Landscaping

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Omar Sakr

The grass loops long outside my window. Sags into itself. A thousand lithe men bowing
in one direction, a lone sunflower here & there draped over their knees. Little slut.
I forget to cut them down. It is winter now and the sea of green is bright with death
as if begging for the attention of the blade. I can’t afford a lawnmower. Still, I picture
myself pushing a fat hungry thing on the yard, shirtless, a thick beast among snaking
weeds. I’m unsure what to kill out here. What qualifies as weed: nasty useless unflower,
purposeless growth—and anything that isn’t beautiful has no purpose, I’ve heard.
The grass though, if grass it is, has such luscious curls. It tells there is beauty in neglect.
My baby cousins have curly hair, all little Lebs. Some grow out of it. Some are cut down
before they can. The air mows the earth. Sky rake. Cloud gardener. The land lord
is unhappy. This is not Greece, he said. What a shit sea. There is no one here to save
from it. I want the waters to rise higher still, submerge my body. I want to stalk naked
through its soft hands, lone sunflower looking to spread against lengths. To queer this
domestic Eden. A fantasy. There are no persuasive snakes in my yard, just one crabapple
tree bristling with overripe cheeks splotched red, rotten cores. They bob on the sea,
fallen fruit, baby heads. The cold is creeping in. There is no one to save here I whisper
as I go over every inch with my mouth and lovingly tender the green.

Posted in 82: LAND | Tagged

Beneath an Ibis

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Gabrielle Rowe

Stripped back to primal desecration, our hearts still yearn for unicorns.
– Peter Boyle, Apologising to Unicorns

In my dreamscape a flip-flapping strip of orange strikes the sky over Kunduz
as the kite trails a boy, before the hospital is hit from the air. I wander into a
museum without walls, rolling across Sydney’s foreshore. A vein of orpiment
runs through history’s sandstone, splitting the rock’s seam. During an interval
between blasts when I tune out from the news, I peruse the poet’s art, secret
sibling to music.

An ibis is searching with its ink-dipped beak for the natural environment
eclipsed by an esplanade. Oblivious, it picks at the word-swept earth.
What does it know of the day’s soundbite or a boy’s withered innocence,
fissures concealed in a landscape, as the world bends beneath? A bird’s
song listens to the whisper of its origins, an utterance under the fig tree
where I sit. The sun tips into late afternoon at the beginning of the solar
slip, and drops on a note.

The dream was a setting for a fable in a future time, a blue cloud weeping
its word-memories. Now it drifts, noctilucent, above a cottonwool world
impervious to the perils of a deleting image… An absence of unicorns.

The phrase ‘secret sibling to music’ was adapted from André Malraux’s Museum Without Walls: ‘the languages of art’ are ‘secret brothers to music’.

‘a blue cloud weeping’ was inspired by the title of Peter Boyle’s book The Blue Cloud of Crying.

Posted in 82: LAND | Tagged

The Fall

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Michelle Cahill

for my father

Tibouchina, warm maple-leaf, elsewhere it is winter.
My father standing at the doorway with a phlegmy cough
in the damp basement flat, his gaze a despair,
resignation, I fear before the rite of knowing.
I take the Piccadilly line after
Singapore transit, change at Leicester Square
to come back to this room,
outside time.
Some days, for no reason, I shed tears.
Some things cannot be reconciled, how do we heal them?
Already in his prime, my father is falling,
And I fall with him
(the kind of man who does not dwell in detail— surely that is greatness
to know when the end has come.)
Forget the taunts, the colour of your skin, the sticks and stones. (He laughs.)
I have spent my entire life catching up to history,
it was never my favourite subject.
We are falling out of the centre of the world into oblivion,
my mother by the maisonette window, distracted.
Clouds are skimming; leaves are spiralling down from the plane trees.
She does not notice beauty, though it notices her.
And I am the dreamer. I cannot bear her pain, or his,
conceding rather, the price paid for dreams.
Now I wake to blackness, that punched-out hole in the ground,
rehearse the law of physics
I’ll answer when gravity calls.

