The Possible Dream (Buying Jeans Online)

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Melinda Bufton

I don’t know. Does Eileen Myles think this much
about her jeans?
Probably not.
Creating the perfect poetry jeans is not as hard
as you think.
It requires patience, skill,
habitat and armoury.
How to be Parisian seems to be really
How to be Patti Smith, with hair serum.
Step 1: have small breasts.
But collarbones
Step 2 take a tonic out of your bar fridge
and replace all the Evian with spite. It’s chilled, therefore.
Not bitter.
‘She buys very expensive shoes but never polishes them.’
Cool. I’m in.

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

Confessional

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Anthony Lawrence

In a country town, the doors and poor boxes
of churches left unlocked, I would steal away
in cricketing heat. The Baker sisters –
veiled spinsters in black, were gardening
like keepers of bees and secrets.
Inside the church the sun was a stain of light.
In the sacristy, pewter cups, unwashed linen
and caged ash in thuribles were enough
to make you believe that spiritus mundi
was under house arrest. In the nave
I’d experiment with kneeling. In the chancel
I’d invent biblical names and watch
over proceedings, my tongue an organ stop
my hands casting wide nets of prayer.
Sometimes a door would open and I’d see
a long shadow hesitate before
heavy timber closed like the audible
stages of relief. I’d keep the confessional
for last, as trespass has a ranking scale.
I confessed to crimes imagined and real.
It did me no good, but I loved the vision
I had conjured on the other side –
a priest in cowl and scapular, leaning in
to say Tell me, and tell me straight, have you
and will you again? his mouth betrayed
by a quiver.

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

Recovery Ode

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Christopher Brown

Talk of the night before –
the moment of mirroring
impasse in the corridor
then abandonment the

Broken thread and wait
It’s news of a two-day
technical misadventure
lifts the spirits
then you ringing me
could I think outside

Months
you place me on a
liquid diet light duties
increment permitting
an official “Visitor”
perhaps a friend

It isn’t mandatory
but in the sequel
I wait and watch
while you

(Common droid your
pretense to humanity
like fame stardom means
only to assimilate)

scatter back to earth
and where’s desire”
what of strategy
a t-shirted subterfuge
inviting revealing
just the letters “…AMO…”

where i wonder what you
mean but can no longer
read and we’re leaving

Now my minders say
(though I’d stay)
and we should do
this more often.

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

homologeo

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Marty Hiatt

otherwise we degenerates just bumble about.

big holes still in my mouth.

i also felt like there were just more weirdos getting around

i cried multiple times

i was so nervous i was almost falling over and could feel my voice shaking and also sort of jagging abruptly

it was exhausting and exhilarating and emotionally extremely overwhelming

we were jetlagged or drunk or extremely tired or extremely nervous the entire time

, saying daft things…

it was exciting to smell them

, even tho i remember i was pretty miserable at the time.

, during which time everythings changed.

i was still woozy and we all drank quite a bit.

im interested in everything

, so its going to be a bit of a situation.

its rushing along faster than we can keep up with,

, which has been a big relief on multiple levels,

there was this kind of perfect storm situation developed in the days following

i guess im just in an open for experimenting phase with everything. (of which more below.)

tho mayb im gonna get a stress ulcer soon. because of my news.

oh im so slow i just realised everything! wow, crazy, awesome

yeah, that light just jizzes our little phone cameras.

its really gentle and mild even if still kind of wild

and also quite gentle things to your mood.

im sort of spacking out but also feeling awesome.

i feel this desire to give you more and better in this letter,

, more like a blurt update.

this made everyone feel pretty damn weird.

, risk of everything amounting to nothing, being mere waste product,

but the chaos told me to.

it made the whole thing feel really weird,

im so excited about so much but then when i try to tell ppl im like

, i had my teeth out and then took drugs.

lots of awkward socialising, which slowly became less awkward.

pretty much the whole time i was either jetlagged, or drunk, or extremely underslept.

time goes by and you just realise how miracle ppl are,

and obvs ppl there are so much more external and open,

i told myself i just had to be willing to say wild shit,

but i still have big gaping holes in my gums

everything feels very disrupted. its really exciting, but extremely draining.

i got a full chart thingy off the internet then two different friends read it for me.

today was astrology day, by chance.

, but the adrenaline i guess carried me through.

i was on a high for a while after. we went out dancing twice actually

, which was really a beautiful thing to do.

, swam briefly in the pacific, which i was super glad for,

do you know her drawings?

its been pretty exciting.

just blurting my bleph.

but mainly avoiding everything…

im a bit of a wreck.

i still love you all.

how youre in a live situation, not a scripted one, etc.

, it woke me right up, i want more,

, its been driving me completely nuts,

, really obsessive about things, impatient, flat and pent at once,

, which is actually a new feeling for me,

so that had me laying low for a while.

lazy as opposed to what. the convulsions themselves.

