Invicta Break Open

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Dusk Dundler
to walk outside

and for the first

the steps on the

beta shivers asking

ever i am not

flat there is a man

helmet & i do not

this light for one to

memory don’t ever

across broadway

of a concrete tomb

time read poetry

phone she is

is it my partner

answering behind

picking it up he

own a bike where is

be another out of

go back now the

have no where left

being a university

there is a woman down

distressed a transposed

calling me how

a book whacks down

is putting on a motorcycle

time ? how close in

concrete tomb sense

ghosts of the brewery

to park.


Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

Gaps

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Rose Hunter
what i’m          , you                    what i’m          of in                    of you the          in which i                     please                    me how we          at each other sometimes it’s true i’m just          no one else           it either all this       mostly your                 ,
of course back then i          to          at                    .                     all about          like          a          of your own          . the          between us          to a          . a whole                    . who this          ? how          it          its          ?          in          those          i                    ,          in          those i                    to although it’s hard to          which    which because/although i          i          to                              everything, which really                    i          , well there that          i          it a          . in                    which also. the          the                    . while at my          i   very           there an un-          at my          whatever & wherever my          what it                    or never          , this           all the time in          as well as          . once i          in a                    the          and once i          a          from the          .          the          i                    and you          or well; the          you          and i          or well. you                    calm. also you          some                    i          including          i’ve never          and never          to, so much wasted          i          , explained or unexplained wholly          in our          ,          i                    that you          i                              i          i          more about                    ;          that                     &          that                    between my          that          in          or under the          for the          .          in the          where the                              through


Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

Intrystuetter

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Laynie Browne
He was glad he had kept an adequate distance from the persons of his sharpest interest. He found a handful of words, even when spoken with affection, to be cumbersome and could easily imagine a plague of actual bodies. Why did he require fond assurances to be buoyant? He had never needed them before. Was his ensconced vantage the complication? While he avidly sought certain words of adoration he was sunk by unwanted words of interruption. As easily as he coveted some, others he scorned or ignored. Words followed him to skulk very close to his person, and this he found extremely problematic. After a time he concluded that all words were treacherous, either because he admired them too much or found their company disconsolating. Yet he found himself unable to exist without language. In personal letters he called his preoccupied somnolence a state of intrystuetter. He rejected common descriptions of his investigations as “mercurial quandaries” and also the words: tryst and infatuation.
Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

Aylan

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Vanessa Page

the sea offers up your name…the sea offers up your name
the sea offers up your name…the sea offers up your name
offers up your name, offers up your name, offers up your
name… your name, your name, your name, your name
the sea offers up your name…the sea offers up your name
the sea offers up your name…the sea offers up your name
your name, your name, your name, your name, your name
offers up your name, offers up your name, offers up your
name… your name, your name, your name, your name
the sea offers up your name…the sea offers up your name
the sea offers up your name…the sea offers up your name
offers you… offers you… offers you… offers you… offers up
your name, your name, your name, your name, your name
your name, your name, your name, your name, your name
the sea offers up your name…the sea offers up your name
the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea, sea, sea, sea, sea

see.

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

Opening

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Laynie Browne
Take apart one moment, this moment beside the blue teacup and yellow desk of the library carrel, fingers parting and coupling, water grazing. If you open the correct book at the correct moment you will be given everything. If not you’ll have to keep opening books endlessly, just that repeated action. Can you imagine it? She imagines opening each book and trying to slow down the action of opening one book more easily than retreating from substance. Hands hold the edges of something physical, whereas within we are looking at something completely intangible. Substance is never ephemeral and yet it cannot be contained in a blue teacup, or in fingers repeatedly lifting a teacup to lips. But somehow every action opens the edges of infinite pause.
Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

Zero Zero Zero Zero

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Johannes Göransson

Based on a line by Mats Söderlund

1.
The figures on the doorframe appear to be
part animals, part unwinding swirls.
Behind that door I am polishing my rifles
recording Exile on Mainstreet
for a future without butterflies.
When you’re in the shadow of falling towers
the sun tends to look rotten.
Therefore I’m telling you: Never trust a foreigner,
they have no interiority. They traffic in inflation.
I can’t hear you. I’m collecting flowers in
the underground. My torso is best photographed
in the shadow of falling towers,
surrendered to flowers, surrounded by white.
From the bark I guess that the flowers are poodles.
I’m rethinking environmental aesthetics
with a hood on. Getting my killability on
for the poets who still think there’s a place for them
in heaven. There is a place for them
but there are many poodles and poodle fur is best
photographed in a butcher shop.
So there’s that. That and the fact that
some of the best poems are about war,
and some of the other best poems feel like
breathing underwater. Next stop: The Orient.
I’m watching a movie about innocence: it’s wordless.
It’s called Suicide Inflation. It’s about rats.
I’d like to dedicate this poem to the rats
and to my daughter who is knitting something
vaguely anatomical to alleviate her anxiety
about her horrible parents. This poem is also
dedicated to Clarice Lispector
because she posed the question: “Am I a monster,
or is this what it means to be human?”
To be writing a poem about music
while polishing one’ rifle in the shadow of falling
towers: It’s not my fault. It’s my scam.
There are no triggers. I drive a truck full of
chicken carcasses out of a sense of obligation.
The economy needs my beautiful eyes to be blind.
I used to be beautiful but that was the cold war.
Now I sleep in Los Angeles and listen
to my wife’s nipples. Protest art.
All I do is protest. All I returns to is a home
that’s turned to debts and snail shells.
I’m in Hong Kong with my nausea. I write
hate poems in the harbour the hour
when the the ship comes in. I bat my eyelashes.
History has too many dead fathers.


2.
La la la, I can’t hear a thing.
The rabble is at my door.
When these figures ask for music
they’re really asking for a kind of silence.
I want to silence the rats gnawing in
the basement walls. I want a rat silence
in my home but in the butcher shop, I want
a silence that is utterly pornographic. I want
a silence that will go with my torso,
an underground silence that reads like
a prickly wreck or overbloomed flowers
leaking fish roe on the bodies of the rabble.
I want a silence that smells like sweat when
I write poetry for a sick nature.
Nature is disgusting, because I’m in it.
I stink like sweat when I’m silent in
the underground blowing my ridiculous flute.
The rabble wants a different kind of silence.
The rabble wants me to kill a girl.
She loves to take images of herself
wearing a malignant trousseau
with an effusion of contagious folds.
Due to this trespassing business, I will now
venture into the underworld,
but I’m already in the basement,
invoking rats instead. The whole plague thing,
the whole inflation-currency thing,
the whole my-torso-is-porn thing.
I’m great at blowing into the femur flute
at fascist rallies. And I’m even better
with glass shards in my hands.
Each shard has been inscribed with a flower,
the skull-cap, named I guess after the skin
conditions of certain infants. Each flower
represents a different rabble,
each infant represents mimicry.
The rabble hates mimicry and flowers,
and they hate foreign currency because
it crosses boundaries. We’re on the same page,
a stained page of foreign currency. Rat currency.
I too hate it when those pests are photographed
on my torso. But not because I hate photography.
I hate the plague because I’m in love.
In this plague business, I sell the rabble
to the rabble. My fingerprints are all over
the rabble. I’ve been fucking around
with bodies again. Atrocity dummies. I can’t
sell them. In forty years
we will meet again – you and I, the rabble,
the girl who takes photographs of herself–
and we will have to balance the accounts,
but for now I’m the star of this empire.
I have to be softer, softer.



 
3.
There’s always insects in the corners of my eyes
when I go back home, or when I go to Hong Kong
Nature betrays me. I have portrayed raw flowers
on the grave of some imaginary outside
where we can live. It’s always about sex
and language. Why talk when you can fuck?
Why fuck when language means something different?
I’m playing down my own desire for obliteration
because I’m in Hong Kong of Death
and it’s beautiful to see the fish get chopped up
like how in the story about innocence
I constantly rewrite that satanic travelogue.
The compulsion may be caused by the rotting of
the sun or the shadow of the falling towers
or by how beautiful the male body looks
in the cold war. When I travel to foreign places
I always think about childhood.
I picture it like an effigy or like 7000
dead sharks. I ate at McDonalds this morning
because I don’s speak Cantonese. The crime
of art is like the crime of the tourist: we don’t
have children here. We have children
in the underworld, where we eat squid and listen
to drone music to drown out the sound of
the bodies drying on the lawn. It’s against the law.
To make dioramas about history, make sure
you use the right stylus. Speak the language
of hangings and ride a motorcycle with a swan
etched into your left calf muscle. Kill the cows
with the diorama and leave it at the scene.
Make a scene. The threat of language comes
from inside of it. How it may turn into nonsense.
My brand is crisis. I live on coffee and flowers.
I belong to a stabbing, showing off my bikini lines
to the soldiers returning from a dance party.
It’s the 90s, it’s always the 90s.
Can you tell that I have ants on my skin when
I write this? Don’t go out of style. Take your style
to the next level: the rotting sun
has been lit up in the strip show. I can’t fit
any more shark carcasses into this poem,
I can barely fit my fingers into it.
No offense but is the prince dead?
Is that why I can’t wake up my friend?
His visa is denied. Wake up, Ali. Translation
is a crime. There’s blood on your hands.
I’m reading your anthology of Iranian
underground poetry. The venom is starting
to take effect. I’m playing with
the black puzzle. Nostalgia.

