Michael Aiken Reviews Duncan Hose

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Michael Aiken

An abundance of impudence

Bunratty by Duncan Hose
Puncher & Wattmann, 2016

The bio of Duncan Bruce Hose describes the Australian poet as coming from ‘the softslang line of the chansonnier, whose reference points range between Trefoil Island, Melbourne and Coney Island.’ In Bunratty, his third collection, that ‘softslang line’ delivers a suite of deftly composed (post)modernist folk songs, characterised by a highly idiosyncratic orthography and a preoccupation with sex and booze. Continue reading →

Pages: 1 2 3
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

Review Short: Love, Sex and Death in the Poetry of Bolesław Leśmian, Translated by Marcel Weyland

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Gareth Morgan

Love, Sex and Death in the Poetry of Bolesław Leśmian
by Bolesław Leśmian
Translated from the Polish by Marcel Weyland
Brandl & Schlesinger, 2015

In this new collection of translations, Marcel Weyland acquaints contemporary readers with Bolesław Leśmian (1877-1937). The book makes us witness to the self-construction of an early twentieth century ‘outsider’ poet who won’t hesitate to invite you into his world. Weyland has taken up the heady task of translating a poetry that is difficult in its original form. Leśmian is celebrated for his creative morphing of language, playing with rhythm, and inventing of words in Polish. Continue reading →

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , ,

Done

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Madelin Newman
Her sadness sits on the couch in a burgundy floral nightie, one button missing, and eats a jar full of chocolate covered peanuts that were meant as a present for her tutor who was always so nice.

She wonders how long she can stay like this, on this couch, stuffing every pocket of her brain (each a potential source of pain) with shouting housewives and ordinary people with really great singing voices.

While she waits, she folds up her small self, her smallest self, tucks in questions (why? And aren’t I good enough?) and smooths angry creases.

When she’s ready, she will unpick it, with thick dumb fingers, and maybe she will learn or feel or remember the character of her sadness.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

The Girls of Goat Island

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Tess Barry

Goat Island is a secluded beach west of Ardmore, Ireland that can be found via a windy lane signposted for Goat Island. It was awarded the Green Coast Award for 2015.


Every morning in every season
they come to swim
the southern coast
of Goat Island.

From spring jackets and skirts
they emerge in blue bathing suits
bare legs skimming across
a cavernous beach,
heads capped in white.

Like a bevy of birds
they dip in the tide,
stroke imperceptibly out,
circle back to themselves
these girl-women.

Their shape takes the form
of the sea,
sinuous as an eyelid,
sharp as a forgotten sound.

Without a white cap, I stand out—
bare-haired, American.

After a swim they strip naked
powder breasts and towel
bottoms, hover inside
limestone hewn before time
was a word or an abstract.

They huddle close,
dress and laugh,
at ease with their bodies,
each other.

But the vigor of May
makes me shiver:
this soft Irish rain mixed
with talk, bare limbs
and wet rock.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

Recommendations for a Western Australian Coastal Pastoral

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Caitlin Maling
  1. I am thinking about limits.
    1. The gaps between limits. Liminal, littoral spaces.
    2. The most fundamental part of ‘human’ consciousness is defined by lack of limits.
    3. Unless it is limited by life and death which are themselves littoral rather than literal
  2. The beach, we say, is a littoral zone. Do I repeat myself? I repeat myself.
  3. In WA the beach is our playground, where our children grow.
    1. A playground is a fenced space.
    2. Putting a fence around the yard strikes us as being the easiest way of achieving order out of chaos, says Wallace Stevens.1
    3. When we grow into our consciousness we find our own limits and no longer need the playground.
    4. But Stevens is, of course, talking about America.
  4. In the language of early settler Australians, there was no way to describe the landscape. Even the colours were limited.
    1. To paraphrase early accounts, yellow, yellow, yellow, desert, death, where is the green?
    2. Unsurprisingly, the fields in the WA wheat belt are many shades of yellow, none of them green.
    3. The most obviously green thing of WA is the ocean.
    4. So it rolls like fields and is most fertile.
    5. But there are no sharks in the wheat fields.
  5. Flaubert says that thing about being ordered in our dailiness to be violent in our art.
    1. He is also not Australian.
  6. The US shore lyric is defined by Bloom as one of confronting limits of existence through the impassable borders of the ocean (death)2.
    1. WA literature is defined by being in the ocean, out past where your feet can touch the bottom.
  7. After the second fatal shark attack at Gracetown, people stopped putting their head under.
  8. If oceans are fields, then when you dive under the surface you are in essence burying yourself.
  9. At the panel on sharks, the audience was asked who among them had ever had a profound experience in the ocean.
    1. Everyone put their hands up.
  10. The beach must be protected, said the Premier of WA, it is our way of life. It will be our children’s children’s way of life.
  11. 11. On a clear day with your head under water everything looks green.
    1. On a less clear day, it’s the more familiar yellow.
  12. From space, two things about Australia are visible: the clearing line–a yellow chevron through the wheat belt, and the Barrier Reef–dark green in lighter green.
    1. The Reef is slowly lightening.
  13. In the 1870s whipping was outlawed in WA, the wheatbelt was cleared and Australia entered the age of enlightenment.
    1. A man’s soul might be disciplined separately from his body: rational man can be relied upon to protect his own.
    2. Aborigines continued to be whipped, often for not recognising fences.
    3. After failure to assimilate they became subject to the Flora and Fauna Act.
    4. A man can beat an animal any which way he likes.
  14. A country built on genocide is not going to preserve its intact ecosystems says the poet from the wheatbelt.3
  15. The colonial Australians we are led to believe suffered from an exile consciousness.
    1. The ocean bought us. It is how we try to get back.
  16. To catch a shark you bait a drumline and wait.
    1. If the shark is three metres: shotto to the head.
    2. Drag it past the limits of where the shore.
    3. Sink it.
  17. Pregnant sharks do not feed for months. A green moss grows in each of their seven rows of teeth.
  18. Around our bays we will place shark nets.
  19. Fences.
Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

from Letters to Allen Ginsberg

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Tara Mokhtari

1:X

A few days passed without words between us, I’ve neglected you in paper only, my spirit

Tormented as ever by my own misadventures. Bought a Black Forrest at Veniero’s on 11th, walked it through the Village

And taxied it to Brooklyn for the Doctor’s birthday, she drank bourbon despite raging allergies

Long Haired Biker from Tennessee singled me out from almost the moment we arrived, crazed wolf in Eskimo clothing

He gripped onto me with dirty fingernails accelerating from zero to a hundred in a nanosecond, his creepy hairless cat gazing little alien

Licking my toes under the coffee table, I had refused to get on his hog and left him alone with baldy in bare dwelling, Long Island City,

Rode free for thirty dollars back over the bridge looking at the Empire State Building’s guiding lights

As the car sped toward them. Showered the grime away and sang to the bath tiles and mouldy curtain,

Tried to sing a note again in bed almost asleep at 4am sounding like a mouse peeping just to confirm he’s still alive, I heard myself from outside my own body,

Now LHB won’t leave me alone, the messages rain hard and fast and I’m a little afraid to not answer or tell him he’s got the wrong girl.

Maybe this is underestimation, maybe this is fleeting futile freaked out filly overshooting the mark sick and sprinting wildly west

For no reason towards nothing, possessed. Tonight I’ll wash it down with sake and vinegary octopus with GS

I won’t tell him what happened, he doesn’t like to hear about that sort of thing, and I’ll walk home in the penitent night

Breathe the air a little deeper and swing my arms a little wider to demonstrate my vital liberty

Take the long route and put the trash out for the Psychic next door who’s terrified of the rats.


2:VIII

Ginsberg, the dilapidated tiles in West End Bar at Columbia now a bus boy’s monorail from Cuban kitchen to hollowed out dining room

Booths lined up, washed out, mahogany bookend to bookend, a miniature palm or two to fill the cavernous spaces, concealing the peeling woodwork

Did your elbows respite on that same wounded bar who nursed my penchant for duality, or did they rip it out from under you and lay me down a new one? I couldn’t know.

Dumbed myself down for the twentieth time in my beer, absconding into ruminations of you in that back booth waxing magnificent (or dumbing yourself down?)

Rejoined reality, dumbed myself down for the last time with the voids once inhabited by your bequest casting eyeballs over my parenthetical female

Foray into dumbing down of the girl, hushed the higher meditations for lower harmonies

Hid in palpable shadows of conception traversing visions of imminent insipidity:

Nightshifts ad infinitum “til death do us in”, marital sciatica nicking kinetic kindness until, paralysed, we fall on our knees in alimony—a billion words, unpenned.

West End Bar who watched you become you, watched my anaemic platitudes; we both left with much work left to do.

Out there the snow makes a Narnia out of the university grounds coating every naked tree illuminated by goblin lampposts and fairy-lights

You, the missing lion. The chill, irreconcilable.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

The Change Room

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Andy Jackson

This morning, walking almost naked
from the change room toward the outdoor heated pool,
I become that man again, unsettling

shape to be explained.
Such questions aren’t asked to my face. Children
don’t mean anything by it, supposedly, so I

shouldn’t feel as I do,
as my bones crouch into an old shame I thought
I’d left behind. Chlorine prickling

my nostrils, a stranger
compliments me on my tattoos and shows me hers –
a dove in flight over a green peace sign –

as if the canvas was unremarkable.
She turns and limps away,
and something makes a moment of sense.

I lower myself into our element
and swim, naturally
asymmetrical and buoyant. Quite some time

later, showering, the man beside me
is keen to chat – how many laps we’ve each done,
how long I’ve lived in this town, the deep

need for movement.
Speaking, our bodies become solid.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

Blackberry Caliphate

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Rico Craig

For months men with coloured stakes have pegged the suburb,
subdivided their way over the hill, toward our hidden place,
this clutch of blackberry. We’re here again, arms smeared

with sour fruit, hands nicked and bloodied from passage
through the bramble. Under our canopy there’s a lull.
Over the hill a dozer sputters diesel; you’ve put sugar

in their tanks, delivered secret spells with sticky fingers
and your two-stroke tongue. Tricks don’t hold long,
nothing works. They’ll find us, out beyond

their kerbs and cul-de-sacs, gorging on sour berries,
licking the skin from our lips. You’ve stubbed
a midden of butts in silence. I need to act now.

There are leaves to pick from your hair; I kiss
the grease on your neck, your exhaust fume breath
buries the shape of words in my ear. I guide you

to me. Exhale your weight, until we’re side by side,
in the musty dirt, damp on our shoulder blades, rabbit
eyes in the shadows. When we come in from the hills

our palms cling, sticky with blackberry; backs grass slapped,
pin-pricked with bindis and briars. In the hours
we’ve been gone, they’ve poured cement between stakes,

mapped our sandstone heart with a concrete tattoo. The footpaths
shimmer; we walk, gravel dust at our ankles, until we find
a place to kneel and cast our hands in wet cement.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

How to be an Avant-garde Ex-lover

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Jonathan Dunk 
bake sixty-eight cakes for sixty-eight mates
be apt
smuggle memes outback of the friend in hand 
roll but do not smoke
anxiously lounge at peeling deck tables
keep yr allusions deictic; it’s fun 
stoically ignore mosquitos
haunt but do not uni
If you uni be avid but ironize the fuck out of it; as though helpless before involved embrace
prefer American things; as though helpless before involved embrace
adore the stutterer
glassily believe that stylistic fetishism precipitates meaningful change
cite but do not read Derrida Marx Hegel
vertiginously mingle yr highs and lows: it doesn’t get old or sad or die
be consistent only in aggressive self-interest
assiduously court favour and spurn it
ache 
be laconic but conversational
avoid muscular usage in most senses – say it’s a heat & light thing
lineate, lineate
cobweb yr agency wherever you go
keep desire in the 'plausibly situational' box
don't think structurally - this is a party
bet 70x7 is 15591 is a long way to Gundagai
lose
be consoled that most are not so wry or strange or scared 
mutter Dransfield knowingly half-heard as dawn slips the opposite terrace &
your perfect depilate skin burns 
              white 
                             like a flare
Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

Lovers of Valdaro

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Samantha van Zweden

You are poetry
Shattered skull, fingers brushed against jaw-bone
legs tangle-gether
rhythmic bone bone bone
crippled in
piling calcium crush.

Your rhyming poses –
arched backs, stacked femurs
your ribs are beat.
You’d clatter if you could move.

Baltimore
I see myself in its decay
recognise time passing outside my body.

Collapsing roof
blown out windows
vines run me over
I am suffocated. Reclaimed.

I am the big-hit search term
‘ruin porn’.
I am a bridge built but never used,
an overpass to nowhere.

But you, lovers.
You are swept away on nothing
like words from mouths,
like been-said, like breath.

My body is abandonment, but
you are poetry.
Your rhyming poses
swept away by six thousand years of
air.

My wish for erasure
stands solid among
the rubble.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

The Instinct of Sharks

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Vanessa Page

Go back to the start,
before the loneliness of this two a.m. mating season carried you home:
watch the bruise on your thigh shrink and disappear from your skin
starve the sideshow alley clowns, take back the deal with the night

Go back to the start,
before the dance floor haze of your memory worked loose:
lift the neon-soak from the dark and let the streetlights blink off
cash in your chips, ignore the persuasion of sticky carpet

Go back to the start,
before the hammerhead light of morning burned the curtains:
unstack and refill plastic cups, distinguish every face
retrace your steps, save your judgement psalms for the unholy

Go back to the start,
before you crept out, drank tap-water from cupped hands:
let the smell of liquor dry out and vanish from your dress
hold everything together, keep your hand on your purse

Go back to the start,
before you stepped into the first terrible song of morning:
cover your tenderised flesh and count out your small change
remember how ugly the amusement park seems by day

Go back to the start,
before the last light turned off, and you forgot where your skin began:
fold and unfold on repeat, breathe deeply in the back seat of a taxi
remember the smell of blood, remember the instinct of sharks.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

She meant vegan, of course

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Melinda Kallasmae

The little lady in Recovery Room
had a gouty great toe – was nasty
with ascending infection.
Her foot was angry, but
she seethed

about Christmas
spent with her daughter.
‘A bogan,’ she said.
‘It was a bogan Christmas.’
Disapproval drew her lips

tight into a purse.
She spoke in bursts
and short sentences.
I did not have to pry
the purse open to hear

the rest of her family
no longer ate meat
but were not content
to stay vegetarians.
‘They’ve all become

bogans,’ she said –
‘No suet pudding.
No custard.
No cream.
No brandy butter.

It was chickpea chaff
–organic –
and soy something
for dessert.’
Thin smile then –

an expression too mean
to meet her eyes.
‘Soy something
doesn’t go with booze –
I kept the bottle for myself.’

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

Emily Dickinson as an Octopus with a Pre-Death Plan

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Julie Maclean

I’m afraid I can’t explain myself, sir. Because I am not myself, you see?
— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground

I

From the high-care low-life facility where my head lolls in the briny bowl
Doctor Death asks what my priorities are What goals I have in the short term
What I am prepared to sacrifice What not I’ll tell you what I want—
to make bad choices, pick a fight, drink more wine, raid the fridge at midnight, steal
that woman’s earrings, disembowel carnations, rip to shreds that New Idea then shoot
for a wave where an octopus looks me in the eye like a Hindu god with the wisdom of
a newborn babe, takes my measure, shows me personality, holds a tea party with
nothing in it but chocolate cake and opioids then hides me in her cave, two of us
minus our ancestral shells sharing a spliff, smoking our guffawing heads off.

II

Back in our tanks outside visiting hours we are chastened, and when nobody’s
looking she oozes across to greet me in redness of excitement I touch her head,
she turns creamy white, relaxed like no one I know, so many lobes coil around her
throat She meets my mind, spits salt water in my face to show me how much
she knows me, she knows me, knows me—bored to death by melancholy she squeezes
her boneless body through aquarium bars it’s mayhem as she marches across her Amherst
lawn suckering everything in her path Down Down Down to the water changing colour,
texture, spots, commas slashing pages with short lines—
long-necked funny unlived Em playing with rage and form, dying tired without me,
alone

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

Trousers

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Aviva Shifreen

Near the ladies your blood is sticky on the carpet. The paramedics have spread out their equipment on the floor of the pool room and you’re on a stretcher, complaining they haven’t given you anything for the pain. If you looked down you’d see the splintered bone jutting out in two places through the fabric of your favourite trousers, your right shoe filled with blood. I say I’m pretty sure they have. The manager of The Sly Fox, keen to point out that the bar staff had acted responsibly, asks if you’re going to take any legal action. It’s three o’clock in the morning and all I know is that drinking makes your bones break and that the baby’s name was Alice, you think, and you don’t even know if her mother kept her and you didn’t even want her to have the baby in the first place, you two having known each other for only one night, and that you tried to stay – you really did – and how long ago it all is now and don’t look down don’t look down don’t look down.

Next day before visiting hours I take the trousers to the Japanese seamstress on Enmore Road although I know it will be six weeks until you can wear anything other than track pants over the plaster cast and metal rods. She says she can fix them for twelve dollars. I’m sceptical because the fine wool is so badly frayed but I want to believe time can be turned back for only twelve bucks. First time you wear them the tear opens straight up again and I am angry with the Japanese seamstress for selling false hope so cheaply.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

Realness in the Mountains

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Justin Wolfers

for Doug


You aren’t supposed to name
the emotion in the poem, just
show it obliquely (poetically)
but will you take a look at that
mountain, covered in moss,
all mulchy with leaves, there
is slate inside it, there used
to be more, the river makes
a good sound, and everything
is either overstated (me) or
understated (Hemingway).
Whether or not the topography
of the landscape is interchangeable
with a woman’s body is, suffice to
say, his problem. I focus on the real.
It’s quite a sight, these mountains,
so much that after five weeks it’s a
given to me, though I can’t speak
more than one word of Welsh.
Thankyou is dioch and I can’t
remember the word for ‘cheers’.
I’ve never had a strong sense of
smell, where one might smell
‘mountain dew’ I smell ‘mucus’,
though I can tell when it’s raining,
and when the Thanksgiving turkey
is off, in the middle shelf of the
fridge semi-covered in cling film.
Anyway, the mountain. It’s covered
in pines planted in rows, some
patches have fallen over (been
lumbered?), some are so thickly
set they look like they’ve been there
forever, as if I’d know the difference.
They’re not really mountains
but I’m Australian. You should
see the café in Corris, Adam &
Andy’s, it’s the cutest fucking
thing, it is the best, it is in fact
the only shop at all, but yeah.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

Ode to Lidia Valentín, Weightlifter

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Alex Houen

CLEAN
I.
Listen! I’m not talking a cake walk of “strong men”
tottering as giant toddlers in car-shell dresses;
I’m not talking soft on the inside like Schwarzeneggy
when he punched that camel in the face as Conan;
I’m not even talking the perforated industry of bees.
No, I’m talking Lidia who proves beauty’s never been
a floaty form that fits a concept with disinterest.
Beauty is a muscle of held breath lifting roots
of itself until a quantity of words or metal, say,
is made a personal best.

II.
I don’t know if it’s a bit of death or some lost
cause that I’ve been grieving, but I’m taking heart
from the slo-mo asylum of your arms,
powering a sound-track of turbines, sirens
and creaking keels, as you thrust up
through the air’s water before squatting
down in your own element and cradling
the bar to yourself. Now that’s what I call
the beauty of under-standing: seeing a human
primed to burst free inside its own cells.

JERK
III.
So we’re also talking anti-Tantalus:
not grapes or water out of reach, but causes
fleshed out and pushed to the level of effects
so a body may show how the surprising pauses
or lipstick it begins with may turn out to be “will
to power” or a portrait by Gerhard Richter.
That’s what I call the beauty of up-bringing:
surging to stand still as a war that’s made
a monument from all that time running out
of you and into other people.

IV.
It makes sense to exchange something absent
for something really solid and heavy,
and what a strange set of movements
you have to make to execute this present! –
one foot forward and one foot back,
arms raised victorious in surrender until
you can gather yourself to stand for it
and finally give it up. Watching you
I fucking love my life – and so it drops
back into place, falling happier once again.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

Our Father

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Aidan Chafe

The morning congregation sits in silence
for scripture. My father stands, leans
on a pillar. Mother has given me the task
of elbows. I hand them out diligently
whenever sleep arrives. He never complains
about the bruises. My sister chimes they match
the port wine stain God spilt on his arm.
It may be the guilt but we silently agree
our father is the best at church. During homily
an elderly man collapses in the back pew.
My father, medical instincts tingling, gallops
to the rescue, rides away with man in the
ambulance to the hospital. I remember the
piercing wail of the man’s wife. The altar boy
letting go of the wine. The rest of us glued
watching this live episode of ER. The priest
not once breaking from speech.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

The Volume of Grief, Love and Music

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Wale Owoade

I want to disappear into every song that knows
me. Sometimes, I sing with my arms around

the voice that hurls me and listen to the gap
between my laughter and the night. A voice

said I love you and the voice is a hand I may
never hold. A song said come in, I did and sat

in couplets full of throes. Every love I knew
turned grey: my mother’s lost love, my aunties’

tough love, my lover’s wrong choice—love is
air and dear at the same time—love is the mirror

that tells me how much of them I wear on my face—
love is a nomad so I cover the tracks of my grief

with music and wear my face upright, love upright
that even in my grief I can feel my arms around a song.

Yesterday, I called my lover on the phone and asked
her how I can love with so much grief in the air.

Every night, I wait for her voice to unfurl me. Every
time a song drops inside my ear, my heart breaks,

speaks volume, hears volume, holds volume, I mix
music with night-walks to drive my fears out.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

The Cake is Done. I’m Finished.

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Heather Taylor-Johnson

What do I have that you need?
What do you have that I need?
Even though we are running in circles
the walls are hard, my face is bruised,
vessels bleed. Numbers are hard
and they don’t bend, like memory.
I am certain you are certain
and that hurts, like memory.
I am tired, and I cannot remember
what you have that I need.
If it’s history, it fits in my pocket.
If it’s water, I already drank it.
What is that noise? I object
to that noise, not history
(though I don’t need history;
both of my pockets are torn).
Do you think dessert was overkill?
I’m stuffed. I’ve had enough.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

The forgotten mountain

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Maria McMillan

Remember when everything didn’t remind you
of everything else. The island just an island
the faces of the people on the train belonging
entirely to themselves, and when you danced
your body was not occupied by every friend
you ever danced with, even those you no longer liked.
This life is overwhelming. What’s there to live for?
asks a woman of her mother who will not die.
Suffering! says her mother. And they laugh
and laugh into the hoary night.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

Precede Me

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Caitlin Doyle-Markwick

I forced myself one day to remove those gilded gloves I had donned for so long and
feel the perspiration gathering on my neck.

I revealed fingers, exquisitely imperfect fingers that clambered ahead of me, serving
as my sight when my eyes were wounded blind.

I began to feel the ground for irregularities, taking note of upturned pebbles and
scrapes on bark.

these hands in their searching have found dry leaves, birds’ eggs and stones,

have clutched at knives and blunted arrows,

burying in hideaways the necessities and discarding the superfluities.

they tell me that to know form one does not need to know light.

to know depth one does not need the perception of sight.
I’ll hold my hands out in front forever now, fingers spread wide to greet the twilight,

and save these weeping eyes for another life.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

Build-up

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Phillip Hall

The bardibardi call time
on mununga slogans of ‘stop the boats’;
shaping-up and giggling
their Makassan memories
of brown bodies coming ashore in a spray of surging sea:

for centuries these boat people cultivated
tamarind trees in a highlight
of northern fruits spoilt
in another latecomer’s scorched earth:

so with the bardibardi we integrated
secondary programs: mapping
Makassan heritage sites and Australian detention centres,
writing petitions and emails, researching
and tabulating the figures
on massacres and stolen land, resistance,
Eddie Mabo and Land Rights now:

we camped at Jawuma and Lhuka
where once the conch shell heralded
Yanyuwa welcome to traders hauling
a well learned reverential eye:

we hunted trepang, shark fin,
sandalwood, the shells of turtle and pearl;
mounting a classroom exhibition –
our pot of rainbow trade:

and at Waralungku Arts the bardibardi collected
an exhibition on all the Gulf’s ‘boat peoples’,
all those sweet fruits and liar fruits
carried by people from far away:

so at year end we bundled
into troopies, and through
an avenue of tamarinds, headed
for Massacre Hill:

here an idyllic creek flat
nestled an ancient fishing weir at the foot
of a spur’s sweeping runway, up
to thrumming silence,
that bluff of pelted fruit:

here the vertical stratifications
of bedrock cut through
cheeky and rough.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

Ode to the L90

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Tessa Rose

Seaforth
Where Meredith’s cousin
Stephanie-Jane stabbed a man
to death on his front lawn,

and got as far as Gosford
in a midnight-blue
Toyota Camry.

She accumulated mass
in prison, and read scripture.

Warringah Mall
Where I bought my first
skin-tight pair of Levi’s
(low-rise, bootleg-cut).

Manly
Where I went to school and
learned to swim and
how to flirt and
how to make a bong
out of an apple.

Where I came across
a couple making love
on the esplanade, as I
walked home alone, one
very early morning.

Where childhood
and adolescence
were birthed and drowned,
and between rounds

at the pub, I found
that being a woman
means learning to comfort
sad men.

Dee Why
Where, at the RSL, the day
I graduated high school, my
Economics teacher told me

his girlfriend had hepatitis
and her piss was the colour

of rust. He asked if I was single
and ran a cool, snake hand
up the length of my leg.

Collaroy
Where I kissed
Shona’s boyfriend
in her backyard, one
February night

—or, he kissed me,
and I let him. I worried
about hurting
his feelings.

Narrabeen
Is crawling with ghosts.

Mona Vale
Where Jesse was king-hit so
hard outside the pub one
lazy Sunday, his teeth sprayed
across the bitumen

like stars falling
against the night sky.

Bilgola Beach
Where the streets are
serpentine, and the air is
salt. I keep having
that dream where cars
pass me walking
on the road at night.

Avalon
Where, down by the water,
by the yachts moored on the
bay, I once made love

to a Japanese man
on a trampoline
by starlight.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged

Haul.

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Izzy Roberts-Orr

I have been trying to mine you,
but you are not a quarry.

You tell me there is nothing in you
but coal
seams beneath the surface
that might burn for millions of years
if lit.

Throw away the halogens and the
rat-a-tat-tack
of mechanised drills.
Use your hands.

Dig for the gem inside you
carry out the rocks and debris
falling in and blocking all the tunnels.

Rip your nails and cut your teeth
callous your fingers and push
upwards.

Let the light in,
or don’t.

Our caves are what we make of them.

Our ribcages can’t be homes for other people
but I know that where there is pressure,
there are diamonds.

Posted in 74: NO THEME V | Tagged