, but with much more distance now.

i wasnt very into it to start with,

whats the point writing if i manage to buy some veggies and cook and sleep and wake and eat and talk with lovely ppl and aimlessly emote……

i felt so overwhelmed with love for all of us there.

im going fairly zany over here, late spring zane

, or just turned outward, quite clearly

and i was super tired after three days and nights of mania and booze,

, buzzing with anticipation (im a fan).

otherwise ive been struggling to read actually. i feel far from everything.

, but things here have been gangbusters intense for a while now. its hard to explain

it feels like a bit of a floaty whirlwind life here.

the sun was going down for ages.

, and then the next week was just insanely exhausting, like extreme, dizzingly extreme, anguishing and joyful and playful and just strung out

i wanted to sleep with everyone.

no worries if not can explore other cosmic possibilities.

, we certainly cant hold the movement back.

i really like you and i like being able to like you

i have an old blog.

, or at least i was muntedly reading it this way and going loony with it.

, while otherwise being very depressed and indifferent to everything.

, and in that state you really shouldnt expect to do anything other than try to not be in that state.

mayb im just projecting everything, but im going mad.

(not to take the wind out of the sails of your going mad)

just rest yesters. painkillers and ice.

and then lazed in the park and talked for ages, about the night before, about queerness and sex and problems and hopes.

i was crying multiple times

and otherwise i feel like weve just been cruising a lot around here.

so much cuddling and back-patting.

, which spread out into a fantastic few nights and days.

sekt, nail polish, black metal, chemicals,

so yeah, no more feeling like im alone and mad,

we all got tanked and went wonky and talked braille barefoot in the dust.

, after a lovely night in the park drinking,

my bro was there too. a lot of our friends painted their faces as dogs

, it was interesting and exciting coz everyone kind of put on their best face as it were.

it was totally heady, mixing with amazing beautiful weird people, so much reflection and info

faces light up for you, to you. enormous presence.

everything seems fine but i also feel really weak.

, but im not really judging myself at the moment, just rolling.

i love everyone, i sit around staring at everyone loving them, enemies of death, nuggets of anti-death even as we are all dying, with their own unique specs

the crosshairs settle by moments on all the players, in rotation. but it is really already too late

, im glad even tho it has been a crazy weird tough time.

, which took a lot out of me, and, well, im still in it,

i was crying multiple times

most of us went quite silly, at least some of us did

, roamed the streets, danced in a tiny little tower

, rather than just holding on for dear life. and you do a shit-tonne of emotional processing,

and i felt overwhelmed with love for my chum every time

i was on the dance floor totally in love with the music,

, risk of everything amounting to nothing, being mere waste product,

grinning from ear to ear and dancing like a total nong

and saying ow when i accidentally hurt myself.

, coz i was super anxious. i dont like losing body parts, no matter how small.

at one point i cd just hear smashing glass but not see anything,

but our session went off pretty well i think.

so great i was howling/whooping after.

was super sensitive to colours, a particular palette (cyan, fuchsia, violet) for days afterward,

also totally lost sense of time at points,

sort of present but provisional, mayb inevitable

, yet still fucking fucking wild.

(we were all supposed to be saving ourselves for the next night)

and how this is always going to go on and on as well

lots of mouth rinsing

, and buzzing and buzzing and just going at it. and then boozing like mad afterward…

and blood clots and crashing out and sitting around in dead time,

, not reading that much po,

im not all that interested in theory and po at the mo

, just going on silly quests instead

(like being mildly electrocuted)

, rather than just fucking around a bit before getting a job in banking

and still feel a bit mediated by externality or something, which might take the pressure down, and it really came out of nowhere,

, rose to the surface

, it got really overwhelming,

this is a totally new and ludicrous life config setup for me!

are you still flipping out?

yeah that is really intense.

its not that surprising if youre a bit bombed. youve been maxxing for quite a while now no?

funny to just sit around, vaguely working, in the lounge room.

i love living in other ppls rooms.

we should all just circulate.

i love to sleep, but i super love being awake! and hyperventilating.

im kind of crying.

i was turnt turnt turnt turnt turnt turnt

and basically almost had an ulcer from the stress and intensity of everything since then!

then a week later i ended up on a spontaneous binge with some other friends.

i didnt mean to sound annoyed before, i wasnt,

im in a capital mood.

yeah im in a pretty good mood since

i felt good, then bad, then just weird and annoyed.

i think im going ok

and, well, everyones broken,

the city is intense and im feeling nutty

ive mostly been feeling hysterical, as well as feminine and sensual and open and colourful

you all have such great avatars

and i send you lots of love and hugs and well-wishing hope shit is going well there stay marvelous and tough

and yes, pls dont go crazy!

thing is i dont currently have a permanent home,

, at least not for this degenerate reader.

sort of feel like sick in my own skin.

my mind is really getting bent out of shape, getting really wriggly and tinny and wobble-boardy.

mostly unable to compute.

even tho there are fractions of it that are mind-blowing…

and then i just collapse into a crying pile of dirty washing.

one of the positive side-affects!

(, said the drugs.)

the city is super beau at the mo, and, well, so are all our ppl here.

i also saw a tiger-in-a-späti video the other day did you see it before your dream?

i get freaked out by futility.

