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

Apropos

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Jo Langdon

At the wedding he says
I took my wife off the pill, it wasn’t
easy. I say, Oh

that’s terrible. (Imagine being a wife,
being taken, taking
off somehow, what

kind of weight
I don’t know— The men at work
said: We’re talking

about you, not to you.
They were talking
of how best

to tame a reckless body
(their daughters’ irregular,
bloodied, not abiding—)

They spoke over my lunch.
I know swinging dicks—
I know to skip the sugar

pills, how to hoax myself.
The man at work said, Think
logically, like I’d lost

my head & not my books.
The skip bin opened
to the length

of half my living
room. It was oddly full
with warmth & admiration—

Sometimes it’s hard to break
habits of hoarding
& spite.

At the wedding
the music swings up
in angles, lit.

A tiny bride & groom
on the dancefloor, the cake;
a small song turning its way out.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Youth

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Cecily Niumeitolu

You’re walking Lovers Lane, paperbarks
warp and woof overhead. The poodle
is at your heal, a cloud of impossible white.
Seeding clouds in the outback,
gramps and gran were gluttons for punishment.
The poodle’s coat is dreadlocked with long-grass,
between her hind legs blood fresh and wielding.
The bush is in heat, the smell of broken leaves
burning your sneakers. You didn’t want to return a murderer.

She’ll need a mate, gran said. So she’d sit on a stool.
Sit there for hours, wait for a royal mounting.
And you remember you’ve seen the red
between your mother’s legs, dark rivulets
mapping her inner thighs, her blonde pudenda so unlike
your brown, hairless skin when you washed with her
in the shower. The same heat. The same red.
The white cloud would be for the silver cloud.
The white cloud would yowl, it made you curious, this pain.
Gran became goddess of conceptions,
patience and silence, orchestrating litters
from here to eternity. The border collie would lurk
on the sideline, waiting for gramps to call her up to the ute
so they could round up the sheep
he’d shave and take to Goulburn, ending in scarves
noosing necks from here to London.
He hollers at you, you and his dog to hop in the back of the ute.

Speeding past and ducking into the yaw of lightning rod
eucalypt down to Dead Sheep Gulley, the back-burned underbrush
bares skulls of sheep that lost their way,
the collie expectant, its face stretched
as far forward as the fast ute. You’re a flying banshee,
this is what it is to be a banshee —
Flying on the back of the red ute.
Gramps knocks on the rear window,
so you pretend to oblige momentarily
holding on, your hair tied back by the wind. Banshee.

The dam’s drying up, the yabbies are still biting,
breathing holes punctuate life’s insistence
at the cracked edge. This country is carved by hoof
and bone, cliffs of dust… The whole erosion.
You got drunk at the wake, crawled
into the scrub beside the pub where you slept
most soundly. You disappeared on Hal’s Hill,
sitting there wet-faced searching the cold light
that disturbed you with its infinite.
This is where the demented flock roam,
this desert country in your deserted head.
This parched youth. This outgrown youth
that tracts then inside now, there inside here.
You burn in a plot of glowing silence,
your mother calls for you, you cannot tell her
when she embraces you she is embracing a stranger.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Backscatter

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Andrew Zawacki

The day brings minor violences
made in the image
of money : dirty martini sunlight,
sluggish, airplanes
taking off and touching down
inside my ears, a collapse
of reflective weather

on radar, its red blotches
moving out, a panic
amassing in paranormal fog.
Sheathed in UV
duratrans with an earthquake
under the skin, I skew
in relation to market

flux, a Doliprane – ibuprofen
regimen. At night
it’s a samurai war
in the air, a burning
behind the film.
By six in the morning the
mortar shelling is real.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Everybody thinks this place will be gone in ten years

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Holly Friedlander Liddicoat

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Inclined

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Felicity Plunkett

The word love is merely a sign that means something like the way to the mountain.
Mark Doty, Dog Years

What the mountain thinks, you can’t
know. When it leans the weight of its shadow
on you, tall, how much might it say in fall
or thrall, like a lover, telling all? You don’t
know, but something’s in step, like (black and blue)
and (avenue), and you, all backpack and crampon, ice-
axe your way through, poster girl for grit: you can’t
wait, think of love as losing wait, court
waitlessness, ascend, impatient as snow, don’t know
how, don’t know where melt becomes avalanche, figure
stunts, jut and chutzpah are the go, don’t
know what you can’t know, find yourself
lost, but (stars appear), so step by step, go
up, (dry your tears), keep in mind the rhyme

(rain on face) (warm embrace) the rhyme
of it, the pulse, climbing in iambics, and you can
know, you stumble, skirt the glacier, syncopate, or trip
and have to use your little kit, your grit, you do
know, though it’s nothing you’ve known, find
you’ve left behind flat foothills, the boot in the ice-
face, powder and slide. And you climb, patient: find you can
wait, watch the mountain waking to remember (rolling sea)
speechful, whistling lovewhispers (wild and free)
and the summit isn’t some mystery since you do
know its song, its height and gaze, its quietude
and seep of calm, how much this climb takes heart
and breath from you, and gives them back, lighter,
might never be known, but walking here, you do know.


(after Bob Dylan’s ‘Make You Feel My Love’)

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

The House, Cracking

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Tracy Ryan

Enough to wake
the deepest sleeper
though still out there

by day I’m more
attentive lying down
by dark the strain

of stillness in
between each strike
a load to bear

as if some bone inside
were close to fracture
could snap in kinship

hearing that slap
in the face for a house
made of give and take

trying to settle but
it’s always been there
in every place whether

brick or timber
fibre cement
with feet of clay

heave or subsidence
thermal movement
each master stroke

a shock irregular
as clockwork
sound of one hand

it’s going nowhere
this cosmic joker
child with cap-gun

clueless what for
vast Christmas cracker
that lacks a token

somebody’s pulling apart

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

After Chopin

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Claire Potter
Out from elms, floating and rising, shrouds of dust play across the sand. There’s something alarming in how quickly the shapes move against my will as if they might carry you away with them. Celestial. Pious. Cowled like monks. They almost turn to laugh at me

It is true that I fell in love with you once and by fall in love I mean succumbed to your music. It was in Italy when the summer grass was cold and the jasmine fused a nimbus bluer than the moon. How it was that I saw you then, your candlestick eyes turned towards the night like a wolf’s scanning for movement in the snow

Let me tell you that I am made of neither the material of a wife nor the livery of a mother. In truth, I move invisibly across the snow. It strikes me very well that the circumference of your hunt is so narrow and the margin of your appetite falls so steep that the only way to find you is to step out of hiding

Step within a nocturne of piano where a hammer lengthens out my name

There I shall move not unlike a braid of waterfall. Let you step through me into a chthonic light where the sleep of stones and the fugues of totems have been boiled, gathered, enchanted away.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Tact

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Judith Bishop

Last night, after we saw you both,
a thrush came to our sill.

Wild for light – her eye
striking at the glass –

for a sea was at her side.
She crouched as if to rest –

then dived. And I

may never rest again
in what is real to me, the known,

having touched small distances
impassable as worlds’.

Brick by brick, I have stroked
the rough wall

of your mind at its remove –
warm, unthinkable

and near.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Re-visiting Chernobyl

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Maria Takolander

1. Liquidation1

The earth has always been so accommodating,
enfolding all kinds of calamities: the meteoric end
of dinosaurs, the Neanderthals and other botched experiments,
the debris of bronze and iron ages, modern battlegrounds . . .

And there is still so much space! For us to tuck away
these bull-dozed villages, lorries loaded with fallout,
electrically-charged farm animals (appropriately neutralised),
even a pine forest (gamma-rayed). Pat it all down.

Permit yourself to rest without a bothersome pop or tick.
(We have reinforced concrete for those more insistent sounds—
the kind that leach the pigment from eyes,
blister hearts as they are beating … )


2. Bio-Robots

What a piece of work is Man! A wise industrial sentiment—
and too often overlooked in newfangled forecasts of automation.
Lest we forget: that remote-controlled backhoe committed harakiri
from the clifftop of reactor 3, after reaching its emissions capacity …
and look who saved the day! Triumphant as a plague,
crawling out the rabbit hole of history
in wave after wave, armoured in medieval scraps of lead
and muzzled for respiration. (Pig-faced, as the jesters said!)
They had 40 seconds to shovel contaminants (flung from reactor 4)
off the tower’s precipice. (We had plans for mass burial down below … )
Have faith, we said, there is nothing terrifying up there—2
but best to run like the dog, flee like the hare.
Scoop a spadeful or two of that hot stuff away and scram!
Before your bones and teeth are meaningless …
How they moved: like roof cats! It was only afterwards they stopped,
slumping together in the sheltered halls like litters of stillborn …
Mind you: some of them are still ticking!
(We had to ban embalming and open caskets … )
100 roubles is all it took—so many bought it.
Of course, we honoured their corps in cement, right at ground zero,
where the birds have returned, against all those glum forecasts.
Listen to them: chirruping away with the Geiger counters.


3. Dark Tourism3

Today we celebrate the half-life of caesium 137
with this sceptical offer: one-day tours only for US$!
Exchange phones for dosimeters and be mesmerised
as battery-powered crickets stridulate in a peace that is
truly ionising. Visitors are most welcome to observe
swans silvering in the cooling pond of radionuclides.
Drip-feed the gargantuan catfish (not recommend for eating.)
The retro excavator parked outside the sarcophagus
is a favourite haunt of the barn swallow, its pale throat
a world-first in partial albinism! Marvel at our mushrooms,
21.88 micro Sieverts’ worth and prized by bank voles
with cataracts—so rare! No need to fear our wolves;
they thrive on dogs left over from the original liquidators.
But best to update your shots: even rabies blossoms here!
How fortunate to have liberated the Earth of some people.
And thanks to the rich and varied lives of plutonium,
we are guaranteed to be more-or-less free of human habitation—
and open for business—for another 24,000 years.


4. The Red Forest4

Dress the wicker basket with cloth and sash.

Set it on the path still running through the woods.

Perhaps a bear, a boar, a raven, a bee . . .

The children have been sent from the village.

All the horses have been shot.

Wind fills the grass with its emptiness.

Once there was a hunter, a dwarf, a witch, a seamstress . . .

Who will sew up the tear in the fabric of our world?


5. What Was Invisible Now Becomes Visible5

Dew reconstructs
the spider’s pure and abstract
longing for itself.

The jaw of a waking fox
unlocks the silence
of teeth.

Lichen brushes the lips
of the stag burdened
by dreams of lightning.

Potatoes push up from
the earth like nubs
of bones.

The moon is the ghost
of a rock in
the broken sky of dawn.

The sun has
already discovered everything
including what we have done.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Insects

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Alison Flett

The diagnosis is hard to hear. Dark
flames lap the future’s pretty
cottage. Knees and elbows
smoulder anger. Three streets
away a fire engine’s
high-pitched gape
sounds amongst the traffic.

The grasshopper in the bathroom that I trod on in socks, not squashing it
but breaking off a leg and not even noticing till I sat on the milky bath edge
in the half-light and a small movement came to me. I peered closer—
what is that?—and saw the little thing crawling round its broken leg
nudging it with its head as if trying to coax it into life, circling and circling touching it. I felt what I thought must be its confusion, its grief
and my throat was thick with what I had done. Its poor big eyes.
I didn’t know how to make amends.

On the other side of the apartment
wall our neighbour is
crying. No-one can hear her. This is
not true; we can hear her
but we don’t know her so we don’t
know how to go to her. We wonder why
no-one goes to her.

My boy when he was little, some days after I’d told him that wild things
prefer to stay in the wild. He came running in from the garden, his breath crosshatched with sobs and threw his arms around me
pressing his head into my belly. Whatever is it? I asked
my fingers stroking the small bones of his back.
I let all my caterpillars go, he said. I put them back in the wild.

Even the birds have their emergencies.
Their loud alarms in backyards and bushland.
And that half-dead galah, flattened on tarmac
attended by ten or so others, who rushed
out from the pavement to flutter and squawk
around it whenever there was a
break in the traffic.

The story my parents often told about a time when I was a child
still young enough to run to their Sunday morning bedroom and crawl into
the soft place where their warmth pooled. On one such occasion a butterfly
had flown in through the open window and I leapt up laughing, grabbing
at the colours until my fingers closed around it and it fell on their covers.
I picked up the broken thing and crawled, sobbing, into the bed, smoothing
the crumpled wings, hoping they might mend. I can still hear the low murmur
of my parents’ comfort, feel their hands on my shaking back, a memory
that may have come from the actual event or the way I pictured the event whenever the story was told, or is maybe just the way I’m picturing it now
as I write this, stopping sometimes to rub at my burning joints while my parents
lie asleep in a bed so far away I can no longer run to it, can no longer find
its soft place.

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