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

A Genetic History of Uncommons

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Corey Wakeling

They take some responsibility for your precipices,
as much as following ought to raze the civic.
Largely, however, obligation, smirking, abides.

*








Wanneroo drive-thru of the talking cars.
It makes the terminations of diversity seem ternary,
that is, complexly coded, which they are. And it gets worse
with the arcade, that expensive oasis of winning diversion,
but the hand is not propped to the head, hence not meditating.

Trainee, fertile ethical puck and jailer, take suit of purpose.
The winnings spread evenly between the chance workers,
who dissolve with winning. The managers especially
fledge themselves with sovereign contempt, is their cope,
but this is bought, is phenomenal and not spectacular.
Trade you my forklift licence.

*








Great Eastern Highway, its galleries.
Hume Highway, Pitt Street; elsewhere.

Less than spectacular, the marmoreal recess
reserved for revolutions of sterile crystal ball
paperweights of a tedium quotient celebrated
as the self exposed from the crowd
by live vivisection; if you yourself can show your guts
for what they are, lancing them with this rictus audit.
Maybe your military are not returned to victory
or nirvana, but are gravely alive to the autobiographies
of marginal parole Canberra, or elsewhere.
When I blow a gumleaf, it’s an instrument.

Sad on many of the in-roads. Nearby, though,
solipsism heights.

*








I saw the motorcade dazzle with ribbons that year.
The universe is a miniature, when you ride Eastman’s line,
westerly at least the genesis of erosion,
like an apnoeic turn, calumniates the brow,
if only to sign it pain.
Guilty of fading, turned away from time.
Midday, she is rubbing the forehead now to wake,
somewhere, somehow, in time.

Trainee, you are not at peace
but you are always well-dressed.
Should I shake Burley Griffin’s hand
it would be with the kid glove of the trainee,
parked in the trainee’s car
with the trainee’s car deodoriser swinging.
You are never really working, trainee,
virtue, maybe, but punctual, accidentally
beginning the dictation which is proof.
Should I shake his hand.

But she does not wake, the dazzle under the folds
renders superfluous the shire of the valley.
Bushfire smoulder stymies cataract ogling valley.
Roleystone, again. Of the busted crown, she first points out
a coming explorer who is actually a speculator,
who works selectively for money, knows no journalism,
no other reason approaching than toward
the prerogative of selection.

*








The shaman’s electrolytes wane
when the betablockers shriek.
Chemist, he is propped like a clown, but his romantic life
is forever mystery. Bleached paperbacks shiver
for memento’s sake
when his wheelchair banks and the rafters sharpen.
Trainee’s nervousness eases, the manager stops lecturing,
avoids his cigarette, then the ombudsman
calls. Certitude legible by the lids, why in privacy
candour is inappropriate and you are essentially lying
to yourself suffering, but keep a filing system on the present
locations of the caravan park. The caravan park
is very enthusiastic, has a long drafted history of presents.

Presence. Plural presents unfolding drafting unfolding presents plural.

Moonshine and nudity follow suit like KGB false memories
and a general Cold War relief, if it wasn’t for the declassified
McCarthy. Aitken wonders how many tears collect
in the phone. Turn to the zombie fictions for the chronicle
of the Western’s final parallelism: a West parallel with West.
Find a real shore.

So, his adoption to our supernumerary redoubt, which can only
claim sebum as a concertina moat, clashes with polite society,
and it isn’t long before our adoption is given the name Palestine.
Much of our politics gathers the deleting name.
So many dead leaving sinecure; hydrate more to make
sure the punch hits jelly and absorbs the universe.

Her hand is propped to her head.
Is this melting or thinking the prop.
Compass, stylus, VCR or GPS device, she is perfectly calm.

*








What did the old fool teach you that dissolves?
Though leathers for spacious spooled flesh
make the Great Eastern highway distinct from the lecture,
the domestic from the landed, not entirely timber.
Woods for the acetone of course, and the methylated,
the windbreak will keep children’s certitude warm
now that the lunar is less popular than, frankly, the void.
Titian and Darwin imagined, so K and Hamlet,
I ask Portbou,
Montserrat is no treaty when treat is evacuation
is caves of ice, antres dark, and in toto.
The gasket imploded on course to flight from all else.

Having been to rehab, the authenticator is conscious
that documentation is the threshold the nineteen sixties
Fluxus breaches when rushing through it in
three canvases. World fascicle breach. But the authenticator
likes, for example, dilation, red eyes and cheeks, candid bones,
whittled ears, the inversion of peevishness, the pallor rose,

Chelsea, Balmain, elsewhere.

When the papers put out the hit on his capture, and the tall man
toppled by style and hygiene becomes a lintel
in the renascence arch, which isn’t as parodic as it wanted to be,
the graffiti engravings get kind of serious, and kind of
indicting, if stentorian intention technology taciturn.

*








The proximity to celebrity is celerious and,
like Putin’s truth serum, savoury,
lathering a dangerous guinea pig
for transpacific courtship,
making both hemispheres mutually seem sad
and irreconcilably asymmetrical.
Trainee, play some music before you’re torn to bits
and I become a twin cam.
Trainee, forget the songs from childhood,
don’t you remember the bees swerving for callistemon?
It’s often the moment you try a hypnagogic move
that you fall asleep, speaking up or inhaling,
or snore stuttering referendum.

The taxi rank poll, a queue, thrives with sleepers.

*








She isn’t awake, but the story of her dreams
structures the kaleidoscope ciphers
resembling this genetic history of commons,
when exposed as cardinal.

Newtown’s crowd was silent at the peak of its throng,
there is so much commonality in certitude.

Views of the streets from the streets street-view.

The cars come in unpainted and unprogrammed,
the documentation is timed, not signed.

Actually, boredom and the quorum are doing famously.
Watch:

The vanishing point returned rotten
It was conscious, and Jupiter nursed the solar
System tampering, setting
Noun antiquity centripetal, good enough
All the wine I need to drink
To throttle the voice
I’d like to put him on trial for each compulsion
He foists when he leaves early
For quadrivium
He might be sprung, call it sprung esteem
If I was there for 1P/1982 U1, 1986 III
I hope more to be there 28th July 2061
If only to mark the tiny limits of his avenues
Perforce his churlishness
I am not a fontanelle
But a vacuum and an island mouthpiece spun
It’s the snore that starts the cramp,
Between the capstones the bougainvillea

But I’m mostly sad about the universe
But only because the universe is a diamond
When I ask for lead or sulphur
It’s his head melts with lead and burns with sulphur
A system sings the melody I prearranged
For Palestine’s renascence, but over time
Something more like a Doppler drag takes over
There hasn’t been melody for ages
In fact, I think a tone from petroleum jelly
Was high-jacked at my birth
They called it melody, but it has long been
Sebaceous ocean crystal
Suddenly Stravinsky sounds generous
And romantic; he wants me to dance with him
I might I think dance with jelly

I might I think dance with jelly
And romantic; he wants me to dance with him
Suddenly Stravinsky sounds generous
Sebaceous ocean crystal
They called it melody, but it has long been
Was high-jacked at my birth
In fact, I think a tone from petroleum jelly
There hasn’t been melody for ages
Something more like a Doppler drag takes over
For Palestine’s renascence, but over time
A system sings the melody I prearranged
It’s his head melts with lead and burns with sulphur
When I ask for lead or sulphur
But only because the universe is a diamond
But I’m mostly sad about the universe

Between the capstones the bougainvillea
It’s the snore that starts the cramp,
But a vacuum and an island mouthpiece spun
I am not a fontanelle
Perforce his churlishness
If only to mark the tiny limits of his avenues
I hope more to be there 28th July 2061
If I was there for 1P/1982 U1, 1986 III
He might be sprung, call it sprung esteem
For quadrivium
He foists when he leaves early
I’d like to put him on trial for each compulsion
To throttle the voice
All the wine I need to drink
Noun antiquity centripetal, good enough
System tampering, setting
It was conscious, and Jupiter nursed the solar
The vanishing point returned rotten


In Belfast, there is certainty of a trickle
which is a tirade. The elephants abominate early sparkle

to swollen innocence, the tarp for the sports car
hides all of the stag beetles at the biconvex meniscus

of Lana Turner and Lana Turner
in the paranoid projection of self in fifties and void

World another matter which does not resemble America
but a quaint acre, which in every way is a failure

the falser history of all nameless beginnings
at lawn, not bitumen

At bitumen the glass, the glasses,
the vitreolalia of the quake of near-future

corpuscles of vision shunting and burbling
gasping for truth, but at Belfast there is a certainty

of a trickle which is a tirade
The Southern Ocean is mostly ongoing

and snarls like a Rottweiler, pumice driveway
is the first lottery

There aren’t any more lotteries
I wish the cinema was funnier, and not just funnier than

it is but funnier than it once was, because
there is always a moment in Buster Keaton where

eloquence of form smirks. Smirks are not funny.
Is it only the big events, like a falling house, that matter

I don’t want to emulate a single modern comedian
in this ballroom of deadpans of history, though the stopped

watches in crystal might be enviable
The dumbwaiter is a person

I had no idea
It is the first machine, which a pulley rates late in,

so I have confused the bodies of events,
but not many houses have, thankfully

but not many houses have, thankfully
so I have confused the bodies of events,

It is the first machine, which a pulley rates late in,
I had no idea

The dumbwaiter is a person
watches in crystal might be enviable

in this ballroom of deadpans of history, though the stopped
I don’t want to emulate a single modern comedian

Is it only the big events, like a falling house, that matter
eloquence of form smirks. Smirks are not funny.

there is always a moment in Buster Keaton where
it is but funnier than it once was, because

I wish the cinema was funnier, and not just funnier than
There aren’t any more lotteries

is the first lottery
and snarls like a Rottweiler, pumice driveway

The Southern Ocean is mostly ongoing
of a trickle which is a tirade

gasping for truth, but at Belfast there is a certainty
corpuscles of vision shunting and burbling

the vitreolalia of the quake of near-future
At bitumen the glass, the glasses,

at lawn, not bitumen
the falser history of all nameless beginnings

but a quaint acre, which in every way is a failure
World another matter which does not resemble America

in the paranoid projection of self in fifties and void
of Lana Turner and Lana Turner

hides all of the stag beetles at the biconvex meniscus
to swollen innocence, the tarp for the sports car

which is a tirade. The elephants abominate early sparkle
In Belfast, there is certainty of a trickle

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

untitled

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Behrouz Boochani

Here, in the neighbourhood of the people who stare for twenty-four hours solely at walls and metal, the presence of animals is a virtue; That flock of birds gliding at night under the dramatic moon creates a magical and striking scene in our minds; So to the orchestra of frogs that have no home except a lagoon that clings to the ocean; Shunning the ocean as they grow old, the eldest crabs sink into the damp mud under the fences and after a while drift into a deep sleep; Slithering under the fences curious snakes sometimes enter the prison like strangers and usually lose their lives for their innocent trespass; When the unique fish-eating eagle with a white neck dives into the ocean bed it catches a big fish; Colourful parrots love to hold their family, gathering on the tallest coconut trees. Here animals are the finest elements in the mind of a lonely prisoner who has no interests but the sky, the ocean and the jungle, all beyond the fences.

Behrouz Boochani, Manus Island

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

The Gates to Dismaland

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Alex Griffin 
A coastline, strung by						
(Larkin) ‘forgotten boredom,’ studded
with distant faux pas.                                                             London Bridge,	  			  
                                                                                                                                falling or nay,                         Wet meat-like
Though                                                                                      ’tis like a wedge,                     Simon Cowell
The snoring cliffs ask                                                             ’tis not?                                     falls from the
whether fun was ever the problem.                                                                           black grey sky
                                                                                                                                A bridge rules                        in the old man
                                                                                                                                                                    And      is snoring	
                                                                                                                                                                                  out
                                                                                                                                                                                  and overboard
The sky: optimistic as Martin Amis
            after his third wank for the day.
            All London tourists do is 
            hump bricks. Here a’ Dismaland, lad,
            they queue up for hours for some 
            disenchanted castle, petrol tankers
            made taffy, fake security hassles.
            Don’t fucking touch the graffiti, 
            it’s heritage listed. No spray cans, 
            but there’ll be Damon Albarn on Tuesday. 
            You know. He sang the shipping report. 

Get knotted.                                                                    retinue
Four quid’ll get you in have a look around                                            ensemble
There are no staircases:                                                      zoning
you can look down from anywhere.                                                       staff
Banksy is a spectre over Old Europe,                                           rounding up,
a gust of well-priced shadows muttering 
in the awning of the Tate, and this is his
Kingdom, Unreal City, this shrine to melting solids
                                                                                            It is now safe to Brexit your computer

            Love your neighbor. Talk is that the Arab
            refuses to exhibit near the Israeli, but Banksy
            patches it up. As Pussy Riot pussy riot,
            another Alf Garnett sunset yawns
            over a Damien Hirst beachball,
            yanking on the scrote for luck.
            Empire's splendour all rancid, like
            opening Tutankhamen's tomb, 
                      and finding nothing but jars of piss and nu-metal mixtapes
 
            After they pack up the old lido, cart away 
            the objets, the Burning Man thingo, after
            Exit Through The You-Know-What,
            the baths will be empty again, and after all
            an empty swimming pool is a way of saying                                  900 years of
            swim elsewhere. And they do. Far from                                          XBOX and Lucozade
            the village green TVs, betshop kids playing,
            they clog up the lovely postcard, travel dot com,
            they swim, wretched. Heaven knows, miserable. 
            That joke isn’t funny anymore. But Strangeways
                                                                                           here he comes
                                                                                                burning books, 
                                                                                                the collected Archer, as 	
            if to say, there is enough here: we can begin to dismiss.
            First against the wall nonsense. Whither sorting hat.
            The fish and chip shop owner says it was l o v e l y, 
            while it lasted. He’s exhausted, now, though.
            Too much business! Run off his feet.
            Finally, Every day was like Sunday.

                                                                        I press my nose into my jacket and report:
                                                                        How do I tell Ma’am that
                                                                        disappointment is expectation’s reward?
                                                                        How do you handle getting everything at once?
                                                                                                Except to reject what
                                                                                                comes next?
People are taking photos of a water cannon.
Diana allegory. A mother and child are to be 
dwarfed by a tsunami. Banksy is a succubus &
any wet September you choose, you’ll find
the centre cannot hold back your hair 
as you chunder on the pavement.  
BANG BANG, and not a shot fired.
            Listen
            I'm a million ages past you								
                                                learnt to expect so many. I was not born to expect so many. 

As the baths were locked up to their solitude,
      we took down the tents, the notion being we give 
            them to the refugees o’er in Cally. There’ll be a 
                        piece o’ Dismaland there. It’s fine though we tell em,
                                                you keep it

                        May the sun never set. 
                        Contiki softly worms thru tin air.
                        Some new light goes out on the harbour.
            Even the new P.J. harvey album sucks &

The subject is closed
Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Liam Ferney

Seriously, spree killings are part of the furniture.
Once you get used to it you’ll hardly notice,
besides that new paleo place is. the. bomb.
Don’t mention the free advice you get
from strip mall shonks, just relax into your latest font.
Let the almond milk piccolo do its trick
and don’t mention the licks
the arsenal tallies torqueing free trade.
We are all Fat Men ready to detonate
at the spare promptings of sleeper cells
plotting cancer in a body’s obscure crevasse.

When it’s time to leave:
forget the bill, gild our lies.
Frothy Jetsons swooshing in vacuum tubes till payday.

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

Creative Vacancy

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Lachlan Brown

You jump at chancy Snapchat
possibilities, your suitcase eyes

looking better beneath the third
filter. You’re sitting here with

technology’s slouch, sinking
further into the selfworld

imagining a terrifying flightpath
from London to Kuala Lumpur

to anywhere really. ‘Be yourself,
Everyone else is already broken.’

At least that is what you intuit through
this cracked screen, apps scattered

across it like Bondi Beach’s littered
surface on Australia Day, the sky

described as azure by the pen
of the fabulist, by the massive finger

swiping right on more brilliant weather
ahead. So scroll down bright sunshine;

imagine me with wallet hands,
just dispensing money and cheap-grace.

Imagine me as the drunk, punching
his PIN into a macca’s EFTPOS machine

before declaring, ‘Cheeseburgers for all!’
And much later remind me to lawyer-

up when the city finally dissolves
into fine print, books a trial date,

tables itself as solid evidence.
New brief in these days of peril.

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

X-Codes, or Katrina Crosses

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Cassandra Atherton
You survive the flooding of the Lower Ninth Ward by taking cover in the bottom quadrant of my heart. Body count zero, I scrawl, to let people know you are safe. I’m your search squad, your protection against natural hazards, your libertarian. Next time the floodwall fails, you’ll be waiting for me to save you from the wall of water. There will be room for you, for the seats pulled from the Louisiana Superdome, for mud-caked teddy bears, and even Fats Domino’s flood-ruined baby grand piano. I collect brokenness in my left atrium. Nature repairs her ravages – but not all.

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

Buzz

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Violet Grigoryan

Translated by Shushan Karapetian

To the Immortal Memory of Alfred

He fixed the little fold of the white table cloth, the last glass, – yes,
yes, to the right, no, it hasn’t started, – done, he wiped and set it down
next to the tall shiny towers, – will there be any
leftovers? – buzz!
shoo! – help yourselves, – just what I needed, what fine taste you have,
straight on to the caviar, like Lusok, bread-fellow,
“The woman and the buzzer: during the last supper,” how dramatic, –
no, you are not late, please enter from the right, – but the “last,” – bro, c’mon,
I had just wiped it, – no, I don’t believe: the great one would say, even for coursework
will I still make it? – you have to be convincing…
Finger foods, for small, cutsie mouthsies, white
immaculate toothsies,
the size of one bite,
Roman – ha-ha, there is no drunken elephant, but there will be soon –
arranged with a ruler, squarelets, color by color and one by one,
Lusok cried: if you go, I’ll die,
yeah they’re shooting, but this is it, are these any lesser frontlines?
stand and arrange row after row,
row after row, row after row, they come and they
g(rigi)o?
softly smeared mushroom medley under clumps of cilantro,
little hams slivered to cheese,
pinchlets of asetrina – what was it in Armenian? the blessings of distance learning-
shiny sparkly barbequed chicken on skewers …, – yes?
excuse me, help yourselves, please, yes from the right –
piece-lings of dipshit – will there be any leftovers? …

The other is whirrlling filled glasses in a big tray
with expert acrobatics;
breaking waves (saunterers’ trajectory) of Nina Ricci
Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent
Chanel no 5, Calvin Klein…

–The cream, ha-ha, of society, how newspeak! –
will he come? how long has it been?
five or six months? acting as if I was hurt, – hello, thanks a lot, yes, Thursday, –
so he would know my worth, miss me, call after me,
instead I hear – buzz! – the good news, the little round bomb
ba ba boom! on me …
Thrift, thrift,
thrifty management of feelings,
the funeral baked-meats did coldly furnish
forth the marriage tables, – no, I haven’t presented
a project, well I wasn’t here, you are in, right? – argh, it’s pestering me,
shoo! Sol Partre! – yes, the topic is good, – to the syrup of my lipstick,-
good luck to you, savior of women, – force a smile, – yes, yes,
Thursday, – will he come? …

I should have been a pair of ragged claws …

Here’s the ambassador, with a white smile, for the sake of those devoted to
Toh lera unce, freehd om, and puh pah peace …
Puh pah pee peace, yes, of course, yes, for the woman, too,
And for the child, Hector’s scraps,
but you stop becoming narrator in the process,
the only thing that’s coming on to you, shoo! and only on your lipstick: is this,
what are you to do, brains nicht, you didn’t have a husband or a proper home,
stubborn señora –

Oh, eternal feminine wail …

Writerjournalistartistsingerpainterdesigner,
the cream…whoa, what’s this ruckus, oh, ohh! of course,
it’s he himself, his foregone majesty – who can stand it, can you say shoo to this one? –
– the state is also pleased with this program
and participates, like so hand-in-hand, – to the encircling
microphone clutter, a Hugo Boss pistil, for the Gucci, Prada, Polo,
leaf cluster, –
for our nation, defense
is our defenselessness – to the tray, through tight cracks, –
how newspeak! – there is no more white? – submissive, compliant, and with a golden smile:
I’ll bring it right now, – and the waves, – for me too! – and more, more and more …

I’ll fuck your mother eh for our nation …

At night Luso, – this one’s Luso too – will slowly take her shirt off
her tired shoulders and before washing it: to the camera, –
it’s the type of job where one always need to be clean, taken care of, you know? –
she’ll bring it up to her nose, ah, what scents from remote worlds, a green
cape, a sailing-vessel, a star-studded hotel, chalices
full of black caviar, coralalalal, sand … struggle,
struggle klepto …
– Hey, hey, look, it was this one today, there is no more wh-
ite?, – he’ll take his nose out, so that he can turn and look
at the television, to the small, cutsie, mouthpiece,
white, immaculate tooth demonstration, – for our nation
like so, hand in hand, – it was the voice of the scent of the parallel world …

– Here you are with red, – white-lacquered delicate nails, mmhm: “Close up,”
diamond-condensed middle finger and thumb, pinky sticking out, – thanks,
oops, oh no, – idiot, it hasn’t even started; a stain on the table cloth, – excuse me,
it spilled, huh, turned into a Japanese
flag … No worries, – turn it … stur … sturgeon!
I remembered, – turn this way, – Zara, one sec, from the shoulder, and one more
excuse me-thank you, – turn that way, –
you know, Gaudi was wonderful, I fell in love, but it was really hot,
Paris in July, not a single museum, I’ve seen them all,
just sheer relaxation, oh, how I’ve tired from this project, –
of course, you’ll grow tired, ten months of the year
you’re loitering about in Europe, shameless grant-eater,
constantly dilly-dallying with the consul, – the middle of July?
it looks like I may have an invitation to an exhibition, perhaps we’ll see each other,
umm, I don’t know the location of the hotel yet, – screw you! sticky gossiper, – yes,
I’ll tell him of course, kiss and bye bye, – to Hector bye-bye,
bye-bye to Hector, bye-bye until death, – how did he say it? until death
I am on your side … ‘till death do us part, joice and rejoice,
crashing cymbals, the baked meat at the funeral repast,
with the accompanying celebrations of the welcome-baby …

You’re good at creating melodramas,
the whole hoopla is for you; yup, there is nothing else,
what’s Hector to you? or you to Hector
that you may shed a tear for him,
like some slut, measure the bile of your heart with words, wo
r r ds, yuck,
curse like a prostitute, like a house-maid,
tsk-tsk! shame on you shame on you shame on you shame on you sh
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame –
you are hell! you are it for yourself,
red-hot needles, on the lining of your dress,
red polka dots on white
yippie! and again, even sharper and sharper, even deeper …
Alimony for the heart – how legitimate! pah pah pah
puh pee, and no bomb or the like, eece of the granny panties
a hefty badaboom
hit your unrivaled society, alas, your unspoken tongue,
how I loved your Parthian, wimp, wuss …
If there were a way to become Sherlock from sissy Watson’s blah-blah
all of us wouldn’t know spy Onik’s address …

I’m fine, thank you, not yet, hope you will join us, –
force a smile, clink your glass, pht, shoo! damned thing!
good thing I saw it early on, otherwise it would have been
an appetizer with the wine, – this July? no, please …, – how did you
say contra … , – it’s been ages, – good thing he approached me, it was the last notch of
the childish babbling of English, – how are you, dear Gago? – see you, – oh yeah,
contract, – well, I’ve lost weight, I am on a diet,
yes, I’ll eat something, uh huh, Thursday, tell Gayan, –
let me smile open mouthed a bit more to this group, – probably a peach, – will he
come?…

The devil asks the Turk, the Georgian,
did you see Mara’s suntan? Gaudi, he-he, it was sooo hot, ho-ho,
listen, did you see Khcho’s piercing? I liked it a lot,
no way, not him, he has a lover, she’s a new chick, yup, come close so I can tell you,
but she’s not a girl, you’re not deaf, are you? hey girl, don’t tell anyone,
he-he, ha-ha-ha, she’s a virgin, but a boy, – whisper and rustle,
whisper and rustle, whisper and rustle, I am shivering slowly
cold, monotonous,
the raindom washed my formless shadow, I am not you anymore,
I am an owl, squeak-squeak!
did you eat my coconut? how was the taste of my … Oh, thanks, thanks,
where did I leave my lighter? – a rhetorical question
for the supposedly fiery Prometheus…

-We’ve gathered nicely, we can start the revolution …
-Hey man, for once, allow us – when did his majesty
approach? – to breathe
calmly, your revo, I’ll be damned! that
lution will not run away to the forest,
leave it for tomorrow, – amicable laughter, Turk and Georgian,
Zara and Mara, Gago and Khcho, devil and Gaudi, revolt and bolt, whisper and rustle,
ow, my stomach, yes, need to eat,
perhaps a peach, Alfie? perhaps, per
haps, the wine numbed me and the elitescented
waves, ah, I wonder, who pops your
pimples? my revolutionized, – well, the microphone,
will I still make it? they are just prepping it, –
and that one with the big yellow head,
that would always sprout under your right shoulder blade, – hey, did you notice
the blonde midget? the yellow head,
barely under the arm, – oops, am I already speaking out loud
to myself? -but how she’s landed
the sugar daddy, – velvet and fur, violin, piano, –
now do you know why they’re fucking? –
don’t exaggerate, – did I say it out loud again? – ten fingers and a tongue,
she does a good job of paying him back with grateful
fake orgasms, aah aah aah –
I’ll buy it, I’ll buy it, – on his favorite piece of beautiful furniture, –
my bed, do you remember how it snap! and I still haven’t fixed it,
the Bible, a dictionary, of the old East, the new West,
poetry, and so on, well
according to its thickness … Will the velvet lady
pop pimples?

A woman’s bed, full of sorrow…

Perhaps a peach, perhaps, perhaps, per
haps, will you eat a peach for life? or co
still conut? still swell, still fart
in front of the velvet lady? drums with your behind …

Ah, the mournful sobbing of my violin …

Oh, who now massages your feet?
who wipes your forehead with lotion?
holds your face with two palms
pressing your lids with both thumbs, –
take off your glasses, do you see
up close? tell me,
and what do you see? –
important things? with your eye? no way,
oh, if you would play
kitty-kitty –
in the Luxembourg gardens…
But are there Luxembourg gardens in the world?
where does the red flag hit the thorny scarlet rose
beyond words?
where is the bee – that is not seen, but heard, – speaking buzz-ish
in his ear?
and does the wind retain the whizzing of the z during translation?
or does it tatter one by one and each and every z
takes a letter to the fields far from the dandelions…
But are there dandelions? are the fields
on the other side of the hill there? is the sun there? is there a star
and moon? does the water plummet from the river to the ravine?
but is the ravine there
beyond words?
If there is sun, then why do the mornings rise in black darkness?
if there is water, why am I thirsty?
if the bee exists, why did the scarlet-red rose wither in my hand?
if there is the ravine, who is that jumping off
that is not the self? But … heartless girl …

No, don’t lie to me, there is no one, they are not here,
I’ve seen them in a parallel place, in another world,
here there are words that confirm them,
but now they are already bearing false witness,
but now they are already their graves,
but now they already smell like death,
but now already …

How far away is the parallel world from the heart of your heart? …

One, two, parallel, yes, it sounds good, three prizes:
1. best
2. best
annnd, the bes …
annnd, the bes …
my very first, my Turk, my Georgian, my devil, my Gaudi, –
waves of emotion and the stink of sweat
from the corners and cracks of ChanelGucciBoss …
– I wasn’t doing my work for the medal or the prize –
the champagne was mine, that’s for Nvard, she was just here, that green-turquoise over there –
yeah, what did I want to say, may the worthy be appreciated.
–Well, of course, ok, I am going to go eat something, probably
a peach, I am on a diet, say hello to Nvush
if I don’t see her, and breaking the waves,
lacerating, la-cerrrrr-attt-ing …

I broke the waves so you, so I, so
that you could rise up
here today, shit on me – what a causeandeffect
conclusion –
kick me in my stupid ass, throw me on the ground and wipe your feet on me,
just like this line, row after row, like an army of long-legged glasses
men were lined up in front of me, oh, frailty, thy name … what? –
ah these women, love over and over love over and over love …

But of course, I wasn’t doing my project for a medal or a prize,
the important part is to participate, we are all for the same important goal – listen, did you see?
this harlot’s ex-fucker has already come with his wife,
she probably still hasn’t seen them, when I said: it wasn’t for the prize, she smirked,
now go and laugh over there, did you see how she had lost weight? Laurel-Hardy,
probably from active masturbation, he-he, a cigarette
in her expert fingers, always a cigarette, yuck, fake,
cuckoo loony old woman, she’s completely lost it,
she’s already talking to her self, uh huh, enough already, one-two,
one-two, we said it sounds good already, like a fly she meddles in everything, nutty
fucker, say hel-loo to Nuh-vush, someone should ask, does Nvush
even give a shit about you, can I tell you something for real: would you believe it
if I said I don’t even care, whoever it’ll be, as long as it’s not Nvard, with her father’s position
everywhere …

I trampled on my father’s crown, the golden fleece your prize,
I tore my brother to pieces, threw him in the sea,
I abandoned my home, my own shore, I abandoned my homeland in the water,
My pair of children, I …
– You don’t have a child to pop the pimple? –
you are hell, you for yourself, when there is someone else sitting
inside of you –
o virgin kiss-ass daughter of Babylon, blessed is the one,
who will repay you your recompense,
who will treat you the way,
that you have treated others,
blessed is the one, who will take your child from you,
and smash him on the rocks,
Oh, dear Kikos, oh, dear Kikos …

Through the waves through the waves through the waves,
hey, careful, little one, where are you running? where did you come from? what’s your name?
where is your brother?
my mom has your, she has your smell too,
what about this, does she have some of this? –
a prize for the protection of oppressed women, –
oh my prize, my red medal,
on someone else’s chest,
a prize for finding women,
for putting a tongue in their mouth,
and with that same tongue, for mouthing off, – mhm, you were one of the judges, right?
you know, in the villages it’s only darkness,
just like the middle ages,
they beat women, can you believe it? those same wretched ones,
who toil in the fields all day, in dung and, you know? this bullshit,
and in the kitchen, I mean everywhere –
sorry, hey Nvard? they were looking for you, – the men get drunk, go
home and beat those miserable ones, to whom they have not given even
one drop of love, no warmth and no care, what language is that in? with what do they
eat with? – sexual object – that’s it, nothing else,
excuse me, tell me, why are you in a flutter, girl? they still haven’t announced the prize … whaaat,
yes, I saw, I saw,
and that’s the object, he-he, sexual, she’ll see right now, you’ll see how her head
has remained bowed, she can’t take care of her own issues, she is solving other
women’s problems …

Hey, idiot women, hey, Dridorian
ten girlies, down there, for whom have you
painted yourself scarlet red? or should I send you the good news in the mail? for the lot of you snoring in the donkey’s ear, ill –
informed sluts, are you still waiting for that majestic facade, on which
you’ve inflated your egos so? … Now watch how I am
shredding you into pieces,
shredding and discarding,
and needle by needle, under the nailzz, sprrrraying rrrred
on rrrred, on the blood, sprrrrinkling a good dosse of salt, garrrrlic, and pepperrr,
how I am brrringing you to yourrr
kneezzz, on a sharrrp shingle, so faccce to faccce
arrrm in arrrm, waillll like that, I am going to wrrrring poizzon
from your grrrroanz and whisperzz, –
-Mr. President, here is the white, –
and a pearl, for thy heal(th) … oh my,
hey girl, oh my, it/he/she fell …
Perhaps the rope was too thin, girl, perhaps, per
haps –
well it’s ok, nothing was left in it/him/her,
but for the new little one, that is going to be born, perhaps it would be enough –
yes, it’s a good little one, minus the footnotes, over 300 …
No! don’t hit it with the trophy, girl, yuck, how you smashed it …
Oh, eternal feminine buzzing (3 threes) …

cut


Translator’s note:

The reference to T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in the dedication reflects the attempt by Violet Grigoryan to tackle – in a manner modeled by Eliot – the impossible task of rendering the explosive cacophony of inner thought into the physical and tangible poetic medium. The intensity and richness of the work comes from various factors, including the numerous nuanced invocations to Armenian and international works as well as the deliberate interweaving of various registers of Armenian, along with a fluid multilingualism between Armenian, Russian and English. These intra- and inter- literary and linguistic leaps were quite a challenge to convey in a translation, to say the least. Although Grigoryan’s intentional nonconformity to linguistic and literary standards (of all kinds) and preference for constant ambiguity may seem overwhelming at first, they only add texture to the main characters’ battle with their double consciousness and the author’s shared encounter with the limitations of the poetic medium.

Shushan Karapetian

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged ,

Distance Theory | Teoría de la distancia

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Valerie Mejer Caso

Translated from the Spanish into the English by Torin Jensen

A body in its passerine excellence looked at me. I didn’t notice right away. It takes time to know what in reality has been passing. And so we’ve written letters, long ones and fun ones, others that confess unmentionable things. And for all we’ve said in them I don’t know your house, you don’t know mine, and you’re several countries away. At least we fit within the illusion that we’re “Latin Americans,” that “we come from immigrants who had wanted to return home.” Anyway, you’re so far away the only time we went to your country we flew over the snow-capped Andes. I had read what you’d said about that mountain range, but it’s true that to see it and be seen by it was something else. So it’s exactly where you understand the price you pay for distance. On a map you’re a horse and I’m a mare, the two of us are the same color, nearly the same size and by a whim of mine we are apparently the size of the country where we we’re born. We’re separated meridians that I’ve painted in blue and white in memory of the sky and the clouds (that you transformed on the page) and if you add up our drawn bodies, if we stretch them out on the map, we would close the distance between our countries (on the map). A verbal measure that exists between wanting and talking and living to want to talk, of seas and nothing, of pasts and of everything. So we’ll speak tomorrow with uncertainty but with a full mouth. Dying daily, drawing and writing nonsense. For the other side of the map measures the still bird, the one I said looked at me. So this theory goes, my infinite friend. It serves as no more than a letter, but it isn’t a letter, it doesn’t negate the distance. It’s nonsense, but it’s the only home where you and I find each other.


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Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged ,

Constellation

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Ella Skilbeck-Porter

… thought is not a sentence at all, but, after several explosions, a fallout in words … Hélène Cixous

… Strolling under a constellation
some moments strike like lightning
spasmodic astral body, gambler’s luck
“toute pensée emit un coup de dés”
ink swirling residual patterns down a sink.

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

Sanctuary267

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Anne Elvey

In February 2016, after a High Court ruling against a challenge to the legality of Australia’s practices of arranging for the detention of asylum seekers in offshore facilities, a grass roots campaign mobilised around the slogan #LetThemStay. 267 people, including many children of whom 37 were babies, had been brought to the mainland for medical and related reasons; they were now threatened with return to detention in Nauru. Photographs of the infants appeared on the front page of daily papers in the Fairfax group. A Brisbane hospital, several churches and some State Governments were among those who responded with offers of sanctuary. To date many of the 267, including all the babies, have not been returned to Nauru, but are in community detention in Australia. (Information drawn from Get Up Campaign and a variety of daily news articles.)

At 31 March 2016, there were 468 people (363 men, 55 women, 50 children) in detention in Nauru, and 905 men in detention on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. 1679 people including 17 children were in various levels of detention facility in Australia or Australian Territories, from Christmas Island to Villawood, from Perth to Melbourne. 655 people (184 men, 154 women, 317 children) were in community detention in Australia.


Sanctuary 267

Note: The names listed are not those of asylum seekers per se, but reflect the diversity of persons, any one of us, who might have been in this situation.


Sanctuary 267

Aadya.
Aaron.
Abdallah.
Abdul Rahman.
Abed.
Abraham.

Adam.
Aditi.
Ahmed.
Ai.
Aicha.
Alejandro.

Alexandra.
Ali.
Alice.
Aline.
Alonso.

Althea.
Amahle.

Amar.
Amelia.

Amina.
Aminata.
Anna.
Angelo.

Antonio.
Anya.

Ariel.

Asmita.
Augustine.

Ava.
Avery.
Awa.
Aya.

Aziz.

Bakary.
Bandar.
Bandile.
Barbara.
Beatrice.

Benjamin.
Berat.

Bintou.

Bokamoso.
Bolormaa.
Bruno.
Camilla.
Carlos.

Carmen.
Carolina.
Celine.
Charlotte.
Chih-ming.

Chloe.
Clarence.
Con.

Dalal.
Daniel.

David.
Dejan.
Diego.
Dimitar.

Diya.
Djeneba.
Doha.
Dylan.

Eisha.
Eitan.
Elena.

Elise.

Elizabeth.
Elnur.

Emil.
Emilia.
Emily.
Emma.
Eric.

Esther.
Ethan.
Fahd.
Farah.
Fatiha.

Fatima.

Fatoumata.
Feng.

Fozia.

Frances.
Francesca.
Frank.

Gabriel.
Gamalat.

Gamila.
George.

Giovanna.
Goran.

Guo.
Gustavs.

Habib.
Habiba.

Hai.
Hana.

Hannah.
Hao.
Harper.

Hassan.
Hasti.

Hatice.
Hawa.

Ha-yoon.
Hessa.
Hina.

Hinano.
Hiro.

Hoda.
Hussein.
Hydar.

Ibrahim.
Iminathi.
Indira.
Ion.
Irene.

Isabella.

Isidora.
Islande.

Jack.
Jacob.

James.
Jana.

Jandamurra.
Javier.
Jay.

Jayden.
Jean.

Jennifer.
Jeremiah.

Jesse.

Jessica.
Jie.
Ji-woo.

John.
Joon-seo.

Joo-won.
José.
Joshua.

Julie.
Jun.
Justin.

Kadiatou.
Karabou.

Karim.
Karima.
Kavya.
Khadija.
Khaled.
Khayone.
Kheira.
Kirra.
Klea.
Krishna.

Kungawo.
Kyla.
Leá.

Lejla.
Leon.
Lesedi.
Lethabo.

Liam.
Lili.
Linda.

Logan.
Louise.
Lowitja.
Lucía.
Luis.
Mahmoud.
Malak.

Manua.

Mary.
Maryam.
Marwa.

Mateo.

Max.
Maya.
Mehdi.

Meriem.

Mia.
Molly.
Mona.

Muhammed.
Mustafa.

Myra.
Nada.

Natalia.
Nesreen.
Nicola.

Nishi.
Noah.
Noreen.

Nur.

Odval.
Olive.

Omar.
Omri.

Onni.
Oumou.

Paul.
Peng.
Peter.

Poema.
Prasert.

Ralfs.

Ramón.
Renz.
Reza.

Richard.
Rin.
Ruby.

Ryan.
Sakineh.

Salma.
Sarah.
Sekou.

Selim.
Sinayabonga.
Si-woo.
Sophia.

Souta.
Stefan.

Sunita.
Susan.
Tali.

Tao.
Tareq.

Tehei.
Teiva.
Thomas.

Ting.
Tobias.
Umar.
Valentina.
Valeria.

Vedad.

Vincent.
Victoria.
Virginia.

Wei.
William.
Wiremu.

Xian.
Ximena.
Yael.
Yan.
Yassin.
Ya-ting.

Ye-joon.

Yi.
Ying.
Yong.
Yoon-seo.
Yusuf.
Yuuma.

Zara.

Zeynab.
Zhen.

Zoe.
Zofia.
Zoran.

1.         the shelter of a cloud passing across the sun
2.         stained glass rainbows her child’s face
3.         a tent that does not leak
4.         a mosquito net
5.         a seaworthy life
6.         a father rocks a daughter in time with the sea

7.         a Brisbane hospital
8.         a bowerbird chick in a poet’s home
9.         fresh water
10.        the beginning of an open text
11.        a chorus of human voices
12.        each in counterpoint

13.        the scent of familiar herbs
14.        clean sheets
15.        the sound of rain on the roof at night
16.        room
17.        space for another

18.        an unstitched coastline
19.        she sews a child’s hem with dry hands

20.        adequate employment
21.        a sufficiency of bees

22.        to commit to memory unfamiliar names
23.        of birds
24.        and flora
25.        to be alert to the redback in the garden

26.        the poet laureate of detention
27.        her bags of rice

28.        a sudden calm

29.        a tenancy of appointment
30.        a child’s construction kit

31.        a wedding cake topper snug in a pocket
32.        a woman and a man
33.        two women
34.        two men

35.        a child pours water on a child’s hands

36.        an open gate
37.        a closed gate
38.        a cool house
39.        a warm house
40.        context

41.        her hand samples the sun
42.        air shifts in a sheoak

43.        if community

44.        a possum evades a cat
45.        the milky way
46.        two stars point to a cross
47.        she looks up
48.        an infant nuzzles

49.        an insufficiency of fear
50.        a sufficiency of awe
51.        water spills over stones
52.        a monolith in the desert
53.        the first splash of rain on dry earth

54.        a gaze that dips
55.        respect
56.        quilled language

57.        the evidence of hope
58.        a free thought

59.        a breath
60.        and then another
61.        and then
62.        suddenly a hush of stars

63.        when the axle tightens
64.        a well sprung cart
65.        a linen-filled chest
66.        the rocking the rocking the rocking

67.        green eyes imprinted in memory
68.        every day a breath shared
69.        from your birth to his death

70.        a street beyond the front fence

71.        as if home
72.        as if home

73.        unbending the barbs of a polis
74.        the unpicked knot
75.        of tension
76.        of injury
77.        a story unravelling as you speak

78.        a tapestry of tact
79.        to touch
80.        without rancour
81.        to touch
82.        the nine tails only a museum piece

83.        only only only

84.        a life worth the trespass
85.        an adieu worthy of a future

86.        to approach the asymptote of your want

87.        a stability of climate
88.        if only
89.        if only

90.        she writes her name on a leaf
91.        she shuffles the forms

92.        a bureaucracy of good intention
93.        the strength of a gesture that is mostly true

94.        every impetus toward
95.        hospitality

96.        to be the word’s guest
97.        if a poem could construct a dwelling

98.        stone and wood and a candle in a niche
99.        its flicker and fade

100.       the solidity of a thing
101.       an arm, an embrace, a threshold kept

102.       she wades through stubble
103.       in an open-necked shirt
104.       the dust is stirred by her tread

105.       only the wind’s language
106.       and no need for translation

107.       a resistant symbol or a vacant sign
108.       no vacancy

109.       a handwritten letter
110.       one hundred thousand signatures
111.       a genuflection, a genuflection, a genuflection

112.       the weaving of scraps returned to the limb
113.       of the tree swaying and claws that hold

114.       your name in the mouth of a neighbour
115.       his alien kindness
116.       her shared world

117.       the comfort of culture
118.       its unsettling conservation
119.       its disturbing transformation
120.       its resilient transience
121.       and yours

122.       to name a child for an ancestor

123.       your empathy for a woman moving house
124.       freedom to exercise kindness

125.       the pronunciation of a name
126.       good will

127.       the interval between drops on a roof
128.       her face softening

129.       a head bowed, eyes closed in prayer
130.       your prayer mat on the floor of your home
131.       the hours rung

132.       a solidarity of nannas
133.       knitting

134.       a quilt of lobbyists
135.       clothed for the season

136.       frith

137.       a compassionate peril
138.       dangerous mercies
139.       the limits of the open

140.       a ruling
141.       against an unruly state

142.       a separation of nations
143.       opportunity
144.       parliamentary remorse

145.       she delivers kelp to his door
146.       a garden compost heap
147.       a wilderness of exotic species tended

148.       a white fantasy
149.       renounced

150.       historically a crime admitted
151.       a punishment postponed
152.       a tug of war between church and state
153.       a space of civility
154.       temporarily
155.       an idea in becoming
156.       towards law
157.       a way station in the rule
158.       of monarchs and monks
159.       reckoning contrition

160.       each time she sings
161.       a leaf falls
162.       a latch unhinges

163.       salutation without appointment
164.       the depth of skin
165.       her hair is held in a bird’s beak
166.       the wind takes the grey thread

167.       the vacancy
168.       a suggestion of singularity
169.       the allowance of an embrace

170.       she imagines she kneels
171.       weeping
172.       beside a hospital bed
173.       and on the tiled floor
174.       the sun spills
175.       indifferent in its own way
176.       to the raw and the salve

177.       a failure of imagination — to say this

178.       if a hand opens
179.       if a hand
180.       if a hand and a hand

181.       to have enough to give

182.       the peal of prayer
183.       the peal of prayer
184.       the peal of prayer

185.       to fashion a peace

186.       if you lean against a chimney
187.       if a house is constructed around a hearth
188.       if the fibres of the carpet soften to your steps

189.       the wear of things used well
190.       a banksia of irregular becoming

191.       what it is to be
192.       this life of generosity

193.       she walks home in autumn rain
194.       she dries her shoes in late morning sun
195.       the next day

196.       a future to welcome
197.       a future to submit to
198.       a future to shape

199.       allowing for the impossible

200.       to hear frogs in the wetlands
201.       to see five pelicans cross the sky

202.       she is chasing the cat from the garden
203.       on behalf of possums and birds

204.       to persevere
205.       to dare to speak

206.       to imagine a child
207.       an untamed growing toward
208.       ripening

209.       the wisdom of infancy
210.       to accept solace

211.       hostage

212.       the kindness
213.       that knows the needful invisibility
214.       and the crucial being seen

215.       the space bar and the tab
216.       that mimic
217.       a room of your own

218.       she practices a spare sympathy
219.       a warm drink and time to speak

220.       even the clichés of welcome
221.       written with paint on a sheet
222.       holes cut out for the wind

223.       a march
224.       a chant
225.       a banner
226.       things that fail you

227.       if you were able to visit her
228.       what would she offer you?

229.       this question of capacity
230.       this question of capacity
231.       this question of capacity

232.       if the body
233.       is a temple

234.       sanctum
235.       sanctus
236.       sacrosanct

237.       dignity
238.       a quality of a roman elite
239.       to live for an empire
240.       or its minion
241.       to be free of this

242.       aphesis

243.       quietly in the suburbs
244.       thirty-seven infants in their cots
245.       ninety-one children at play

246.       a word for preservation
247.       of other species
248.       and our own

249.       that gives to silence nothing
250.       that gives to speech nothing
251.       that gives to justice nothing
252.       in excess of hope
253.       the privilege of more
254.       than making do

255.       she is safe enough to be disappointed

256.       a star and a crescent
257.       a cross and a book
258.       an emu flying
259.       a story of bunyips
260.       and deep water
261.       a reviving flood

262.       necessity

263.       her births are accompanied
264.       her bones are buried in good time

265.       what cannot be imagined
266.       other and more than
267.       the thing you came for

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

Omniglot

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Julie Maclean

after Mica Still


if these walls could talk
they would say I like pink
& fleshly themes hares with x-rated heads
lobes suspended in amniotic fluid
ears flat back in fear and thrill

a passing prefect or someone on yard duty
might see an outline of us in silhouette
cherry – flipping, a tongue perhaps
meanderings in sharp relief

i give no turquoise clues outside
the toilet cubicle

conducting the occasional tryst
working with my hands
all ways

just you and me entering sacred ghettoes
high on fluoro dreams in your lunchbox
canned ham through cling – film

a vegemite sandwich

wolf lovers kneel at my altar
I howl in pig latin to the sky

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

neodymium

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Jordie Albiston 
Nd— experiments are conducted at the e+e− storage ring VEPP-2M in the energy range 2E=0.5-
1.4 GeV by physicists at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics    Novosibirsk    1982 to 1987
her kids born during that time    Norway's Norsk Data peaks then too with the NORD-5 32-bit
minicomputer which beats the VAX by six years so what!    Nancy-drew-Naughty-dog-New-
democracy-Nuclear-dawn    none of it matters when she becomes mother to angel daughter &
son    she does not yet feel his lanthanide pull    is blind to his laser light    walks past him at
concerts takes the same bus    miss! miss!    they are still "he" & "she" not "us"    25 years until
God forces things    & then Dear Reader the astonishing begins    a nanosnap in a late southern
spring    a beam more powered than the American Dream    o incandescent fate!    "new twin"


          it is a mighty magnet that connects us    we smash into each other like this    it marks
          us for life    a confluence of colours a duality of light an excitement of newfangled
          cells    but love so pure is dangerous & rare & one must take care    intense! intense!
          the kiss so bright the heat so huge it melts you whole before you can say "permanent
          Home" or "popular inversion" or "inertial confinement fusion"    one must take care
          protect from within    be able to say    refugees welcome!    rescue the reef!    respect
          your elders!    rape is wrong!     be able to say I-am-sorry-I-love-you-come-back-come-    
          back for the truth my darling is told like this    in the grim dark future is only cold    
          the soothsayers have spoken    St John Nostradamus George Orwell Jim Jones    it will
          come as we laugh or make love or eat    an Andromeda colliding a World War Three
          electrons finally forcing themselves free    you & me learning the latest buzz speak
          'tribulation'    'revelation'    'Armageddon'    'hell'    with Gog & Magog both clanging
          their bells & asteroids & strangelets raining on world    & Daleks descend & rapture
          upends & the fifth sun blackens & NASA announces "total existence failure of—
Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

this precise rain, this floating world

Posted on November 1, 2016 by John Warwicker

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

Phlogiston

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Les Wicks

A nonexistent element. The theory of phlogiston was devised as an explanation as to why some things burned. Materials which had lots of phlogiston were supposed to burn well, releasing the element during combustion. Disproved with the discovery of oxygen.


We need to know why we blaze, when
nothing happens as
life escapes from an aviary of scabs.

We breathe in our canopies. Watch the basket of
wants – our morning beggary,
the mansuetude of respite.

When nobody knows you,
as though pain needs an audience.
Punch the sky, kick the dirt.

Then piss out your small complaints, maybe
beat the wife & kiddies maybe
run down that odd person outside the shopping strip.

Anyone could understand, it’s
an element & they each have
their own course, their need.

Our trees are just dinner,
other life an inconvenience. We eat incandescence
as frantic hands simultaneously paint windows in their fear.

The animal intelligence avoids our sunlight.
Earth serves flammability poorly.
We know so little, in certain conflagration.

There are no apologies in legends
& futures can’t by definition
live in those written towns.

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

Time is a river, time is a bridge

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Kim Cheng Boey
Time is a river that passes through you, crossing and recrossing, rippling score of silence under the bridges of your life, and you wonder if it can be the same river or the same person twice, the amber glide of the Arno, the spring light polished in memory, a long scroll of plainsong flowing out of some deep medieval past, and I am back here in middle age, mid-river, the Ponte Vecchio downstream a golden span, a bridge crossed a lifetime ago, sniffing out echoes of that early spring morning when our steps rang out softly on the stone streets on the other side of the river, our first morning in this city that seems to go in search of itself, piazza by piazza, church by church. In the hostel kitchen Ansgar had said, “That is why I come back every year, the beautiful stone alleys and hidden gardens.” Each spring he made his way here from Skagen, after his wife’s death. His words came slow, the Nordic accent laden, as though they were slow steps in heavy snow. After breakfast he led us, shuffling in leather loafers worn as his face, through quiet streets of shuttered windows and arched doors, the stone alleys that gave nothing away, the April light shifting with each turn, brightening the top of the buildings, parleying with the counterpointing shade, foreshortening and then lengthening perspective. Ansgar moved so slow it was as if he wanted us to read the unwritten history of the city, the journal our steps traced on the rivers of worn stone. The old man’s drooping mouth curled in a child’s smile as he ushered us through a gate. To a pause in time. And we sat at the fountain in the cloistered garden, ringed by arched galleries of a convent. Ansgar held out a brown paper bag, the tremor in his hands at breakfast gone, his fingers gnarled, skin thickened from a life trade in carpentry. The cherries sparkled in the chant of light and water, and we ate without a word, on our foreign tongue the dark crimson flesh turning into sweet wine. And the pale blue light in Ansgar’s eyes answered the chords of the Florentine sun, the peace settling on his face like Victor Sjöström’s in Wild Strawberries, the peace that had travelled a long way from home, from the pine forests in the deep north, the hidden fjords of Ansgar’s life, from the past, from its glide into the future, travelling through the seasons to hold this gate in time open.

***

Time is a bridge you cross and recross, the river’s song unchanged in memory’s burnish and in your mind’s reliquary this frayed image of the naked Christ, the pale sheen of its slender carved body suspended in space, calling from the sacristy of lost time, that spring morning when Ansgar led us to the plain Romanesque façade of the Santo Spirito. In the nave we stood, still in the hull of a submarine ark, and felt the press of silence, emptiness contained, and then the distant hum, long deep waves of soundings, till like struck bells, we heard it ring on and on within us, calling us to step across the threshold, through the door in the aisle to the sacristy, the life-size crucifix bathed in the floating panes of light from the apse windows, hung by a thick wire rope. Naked Christ, not even a crown of thorns or a modest loincloth, his long slender arms held up as if in flight, the right foot nailed on top of the other foot, so the knee and hip are canted to the left, in counterpoint to the right tilt of the downcast head, its finely chiselled hippie face and eyes closed in the perfection of death. No hint of resurrection, this quiet death coming to life under the sculpting knife, unpeeled to the mortal light. Such perfection learned from anatomising corpses from the basilica hospital when Michelangelo found refuge here at seventeen. You wonder about the young man he picked to be this serene Christ, the body still garbed in its mortal dress of joy or pain, coiled in pain or taut in lust, not this loose-limbed pinioned repose. We bowed before its beauty, then bought postcards from the basilica shop. For years the dead face was taped to the wall above my study desk, till it vanished in the move to another country, another life from yours. And each Florentine spring Ansgar sent a postcard to you, then silence. Time is a river you recross, ford to the place you have been before, the past coming alive on the other shore. Memory’s guesswork, crossing another bridge, from the Duomo side, my feet feeling these streets without a map, as Ansgar’s did, trusting memory’s route, drifting past the open market, the morning light now warming the tree-lined piazza and the face of the Santo Spirito, streaming through the high windows to find us standing in the sacristy, dipped in the font of silence, as if in the vault of held prayer, before the hanging, waiting body.
Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

September 11, 1973

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Juan Garrido Salgado

That September 11 … exploded there in my country.
Yes. It exploded La Moneda in Santiago which was devoured by flames.
But. There were thousands, hundreds of thousands of tortured bodies,
crushed hands, eyes staring at the gates of death,
bodies tied to pieces of rails of evil and thrown into the deep sea.
That 11 … if Dante had not written the Divine Comedy
& Raul Zurita had not written the Anti-Paradise
still it would happen as happened it.

That September 11 … Neruda shouted: Come and see the blood in the streets
he died, his funeral was prohibited by a military Junta.
That 11 … It had not been in a chapter of Marquez’s book, Chronicle of a Death Foretold
That 11 … 1973 Kissinger and Nixon collapsed our history forever.

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

Killing Bill or whatever the hell his name is (‘Battle Without Honor or Humanity’)

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Stuart Barnes

with a line from Yeats


No one expected the second coming
out:

a burst rubber, a premature
BOOM!

‘PEP,’ you echoed. ‘I’ll drive you to
Bolsover

first thing in the
morning.’

His speechlessness a stun
grenade,

ignored
calls

blast
mines.

Hours later, Grindr’s
missiles.

*

Small: the Beef Capital: the bit of
linoleum

on which Bill or whatever the
hell

his name is
fixes

a gaze blank and
pitiless

as the sun in
Coles’s

old-fashioned produce
section.

Your imagined visor blazes
blackly,

like the Bride’s, your Yamaha sets off
yellowly.

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

1967. Bombs Rain Down on Torrey Canyon

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Ross Gibson

Blustery springtime month of March.

Supertanker Number 1.  Commercial Vessel Torrey Canyon.  Titanic proud with bulk unmatched.  Liberian in its livery.

The Captain, bonus-parched and scared of crew, shortcuts through to Northern Wales.

Metallic belly-hull of Torrey Canyon grinds eleven days on Pollard Rocks in 7 Sisters Reef betwixt Lands End and lonesome Scilly Isles.

Torrey Canyon, plump with slopping cargoed oil, is a full gorged tick throbbing megatons of goop.  Megatons.  Of crude.

A viscous slick anoints the oozing gash.  20 miles of stink and dreck outreaching.  From the upwelled unctuous rocks and over to the offshore trench:  a thickness slow and black as recent dread.  Furthermore  …  an extensive, tanged corridor glugs 70 miles northeast&west along the Cornish coast.

(Old men now convince themselves they walked upon the lolling pelt.  Lifeboat to lifeboat and back to shore.  So glutinous, the gunk, they claim, in cold salt Channel water.  ‘No mere thin smeared meniscus, this’).

Too, shoreline Normandy prepares to get some sludge, while Paris lambasts Downing Street, which lisps in diplomatic snoot, ‘It’s the Liberian lowlife, Jacques; nothing’s down to us’. The French say, ‘What? You have no men with force?’  Then Harold Wilson cracks the shits. He summons Royal Naval Buccaneers hangared up in Lossiemouth. (Garrison town smashed by bluff Norwegian Seas assailing northern Scots.) Wilson’s roused to shout, ‘Just fix this fucking UP.’

The Chief of Buccaneers thinks out loud, ‘Let’s bomb the craft and set the oil alight  …  with napalm mercy-dashed by hot-lined Yanks from ‘Nam.’ (It’s 1967, recollect.)  The Yanks respond, ‘This one’s gratis, all on us, so long as you just let us stay and play.’  The Chief of Buccs quips, ‘Acchhh, I love a peacetime bust!’

And together this is what they do. 70,000 pounds of shrieker bombs break up and sink the Torrey Canyon while the sloppy leas of obstinate crude get doused with ‘palm-and-petrol muck.  52,000 gallons disgorged from gyring B52s.  (They see good portent in the numbers.)  Yanks drop a firebomb in this soup and bank their plane in howling climb.  The towering column of particulated flame lights up the dozy town of Tintagel.  100 miles away.  And 500,000 sea-birds cook quick to crisps in ferocious noise while galumphing through the grime.

Up in the plane, they squint and spy the ascendant whoosh of discontinued souls.  Notice next the gleaming ozone breach  – –  first time seen  – –  the Arctic Circle leaking at a scabby dent.

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