(like what we chatted about the other night)

i was really really flipping out but now im a little calmer. like trying to function while in shock

its a disaster but everythingll be fine?

sekt wells in my gum holes

all the rest of us were all madly hugging.

and the rest of us just standing there killing ourselves laughing.

and it was fucking nuts.

we band went late to the park where we had strange arguments, got whack stoned all who touched the joint, and some went on the giant neon ride for to upside down and be ill.

i felt like time had become like a water-trampoline force-field floating-pulsing back and forth before and through me

, couldnt finish a sentence.

so intense with like 30-something nutters there all bumbling and thrumming…

(you cant see whats happening only ten ppl away)

i was really manic and great, have also been telling myself to calm down, chill out,

and walked around all night just relaxing and chatting and it was super-dooper.

im a bit of a wreck too, emotionally and all.

everything is actually also totally great!

but it is more the super-exhausting emotional aspect of it for me.

i think im turning into a girl.

as we were all merrily saying goodnight, everyone hugging.

and walked and chatted till long past dawn. it was amazing and awesome, really intense but also really gentle and mild and open,

, but it was almost more fun walking around for hours afterward, just chatting and feeling nice.

im always up for a chat about old po fogeys, polyamory, anxiety, confusion, time, etc.

now im just like wanting warm sensual affection from all and sundry, boys and girls, girl-boys and boy-girls.

, after thered been this intensity building between us for days,

i cracked under the pressure after feeling some sharp gutting stomach acheys,

was buzz-sobbing in the street after the storm (the storm!) outside the vietnamese joint waiting for my take-away while they blasted hideous super happy bop-trance from the kitchen

a lot happened, it was intense. i guess it was a bit of a growing…

, we stayed till long after close and we told off the men who came to tell us off.

we are all drunk on each other, light-headed, stumbling, but also racing, talking too much, bounding along unbounded boundless…

since then ive been in a kind of crisis situation of attractions!

but this meant i got to see the crane man climbing up his tower crane and switching it on and spinning it around and around in the dawn sun.

it was certainly an abrupt extraction

the sun was coming up for ages

, the shifting significance of time (retreating, approaching)

the shifting extravagance of time

what are we doing. goddamn.

i wasnt very into it to start with,

i should prob go fry me some eggs.

ill get you a pic.

happy lunacy

always a pleasure

life here still feels pretty open and weird,

ill show you in the flesh soon.

thanks for the carrot pie

cd you pls tell me what time i was born?

might send you this draft poem ive been working on for the last few days

dont worry im not normally like this im never like this

just felt like making contact with you

its been a super intense time

on the shoulder of weightlessness

things here have been fairly wild here since you left.

otherwise things are just plodding along here.

i hope youre having a good stint in the zany mountains!

happy crazy week at work

we should skype soon.

turns out a bit of bone came off during the procedure. luckily no brain attached.

the other day i read about a benign brain cyst you have?

im out wednesday night and thursday night and saturday and sunday nights.

but im prob home for the next few days recovering…

i guess you just try to get through it and make sure you dont mumble!

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

Revival

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Danny Gentile

He sits at the fulcrum of a critique.
He sits as an italic, an index, a concern.

There is no bone to be picked at, so
he gives it one. There is no hate to be
delivered, he attends now with a pen.

The slight weight has shifted its tolerance
sideways. Was that what you projected?
Is that the bitter cadence you have rung?

Give me an apple-skin to shine through
every vector of my home. Bring me the
cast-iron plate. Bring me combustion.

From the sedentary workroom no axis
tilts from its custom, nor its plane, for
the bench lies idle with the undecided,

the unlikely, the uncontained. Prayers
come like breathing from a chair. An
adage ripens. When dust is next un-

settled you shall hear the hum, the
ineffable note rising. The song rises to
rise again, from unrestricted evidence

of timbre and tone. From the critical/
uncritical adage that set it going. It is
neither broken nor un—. It is reviving.

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

your new diet

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Oscar Schwartz

i met you just after you started a new diet
every day you would eat only that which was related to a food memory
sometimes you would tell me the story behind your diet for the day
for example there was the day you ate a box of freddo frogs
and you told me that it was a reminder of the time you stole a box of
freddo frogs from the school cafeteria
and ate them one by one on the school bus home
other times it was easy for me to guess the memory
for example there was the time i came home and the apartment looked
like a 10 year old’s birthday and we ate rainbow cake for dinner
you also ate things that you didn’t distinctly remember
but that your parents told you they had fed you
like sweet potato mash or fish boiled in milk
i learnt a lot about your childhood by watching you eat
lots of pasta, mangoes, almonds, not much meat
we also went to quite a few average suburban restaurants
many of them had changed cuisine or ownership since you were a child
but we’d eat there anyway, which made no sense to me
mostly the new diet was healthy and conservative
but on the days when your memories
led you back to what you had once desired
the eating could become extreme and manic
there were times when you became secretive about your memories
like the day you cut up the pillow cases
into tiny pieces and swallowed them
when i asked what memory you had of eating pillow cases you replied
what do you care? this new diet is doing wonders
i look and i feel fantastic i bounce right out of bed

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

Save

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Sam Riviere

With Astrid there is this sensation of invisibility. After a couple of days in her room I feel an agreeable fuzziness developing around my skull, as if my identity is actually becoming unfocused, so it’s a surprise to encounter the distinct lines of my face in the bathroom mirror. For the first time in my life, I remain largely insusceptible to the temptations of jealousy, which would involve the assertion of my ego to a prominence I don’t feel, currently, it merits. I am anyway familiar with its special contortion: hating those who precede me, meaning I must hate her (or at least her judgement) for allowing them close, meaning I must hate myself for occupying the same category. This logic asks me to be the exception to everything, when I find I want to absorb those names, to become larger than them, to incorporate them all, impressionistically, in her memory. To be interchangeable like this seems fine, and in her bed, luxuriously blurred, I finally feel able to author an anonymity that is believable.

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

methane dress

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

remedy advance
omniscient pavement

sickly uniform
exchange headstone

thump cyclone
adulterate unit

fleetingly diagnostic
especially fracking

whenever ancestor
buck room

secrete muscle
generation stains

distance basket
bouncing courtesy

proxy hernia
rainbow cursor

faux radio
welt crash

warring fractions
upholstery elite

special synthesis
favorite contempt

classic stranger
sorting award

plastic hallway
troubled fume

smoking typology
album drone

conclusive cards
laughing privilege

unexpressive net
crushing filaments

window justice
handheld sigh

irrelevant hazard
uninterrupted sleeve

indelicate pool
enjambed vista

vintage prong
non-normative feeling

stuck in impossible buildings

dizzy elegance
in a binary diagram

the bedsheet wind
is deafening

imaginary portraits in
sedated reflection

brittle flags for
vinegary excuses

pulse friendly a
buffed environment

scripted bodies
boycott levers

oversized facial
for bandaged perfume

casual stooges
lift up slime

sentimental abandonment
of polite zeroes

platform veneer
wears methane dress

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

Making Instant Noodles at the End of the Rainbow

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Norman Erikson Pasaribu

Written by Norman Erikson Pasaribu, translated by Tiffany Tsao


Wake up. It’s four a.m. Your cellphone alarm goes off.
It’s for Christy—her morning Quiet Time. Turn off the alarm

and make the bed. This is usually Christy’s job.
Go to the kitchen and get out two packs of instant noodles. This

is usually your job. Boil water in two small saucepans. Prepare
the seasoning, then the chili powder. Christy hated spicy food

and you were just the opposite. Put the two blocks of noodles in one saucepan,
the soup seasoning in the other. Christy couldn’t stand starchy broth

so you humored her. We can afford the gas, she’d say. Drain
the noodles in the colander. Divide them between two Hello Kitty bowls.

Christy bought them ‘cause they were cute. Christy said she wanted to be buried cute—
in pink ribbons, foundation, a little powder, blush, mascara, and a frilly dress.

Take both bowls into the bedroom. Enjoy them
alone. Christy’s gone. They found her body

under a bridge. Before it happened, Christy said she missed her mom’s sayur lodeh.
You don’t. You miss Christy. She came to you in a dream the other day and said:

there is nothing at the end of the rainbow

it isn’t even a painting—

just a trick of the light.

Christy—who once told you I am pounding on
heaven’s door. Who knows, it might open—forgot

we are all droplets of water
we will fall to the ground but not yet.

(And love is the Light!
And Love is the light!)

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged ,

By Christmas

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Cyril Wong

I’d like to be gone by Christmas.
Not due to sadness (nothing
so trivial, even as she waves to me
across time) but because I’m done.
Or because I’ve no more
agenda, nobody left to impress,
nothing to do that somebody
else cannot do, regardless
of what the sitcoms tell me.
Not that life is no longer
hilarious, but such a space
is opening around my tears
and laughter that I’m no longer
certain if I’m myself or the sky.
So bring it on, dear body
(don’t expect me to do the work):
the casual aneurysm,
pneumonia or multiplication
of cells – what difference
does it make when change
is never new? Not even
that I’ve stopped caring –
but if my tea leaves inform me
I’m through, I’d nod at the news.
Hell is other people: oh boo-
bloody-hoo. But more likely
that I’ll awake next year
beside you; I’d wash the toilet,
teach, read or write
a poem about us again too.
Just in case, let me say goodbye
before it’s all over; for in spite
of what anybody says,
I’ll always love you.

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

Illiterature

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Toby Fitch
I’ll start this off without any words, watching them pass like clouds in the sky, too busy sucking. On warm milk and laxatives I’ll walk you through heartbreak, show you the out-takes—all the dead wood from jungles and cities on fire.

Someone talked me into it—“Entertain us!”—odour on their bodies, even though we hadn’t had sex for a week. I was shaved, tied to an easy-chair in a room with a window in the corner. I found truth horny, but that’s okay, my will is in holes and dis-used shafts.

She kept the sound of broken homes pumping—a live transmission straight to my heart. Every wet nurse refused to feed me in the fire of daddy’s little radio girl, the lady I felt maternal love for. We talked in the heat with a hint of anaesthesia in our mouths—“We can plant a house” / “we can build a tree”—bipolar opposites attract, I guess, but you were right to walk away in silence; the animals I’ve trapped have all become my pets.

When I was an alien—sickening pessimist, conservative communist, apocalyptic hypocrite, master bastard—lights shined like a neon show. Negatively creeping, emotionally scapegoating, I learned to cry on demand—my eyes, dark grey lenses frightened of the sun. She should have been a son, not an eclipse living in the Ice Age. A duel of personalities, she would’ve had a fine time living at the Sunday swap meet in the over-bored night.

Thank you dear God for putting me on this stupid and contagious Earth. And fuck me, man, this is a waste of time, passing through wastelands once more. Look, an oversized rock! All of a sudden my water broke, scattering flowers washed down by the rain. I really wet your bed.

Oh, so this is permanence, the past now part of my future comfort in being sad.

I don’t know why I’d rather be dead than cool, systematically degraded, neutered and spayed. I feel very privileged, in debt to the centre of the city where all roads meet, weather changes mood, routine bites hard; where electrolytes smell like semen, meat-eating orchids forgive no one, unknown martyrs die; where love will tear the lights out.

You’re less dangerous turned away on your side, hanging out on clouds and moving through the silence without motion.

As the king of illiterature I’m very ape, alone here in this colonised afterbirth of a nation. Avenues lined with trees, strangled words—they take turns in cutting me up, nail me to a train. With eyes so dilated I’ve become their pupil.

This is why events unnerve me—the flowers sing in D minor in strange new rooms, maybe drowning.

There are countless formulas for pressing flowers washed up on beaches, struggling for air—do the twist by the gate at the foot of the garden, lie in the soil and fertilize mushrooms, listen to the silence and let it ring, erect a city of stars—but I lose the feeling.

I’ve got a new complaint: dreams always end and I’ve another down payment on very bad posture (I’m metallic blue turned red from rust). Oh, and the soft pretentious mountains glisten in the light of the trees. I’ve gotta find some therapy; been locked inside your heart-shaped nights filled with bloodsport. My own parasite, I’m not afraid anymore to distill the life that’s inside of me.


(after Kurt Cobain and Ian Curtis)

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

I’m Worried That My Increasingly Complex Shower Masturbation Routine is Unethical Because of The Amount of Water I Use

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Adam Ford

I use thirst as a guide to how much to drink.
You absorb more toxins breathing in a hot shower
than you do by drinking tap water all day.

Evening seems fine.
Nothing else has changed.
I’m good now.

The needs of detainees are complex.
From bedroom to bedroom an
increased amount of graffiti.

I’m worried that this is all because I
can’t make the break from what I know.

I’m having trouble at work with judgements
of my ability and trustworthiness
or being assertive enough to say
this isn’t where I choose to go.

I’m wary about people visiting.

I try to avoid thinking about the
permeable membrane between
TV and the internet.

When you blame the problems
on porn, you’re telling yourself,
“Porn has me in a headlock.”

Complex pieces of assistive technology include
complex computerised communication devices.

Positive relationships don’t just happen.

I’m blessed because my Dad and Mum are
alive to help each other along the way.
I fill in the blanks, but that’s
how we get things done.

I agree it would be better for boys
to make their own decisions later.

Personally, I don’t care
if you do cartwheels
naked in the shower
so long as you aren’t
impeding my routine.

I wouldn’t mind being naked next to a guy
in a shower or sauna or whatever because
I’m comfortable with my body.

Using Rhesus monkeys with artificial hearts
I turned traditional presumptions about
sex and marriage on their head.

So that’s why I’m going in again.

Can I find love if I’m depressed?
I’m in my 40s and people my age don’t
compare to the 23-year-old I married.

I long got tired of all this mess.
I don’t want to be part of this.

I have so much more confidence.
I’m really happy with my results.

My life has meaning because I’m still
here and all the possibilities I have.

I’m increasingly aware that
my time is being well spent.

I advance my privacy settings.
I get involved. I develop.
I spread. I give feedback.

A substance appears coloured
because it absorbs light.

I’m probably not much different than most people.

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

G’dayology

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Michael Farrell

Or this – I have an autistic child, and
when she repeats the whole Catholic Mass
at lunch the medical team call it echo-
lalia. Dock their lunch says Bruce, say
hello to reverse red tape prejudice
The trees won’t chop themselves down
unless you show them patiently, by

analogy. We had to gaol your combine
harvester say the police, it was doing
something wrong. It was Sunday, but
luckily I have an arm so I could chisel
my way in to the yard. Wrote a speech for
Stump Sunday: it was not complimentary
to your Christmas lights or the way you

arrange the white bread in your summer

pudding. Someone’s captain’s visor
slips out of the op-shop. Ghosts don’t
vote or they’d scare the Liberal Party
My voice was caught in a wombat burrow
by the time the night was over. Coral’s
gutless that’s its problem. Practically by
definition, a predator’s unseen till too late

Bruce is an asset: no matter how much
nothing there is to do, he’s always done
the least. He was in no rush for a handbag
made from a native bird. The young bull
fell in love with his father in the mirror and
his mother in his sister, it’s classic husbandry
In the paranoid waiting room, the weather’s

a major distraction, the TV appears to think

Speech patterns flatten this route, raise
the other. The gate indicates all kinds of
inclusions, performing none. The re-
ligious fallback itself begins to fall. I
have an autistic lyrebird and it covers
its head when we go to bed. The kids
were braver than those raised on abstract

mammals. Up a ridge and down a gullet
No, I won a bag of coal, and won’t let it be
burned, that’ll show the desert. I wanted to
show my upset sister how family war’s an
antidote to the world. She took the glocken-
spiel out of my hand and sang a G’day that
cracked the water tower, raked the hay, shaded

the sun and set the snake and mongoose free

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

Aletheia

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Lachlan Brown

And when you find an entire cigarette on the
ground* but you’ve never smoked anything,
it seems like there’s a wide universe offering
you lung-cancered perfection, no longer

content with your ease of breath. Wander
the streets on any council pickup day in
any rich suburb and see this gift shining
up like a twenty cent piece, over and over.

I have this dream: I’m back in track nineteen
listening to Gretchen Parlato through
heaps expensive headphones and it’s

changing my brain somehow (*between
the edges of a parked car and the curb you
can sometimes glimpse stuff like this).

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

Reunion Song

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Luke Beesley

Every time she saw herself in the mirror, I remember, she pushed
her chin forwards so as to stretch the skin of her neck. The crushed
tram ticket in her throat produced the crumpled husky sound, itself.
She had seen a throat specialist at one point and I told her a long
anecdote about my trip to NY, which fanned out from the phrase
‘detective work’ which I used to describe my absorption in research.
I sat there, in the library, for 9 hours a day, a short lunch in the brisk
sub-zero sun, and spoke to her of the blizzard and its pattern on the
east coast. A doctor pointed the sharp beak of curlew at her neck
which twitched like a nerve as she sang: it’s nearly 10! We had had
another wine and met outside the pain – 7 years. Most of the local
bars were closed and the cellar was closed to the public given a
whisky festival. I stirred honey into the corner of my mouth and went
to itch my own brain through a hole in the back of my skull obscured
by a flap of thick hair. The texture of a soccer ball retrieved from
a swamp, my mind. Colour of cross trainers, lycra. She’d been an avid
runner. It’s harder to communicate the evening without thinking about
breakup (ours) and death (her mother’s) but we used those words.
                                                                                      The light was very low.

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

confit

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Joanne Burns

although we might have chewed on the same
page we never lived on the same continent
my new revised atlas confirms that i am
not of the same stock cube as you i filched
those cubes to add flavour to my misdemeanours;
you coveted my watermelon thongs although they
were the wrong accessories for your cassock your
whiskey profile made me lie so i could extract
myself more rapidly i never left the hose
on or stole the prunes i just needed something
to declare in that claustrophobic broth your wry
desire left nothing to the imagination but a throb
of narcolepsy how many strings of beads went
rusty while the candles gutted themselves you had
too much cheek to turn things around how many stuffed
holes in their shoes with the pages of your little black rule book
in the years of the credit squeeze i spied you hurling a decomposed
fish down the aisle like a scarecrowed olympian your motorcycle
slithering into the delta’s bullrushes its slick conspiracy

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

Phlegm: a love poem

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Tricia Dearborn

I’m reading Maggie Nelson
occasionally stopping to cough up phlegm
in some indeterminate post-fever stage of the flu

she’s living on a canal with a junkie boyfriend
or that’s how I read it

the poems might as well be called ‘no good will come of it’
raging despair oozes out of them
toxic as the canal’s stinking sludge
or my almost fluorescent yellow-green phlegm

I hack
‘Spit,’ says my mind
I spit out on the tissue
‘Good girl,’ I say out loud

I learned this

my mother, not big on emotion or touch,
excelled at sickbed ritual
earlier tonight I was telling my girlfriend
(scavenger of sleep, getting what she can between my bouts)
how it calmed me as a child, calms me now

the bucket by the bed in case you were sick
the towel laid across the bed underneath you
in case you didn’t quite get to the bucket
its strange comforting roughness
the smell of disinfectant
when the bucket came back fresh

then I instructed her in percussive therapy
another thing I learned from my mother
it breaks up the phlegm

she pounded me on the back as I lay angled off the sofa
head resting on my forearms on the ground
up/down from the waist to the top of the shoulder blades

then helped me back onto the sofa
where I lay sweating
while she looked on with patient palpable concern

I notice we get on better when I’m sick
she less defensive and kinder
I more vulnerable, less autocratic

at night a Buteyko technique I found on the internet
eases the coughing
to begin, you take a breath
and hold it ‘till discomfort’
the aim is to create air hunger

lately I’m learning to tolerate
the right kinds of discomfort
to honour the hungers my mother discounted

Maggie tells her boyfriend
it’s not the content / I’m in love with, it’s the form

how can you separate
a slender torso, small breasts, their exuberant nipples
a clitoris that is a chameleon to the tongue
now rampant, now indiscernible
somehow melded back into bone
from the love, the rightness
the great goodwill

her habits with time which are mine with money
no planning
then blaming the shortfall
on some unexpected but perfectly foreseeable circumstance

her face turned to me on the sofa
its energy and joy
dark circles under her eyes
because I’ve been keeping her up at night
coughing

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

Mortalities Memorandum

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Kate Lilley

For her to die like that nobody there
not screaming for morphine in the ICU
Help! Help! Come here! Rub my feet!
A good death is humble noble lonely
cancer is lonely writing is lonely
Get it out on the airwaves the evening news
the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald
Name a prize after her call it the sad and lonely prize

I’ll never get over (not) having you as my mother
all the elegies in the world their beauties and occasions
compensate decompensate
dewey decimal dewy-eyed
I’ll take whatever’s going
An acre on Uranus seems like a bargain a future

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

domestic proportions

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Loma Bridge
i ran into her in the toilets at Central. our herstories writing themselves on the mirrors as the night trains rumbled into a Blakean moment, in reverse, no more like a Facebookean one like when i had written ‘groupies’ instead of ‘aliens’ or failed to write ‘grunge feminism’ on my note about the state of the art after some fuck. Sadly as soon as we met we kissed goodbye – no joy (even though her name was Joy) but 15 hours later there she was again in the QVB toilets (the renovated ones upstairs minus the French attendant) cleaning her teeth in the mirror that only showed the top of her head like something out of Fargo and me staring in disbelief for when she raised it she had two black eyes oh Joy what has happened to you i cried ƒ she pretended not to know me there was this absence of quotation no blessings or even sadness just a fact of two black eyes, tiny like those of the children’s book character Dumbo no i mean Madame Mus or was it Celeste, yes. no again a mistake. inside the pupil i definitely saw K’s* ‘tiny little man’ staring back then away but whatever – those dotted eyes shed a tsunami of fat tears causing a b/w nuclear disaster in my kitchen i discovered on return from that last sighting of her.

Lord she had surreptiously filmed our meeting; when i checked facebook for any advice on dealing with the nuclear thingo there was i with two red eyes in front of the QVB toilet mirror sporting some foreign words – eht laedi tsinimef – in blue permanent marker, kissing Flying (picked up for $7.75, Snow’s Bookshop 1985).

Luckily i remembered – on a visit to Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) i’d stolen a mop from her kitchen! Jeanne Dielman Jeanne Dielman: that green mop saved the day.

Oh! this phallacy of lost luggage disappearing fast as a wrinkle.

*Khrzizanovsky

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

My Skeptic Tremor

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Jill Jones

Perhaps I require revolution rather than mending day
or need to get back to my ill channels,
disinterest, a fetish or two
and a more obvious sin than procrastination.
Force is never equal, not in my calculations,
nor is severance or servitude.
I tell myself lies that sound like truths. That’s clever.
I turn out my pockets for dust, coins,
and palaver. That’s too clever.
When I divide it evenly, the cavalry will come
with their shiny tear gas and lucrative immortality.
When I hold it out, the futurists will come
with their holograms and plebiscites, their ghastly chums
full of gosh and ingratitude.
When I hide it away, it will be covered up by
brazen vote cards and gaudy guilt.
Here are my stupid boots, my placards, a little book
of tasteful green catechism. Already the rocks hate me,
the wind turns its back, the day sours,
wearing out my slang, my tokens, my renewables,
the hopeless gluten between my bones, my brawn
and its wasteland of humours.
The only way to revolve is to stand still, give up my axis.
There’s nothing special in that, except when
ground shudders or the wind refuses to hold me.
Even now my shoes fill with doubt and slick.
I can’t mend, I can’t fly but at least I can keep
skeptic tremor over so much prior glut.
Shame is my sticky thing.

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

Our Night Afternoon

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Elif Sezen

for Ebru


You say
‘every noun is a gift as long as it trails its hollows’
So we swallow the day’s nouns:
Melbourne Istanbul Salonico Ayvalık
Bazaar Cat-eye Soap Pajamas

We become the evening
one by one
we become the blank thing
You say
‘nothingness speeds the mutation
invisible blossom seductive scent’
we become nothingness
we become the blossom that seduces

And just then we return into our child body
we are sitting still just so
to bless our sisterhood?
whilst night blue distills the fear and mystery in the air
and right when our mum was about to press the shutter button
you and I
our delicate souls are reborn growing up again
we recognise the house we are in again:
the windows the carpet
plastic roses
the door that imprisons to the outside

We don’t have a secret remaining
so we no longer wait to grow up

breathing through many a body
we sisters each other’s witnesses
you and I
while this memory shades off so do we
we laugh
we hope.

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

Site 1686

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Kait Fenwick

And, after all this time my heart still f l u t t e r s
when a queer person walks through those automatic doors.

As if femmes don’t need fuel
or diesel dykes don’t chain smoke twin packs of B&H
or the gender-bent darling from Railway Street could head
to The Gateway without a canister of gum.

///

A couple of hairy bears sashay their way through salty snacks
before heading to the BJs fridge for fulfilment.
The top locks arms with his better half, scanning the room.
He clocks me, smiles and reverts his attention back to the cabinet of curiosities.
Foreplay? With a spectator?

One of my regulars has just pulled up on her beat-up, blue BMX.
Sent her girlfriend Kellie up to Kempsey.
You know for prosperity?
Some shifts, I wonder how long she’ll be in rehab for

whether Kay will keep her Hamo South-door wide open for when she gets out.

Variant people doing a variety of things
unmasked in public
open,
aware
& others not.

Others?
High as fucking kites buying cherry pie
stuffing sugar sachets down their pants when they think my back’s turned.

I’m here watching them
one-by-one
go about their
day-to-day.

The voyeur in me is aroused and yet the conversations
I’m involved in surely aren’t mine to have.

In comes Jimmy.
Gets a kick when I call him ‘Keef’
locked hair adorned with coins and twine.
He shows me his latest creation, a necklace featuring

“a blackfella on a crucifix”.

Jimmy has always called me brotherboy
catching himself on occasions when he slips up and spits, ‘sis.’
One of those fellas who knows your story before you unhinge your trap.

He tells me of his dreaming:
of his mob back out Mooree way
of his tumultuous love affair with the pipe
of how he wishes he had his culture to help cut the noose.

His stories draw me in
tied to the prison inkings on his forearm.
His personal style is unearthly.
Some nights I swear, if he wasn’t koori
he would be on the cover of Vogue,
distressed denim and leather.

If he had a phone, Jimmy would have a couple of thousand likes on his OTDs.
Instead, he is here entertaining me,
scratching up cigarette change.
Whenever he is short I cover.

///

The outline of two figures appear on the security screen
distorted by the damaged wing of a lost bogong .
I watch the women dart across the car park from the hotel next door
clad in robes,
concealing their bodies like weapons.
Lowering my eyes
I exchange goods
green note,
no bag,
no receipt.

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

poetry kool-aid

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Sophie Curzon-Siggers

the immature poet(ess)
clawed to know
the moment directly
before – before the world
is skinned, realisation
of a flaying’s cusp
that as yet, she could not
conceive of.


before i curl out a line,
i have already censored
not for good, nor merit
but for presage. is omen
subterfuge or are we
mostly hearing –
i would say ‘deaf’
but those whose speech
is choreographic
are probably more attuned
to seeing a prophecy
fractally bloom. in hindsight
i feel the omens so round
about me, more real than a town
of mourners, transitory
– more pert
and fresh than fermenting.
years on.


in an alpine hotel lounge at new year’s,
of dated interior yet prices
adapted to so far above
sea level, we requested cups
of hot water from a barman
who disdained our tea ruse.
i wrote her a december
gift, birthday and christmas
(she understood the artistic
was not always instantaneous,
more like our earl grey suffusing)
a central motif beginning –


“i.
(rem)embers,
your defiant trails
even in the dusk
of coats unincarnate
and over the quilt that lays
still, without our heads
brought close
above (the source –
yours’)

in the flat expanse of hours
i find their number in tender
embers

though we must,
i suppose
work – crave, crave
your element be.”


this became her euology, less than
24 months later. at dias,
i wondered how i had wrote
such words and not seen
farewell.


i confess, though it is not literary
though maybe it does truly
make me a poet
or an off-kilter one
(i’ve really drank the kool-aid):

i confess
an intricate adhesion
of meaning, of signs and
suture ties where you’d
never guess collusion.
does obsessive-compulsive disorder
ever give up its narrative, go home?
does the herringbone
mind, underlaid for poetry,
really have primacy? i worry less that i am creative
of tragedy, but my failing indicative –
supernova omen
descend, an unheeded
presage. i confess
to brewing and imbibing
the poet kool-aid
neurally,
the uneclipsed optics
of seeing all
underjoined in
poetic cohesion.

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

There’s a Kiss

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Michelle Hamadache

I don’t remember except in the raspberry shadow of my lips upon the shoulder of my loved one. I remember his shoulder, god-gold and warmed the way you would with honey were you to want to pour it over cakes in savarin moulds. As he stood in a change room filled with men ready to take to the field, he let fall his singlet in preparation to take the jersey and stood, momentarily half-naked, before the team of thirteen men all playing for the evening piss-up and the glory of a championship, club level, but premier league all the same. Who is she, asked the goalkeeper, you sly cunt, you never said a word.

I remembered then that just before he’d left for the game we’d made love, and afterwards I’d stood pressed behind him in the bathroom as he washed, my eyes meeting his in the silver of the mirror, never taking my eyes from him as I pressed my lips against his shoulder, his eyes penumbras of all the rivers from the Euphrates to the Milky Way.

I wish I still wore lipstick.

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged