of the load.

You keep your dark light locked in passing cars, sat on the rug in back
where fox’s jaw crunches bones, there’s more to taste where there’s teeth.

Neon glows too bright on all the words, you—darkening acetone.
The cloth is wet face unknown.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Life in the Permian

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Victor Billot

There is an exhibition about Monsters of the Permian:
they roamed the planet before the dinosaurs.
They look the same to me, with big gnashers and claws.

I need cash. Don’t we all? Lunchtime comes.
I walk with a heavy bag to the second hand bookshop
which buys and sells. I sell only. My library is thinning.

The Permian, all 46.7 million years of it, was jammed
between the Carboniferous and Triassic Periods,
and featured the supercontinent Pangaea. True fact.

I make small talk with Richard behind the counter.
Walk away with my $30, feeling halfway between
20 and 70 million years old in the Mortgagearian Epoch.

As well as reptiles, there were Permian creatures
that were kind of proto-mammals:
hairy little fuckers with mean eyes.

I paid for my children to see that exhibition.
They read wall panels about the great dying.
The gigadeaths of the great and small.

That’s how the Permian concluded: the great dying.
That’s what they call it. Lava floods.
Methane clathrates. Aridity. Acidity. Anoxia.

I search for the two bills in my wallet: a twenty and ten.
Gone. Nothing there. I look again as if
they could magically reappear.

After the great dying, it took ten million years for life
to get back to something resembling normal.
(The hairy little fuckers hid under rocks.)

Now I’m standing in front of a sign
advertising the Permian Monsters,
as I rifle through my pockets, in rage, in anguish.

Then a bit later on it all got smashed again
by the killer asteroid 65 million years ago,
and the HLFs were the only game left in town.

I’m searching for my missing cash
as killer asteroids explode on my head
on this fucking planet, this planet of death.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Drawing Straws

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Marjorie Main

I keep seeing things – glancing light on a window
and darkness, the kind you can look through and see
the cold sou’westerly fretting the leaves of the chestnut outside.
Just the night wind has me back at Torbay:
it gusts against the roof and sends me from my bed
to stand between the curtains and the cold glass, looking out.

It starts raining and I think of him navigating those night flights.
The little I know makes him a stranger and I can only
sense the years that vanished when he died.
The space at the table where his stooped head obscured the trees
outside is clear now, yet I see him sitting there unspeaking.

Silence is a kind of tyranny, his broken to pronounce:
life is the accumulation of scar tissue, it’s just pain.
Perhaps it was this that got him through
the time in his mind that dwelt between the rivers
Isar and Amper as Prisoner No. 146708
armed with silence and a small knife he fashioned for himself

to carve up bread so that he could draw straws with the others
for a crust, and know that what couldn’t curb
his hunger was at least scrupulously fair.
This was what he told us of as children, and that when he was shot
down he shouldn’t have hidden from the cold in a haystack.

The leaves on the chestnut were turning,
fallen husks mulching in the grass. It was Easter,
I think – I was small and he old, his head half-shorn.
When I asked he told me the wind blew his hair away
as he leaned from a window.
But what of time without a window or a way out –

opening into cold night and a track through the trees to the river?
Long after all that the chestnut stood bare
until no one could say which spring it didn’t green.
Then someone cut it down, stacked the wood
against the stump and left it.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Disconnection

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Kirli Saunders

Little one,
I see you mouth empty spaces,
for a mother’s words to fill
and stretch your ears
for the stories and their voices.

I watch your
trembling limbs
ache to shake
in dance
and hear your lungs
as they gasp with songs unknown.

I feel your
body sans
spirit,
ceremony
and secret

and know that
it has been grown
without roots –
away from the earth that cradled you

and I taste the hunger
you do
to know the parts of yourself,
to feel at home
when your
dreaming has been taken.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Echidna

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Mike Ladd

Undulant pinecone,
needle-nose sniffer,

I imagine you mountain-size,
monstering a city.

You are harder to pick up than Hungarian,
more stand-offish that a stylite saint.

Little high judge in your wig of thorns,
its pattern complex as a deal in the Senate,

once a year
you queue for spiky sex

then crash burrow-wards
through the bracken curtain.

You are distant as Aldebaran.
Private as euthanasia.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Country

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Jasmine Pierce

Part I

This country breathes secrets
restless wind roaming,
biting at your neck,
knotting your hair.

Trees of old bleed
stories in ochre sap
elegies
for things forgotten.
The dusted shedding of the paperbark;
a raw reminder
of the land’s crude underbelly
its knotted centre.

Sun curdling
the earth at your feet –
Don’t try to deceive.

You’ve already whispered
your sins into the ear of the land,
carved your scars into its belly.

This wind
a nomad,
recognises the curve of your skin
dirt knows where to hide –
in the creases of your eyes,
under the ledge of your chin

This country knows you better than yourself.

You are only
one of many.

Country never forgets.


When the riverbed cracks
under the sun’s hot glare,
when life must battle
for existence,

the past mounts

rising with the sinking water
settling in the mud
scalding to the eye, waiting to burn the feet of all
kindling old senses
stirring old sins
no-one can escape it


The past runs through this country
can’t be buried
can’t be thrown out.


Part II

Tommy knows this place;
can count the times he’s been away from it
on one hand.

Tommy knows the best places to get a feed –
around the bend of an old trunk,
where the roos lead you

Follow them and you won’t be left empty handed.
No,
this country has much to share with you.

If you ask he’ll tell you
where the biggest secrets
lie in folds
where the bush is
thickest
and
the best climbing places to view all up this country.

Tommy breathes in stories of this land
family stories
feels them buzzing about him
written in the mud slapped against the river’s walls
they drop into the air as the muck dries

He’s walked this path all his life,
pausing
where the ground drops
and the two chasms clash together,
where the crags shiver in dusklight,
where the willows weep more loudly

But Tommy doesn’t swim this river,
won’t test these waters,
doesn’t climb that mountain line
the great heights towering,
looming blackness where a generation
was pushed
to the nightdark waters deep below

silver moony reflections swimming for years to come.

Tom has seen the dirty swirls,
felt the shingle underfoot at crossings
watched for carp clap and water slap

But Tommy doesn’t touch this river.
Out West he’ll swim in old Surry River

but not this one here.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

The Men Who Hate Clementine Ford

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Paul Dawson

Everyone knows one of them, the men who are #notallmen –
They are the ones who have no opinion
just facts and considered views, which they cling to
like a real estate agent to a slice of ocean
who fantasize about swooping down on a vortex
of social media feminism, and dispelling its force
with a single tone-deaf injection of reason, like:
‘are you aware that men are statistically more likely
to be assaulted’ or ‘funny that no-one wants to discuss
male suicide rates’, lamenting Clementine’s swear words
and pitting rational debate against hysteria
as if explaining the mechanics of a carburetor

They are the ones who take it personally
like a kid who thinks his sister got a bigger
serve of ice-cream. Who won’t recognize
the behaviour Clementine condemns
because it doesn’t come from them
because they love women, their boss is a woman
and they always leave the toilet seat down.
Who squall about equality as they brandish their
hashtag syllogisms, as if feminism were a
false premise because it does not attend
to the rights of men, and how dare she

post a man’s private message for all to see
the man who writes: ‘You should be raped
you fucking man-hating feminazi’, before
pointing out that she is too ugly to be raped
as if to be raped could also be a compliment
reserved for an attractive Tinder date
the man who utters pig, dog, slut, cunt with red-eyed relish
as if each noun possessed a natural equivalence
whose private words sit nestled to the right
of his profile picture, where he smiles
with cheeks pressed to his two daughters

And when I stare at these men and their belligerent eyes
set in a frozen Facebook smirk, I wonder
how deeply their male gaze penetrates
what they see when they look into the eyes
of their wives while they thrust inside them.
What do they think when those daughters
grow into their limbs? Would they rather protect
their girls from women like Clem or men like them?

They are the men who think women can’t be funny
who assess a woman’s body as if it were a work in progress
an architectural draft of their dream holiday home
who are incensed by Clementine’s red lipstick
because her smile is not theirs to own
because they hate the idea of her, the idea of a woman
who renders them irrelevant by giving zero fucks
who speaks their unspoken assumptions, inviting them
to prove her right with every toxic rebuttal

They are the man in the bar who plants
his fat keys on the table and stands
with a thumb hooked over his belt
drinking his beer in slow, measured draughts
who wants the women chatting near him
to feel the weight and heat of his presence
who thinks it an affront if his boozy desire
is not acknowledged, yet takes offence if it is
because he was just trying to be friendly
who thinks his reflex quotidian leer is a compliment

because his desire needs to be legitimised
and could be, with a simple titter
or a smooth palm on his forearm
so just fucking lighten up, why don’t you?

They are the man walking towards me
on the footpath, on a clear blue day
who will size me up and then bunch
his doughy shoulders, and keep going
gun-barrel straight, eyes aimed at the edge
of my temple, like a misfired gaze
inviting the collision, daring me
to be the sort of man
who hates Clementine Ford.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Restless

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Jill Jones

I’m restless about affinity There’s a form
of am in every dream Stress prevaricates
Aniseed lingers You can be too fond of fences
making shiny choruses Air is a treasury
The horizon fills with shallow light
There’s devil in the air and everything’s
forgettable or repeated by cheer leaders

I failed at being a host as crumbs kept falling
My wounds itch on the right-hand side
and I made lines break like bones
that made me reel

Form is simply vanity I contemplate the heart
of each vegetable How do you say what to say
Genius is like terror You can never be that jolly
with scattered feet The old bush had to be dug up
There’s too much noise Worry is a form of idealism

I fret each dirty line The horizon fills
with self regard or the last light on the gum
which is a pink glow you can only see

I revise my chemistry I argue with stairs

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

untitled

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Colleen Woods 
I.

the idea of a productive morning          an ideal of productivity          a man walking on 

the beach in the early light                     I become a space into which his care pours   & 

so am lifted out of poverty          the family wander elsewhere          in the first home 

without others, a cactus bloomed in the backyard          a night-flowerer          & the 

noisy miners swooped the dog 	



II.

in the sun reading about a winnicott case                    a boy who obsessively tied 

furniture to other furniture with string          an attempt to ameliorate fear of 

separation, desertion                    you are a representative representing self                    & 

we are all bodies & desires                    pulling at chairs tethered with string 	 	




III.

counting the days between letters                          small events take on too much meaning
  	
(perhaps others can smell this)                                              the strangeness of this practice, 

the realisation that no one is keeping track       that here one can do anything one wants

around you I am inevitably trivial             & thus strangely peaceful                 we reach 

for a device & form a window



IV.

what was reserved & parched opens                    (a masculine-flowering)               noting 

delicate acts on television       I watch a man lift his hand from where he was touching 

a woman          his hand is covered in blood      she begins scrambling for the date     his 

face softens with surprise that she contains such redness, such vitality              another 

program & the most tender act I have ever seen on television: a man putting makeup 

on another man while they talk softly about their lives



V.

I suddenly become afraid of losing my notebook, of losing track                       in the post 

you arrive surrounded by red, a fragile packet                    everything turns on a number

& a series of arrivals, always delayed, awkward, charmless                       so I speak less 

& read more                                    & with the dogs inhabit an unbroken weekday quiet

on the bench they lean their dog bodies against mine                         scenting the air
 	
we consider the backyard and it reflects back to us green    always more green  	

our companions, a leaf-curling spider, the buzz pollinators               & a magpie lark 

who walks the pool cover like a waterlily



VI.

in the night vegetation is removed          a sandstone wall is constructed to keep tides out 

of lounge rooms                they've trucked in 
beach sand          the environmentalist says 

it will only work for now          there’s talk of compromise          the casuarinas ghost & 

the commelina chokes garden beds                                    I am struck once more by your 

fear of sentiment          is the goal to write like you?      to erase the self          push up 

and up          a relentless stripping



VII.

today more reading: an author who says hugging a eucalypt is like hugging a horse’s 

neck          I tried it, it’s true      firm life against your cheek                              the other 

day I saw a journal that said no poems with birds                  I told the wattlebirds out 

the back they said fuck that                                 I told the sky it said so much life against 

your cheek feathers cambium green blue
Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

from , et c-

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Dan Disney

Is it true that somewhere
the plum trees have happily blossomed?
Yi Saek (1328-1396)


(i)
bee vertical
her flickering eye
enlarging

hindwing shadows
skittering the bright
3rd storey dirt

-edged aerie >>> trucks
gearing down
into dusk’s gold

overtones (looping script on autoplay)


(ii)
‘you umderstand?’
we jabber, jabbing
phone translator apps

surveying the non
-silence, stumbling
our conversations

architectural
>>> her, me, Samsung,
wind, brickwork, err

-ings, birdsong/ the sunshine & glass façades


(iii)
joint pain, teeth
grinding along
in the adjoining room

she is cross
-legged, meditating, 4am
upright as a stork

in tatami fields, breath
-ing entirely in 3D >>> o
possibilities, in

-finitudes & distance


(iv)
our neighbor
Lung Biscuit
(informal) hunches

through the weeks >>>
scowls ‘yeah’
to our hellos

in the basement
of his
bony-shouldered shadows

‘thinking, thinking’/ fuckoffificatorily


(v)
‘birds, skζwårqnψg
in bird language
& the leaves ru

-stling [sic]
in seasonal grammars,’
we think, touching

our thoughts with thought
& all the sky
a morning’s bluescreen

/ flock of cadence harries past

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged