La Petite Mort

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Amy Lauren

Buried in the same plot,
a thousand years breathless
in an earthen mound, no decaying
skeleton but still one hundred percent
human, all flesh and blood here,
hips quaking headstone,

yes, we are ridiculously human,
pausing to lift head for a gasp
of air, mouthful of lipstick teeth
smearing thighs a reddish-brown,
kicking off heels and legs writhing
to unravel fleece-lined stockings,

tearing seams with knees beneath
white cotton sheets, and sometimes
her curls catch in my mouth, we laugh
at its silliness, or her earring catches
my hair, two femmes tangling
teach you hair’s perils,

she can unclasp my bra in darkness
from above or below, but I’ve got to flick
on the lamp, turn her around, it’s wildly
unsexy, ponytails tossed across bedroom
as her low voice strikes lightning between
my legs, tectonic plates shifting in veins
as I settle forever in her breasts.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

September 27

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Mia Slater

The sky is an Arabian shepherd
and the moon is wet to the bone and the sheep
are grazing on the gold fish side of the mountain
like a creek made of clouds.

The sun is a little parlour guitar playing along to
a whole can of dandelion flowers
in silver costumes.

I am an aeroplane free!
It’s a good day for flying
into a lake that’s frozen
like a cracked haiku.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Stasis at Oxford 130

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Mags Webster

Today is a good day to die in a freak garden accident: fall back
onto the spikes of a giant agave, say, & expire in its healing
embrace. I’m 12,000 miles adrift from what I used to call home,
mainlining a long macchiato. A street-kerb café: an old woman
sits two seats to my left, her bun in an eight-legged spring clasp. Blue
plastic tarantula, clamped to the back of her head—or that thing in Alien,
sucking off John Hurt’s face. A blonde in a yellow bikini smiles up at me.
When in doubt, offers her perma-tanned thigh, make lists. Enquires
her left breast: Are you ever truly satisfied? Five new ways to achieve
orgasm. Are these connected? Sure, breast & leg, but lists & lust?
I’m in doubt. Make a list. Recent addictions: weather reports,
Marmite, coffee, misery. You see, today my marriage broke up—
or was it yesterday, last month, a few years back—the moment after
I said ‘I do’? I open up Cosmo bikini girl: read an article on how
to de-tox. So easy: starve until you hallucinate, then drink a week’s-worth
of pond-weed. Maybe it’ll de-tox your body, but that’s not enough,
I need it to nuke my mind. Ten years. No wonder my brain’s peeling
out of my skull—it’s a lot to purge in one go. But this city’s
made me learn how to drink really slow, I’ve majored in reverse
caffeine velocity. Too much & the pavement comes up to hit me.
Too little & the pavement dribbles away. So I’ll have another, long
& strong, no sugar, definitely no spouse to go. Top breakup bands:
Keane Cowboy Junkies Everything but the Girl Coldplay

Noon. This city is a corpse, ants running along its length. Today
tastes of grey, not yellow like Mondays used to. The tinge
of my world before love got to it. I remember when we coloured in
the days of the week, rainbow, rainbow, rainbow. So, I’m trying
to find the yellow again, I’m just taking apart my brain,
to see if it can be fixed. Brains look like cauliflower—
would they taste like one? I tilt my head, hear the patter
of tiny synapses. No wild brine to smell. Actually, not so much
like a cauliflower—more like jellyfish. Rhopilema hispidum,
a giant grey light bulb washed up on the beach. Somewhere I read
jellyfish don’t have brains, instead their whole skin is a ‘nerve net’.
That’s how my skin feels today, an electric web, I can light whole worlds,
I can hear through walls. Across by the ATM, I tune in to the queue.
One man is telling another that his dog just died. Ah well, if you’re gonna go…
that’s the way to go. Just four hours where he was a bit … unusual.
That woman sitting opposite, she’s thinking I cannot find
a way to mend the breeze. She looks at me like she’s watching
a documentary, and I’m some country she’s never been to. I know
how she feels. Last night, my taxi driver’s name was Jack.
Chatty Jack. He smelt like the ex before last—same strange twist
of scent, the melody’s been left out, only the bass notes boom.
Jack’s in love, ten weeks so far. She lives in Hong Kong, has a daughter,
no visa, he’s giving her $6000 a month, hopes she’ll come over
for good. She wants babies, but at 32 he reckons he is getting too old.
His mother is ‘appalled’, he’s not sure, thinks it’s for real, but I can tell
he’s faking it for every fare. He’s got nothing, Jack. Like, I’m an expert
in love—a used car with one careless lady owner—Fiat, Subaru,
Chrysler Jeep, Holden Commodore. Loss is a cockroach that barrels
to the back of the throat, & sticks there. We start off as plump balloons,
end up as rags of rubber, lying on the floor. 3.15pm. This city.
How it thickens, its arteries clotted by cars. Today I woke
as if I hadn’t killed my laptop the night before, & then the memory
came rushing in, filled me with cold green ocean. Sleep makes me feel
like yesterday’s life is part of my violent dream. Waiter! There’s a face
in my coffee. I don’t want this one, bring me another. Grief gives you
a glassy look—a veneer which stops germs getting in & poison
escaping. You see yourself in a photograph, wonder when
you got trapped in its frame. It’s like looking through the wrong end
of your mind, seeing Earth’s dark side instead of the sun.
Recent discovery in space: a planet with four suns.
Dr Chris Lintott, University of Oxford, tells BBC News
—it’s absolutely not what we would have expected—
but that’s where he’s wrong, the unexpected happens all the time,
always has. Planets sprout suns. Orgasms are achieved. My head
is a caulifish, growing jellyflowers. Time for some brain DIY.
I’ll borrow some knives, sharpen up for surgery. Look at that—
daytime moon. One crazy bird, knows she can’t hang around
any more, she must fly behind clouds, without a map, with nothing
to lose but rainseeds, & I’ll be left behind in the hollering dark,
mopping up my rhopilema, making it into trifle, which will get up
& dance with me, do the cortical waltz. One two three, one two
three, three—to—none. List of favourite proverbs:
can think of only one, don’t even know how to say it.
Mōzhe shítou guòhé. Crossing the river by feeling the stones.
But the river’s getting deeper, stones are crumbling.

I’m rushing headlong to nowhere. I want to be an ant,
they live in nomadland, don’t care how many suns it has.
Three—two—one? 5.35pm. All those ants on the freeway,
they’re heading home. Someone tell them: wherever they left it
this morning, it won’t be there anymore.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Staying Alive

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Kim Cheng Boey

in memory of James Peden

Massachusetts

The first homegoing song I knew, though I didn’t know where it was they wanted to get home to. I was new in the class, transplanted from a Chinese school and learning the strange faces, the new voices, all so foreign, unlearning the Chineseness that I had worn for three years, the old badge and uniform now put away for a foreign tongue. I was an émigré outside of everything, of my life, the class, Mrs Ravi, beautifully sari-clad, twisting my ear for not declining the verbs right – go, went, gone, sing sang sung, not knowing the grammar of time, the alien language that was slowly, mysteriously mastering me, turning me a stranger to myself, an exile in longing for what I could never call my own again. Then I was in the Scouts, learning this song, the melody, the words filling the valves, the instrument of my body, and when no one was around, they rolled off my tongue, trailing after that tremolo-edge, the pitch where for a moment you sense the missing key, the way back, the way home. It was as if they were always there, the voices, their song waiting for me, as I got up at dawn for the school-bus, as I waited for my errant father to show up and take me away from the school of strange faces that seemed so at home, happy as you are meant to be in childhood, from the hours of brooding under the saga trees fringing the school field, their glistening red seeds bejeweling the grass. The lyrics entered me, like the birdsong billowing the spaces of wandering branches, the chant of afternoon sun lighting up the lungs of blue-green air, words I barely understood, that place longed for not on the small, altered map of my life, but somewhere far inside me. The words rose up like an anthem, a credo, as the Scouts sang their medley on the school stage, a concrete platform under the rain trees, their yellow flowers dusting the grounds. I can see the khaki-clad boys, mouths agape as the harmonies grow to a pitch and key of love their small bodies will in time be tuned to, but now they struggle to hold the notes, and I am with them, carried on the one voice that commands us to grow up, and know the pain, the loss that will wrench us out of our boy-bodies, the words a mantra tugging, pulling us out towards that loss larger than our lives put together, and Massachusetts may as well be a distant star, but there we are aimed, ferried on the voices, on Robin Gibb’s tremulous falsetto, searing, soaring, the home-and-love-sick words taking me far beyond the cold, alien spaces, to wherever the song is going.

To Love Somebody

A few days after Maurice Gibb’s death Jim told me he wanted to beat the rare form of cancer that was eating up his body, laddering up from the bottom of his spine. I knew he couldn’t but he wanted to believe, wanted me to believe, even when the grenade-shape lump detonated, and splinters lodged in his liver. It must have been just after Robin Gibb followed his brother Maurice to where the music stops. A cold knowledge set in Jim’s hazel-green eyes, and you could see the end in them, a dead wintry light consuming all the summers larrikining in the bush, its silent chords eating up the spirit, stilling the music in his drummer hands. Jim said he would never stop writing, never let the cancer swallow his words, his memoir, and the coin-bright memories of his Glasgow childhood, and then a Ten-Pound Pom on a ship sailing through the Suez, a blurred scroll of ports, Aden, Colombo and Singapore, before going down to a strange new life growing up in the bush in Wallsend, never at home again, not even after losing his Scots brogue. In his last drafts, his father was coming back to him, in ghostly words, in sheaves of handwritten notes: a father who never spoke a word about Alamein or Normandy, whose mute medals were all Jim had of him. Jim was going to complete his memoir, deaf to time and death working their inscrutable beat on the drumhead, their soft taps gathering pace, but he was never going to work his passage back to South Africa, as he did at twenty-five, joining a combo on a cruise ship, nailing his drum-kit to the stage, the liner pitching on heavy swells; he was never going to find the letter to Livingstone he had interred at a spot in Victoria Falls. Never going back to Glasgow. Never going home. But there, in my office after the last workshop of the year, in the diminuendo blue chords of winter light, it was Robin Gibb he mourned, and Jim said “To Love Somebody” taught him what love was, what it is to throw yourself into the pitch and roll of song, the pain so pure, the key of lost love tuned so high it is electric, and you are wired, a struck bell tolling orgasmic waves of longing, the loving and dying welded in one breath. Once, he showed me a photo of himself in ‘75, slim, in a flowery shirt with dagger-lapels, and beltless flares, drum-sticks in hand, his first gig in a Newcastle club, looking like a Bee Gee on the cusp of the disco age, the life of music and the music of life all his for the taking. He loved Robin Gibb’s supporting harmonies, steadying Barry’s wailing falsetto, the way the song shows by not showing what it’s like to love. I can see Jim’s ashen face, his oatmeal skin, the tears held back, his body shrunk, his belt tightened to the last notch, death’s knell loud in the silence between us. I can hear Jim as the record spins to the song, sitting snug behind the drum-kit that has travelled with him to the last rented place, hitting the drumheads, double-kicking the bass with bolts of longing, the room filled with the last flare of living, plugged into the wail that is like rapture, like searing pain, the fuel, the fire, the force, like nothing I will ever hear.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Snow

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Cassandra Atherton
The snow turns our year into white noise. Like the echo chamber in your noise cancelling earphones, the bliss is whitewashed with flurries of snow. My body becomes powdered chalk; your touch is desiccated. On First Night, I watch the ice sculptures outside the Copley Plaza Hotel and wonder how many days they’ll take to melt. When the temperature increases, they’ll shrink into grotesque stumps and become puddles of dirty water. I try to remember your warm hands on my back, my spine liquefying under your palms, but the December chill numbs me through my blue coat and pink pom-pommed hat. As I lie down outside Trinity Church to make snow angels, I see ice crystals free-falling. My words become the fine rime on their backs.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

The Courage Diet

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Ben Juers

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

famous writers … and what they wore

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Gareth Morgan

sometimes i think of people as looking
like pam brown
sometimes i’m actually thinking of
helen garner
sometimes maggie beer
who i try keep out of mind
as best i can but she
often sneaks in any way

i see a person in the park
they look like my grade prep teacher
she passed away recently and her
stuff – bookshelves, dining chairs –
were put on the nature strip
dad saw them when he was
doing his route
and asked me if i wanted any of it

i see someone playing giant jenga
and he looks like atticus finch
he’s kiwi and has tattoos and he
gives me a cider
because i can open his bottle

i go to sydney and i see
pam brown wearing an army camouflage jacket

luke saw helen garner at la trobe
she was feeling a little faint
i thought i saw helen garner at the zoo once
in the butterfly room
but i looked over to my niece to make sure she was ok
and the vision was all of a sudden gone

i see jacky from high school on the train
she smiles at me
she’s wearing a black dress
thinking about abstract expressionism

sometimes i see industrial zoning
and i think of javant biarujia
i think of peter bakowski’s famous
beret…………………
on the highest shelf at
hill of content bookshop, shimmering
then i feel that if people, generally, looked more
like ania walwicz
our cities would be more beautiful
in an interesting way

i’m going to the movies
and i see some guy who looks like
georg grosz
and i get to worrying
he looks like a beware of the dog sign

on the bike path i think i see warren whitney
miss that guy, what a good face
remember him wearing a free palestine
t shirt and shorts
bashing the white board with some new idea

sometimes i think of marty hiatt as
looking like a seal
other times as looking like a
disney cartoon prince

i like to think of pam brown
working as a postie in some golden year
wearing hi vis
picture this in melbourne because
i’m a narcissist

i think of pam brown going to school in america
and meeting eileen myles
they probably wore
normal things
t shirts, trousers

i think of writers not as working class
but as middle class
without the steady money
at least i think i see things this way
my ideal job is working at a personal computer
in a giant, bustling room of people
and instead of doing my work
i’m writing poems

i imagine the working class not
as you say
in offices, but in factories
pate factories to be precise
i imagine shakespeare
wearing something irrelevant
to match his plays
as he does the visiting rounds like a storm

he’s no longer even into those ancient stories
even in a form that is possible to understand
by normal people
and we don’t care who’s putting it on!

if you give shakespeare to a pate factory
say, in narre warren
they will probably churn it into the mix
along with the chicken livers and the peppercorns
i think of pate as kind of like d h lawrence

sometimes i think of people
as looking like d h lawrence
when i’m walking up a hill on some
generic holiday
and they do not wave or flag me down
and i run on

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Driving to Broken Hill

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Judith Beveridge

Distance—continuous, ungestured. Crows
on fence-wire-watch stretching into a haze.
When a kestrel hovers it’s an abundance—
like water, or a horizon with a hill.
We pass towns, streets written-off by dogs
and half-asleep dreamers. Those who live
at the edges here must have put aside
all satisfaction; mile after mile of paddocks
full of saltbush and wrong conclusions.
The heat keeps drawing wobbling lines
parallel to forgetting. We think of rooms
by the sea as we drive, no props in this theatre
of emptiness, only a whistling kite
or two, trucks hurtling on interstate haul.
At dusk, more kangaroos, unblinking,
holding their pose, stunned into road kill—
the highway’s only intimacy. We hear insects
smack against our windows with thwarted
wanderlust. The horizon glowing red
is not what we can attach desire to, though
perhaps a sky strung with starlight, a vault
of curative silver, will be enough to ease
the choking flatness, the ubiquitous dust.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

The Patience of Affixes

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Lakshmi Gill

Within the half-life of affixes
in the grey gap between pre- -suf
are thoughtlings swimming to the surface.
In winter needs must break the ice with battered noses.
In summer they leap and dive with paeanismus tails.
In breeding season they lay blue eggs:
un- closes shells, com- opens, em- -en squeeze the juices.
In time they mature to -ful
then beach to wait some more

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Plague

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Caitlin Maling

i)
Walking in white socks,
you watch the black dots jump
and stick, trying to feel their way
to where the blood is easier.
Somehow they don’t sting
and pinching them doesn’t crack,
instead your blood is there
on your fingertips and their legs
keep wriggling. It’s been
a half-formed day, overcast
with fire-smoke and no change,
the wind still blowing strong easterly.
Under a microscope, every part of a flea
is visible, even the sucked out
parts of you. It’s a waste,
the time spent calling images up,
trying to know, when the answer
is a can let off on a sheet of paper,
an hour spent vacuuming up the bodies.
Imagine being able to jump
twenty times your height,
and suddenly finding yourself
stuck to the ground.

ii)
Sleeping in the basement to avoid chemicals,
there’s a rustle over the din of wind,
a mouse runs across the floor.
Where there’s one there’s more.
There’s a desperation I’ve noticed
in my voice, that’s like that scrabble.
It can’t be bourn. I’m here to be alone,
away from listening to women talk to men
with high-pitched hostage gaiety
“please love me, let me love me, don’t leave me”.
In a plague there’s hundreds of you being born
and dying once food runs out
or when the whim of something bigger
decides it’s had enough.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Fried Bread and Mango Juice

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Anita Patel

(for my grandmother, Suraj Ba)

My father bought mangoes
(a dozen or so)
and we carried them home
in a gunny sack
filled with the dark
orange smell of ripeness –
my five year old mouth watered
as my father slapped the sack
down in front of my mother.
Her face did not change at the
sight of the fruit (now a bit sticky
and blackened in places,
sap seeping slowly through
small splits in the tender skins)
these were not the mangoes
she expected,
firm and smooth – ready to eat
in neat, sweet slices –
Yet her eyelids did not flicker
at this messy offering
and I watched as she
washed the sack carefully,
peeled each soft fruit
and rubbed the yellow flesh
on harsh hessian
till her knuckles grew red and raw
and the thick juice flowed
like a honeyed miracle –
enough to fill a pitcher and then some more –
And after that she rolled dough
into silky discs, slipped them
into sizzling oil
and lifted out puris –
small, golden balloons…

I have had eight decades of eating
and now my dry mouth tastes nothing –
but in the stillness of my dreams…
I feast like a child
on fried bread and mango juice…

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Creek Gully Dreaming

Posted on May 1, 2018 by James Stuart

Fan-tailed, a brown cuckoo dove swoops
across the highway, settling on verge. 
You could it take it as a sign there’s undercurrent
to asphalt, that it’s the world flowing
beneath us. A vinyl-clad demountable demurs 
roadside. Blurred country flips through vignettes
seen or remembered: grass-trees that compete 
with lantana clots rising like a bad dream
from the creek gully; gold mine shafts, caged over 
on rain-shadowed hillside; the open cut mine –
its rail line that bridges the road ahead
& now the road behind.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

zipper fax

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Kirsten Ihns

not master of my house, but light sitting
on a secret density, while some part of it
is female, suffers this red temperature
to continue—

ginger as a formation incident
i think i want to be known?
i think i am not a moral object

tho such was the thing that gave me my outsides
let me drift across the theatre like its curtains

the day comes unspooled from somewhere on the left
drifts across the scene like disconsolate ash

would you say i was naked were it not for these scraps

please only know my illumined parts
this is what the picture asks
dropping like a used pale flower

i am writing the shape of that same slow message
writing its circles around the drain

like there is a fantasy there, and i want to go in
it picked up the look of a door
picked the lock on the semblance
chose me to love it insatiably, so i do

i am everywhere low
low and clean, form and totally
content with that

user, i am content
with the effigy situation
and the hazard of its useful arms

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Ismene’s Thirst

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Claire Gaskin

in this binary library
a murder of fictions
crows gather in corners
it is work to witness
question marks polished apples
witnessed by medication

one side limp
I called an ambulance
this memory smells nutty
the first line I trusted

hot under a tree in the outback
a bag of lychees
declarations of love are not

front teeth crack the husk
translucence of trace

the bee on my chest witnesses the space between beats
I dusted my brother’s body
the dandelions nod affirmation
the butterfly heavy with the want does not land

the day I went to get results
my notebook opened an incision
lay lined
an inky river

the little boy runs into
my failure of ground
there is a beach where the two rivers meet
the Jamieson the Goulburn

not remembering protected them from the birds and their crimes

a woman on a horse tells us one river is warmer one faster

standing in water two arms end in a heart

their crimes fell like coins out of holes in the lining
yellow leaves are boats moving as fast as the colluding current

I have to stay till arrival happens
medicated into the seams
two elbows on the table
the wood smells like old books
my notebook spread fightless

a muddy pond of tea cools in my hands
sitting in the wind of hospital corridors

cockatoos rip apart the morning
the river swallows the fall
my mother raised her arms in prayer to the clothes line

blood flows from the left atrium to the right
the flies land on my denial
the privacy of grief

she took her two hands off her walker
onto my shoulders
pegged me with prayer

the two rivers don’t meet
the Jamieson ends in the Goulburn

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Reflective Insulation

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

You just walk out of the world and into Australia
Lawrence

Dozing your afternoon away
hot and salty, outside time
you do not see the powderblue
of distant hills,
beyond that cape.
Everything has become quite marine
with gulls for scattered punctuation.

Huddled all together lie
the igneous and stratified:
craglet, pit and water pebble,
mini-tarn, long crinkled shelf
yellowish, ginger, tan, wet-black
with a hint of half-decayed
kelp, sea lettuce – something off.

Could be a dead penguin, eh?
Elastic theology against the green
or a psychic stress enacted by
a flannelled ghost in the machine.

Days are seasons of the psyche as
fresh waves crash against the sill,
over and over.
Sandstone
is the metaphysical pavilion,
our old mate the summer’s ocean
finding odd gaps in the field.

Epics within epigrams
and the stink of restlessness,
but on the sand it feels like Bush Week,
folk with stripey towel and radio
crescent between quotes of rock,

off which those yellow-eyed silver mullet
patiently abound.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

snob

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Joanne Burns

don’t think i’ll hear
a fly buzz when i die
more likely a voice booming
instructions on where to queue
for the official passage there being
a jam in the tunnel some spirits
rushing to cross the river others
determined to rush back to life in
time for the latest sports event or
extra season of celebrity chef ―

i’d like to die a more easeful
death to the rhythm of a slow
light breath like a final exercise
in pranayama thinning down to
a miniature mmnn ~ lifting towards
a familiar vastness an expandable
yonder the ‘me’ now a drift of
prodigal particles not szymborska’s
‘to vanish like a spark’ :
but a generous
sabbatical or silky gap year
before the next reassignment ―

no dog or horse or rat perhaps
something more extra-terrestrial

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Woman with Her Throat Cut

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Alisa Dodge

If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.
Todd Akin

While looking at the throat, bronzed and flayed: the ribs
artichoke-winged, I feel neck-strung and silenced.
Giacometti’s cork-screwed contortions too familiarly …

… subjugate, dear Congressmen, like anatomy you parse
syntactically. Butter-lipped, you scrape your teeth against
my cervical hollows and leave ( ) as the space between…

…my legs where a title lives. Dear sirs, you clip my clitoris
into a neat trilogy. Legislate fertility like a war
order. Brand my haunches with your initials, iron-cast …

… and sizzling. You unsheathe your pen and lick
your greasy fingers. It seems you have studied
Giacometti, that you already know…

… how simple he kept his forms, asking only
that she/it always remain with her/its back
laid flat against the ground.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Questions of Travel

Posted on May 1, 2018 by David McCooey

Elizabeth Bishop packs for Seattle, December 1965

Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969).

The unseen night creatures—scaled and feathered
for their occult ceremonies—rasp and call outside
in the dark beyond the half dark that
surrounds this marbled, half-lit house.
There is little to occupy my nest of suitcases
on the narrow bed: the hillock of a portable typewriter,
a few pairs of shoes, three suits,
a middle-aged woman’s underclothes,
a clutch of diaries and letters,
The Poetics of Music (Vintage Books, 95¢).
Some other books will go by sea,
boxed in a ship’s vast and steely womb,
or else be left to visitors and the foxing elements.
There is, after all, nothing too large or too small
that can’t be left to the mise-en-scène of Brazil,
framed in this teeming window.

This house, midway between city and jungle,
is not indifferent to politics and promenades,
carnivorous plants and tidal rivers.
Neighbouring houses, though, are lit with gasoline,
and tenanted by defeated goats and unbrushed horses.
Underneath us all, the heavy, red earth keeps faith
with the human structures built upon it,
as if there was no such thing as
hubris or landslides or phone lines.
Meanwhile living things spring and decline,
in their godless and Biblical manner.

Obscene and prodigious vegetables are revered here.
Leather-skinned men work their Virgilian work
and hang their homely pots of lunch
on the shaded branches of trees.
The region’s fog, the rain and rainbows,
the obdurate sun; they were only ever
metaphors for the weather we call emotion,
that daily melodrama of violence and rectitude,
like an updating of all the old hymns.

The moon now set, I will sleep alone
like Sappho, leaving only the mirror to report—
in its contrary way—on the state of things.
Tomorrow begins the condition we call ‘in transit’
(Rio—Lima—Miami—Los Angeles—Seattle);
all those hours to think upon a decade
of time spent in the close geographies
of vehicles, gardens, and rooms.

All these human thresholds will one day give way
to a place beyond cities and hills, plains and jungles—
to a splendid and heartless book,
where it is neither night nor day,
neither here nor there, neither me nor you;
a place where a rain endlessly pours,
with nothing ever to break its fall.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Impressions in a Rehearsal Room East Coburg c. 2014

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Carmine Frascarelli 
Each generation dreams the one to follow
	
with the swagger of a zoo fictions dead-end in a mottled transparency
            here, just outside of skin
the arm out
aliases & stage names
toy branches for aping manqués
& it’s a stilled ticking clock tossed
down a second-hand burrow that’s
enough to fugitive the intended scene’s
snipped ribbon

a public attraction of private anthropologies

PUSH BUTTON FOR EXPLANATION

self-displays of self-conservation
a three-bedroom dyad or arrangement of chromosomes: ✗ and/or ✔
when the males accounted for one more the Lost Boys junta-ed
fursuited in IKEA’s ark

BUTT SUM GRRLS R ALOUD

“peel me a mushroom
                                    tab”
went the owl onesie, shaking its tail like a prolapsed bowel.

“dooood you need to do more Hegel exercises!”
retorted Dr. Bear before he was a tiger with an undone fly

“remember when you both did youtube kung-fu and yer eyeball came out like a male nipple?”

“additionally, Ca…..Kar….KAh….Kuh….’s a bit of a cagey prick!”

…the wise one resumes, grabs hold of himself & takes the lictor
            through the Hula Girl bamboo beaded curtain
            disappears in an I goes ⅄ then I

            “it’s not the size of the glyph…”

                                                (“Like…

            zipped crypts same as Disney tall-ships
            a panda, wipes its mouth with giclée print princess
	
            “what’s yer angle?”
                                                “I lope tropes…or lop hopes…or…”

trams mowing outside, chins swiping inside
some go down swinging, holding bad breath
emitting excessive saintliness
each turning way	faces pale
listening for fractured feeling
“voice” gets wandering barefoot
in a bear suit
sleeve up: “aw guu need ib lobe”?

                        “it used to say, “all you need is love”

            “yeh, my hibiscus is sagging these days”

                        “oh that? that was Bambi”

            “why?”
		
                        “why not!”

evaluative catch-ups as consumption ‘ssumes
song of the Donkey that sat on the SINGER
plays on the depressed vinyl flooring

            “have you checked your feed?”

not a surface spare in
the superstructure of the fridge
first name: surname of a neo-liberal US President
one wonders…
that’s apocryphal torque!

            she’s two pairs of parallel lines
            no personal	not social
            a self-divorcee, refugee, from neglect
            a hand should arrive sometime soon…

            should never have married
            was thinking with her dick
            as it turns out
                        bits were incompatible
            for mental penetration

            “☹ u r!”

            ur-
                specular glint in the BIG CUMMER’S
                    optical organ

BUSES WILL BE REPLACING TRAINS

steps out the back, door at the front
she gets the news digitally these days
quick, with long matchstick finger
		
            “the right poem can only really happen when one attempts to strike a coarse portion of
ice”

she goes, she goes: “I wax an old woman/her epigrams/purge/what’s left/of those/sentiments”

                                                                                                            (“Like…

interlocutors up to here ← as a magpie in its bits of a bird book nest, croons 
atop a Devils Fig

in twinkle-twinkle terms,
a daddy-knows-best goo-goo ga-ga-ing
by ma ma’s hair loss gene coochie-coo-ing
cha-ching cha-ching-ing after every enactment
& letter etched in the putti-putti stack o’ futured
have-it-all from a car deaf to a home moan!

“chirp-chirp”      “chirp-chirp”    of such loci

(SEPTEMBER)

once upon a time there were five days sated, 
a disappearance of memory functions
again
what direction
acquisitive, bright
prods between previous places or
makes a new bed crowded more
with pilgrims
11/17 bulbs
left flashing in the arrow

Alice & Co., dissociates
an OM tattoo on oranged skin
someone objects, it is noted, it is removed
they all are.
pale rectangles of an off-white wall replete with mould brocade

            “why?”
                        “why not!”
                                                            (“Like…

“do you remember what aisle your shit is usually in?”

straw hut, lush palm: gone grey in the sun
glade, nymph an exotic other FOUND
in every second edifice in the North

            less “documentary”
            more “situated-ness”
does or doesn’t it stack-up?

Mee-ruh! Mee-ruh

the shape of the ‘jectification
the black glass that throws the light
that colours faces
            “why?”
                        “why not!”

            “it’s wot the ad say’d”

Look-it-up!             Notice. Black. Deep blue. Notice a speck. Then another. Then another.
                                 Another appears. All appear or were they always there? And soon, the
                                 entire plane is cliquant with a cacophony of me too me too me too me
                                 too me too me too me too…

other notifications tick: your white hairs” -sit down & eat- “everything tarnishes”
here, my grandmother’s recipe for an ampersand

“a thank you” built to scale, sympathies too schooled.

“fuck your ambulance-chaser-feminism & your recuperative hetero-hegemonic…who’s a fucken click-cunt!?”
chimed the bull in the END-TRANSMSSION tights.

“my motorbike can outrun the tectonic plates!”

“I’m on yer side grrls!”

“grrls?”

            …

            “why?”
                        “why not!”

            “you have a pregnant pause of a penis…”

mapped, the cuniculi smudge-scape table
market-me-in invisible targets of
a unitary code pouring veils over 
uncleaned mirrors
		
long used to ideologies, some look
to look away

“I bulge in my box!”, she odds.

“I shake my lobes”, she adds.

there’s literature on it, no
films or video art as yet
unfulfilled dreams of awakening
            & then the Wizard
before work puts powdered milk, 
boiling water, sugar & 
alphabet pasta in a bowl
for the accident child
eats

we are not how
we wish to be
but how we
look

				
	
                                                for



					




                                    it



					

                                                                                                            (“Like…
Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Cicada Song

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Sam Morley

the thin atrium of your body
dry as crepe paper

wings flat on your torso
a leadlight map of nations

eyes sequined solar panels
reflecting silence

husk of you in my palm
how the sea warns you

its long-rumpled muscle
pounding on full drums

as the sunspokes beat down
hard upon your piercing song

old shriek memory wailing
through your empty body

the relentless cicada wave
endlessly arriving

the one thing wild enough
to roll against the sea

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Eve Incurs God’s Displeasure

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Benjamin Dodds

after Marc Chagall

There she lies
red and engorged
taking up the scene’s bottom-third
like a throbbing tiger prawn.
God above is green and great and accusatory
stabbing a fat cartoon finger
at her shielded breast.
She’s taken the hue of overhanging fruit
as a rudimentary deer
or something equally innocent
looks on.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Sea Seek

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Sogol Sur

I have been to many a house
Alas, never a home.

But one silver day
my father phoned
from the North of Iran where
I could hear the sea in his voice and the sun
dangling from the ceiling of his worn villa;
my skin streaming to the source of his humid voice,
and I confessed I did not want to be in London in this golden city that
I used to exoticise
as a grateful immigrant girl
always on time for visa stamps, smiling in the police registration
to conceal the seemingly reasonless stress
sticking to deadlines like they were my guns
every application a war that
had to be won.
Thrilled just to be acknowledged by whiteness
and the sparkling promise of nothingness.
Speaking my second language like eating an ice cream:
cold but sweet
foreign words swimming in my foreign mouth
sometimes tricky, always surprising
like a secret that I shouted to betray a friend
except that I betrayed myself by confessing to my father
I want to be where you are
I want to be in Iran
melting in the Caspian under its ruthless sun
until my pale skin turns brown
and I become a real brown person who
can keep secrets and
admits she misses the sizzling streets
of her burning country.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

We Ask More

Posted on May 1, 2018 by John Kinsella

‘Give we the hills our equal prayer,
Earth’s breezy hills and heaven’s blue sea;
I ask for nothing further here
But my own heart and liberty.’

Emily Brontë


Ask everything more of layout under pressure.
Ask for depths outside and maybe beyond sacred texts.

Reconfigure ‘peace accords’ in glyph-take from deficits
filling out coupons and decorations of hope — elope

in weather maps and tracking, diagrams and divinations.
Ask jam sessions to reconstitute your faith, to make

the dried stalks — wicks — of long dead orchids
to act as spectrometers in the shade of eucalyptus.

Ask more in circulars, gravity-fix of personality,
all those making monsters in snippets of bushland —

such machinery sits in sheds, comes out, deletes
a stretch of flooded gums, returns, settled down.

Ask further of here, ask to shed skin in quietude.
Think of how friendships can kindle in old gaols —

exhibits: chain & ball, inducing of claustrophobia
when that’s a self-parody of the absurd: walls

already closed in, ticket of leave revoked in
striated light, and even back then gerygones,

pardelotes, prelates, roisterous mating song of rufous
whistler. Even then, as if, prayer for asking

to reset, play it differently, or fait accompli?
Never. Not in the hills of production, selfsufficiency.

Correlate a sea in the eye-drought!
What screech of epiphany dismissed for love?

We ask more under cloud where burn comes
fast and shockwave is no application — too

easy to see the disposition of incongruity
is setting up an image, phytochemical symbolism.

Why ask to ask more of core beliefs shed
when stress levels rise? To whom, and why?

Knowing more of lore than one should, it edges
under display, but can’t be plumbed, scrutineers.

A leisure of worship, a relief of granite and clay,
of laterites fines to spread out as tracks to London

or Rome or even an island like Singapore. Television
reception is poor, and that’s to be written as pyramid.

Here, further, out, nothing. Here asked of, a satellite
photographs as firebreaks glare, veins of geometry

leavened: heat signatures of all life, the beetle
we are surprised by (wherefore?), echidna gone

now from dead log ripped open, termite-less
city fallen out: after the event, the spiritual glossary?

Travel to define a feather’s curve, it’s readiness
or unwillingness to wet or dry, precise place

of arising. Could be said simple as flight,
with interference from all directions. So,

allot this fragment to that erosion,
this banging on about the same old thing

to that poisoning. Some of it, honestly — epigene
you can’t see grammatically, can’t add to programme.

And a loop in a signature doesn’t guarantee
cross reference, any more than echoing out

into marri flowerings makes ID — tinted snow
over hill bristles south of here, indeed indeed!, so

overwhelming that we’d believe the bunker-busting dozer
parked — snuggled — behind a few of them for over

a week now is contrite, pulling its head in,
lying low till (at least) the glorious palaver

of opening is over. Then down down down
into copyright and colonial overture of Underworld

idiom, a pew a cushion to kneel on, yank out weeds
in the old way (visions of ancient relatives?).

Ask more of a subject than an encyclopaedia
can offer you. Ask rubric and antiquity and transmutation,

ask gnosis and eitic/n-eitic/heitic/t-heitic & glory barbs
(a thumb is infecting from being scratched pulling caltrop).

Sore. Prayers lugged to carry you via — no way to obtain
lift when said and gone? Stirred in dust and residue

of manufacturing? Really, ask for more than shoot to kill
take aim at your denial of scorched earth? Your — us other:

‘You gotta ask yourself, do you feel lucky, greenie punks?’
says the funny fairground fella, all pukka on Twitter.

We mean — commonplace, common prayer in league.
Such power quickfix laugh model stand-up massacre mirror.

It’s all in the splurge, the burst of ‘information’. Lamentations
are lamington drives to collate a backlash — the seedbank

(genetically modified) of moralising calls out moralists.
Pitchfork realism in tractor loveland, we bow down

and take our rolling back of vegetation on the chinwag.
Wagtail does its watching, don’t you worry. No fear!

Ask everything more of layout under pressure.
Ask more, ask more of jam sessions ask more

of nature descriptions ask more of annunciations
of erasure, ask more of art therapy and sacred texts.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Third Nature.

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Drew Milne

Sonic boom just flew off the page, leaving a trail of swooning fragments, feather and spore, all sentenced to prosaic yarn. Amid other murmurs, skyglow and cracking statistics, consolations filled dead zones and paragraphs, visible paragraphs, great clouds falling from aircraft, tankers and lorries. Distress tones intimated the massacre of passenger pigeons. Waste was visible from space, not that any but prosthetic eyes and acronyms were there for the money shot. The stain of chemicals ran off into the water table or joined with fatbergs. Niche violence echoed trade winds, while traceries and microplastics drifted into the mouths of plankton. Avatars found signs, fossils even, of prehistoric struggles, and attempted to map the faultlines of coming climate wars. All hail the ancient struggles for oxygen. Depletion was mined for compost. Newly deciphered lichens sang of slow revolutions, of solidarity against humanist pathos and succulent doom. When passenger aircraft first broke the sound barrier, the prospects for bone shaking jeremiads of sheer noise still seemed endless. The sky was no longer the limit it once was. Some subtle diminution of lyric fire was registered by composite wing structures. At supersonic speeds the air was taken by surprise, caught off guard. Cones bled and nightingales ducked. Once bitten, twice shy, third time lucky there was no going back. Identity formation buffered into so many imposed binaries and intransitive verbs, but hurricanes were still given alternating genders. Contrails lingered, bearing witness to the inscription of noise as the presiding tone of human sky. Second nature’s chorus was resisted but also kettled and tortured. Herbaceous borders are an index of lyric charm. Gardeners led the push for human geometry. The formal garden framed labouring peasants and ruminants in the middle distance, which in turn gave ground to distant follies and sheer landskips on the horizon. Picturesque hierarchies announced the pomp and circumstance of private property. Bioproles were unimpressed by heritage signage, but gleaned what they could. Proponents of zero nature and deep ecology tried and then failed to animate the ideology of the concept. Songs of constructed otherness leapt over ancient biology, but the pulling power was with cellular repetitions dragged screaming and kicking into world prose. Trinitite, also known as atomsite, was devastatingly apt. Its scree of human handiwork was harvested for private collectors. Accumulation of mined but unmanageable waste became the default setting. Amid boom and bust, resistance movements gathered reluctant clumps and microbial cells. From each to each met with unacknowledged substrates. Senators of sentience proposed rewilding grammar, but nothing was free and the emergency brake seemed too hot to handle.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged