Hour of bright & dim; such stillness you could
skate, crack to beneath –
Circling out, not yet dark
enough to watch
traces of universe, blinking down. Only
the glimmer & still. One last swerve & you
are returned,
the view softly
frozen over
at your back: lanterns & palms &
the sheer-seeming drop of grass & stair –
Water as though it might hold you
on your feet, figurine-like & turning.
The hills have receded
so was the attrition war
You hold in cup of hands
what remains
listening to a sign
the visuals may betray
soil then, gritty
a flinty snuggling feel of a rock
can’t hide curves, smoothness, fine and harmless so
but then near the tip, a sharp edge
a tool, a word
P, Paleo, …
only that much
the rest of the word is hiding
hide-and-seek neatly in a box
‘Box’ as they said, they could help you to put down, rest
An island of white cumulus
that has been with you for days
Rains come from the North side, pattering, in installments
How much did I still owe?
Leaking roof and kerosene stove
tribes of rusty reeds, a feather of an unknown bird
Songs are coming out
behind unmarked stoneheads
protruding roots, vines, birds, invisible. Birds when nights fall
chthonic shifts make them giant
Paleolithic
that word, it comes back
How the size of human brain
changes over course of evolution
A thesis, but you were too late
(it’s too late for you)
A piece of graphite will do
write any thing down
a name then
one that first comes
to mind.
You begin service in an unnamed base in the Nevada desert about an hour from Las Vegas. You fly unmanned airborne vehicles over countries in the Middle East and Africa with the purpose of making poetry of enemies of your country.
Due to time lags in the satellite connection, and the fog of war, it is rarely clear that you have achieved the aim of any mission, and you are haunted by the growing suspicion that you may have inadvertently made poetry of innocent civilians: children, the elderly, as they go about their everyday lives.
In time this suspicion turns into a neurosis that leads to an early (but honourable) discharge. Procedure dictates that you are handed an envelope by your commanding officer. The envelope contains the number of poems you have either made, or assisted in being made through your actions. You suspect the number is large. You open the envelope.
There are many middles.
Everything that touches the middle, touches each middle.
The room
The earth
Ash
On the way home from Albuquerque the Christmas before my mother died, I purchased ghost beads in Old Town and held them in my lap all the way to Denver. A small amount of snow on the fields. The desert full of small mountains. I attended to what holds us here—permanent and communicable. Each horse I saw I felt. Each tree.
I believe in the entrances to this world. How we swim excessively through like torpedo fish with prompt hearts. How we are fastened to earth. Our agricultural love for it. How the earth continues to contain us. How it is gigantic in its containment. The wild airy deserts made visible.
Mortality is singular.
There are many things in this life that we touch and of the corresponding states, there is only what we express of these things that stays in us properly, waiting for the future, like packed down snow we glide effortlessly across.
The first year I lived in Colorado, I photographed the sky from the same location each morning at 8:00.
The place where I stood to photograph the sky was in between two brick apartment buildings. Nothing existed in this space except for grass, a view of the sky, and, if you looked forward, a street with parked cars and an empty parking lot behind it.
I can’t remember what I was trying to learn by doing this, but it became a meditation on the expressability of light because that was what most noticeably changed throughout the year.
The light began to express the things I looked for.
I grew up in a small home near woods and on holidays, or after big meals, we would walk there.
In winter, the branches of the oaks and maples froze. The work had moved underground, where the roots diligently waited.
The things I searched for then, I don’t now—messages, buried objects—
I feel like I’m full of weather.
I can only picture myself as I was then as I am now being who I was then.
I’m not surprised that people die.
Each person is her own hive.
I’m learning to take consciousness as an astonishing phenomenon, explained only by the location in which it occurs.
I don’t think this is outrageous, but I try to imagine that it is. I try to imagine everything as only external—all our processes and thoughts, our senses and understanding, each recognition of a face, each image of a neighborhood, the Midwest, other people’s pulses from a long time ago, the hidden animals that exist and the ones that don’t, imperialism, bias, what is dead and what will come to be so.
After, Joseph Leidy
1.
The string is a catalyst not
a specific set of instructions.
Of afterlives, she has
empirical evidence,
in spades.
Still it defies you,
this canopy of velocity.
Nothing for it but to endure
newfangled brocade deliriums.
Instincts on rampage
balk at investigation.
Cellular memory recoils.
Brackets repress
a more mysterious lacuna.
Bruises bloom under coltish grace.
We might be vicious
down here
the shock stays with you.
Altars float all around her
wilderness, waste.
2.
Sunburned girls gone horse mad—
seized with mirror fever.
It only takes the once.
These days,
she drinks laudanum
laced with charcoal.
To obliterate an upbringing
a sedative of false composure.
Leave the door ajar,
hips tilted toward
widening aisles and bed
dust wound down.
The patient cuts her hair
in the waning moon.
She is permitted to shower
once per week. Under guard.
Miasmal fashions cut
for the asylum panorama.
Such whorish artifice;
horizontally alarmed but
demurely absent sentiment.
Come home, her dialect mutation calls.
3.
In his experiments,
a fine wire was made
to encircle the shaft of bone.
Seemingly, in its interior,
a hollow columnar condition. Lost
thumb that cuts into an absent palm.
After the water cure only
blood attar dulls the fits.
She’ll be in the sunroom
dressed for the weather
arranging seating charts
for the dead letter dance.
The only party worth
attending is a funeral.
I know too well the cost
of that remedy’s call
bright placebo ghosts
(scarlet and subaltern)
lost to verso charms.
Will you remember me
after the wintering sieve?
In a diversity of baths
wet dressed penitents
salute their redeemer
in three-part harmony.
Such reverence breeds
only dulcet curiosity.
Enter as a bullet
sequestered in blind faith.
Leave her floral marginalia—
just another face
for to be burnished in.
Sell an every-third-day sunset, buy endearing ocean. Live well—the swell. Tides and markets speaking like they know you. Newly entitled ocean cities do not float around just any corner. Each quarter acre beautifully plastic packaged—fish in transparent bags—where the water is replaced daily, no need for algae gardens. Designer prism reflections planted tastefully in flashes. All sewage specks pumped far beyond such dreams. Have you seen a sunset? No-one save the ocean where acid rain and tsunamis become such inevitable discharge. Nothing should howl like it knows you but the pollution is replaced (mostly) daily and becoming oyster horns without mouths. Were you right each of these reflections—a number—and so many people only goldfish market eyes.
This is what I think of a man wearing a Utilikilt
If you wrap your celery in tin foil before placing it in the fridge it will last for weeks
and it will still be fresh and crisp when you pull it out!
First get a bucket of warm water, not to hot, with a cup full of Epsom salt
Allow salt to dissolve before placing your feet inside. Once the salt has dissolved, place
the arched with its final ache
You know
I think of you for free
I think of you searching for Sugar Man
Let’s dismiss our time together
as simply a by-product of American country music
as physical recovery, as well as, a difficult moment
Plain Sharpies do not work
I drive a truck, it carries money
Rest your bones. Somewhere far from my house. Yeah
What do I think of when people text me “bahahaha” instead of “hahaha?”
Tip 86 Inventing your anchor rode from chafing on the bobstay
Tip 259 Creating extra stowage space in your V-berth
Tip 1,019 Preventing barnacle growth
What’s red and smells like blue paint? Red paint. That’s right
Of course there are no significant details yet, there are few points
But there’s lots you can do, and lots you wish you did
in a scalable manner
Without the bizarre origins of ingenious inventions we couldn’t live without
the sky would be empty
Everyone wants to be a Guardian of the Galaxy
He’s got all kinds of time
There are windows flying in blue heat. A room that flies
Two Million subscribers! We thank you for your drunken ramblings! Welcome!
Hull does not recognize him, and explains that his visit is to inform him about his brother’s killing spree and disappearance
He thinks of throwing up. The fever, the focus
We cannot judge such a period of transformation by its own consciousness
He thinks he’s in Colorado with a girl left behind by the circus
He thinks he sees daylight
Japan Question Forum
What does a man think of when he thinks of nothing?
Maybe he’s lost his gutter-devil
or he’s crushing on you
The Giver starts transmitting more and more painful memories to Jonas
Then he tells him that he thinks he’s proud, insulting, and pretty. Quite the cocktail of qualities
She thinks of
a blue nonchalance
Songs shipwrecked on an album
She thinks of nothing but papergreen
She never thinks of her husband’s name when she thinks of her husband
He is an athlete, a compliment, a dust jacket
When they were universally mocked, “Hooves,” my mother said
Her mind has become Decembered
It all sounds very friendzone-ish, but hell, if you’re determined talk to her
Women are paying attention to your underwear
in their stone shade
Because yes, she’s looking. And yes, she cares
She feels surprised and unready
She thinks of small, last-minute advice and instructions she wants to give
They think she is a plate of meat, or the battlefield of the body
She thinks she is a photo while they look at her
‘Generation Loss (after Alvin Lucier)’ is a response to Alvin Lucier’s 1969 work I am sitting in a room, in which the artist’s speech is recorded, played back and recorded again until the iterations become unrecognisable and incorporate the frequencies of the physical space. ‘Generation Loss’ contemplates duplication and decay; the ‘generations’ here respond to concepts of text degeneration in a digital environment and acknowledge the integrity of Lucier’s conceptual approach to experimental music.
second generation: text compression
third generation: Alvin standing outside (stick to your guns)
a bone white linen jumpsuit hangs in the corner of my lush pad it spits up crude reproductions of ink samples but you remember its scent you know you must ward off its digi vomit stains which transfer to other materials like your skin cells and your soft spotted knickers or else i might have to expel you for taking my crouching figures and hurling them towards my mouth hole while the bone white linen sends signals in through our earholes and we flee, we flee
into the
recesses of my lush pad it seems the bone white linen jumpsuit is trying to acquire genitals but it has not quite figured out what genitals are since they were eradicated in the last great witch wars of the previous century before the linen jumpsuit ever was dreamt into existence we return to our history to the fold of carpet in the corner of my lush pad you reach into your pants the owl arrives at the window and is accompanied by organ chords we try to uncover the source of the organ chords you rip my shirt open. there is a vibration from beneath the carpet and we are immediately suspicious of the bone white linen jumpsuit & you forget that i liked to repeat phrases from my secret lover the affective labourer bot like ‘i produce a sexist sonnet to make you
feel relieved’
you don’t even know how to write a sonnet you scream directly into my mouth hole i sob i admit it again but can you admit something to a person if you both already know it, is it actually called admission i reach behind the jumpsuit it electrocutes me you try to kiss my ear hole you are botanically inclined towards certain sexual positions but i am forgetting the last time we were in this lush pad there were fifteen of us and four owls and alette was descending and we stroked the window pane, cried out ‘what is a surface’ how do we tension relate to each other’s experience of hostile school ground memories i couldn’t see the linen jumpsuit it was no longer in the lush pad i hurled my stomach contents onto the vibrating carpet it reaches up to my face as if to say
‘it will be okay’
the jumpsuit is spitting up crude ink face spots into your pants it is emanating a soft violet glow it brings out the violet in your eyes which are now welling with tears you glance down to your hand and your pants,,,, a squid is breaking through the carpet now and i remember the first time you encountered doreen massey & i wonder whether witches can expand rooms or feel the inside of a squid without breaking it open i close my eyes i hum i squeeze your fists into your quads i squat down in the toddler squat my trainer taught i picture the gummy insides of the squid’s body i forget for a moment the bone white linen jumpsuit has been forged from the bones of my body i plead
to the squid
and to the witch that was not me but in fact another being in this room i had ignored until now i fake orgasms to distract the linen jumpsuit so the squid can escape i read loudly from the inside of my skin you remove your hand from your pants only to discover you have removed your hand entirely from your body and it sits now on your pants. we gaze around our walls of this lush pad really my lush pad i remember fondly the moment before we were cursed with the bone white linen jumpsuit it is now fondling the witch’s shoulders it shoots its ink like sex juice into the squid’s mouth we realise we were thinking too much about sex this entire time and wonder if it’s a side effect of the fish oil tablets we’ve been
wolfing down or
maybe because of certain deaths that have left us numb & then our boyfriends start raining outside only they are not whole people but body parts and they looks suspiciously like everyday household objects. objects that have a point of view are they capital? or did the spell just backfire baroque eroticism is the name for our eulogy slash memoir. the linen jumpsuit is no longer quite bone white but remains bone, it hopes for memories outside itself it wishes the universe a
long half life
src=SciMag@2016-03-11: Peacock AC, Steel MJ (2016) The time is right for multiphoton entangled states. Science 351: 1152-1153.
src=QED@FeynmanRP-1985: Feynman RP (1985) QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton University Press.
These lost boys translucent in the radiance
of a torn shop window with its eternal alarm
are ripping the side mirrors from a stationary Audi,
their vandalising hands strong with slowed time:
lizard eaters with tongues of rough leaves
and guts toughened by ingestion of dark meat,
the tintinnabulation of their armour issues glamour
like leakage of mercury from a watch-face.
The gesture clatters to the roadway, a Lenten
abnegation, honoured then unlearned. The child
ensorcelled by bougainvillea suffers pangs
of separation from primal heat. We had barely
discussed his slender maternal memories
when the police took him to Darlinghurst
lockup and beat him badly. He told me:
“They were showing the video of Ice Cream for Crow
when a black arm from Eveleigh Street
reached through the lounge room window
to repossess our television.” A mattress
dense with fleas exposed to early morning
Chippendale traffic, the sunroom strewn with ruby
fragments of smashed flagons suffused
in an ambulance glow. He borrowed money
from everyone he knew in the Trade Union Club
then disappeared forever: someone named
a cat after him. He was discovered later
swinging from the latticed balcony, to be revived
in the greenish pallor of hydroponic lamps.
Their supreme love expressed in meaty fistfights
down the staircase, hammer-threatened walls,
until one night a car skidded on its roof
against the pole outside our front door –
the topless waitress from the pub across the street
brought hot sweet tea in her netted singlet
to the white-haired suspended passengers.
Singed by the traffic slipstream we passed
secure in an insulating cloak of diesel, running
with the pack over six lanes of Parramatta Road.
The Review
scott rated it colleen rated it shannon rated it catriona rated it lyn rated it brittany rated it lynda rated it andy rated it don rated it apatt rated it dirk rated it szplug rated it sarah rated it henry rated it justin rated it ron rated it stuart rated it morgan rated it ian rated it lit bug rated it dead letter office rated it not getting enough rated it werner rated it jay ant rated it jason rated it aloha rated it chris rated it phrynne rated it #science-fiction #fiction-adult #sci-fi #apocalyptic-or-post-apocalyptic-psychological-thriller #owned-it #this-is-the-book-upon-which-the-film blade runner was-created #fantasy-sci-fi #author-uk #5 stars #kindle-books-i-own #classics #dystopia #science-fiction-read-2016 #set-sail-for-disappointment #this-novel-is-a-cult-classic #sci-fi-fans #i’ve-been-saying-for-years-this-book-is-boring #those-interesting-in-bringing-down-the-quality-of-modern-lit #genre-sci-fi-that-i-own #discuss-this-book #technological-masterwork #humans-mankind #cyberpunk #androids-are-so-sophisticated #born-&-lived-most-of-his-life #i-have-a-confession-to-make #what-is-an-empathy-box #it-takes-five-full-pages-for-the-character-to-buy-a-goat #a-professed-episcopalian #the-latter-two-are-artificial-or-human #subsequent-dystopian-cinematic-fare #fallout #an-android-walks-into-a-bar #don’t-get-me-wrong-maybe-2.5-stars-far-more-bleak-i-won’t-go-into-details #is-it-really-possible #threatened-their-existence #ask-other-readers #this-question-contains-spoiler (view-spoiler) #by-2021-millions-killed #entire-species-into-extinction #those-who-remain #horses-birds-cats-sheep #radioactive-dust #most-live-creatures-become-extinct #artificially-created-mass-produced-identical-individuals #not-purely-electric #review-your-friends #may-be-it’s-a-contradiction-in-terms #dust #living-creatures #this-story-is-about-machines #this-book-was-so-amazing-in-the-beginning #then-everything-plummeted-downhill-it’s-been-a-long-time-since-i-watched-the-movie # rate-it
Standard Operation Procedure
manual handling is any activity involving the use of force. use lifts, trolleys, paths, stacks, breaks & avoid twisting, stretching & bending. take a two minute break. have feet level & well-planted on either side. assess the load & mechanism. clear the area. keep the back straight. don’t overbalance. be especially careful of fingers & hands. wrists & elbows should be stretched, moved & relaxed during downtime. any situation arising & leading to a development shall be reported to your manager for investigation & rectification. if you do not have language, engage the specialist. do not rush the task. relocate. turn your feet in the direction. keep the object close to your body. the machine will have a humanising influence. clear children. clear families. whale-crops should be monitored for bleaching. high consequence salinification incidents should be reported immediately. near misses should be reported. incidents include the following. immediate treatment shall be forthcoming. high-risk margins are conditional. incidents include. management of freedoms remain. curfews shall be enforced. work gradually. whenever possible, use the transport for dangerous or unwieldy loads. follow the guidelines. bend the knees, feet apart in the position. assess & plan the handling. be particularly careful of the device. tight doorways open to the area. signal & rotate staff. keep the back straight with the head looking forwards. utilise multiples. ensure you have a clear area in which to work. the program will demonstrate force.
V
Now I will walk again into this field of wreckage
which is my starting place—On its stone heaps the tussock
is dry stalks the colour of a scratch in glass and rattling fennel
tendrils from the root—A single cloud
now coming in over the motorway on slow dissolves of light—
Along the cutting’s side speargrass with a rain wind in it
moves through the shape of a catching fire—This
stoppedness before rain in which years I have forgotten
invent a landscape still in what I have named landscape—
ruinable, incandescent, piece by piece drawn
into that blank in thought which sets the names
in their array—tussock, speargrass, wild fennel—bright charges
hung upon abyss—Do you remember?
In head-high grass, its pale seedheads, the wind is massing
light, lights moving in place and scattering down—
At the level of my eye the grass untidy, touchable, steeply
its slant stalks narrowing back into their likeness—
A train which even now is sending its long cry back
out of the vanishing point it keeps discovering from the scene—
The rain is first a prickling sound and then hand hair eyes all
touch and does not know me walled in itself, its dazzling blank—
The road will come through here—
Content by Liam Ferney
Hunter Publishing, 2015
Liam Ferney’s Content is a book of poems largely composed out of memes, or slices of culture. The notes at the back of the book state:
Some of these poems contain allusions, sentiments, words, phrases, sentences and images that have been lifted from the culture. And Cordite’s comments. If you’re not sure, Google it. At this stage your guess is as good as mine.
Idle Talk Letters 1960-1964 by Gwen Harwood
Edited by Alison Hoddinott
Brandl & Schlesinger, 2015
The letters in this illuminating and entertaining volume, written by Gwen Harwood to her friend Alison Hoddinott (the collection’s editor) and her husband Bill Hoddinott, cover the period leading to the publication of Harwood’s first book of poems. 1960-1964 were the years in which Gwen Harwood’s poetry was coming to light in literary magazines in Australia, sometimes under her own name, sometimes under one of her three nom-de-plumes: Walter Lehmann, Francis Geyer and Miriam Stone. Continue reading
O Sonata: Rilke Renditions by Chris Edwards
Vagabond Press, 2016
The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau by Toby Fitch
Vagabond Press, 2016
Chris Edwards’s O Sonata dwells in the vortex of the underworld, plumbing the depths of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth and resetting the entrails of Rilke’s Sonnette an Orpheus into a crossword puzzle ready for consumption. In the eponymous sequence, Edwards offers up a renewal of the Orpheus (also known as ‘the futile male’) myth to signal his reconsideration of repetition and originality as the basis of a literary revision – releasing a suite of renditions that purposely misinterpret, transliterate and obscure. Continue reading
Unexpected Clearing by Rose Lucas
UWA Publishing, 2016
In ‘Balancing,’ Rose Lucas describes how Philippe Petit, the French high-wire artist made famous by his walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, ‘launched into a fitful middle space.’ With a ‘steady grip of muscle,’ Petit is imaged as a ‘machine riding air and sky,’ defying gravity as he dances ‘from element to element.’ Continue reading
words breathe, creatures of elsewhere by Nhã Thuyên
Translated by Kaitlin Rees
Vagabond Press, 2016
The relation of place to identity and self-making is central to much poetry, indeed to writing more generally. It won’t be lost on the reader, therefore, that Nhã Thuyên, writing from Hanoi (‘river within / inside’) – a city built on lowlands; a city of lakes situated in the Red River delta, where rainfall is high – makes an impassioned plea for poetry (and thinking) that is fluid, unbounded, borderless.
Diurnal by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa
Grey Book Press, 2015
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s Diurnal is a slim chapbook of 24 numbered poems of seven two-line stanzas, which by my reckoning makes it a sonnet sequence. The cover of the edition I received is reminiscent of silver gelatin, with stark tree branches visible in the glooming (the chapbook comes in a series of three colours). The image is evocative of the tone of the poetry and while the title evokes the daily, it suggests that there are long, dark days of the soul, as well as nights. What of the noir of the day?
Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems by John Kinsella
Pan Macmillan, 2016
The poetry of John Kinsella will need little introduction in a forum such as this, though with the recent publication of his Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems, aspects of Kinsella’s biography move more meaningfully into focus. Author of over forty books, Kinsella’s writing career spans three decades. What with the wealth of material available to him, Kinsella and his editors might have been spoilt for choice; though how to bring this wealth into a general coherence? Continue reading
On Violence in the Work of J.H. Prynne by Matthew Hall
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015
Violence and poetics are the key poles in Canadian-Australian critic and poet Matthew Hall’s new scholarly release. Hall charts how the British late-modernist poet, Prynne, responds to violent events of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – from the Holocaust, through apartheid, Chernobyl, and Australian colonialism, to Abu Ghraib. These affective sites of violence are linguistic, too: chapter two takes its subject as the ‘the sociolinguistic war’ which takes place under ‘the strain of economic factions and the reach of the multinational resource sector’. Continue reading
Exhumed by Cassandra Atherton
Grand Parade Poets, 2015
Dazzling, vibrant and terribly witty, Cassandra Atherton’s Exhumed does not give itself over entirely to the horribly serious, gruesome images invoked by its title. Nor of course does it travel down to the desperate depths of its epigraph’s hero, Rosetti, who (in)famously ‘recovered’ the book of poems he had buried with his wife. Yet Atherton’s collection of prose poems is nonetheless morbidly fascinating and even darkly exhilarating, with some of the more raw, emotionally-fierce poems evoking similar queasy feelings in the twenty-first century reader, perhaps, as the nineteenth-century poet might have experienced recovering writings from the grave of a loved one. Continue reading
The Subject of Feeling by Peter Rose
UWA Publishing, 2015
From the beginning of the latest work by Peter Rose, the reader is given the impression of an unfolding tableau or score, the creases and outlines of which to be generously shared. A sense of intimacy is engendered from the outset: we are let in on the scales and arpeggios that a musician practises, as if each poem, or note that it reaches, ‘might lead somewhere / or fail to ascend.’ The seemingly off-hand candour of such admission serves as an indication that one is in for a special experience from a master of the craft.
Report from a Border by Dan Disney and John Warwicker
light-trap press, 2016
The book starts with a full stop. It orders me to stop before I begin. On the next page there is a font that looks like a zebra crossing. It straddles the page spread, white shapes on flat black. I stop, looking hard at the letters to make sense of them, and then realise what they’re saying: WALK WALK STOP! I’ve followed orders; how biddable of me. I move on, turning the page. There’s another black expanse: it says WALK in the same font, followed by a full stop. I guess I have permission to move on. So far, so good.