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Apparently Soccer

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Magdalena Ball

She woke flying, her cheeks burnt to a flush, the world an illusion in lipstick tones of green, a loudspeaker advertising local services-if you need a new car speak to the guys at green Toyota. Everything green washed. The grass striped, eucalyptus-swayed leaves, olive bark. The land was not hers. Interloper. Dressed in local clothes but speaking in tongues.

A pop song everyone knew played in the background. It was by all accounts a beautiful day. People said it again and again. She was a migrant to the space, caught between worlds, at the intersection of now and then. Like a level crossing. A train zoomed by. She saw both spaces simultaneously, she knew and everyone knew from her accent, the tilt of her head, that she was different.

A game was being played. Every now and again a whistle blew. When that happened the ground shifted. People shook their heads. She absorbed it, wrote it, syncopated the sounds, the dream she was finally able to shake into a warm wind against her cheek, the buzz of gnats above the bleachers, and thump of ball on boot in the strange familiar unfamiliar present that never happened.

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Speed Date, The Next Morning

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Scot Siegel

Should I stay or should I go now? – The Clash

I saw a jackrabbit on that ranch
where you went for a run
and I walked the gravel road
with the coyote skull and deer bones.
You and the rabbit ran,
second hands on a clock diverging.
All I could do was stop and stare
at the rabbit, ears like bookmarks,
bony nose speed-reading the sage,
blazing across the high desert
like that hare at the dog track.
I am still frozen in that moment,
anchored like a rock jack,
one foot planted, the other scratching
an arc in the sand, head swiveling
like a weathervane.

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Not even landscape with its cordial trees…

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Jenny Pollak

How many times, looking towards
whichever bay it is
I’ve been drawn to, casting myself out
across the horizon,

held aloft by this or that
particular bird (today a flycatcher
suspended above the River Derwent
singing out its heart
on a wire);

watching a tree teased out of its trunk
by the acute sun, its shadow
like spun wool
drawn off a spindle that won’t stop
being pulled,
thinking I can stop the inevitable fall
back in my bone.

And falling, of course, the bird
long since
gone

(and all the feathered lengths my head
went to
shot down
at dusk).

Posted in 82: LAND | Tagged

ngā tuna o opoutukeha

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Carin Smeaton

like egypt opoutukeha’s fate
was never written in the stars
it was writ on a piece o park
in grey lynn by a kahawai
the gardener dug up in the dirt
a goddam miracle memory
in soil unstoppable steak
silver-wet & whatta girl
her flip-flapping tail all
tenacious in the earth
this kahawai tried to turn
the light back on she did
gleaming the gardener said
she went like wwow! wit her
fireworks while the dusk was
failing showt the gardner the
everythink even da shadows n
his shed where he’d hung her
high (his trophy fish) on the
wall so he cd hear her sing
(and she sang sweet):
remember how i bathed
youse nourisht youse
fed youse all till you fartd
and now all i smell is
yr piss running warm
over my hauraki eels
fossilized stiff on the path
off williamson’s still
pointing the way bk 2 okā pā
quarried way off the radar

they were my friends

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Some Portraits of Country

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Michael Giacometti

1.
The distant mountain
— inverted —
levitates above the horizon

2.
Overnight
boulders are raised on pillars
of ice

3.
Cumulus clouds bloom
out of a cobalt sky
plump as mould

4.
Cicadas emerge
from death masks
gleaming

5.
Bayonets of light
eviscerate the canopy of cumulus
A crow carks and departs

6.
Praying for rain
the shrubs offer
flowers

7.
A semi-circle of standing stones
hides in the shadow of song
and silence

8.
A murder
or an unkindness interrupted
rise over roadkill

9.
A shower of
fluttering wings startle
rippled rockhole reflections

10.
The watermark of a ghost
gum hangs in the mist
where a hill might grow

11.
The weight of cement
silences country — and yet
the leaves rustle

12.
A crow alights on an upper
branch — holds the tree upright
without effort

13.
The gloaming dusk creeps
up the glowing-orange cliffs
like gangrene

14.
Mountains meditate
in silence — their shadows
prostrate before them

15.
In the west
fragments of cloud dissolve —
All the rest is sky

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Edible design

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Anna Ryan-Punch

Chin lowered, I moulded into
the scene behind your shoulders,
pressed our embrace into the ley lines
like we were some novelty shaped
biscuit cutter sunk sharp into dough.
Flung back in a waterless mirror of
From Here to Eternity, we rushed against
the dirt and plastic shine of new grass.
I kneaded your arms, scored you
with fingernail half-moons and
brushed my mouth – your neck –
egg white wash and pastry shine.
Sun-baked against the landscape,
our edible design soon cooled into
a memory of Combray madeleines.
With the taste of tea I recall
your fingers; curved shells,
and your eyes; hidden almonds.

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Holding the Mountain Together/Before you Climb

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Megan Merchant

I will glue the mountain cracks
with wildflowers and flayed feathers,

place my palm on the sun-stroked face
to affirm the ridge’s jaw hasn’t slackened.

I will learn to mimic the raven’s kraa,
to retreat snakes back into their skins,

cake mud to seal them for another winter.
I will re-chant my grandfather’s warning—

that even the most stoic crumble under enough
weight— (his lips in front of his father’s gin-fist)

–this wall of petroglyphs after rain
that hammered for days, keys to its decrescendo.

But you are still tucked
under a sheet of rocks, despite.


Driving to the hospital, I see a woman in her bathrobe
picking goat head blooms into a box of tissues,

wondering what kind of breaks their lemon color
might be holding together.

Posted in 82: LAND | Tagged

untitled

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Adam Aitken

After harvest there were autumn days
of airy nothings. Plein-air.
I hoped that one day, like this
we could build ourselves
a new estate to take the place
of the old one
indexed to its horizon
of dismantled chateaux.

We would grow our own ancient wheat
in a field dotted with subsidised tractors.

Storms rolled in and other weather effects
we could filter out, at least the worst of them.
We compared British clouds to sheep
in dozy evidence of picnics.

I could dream of my younger self
in a cloak of oaks and green leaf-light, the light
unseen in England or Australia,
the light the painters saw
when we dreamed, the golden glow
rolling in
over a desert inland sea.

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CIRCLES (A Parable)

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Bella Li

Let us descend into the blind world now






Prologue

In my thirty-third year, midway upon the course, I found, I began I entered like a curse. Through stones through rocky stars, and the pinions descending. Furiously I awoke. Sad, miserly, my foot on the slope and around me. Ruthless as the sea. Back to where the sun. When I saw him in that vast wilderness, when he advanced, the way into the suffering city—‘You are my master and my author, you—’ When speechless I. And he will hunt that beast through every city. And in the season of the false and lying gods. And the ground, when he advanced, were my words to him: SO DID MY SPIRIT, A FUGITIVE (and I entered) STILL (I moved on behind him), TURN BACK TO LOOK.






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Ravelyre

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Gavin Yates

A table drops from the fog:
you pick something autumnal.
They’re swimming the tiergarten,
they lean forward pouring accordions.
A rasp. Island heels. The money you waste
was always going to be. Sunny evenings:
an ink smudge. You ask for a bramble
on a round table and everybody’s picturesque,
merely spelling.

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Symbiosis

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Sophie Finlay

water knocks
in waving columns
and capillaries constrict

bark cloven
and I trace
pain with my fingers

sugar feeds roots
and the fungal network

they vowel
in a language I’ll never access

this cloudy web – the mycelium
bark and soft hair
crackle of blooms

they decide…together
with their whispers and codes

transpiration clouds and slides
over the earth
and I touch the filigrees
the white threaded soil
where glaciers once trawled

I touch ice and wood and nutrients

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On All Souls’ Eve

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Anne Elvey 
The map sketched 
on the oval
of the Sir Douglas Nicholls Reserve
had borders 

formed by the meander of Murray 
and Bay, Pacific and 
Bight, the straight 
lines of neighbour states and the name
of a nineteenth-century queen. Stones 

marked each massacre site          ^    ^   ^     ^    ^ ^   ^        ^   ^    ^ ^          ^ ^         ^
                                                               ^         ^ ^       ^    ^    ^     ^       ^ ^    ^      ^    ^
                                                       ^   ^ ^           ^     ^    ^  ^   ^     ^     ^    ^ ^         ^ ^ ^
                                                        ^     ^ ^     ^    ^     ^     ^  ^    ^ ^     ^   ^  ^     ^ ^    ^
                                                                     ^           ^ ^        ^ ^    ^   ^   ^           ^   ^    ^
Late evening, we came,     stood 
                                                in turn 
                                                each hour
                                                placed candles in clay pots 
                                                while the stories were told until day.

Is it cliché to say what is true
that the rain that night came soft and silent?







The rain came soft and 
                                          ||||
                                          ||||
                                          ||||
                                          ||||
                                          ||||
                                          ||||

                                             ... . .. . . . .. . . ... . . ..... ...  . . . . . .. .  .. .  . . . ...... . . . .. . .... . . . ..... ... .
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Ovibos Moschatus

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese
In connection with the ongoing negotiations among governments concerning the laying down of international provisions for the preservation of musk oxen, the Manager is requested to forbid the killing of these animals by the native population except in such emergency situations where the life of the person involved is at stake … The Greenland Agency, 31 July 1925
muskoxen
                        butt the sparkling crust
                                                                  furrowed to sastrugi : sharp crescents of cold
                                                                                                                       ingrained in snow crystals
                                                that melted, froze, remelted and refroze
                                                on windward slopes of snow dunes heaped here by the blizzards
                                                                          then eroded to anvils pointing upwind

                                                                                         to meet more wind – gravity winds –

by late March geometries and hunger become more abrupt

                          recrystallized grain clusters swallow sunrays
                                               squat muskoxen swallow saliva
                                   hunters and their dogs swallow shame

muskoxen push their horned heads
                                                     towards the air pooled under the slab snow
                                                                                  propped by bent-over spikelets of Arctic
                                                     wheatgrass promising other ground-hugging plants :
                                                                                  crowberry dwarf birch beach rye grass
                                                     soft to the squared-off warty laminae of their lips

they inspect their daily portion of two kilometres
they amble between feeding grounds where frozen shallow water doesn’t allow a whirl yet
they cross the polar desert towards the barren plateaus frequented by high winds
                                                                                             which sweep the snow off the edges of cliffs

                            muskoxen remember last spring
                                                                                     the cliffs welcomed – briefly – nesting birds
                                  the guano fertilized succulent green
                                                                         now swallowed by the starving white
the hungry polar cattle
                                whose long brown shaggy coats
                                                                               repel the wind and rain and snow
                                                 and keep the warm winter secret of every long-bearded one
                                                                  (here hunters call a muskox umimmaat)
                        : qiviut
                                       cashmerelike underwool
                                                     fine down feathers of little auks
                                                                                            calling alle alle under the coarse guard hairs
while on slippery slopes muskoxen splay their two-toed hooves
                                                                                      dead keratin in the dead of winter
                            – where no warm blood runs
                                   no heat is lost –
                                                                    in their firm contact with the firn

                                                        if this densified snow has survived one melt season
                                                               they too can survive : they will paw their small eating craters
to reach the matted roots
                                                   of the only woody plant that can grow beyond
                                                                        the treeline on this dry dwarf shrub heath
Salix arctica
                         in the short spring its oval leaves will offer more vitamin C than oranges
                         the violet of its catkins will carry more warmth than the surrounding plateaus
                                            so its seeds and pollen may quicken and attract insects

                                                                    just as the Arctic willow attracts muskoxen
like muskoxen it grows
                                  long fluffy hair
                                                        on its silvery leaves to protect
                                                                   the warmth
                                                                                                so precious in this land
                                                                                                                  Greenland
     where refugia mean survival for this species
                                                                                   of sheep oxen
                                                                                                  counted in late winter while their dark
                                                                                        coats are still
                                           spotted against the white

                                           when the fixed-wing aircraft overhead
                                                                                          makes them clump:
                                                                                                                                 rumps together
                                                                                                                                 horns outwards
                                                                                                    in a tight circle
                                                                                                    or a crescent of defence
                                that withstands Arctic wolves
                                                              but invites firearms
when the quota
                               – and the hunger –
                                                                       cannot be negotiated

the colony’s Manager writes in Muskox Daybook (entry 3, 1932):

Hunter Niels Arke, Kap Hope, reported taking a musk ox. I killed an animal because we had nothing to eat, and because
my dogs were very exhausted by too little food. I had passed the animal, but turned back as I found it necessary to kill
it. Hunter Niels, who has ten children, could not pay immediately, but was fined 10 kroner, which he was to pay when
he was able to.


Notes:

*The italicised quotations come from Stories from Scoresbysund: Photographs, Colonization and Mapping by the Greenlandic-Danish visual artist Pia Arke (Pia Arke Selskabet & Kuratorisk Aktion, 2010) 65-66.

** Umimmaat (‘long-bearded one’) – the Greenlandic name for muskox used in Arke’s book; dialectal variants include: Umimmak, Umingmak, Omingmak, Oomingmak. In 1816, Blainville coined ‘Ovibos Moschatus’ (also a chapter title in Stories from Scoresbysund), combining ‘sheep’ and ‘ox’ in a mistaken belief that muskox had only two teats. In the 1920’s Arctic explorer Stefansson objected to ‘muskox’, since the animal has no musk glands; Stefansson preferred ‘polar cattle’ to promote the domestication of muskoxen.

*** Little Auk, a bird species otherwise known as Dovekie (Alle alle), arrives at its Greenland breeding colonies in early May and abandons them in August.

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untitled

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Janet Jiahui Wu

Wind on your path
whips you clean; on your brow
a row of sweat – though these were dear,
now I name God my first, and jewels and deeds from
where I cannot see, bind me to the tree of death – tint of mead
and straw; at the quay, we wait for fish; on the rocks, we seek dark; few
could view such a flat scene: not a live thing at all, but skinks;
hard though we tried, still slipped, a word here, a word there;
then the fall, the bleat, the fog and hill and dam and sloth –
whip us to a halt; to go far and far is mad; to go back is mad;
to tilt is to take a dive to the depths; come and see –
what you can not see – the nude,
hushed wind.

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Swan Song

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Mitch Cave

i have spent these small infinities
calculating whether or not
God is made of paper
*
i omit breath with an ocean in my veins
drowning beneath the plunge
of your golden resurrection
*
there are swans
monitoring the swamp of moss bourbon
silent as they awaken a warning
complimented by sky birds
we must abandon these bodies at dawn
*
on the carpet of no one’s grass
my body is folded
as i drink the colour
of his moon fingers
i am reminded that
if we become inaudible
soft trees will break the fall
*
if this is all that is left
of our apocalypse then
why am i still here?
*
that fragile cathedral
you lay your bones inside at night
bathes her floor
with the salt of bleach
*
patience removes the rings
from my boned fingers
as i prepare to throw my body
beneath the tears of waves
*
carrying nightfall in my palms
i begin to remind myself
of your skull’s absence
i look on as a lighthouse
begins to burn

Posted in 82: LAND | Tagged

genius loci

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Ella Jeffery

god of wrong-coloured curtains we kept anyway
god of the chlorine-poisoned geckoes and treefrogs
in the filter box god of pale brown spiders that cruise
humid cupboards empty shoes a sleep-warm bed
god of cups exiled to drink up dust
pens that should be thrown out
laundry baskets losing their handles
god of half-closed eyes in photographs
god of the oilslick chests of male wrens
and the jenny wren cowled in brown
god of foxes and feral cats thumbing through scrub
god with the patience of a skink growing back its tail
god of lights left on all night
god of wind that carries off plastic chairs
and elbows through thatches of trees
god that stands behind the locked door and looks out

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Borders

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Audrey Molloy

We were tossed
coracle to sand
each side of a line
that once ran
like a guy-rope
between us
but now divided
yours from mine,
nothing ours
but our border.
I waited some time
at the edge
looking for you.
When you returned
I was older
but you were not.
I probed my land
learning its secrets
and now
when we love
it is here
on the edges of us
along every twist and
undulation—
a line many
times longer
than our mooring.

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not one silent lamb

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Alison Whittaker

1.

a tuft of sustenance, adrip with meat
and wool, pads the clay

2.

a hungry metaphor born, it breaches
somewhere out from Botany Bay

3.

smeared on a frontier ill-defined
beneath it bleats its grass-fed mine

4.

there is nothing less ill-
defined here. still them nullius men
carry that hard frontier, guard

these rhythmless feet

5.
a trespassing sheep.

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It was an early April evening in the year of etcetera.

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle

It was an early April evening in the year of etcetera. A vertex without children is a leaf. But I receive something I said I wanted, because I had to say I wanted something. The function doesn’t explain it. Sometimes the dust that surrounds it slips over and covers it completely. Or leaves fall off to create drama. There’s no meanwhile left. I’m afraid is equal to I can’t handle this. Directed to graphs, parent and child may be replaced with source and target. Edges were still abstract. I was out walking, I had left the village without noticing. At each node, an operation is performed. Because I didn’t know, and I didn’t say no. What sort of an answer is that. A circle formed by the narrator, a mask in which it is night. I had the impression that she knew where she was going, but I was probably wrong.

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Learning to Read Wang Fuzhi, with Difficulty

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Hugo Branley
Qing (情) is hard
to translate; I am not
sure I know what it means

an old man strutting
a fat man strutting, his gut
projecting, not rolling
but trembling, shaking
like leaves
in the breeze older
than me at least.

the tree trembles; joy
because well-rooted.
This man is happy.
Qing is subjective

experience-in-the-visual
or so
the pocket dictionary

This
a man of substance; his belly
a polka, waltz dancing
like bean geese in winter
bobbing:
flutter, tremble, shake.
[means?]

Jing (景) is easier
to live with:
the visual-in-words

a phraseology lexicon
of

reeds bristling in water
like glass, fogged with
pollen, like shaving
cream, shorn stubble, mirror;
like the dove trees,
libations of weary leaves
poured out into the Yangtze
brushed down, off
painted words on a
cream, receptive screen

moths
at the movies flirting with
light, jet-
traced tangent to the
sky,
ghost of a screen
in the dark.

Gratuitous.

Posted in 82: LAND | Tagged

lost

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Shona Hawkes

as kids we danced in circles,
holding hands the gentle tug of arms would ripple
so we fell inwards
and outwards,
groggy with the game of gravity,
inwards and outwards,
and if we fell the circle would catch us

you whisper: “there are stories in the stars”
and trace the belly of the Big Emu

your father taught you the arcs and names of the planets
and long after their empire has fallen
the Romans still conquer the night,
every night

my stars are nameless,
the Milky Way a path for no-one, leading no-where,
a highway in the desert of the sky

it is the sum
of 1 and 1 and 1

we now dance alone,
imagine we live outside time,
on the tip of a line,
at the precipice of a new frontier

we walk in circles,
annotated in straight lines:
all crucifixes and fences

you read in a book
that everything has a story —
a rock, and a road, and a river

that nothing is orphaned from time

you walk by the stadium built on a marngrook ground
and the freeway that follows the songlines.

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