Cordite Poetry Review

Good Friday

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Emily Stewart

Your carefulness was a waste
Of fucking time. I needed your
Libido’s restless vice an unstable
Touch. There is much to fear
Paragraphs of fear and many poor
Taste suitors who might stick up
For a Woody Allen. Only place to go
Is the gym but the nearest is CLOSED.
I sustain myself with these sticky buns.
Q: Who is this person I’m fighting?
A: He is made up, mere grist.
The planes fly low and I view them
Often, foregrounded by evergreen
Leafiness. Everyone who’s talking
Stops a few seconds adding minutes
To each hour where they simply look.
I hit MUTE on my volume control.
It’s a good chance to reconsider
Whatever I’m up to. People say I’ll get
Used to it. I am new to this suburb
New to the lives of my neighbours
Who I overhear arguing and love

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Emily Stewart

Oyster Slip

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Marjorie Lewis-Jones

Oyster slip: Could be the mollusc glistening
Or the silk chemise.
Twist a word too far and it shucks itself,
The bivalve letting off steam.
There’s nothing in the world like this:
The plump pillow as it slides
Across your tongue, excites your glands,
And plunges down your throat.
Swell.
When will our next lick of lexical
Slipperiness be?

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Marjorie Lewis-Jones

Kacey

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Andy Jackson

I dust the cobwebs off my spandex and sneakers. This is where I document my progress. I want to take this moment to apologise to my muscles for whatever the hell happened to them the first day. Everyone is fighting their own battle. Turning up and giving it your best is better than sitting at home, wishing you were there. One thing I struggle with and I’ve known this from doing yoga before is that I forget to breathe! Falling for me is a normal, everyday thing. Stepping off the treadmill, my left hit the ground and let out a gigantic crack. I laid there pretty helpless for about fifteen mins, iced it and then decided to do arms and abs. Can’t miss a workout now, its week ten! Who really wants me to tell you each day was awesome and wonderful with butterflies and rainbows? No-one. My jaw doesn’t line up properly. It cracks and clicks and locks. Every day, anti-inflammatories for my jaw and pills for my heart. That’s my dad right there in this photo, and the little creature on his lap is me. He was a strong and active man, a body builder, managed a gym in Charlottetown. He came down with severe chest pains. Doctors at Halifax were baffled. He didn’t make it through the night. I was eight. And what do you call a girl who has only worked out twice in two weeks? ME! You call her me.

Prue Stent remixes this poem for The Lifted Brow portion of this issue.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Andy Jackson

Ithaca

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Linda Godfrey

Wet weather triggers a flush of fruit, those little vats of flavour. Let’s make some preserves he says you collect the pomegranates I’ll get the jars. I pare the skins, expose the arils, but he’s gone. I climb half an hour west, all pale stones and poetry, to look for him. Sails on the horizon. Collect the words.

My realm of hours is filled with dream houses calculating what is lost (the way that lies are madness), love keys are written in the river, a fireball brighter than the moon rages on the horizon, I keep the despair, that’s what manners are all about, nothing to be afraid of except their noise.

The wine shines tannic skin and sweet flesh, those lines written in the bath. Once I clean up the poem I see the edges, heavy on the iambic, sit down with the suitors like gangsters (don’t count the shields and silver spoils), there is beauty, but it is done, no longer pastoral, a quality to their lying changes me. Chaos is embraced, there is motif in the new peach and pomegranate jam. Eat your fill. Marry one (he is never coming back).

The suitors, smooth and deceitful, offer gifts of flowers, earrings, gold. I start another draft of my misery. A beggar emerges from the gloom, hunched furtive as misshapen as dobs of dog, dirty, filthy freezing, his identification a drop of blood, a whole new set of decisions, and once again I have to calculate what could be lost. Another quest, another stanza for the poem to read over dinner. Whoever can string that rigid bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axe heads may have me.

He reveals himself in all his lyric glory, yet I won’t believe that he has returned—he’s a god in disguise—and test him to move the bed in the bridal chamber. But he knows one of its legs is a living olive tree.

There’s an overlap between past and present for clearing the mess, there’s commotion, there’s muchness. Drink wine. Open the jam. Get it over and done with, end the poem in a neat couplet.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Linda Godfey

The Quiet Man

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Alice Allan

If I told you, I was lying.
I’ve never seen past your front door.
The quiet man in the kitchen sings
this is all my business.

I’ve never seen past your front door
and I still forget your birthday.
This is all my business
while the atmosphere buckles.

That’s why I forget your birthday,
Venus, the door, the cat, this page—
the whole buckling atmosphere.
Remembering ties a knot.

The cat, the door, the page, the planet
wrung out by the sun.
Remember to tie a knot
on the tooth of the jaguar.

In the wringing sun,
in the death of hypergiants,
in the teeth of the jaguar,
there are licks of knowing.

If I told you I was lying.
In the place without any light
the quiet kitchen man sings.
He never opens his eyes.

This is all my business—
Venus, the door, the cat, the page,
the lies I was telling you
in the place without any light.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Alice Allan

Reading

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Heather Taylor-Johnson

I. A book with a title that says it all
After the pear fell into the milk,
cacophony at the kitchen table
me swearing a hole in my mouth
as I lay down my book because like it
or not this day has begun.

II. Midday
After the crackling grass
the wind lifts the edges of our nest
and I am mid-sentence, a bookmark:
ants smacked from my inner thigh
next to me, my dog claiming the teasing fly.

III. A book gestures goodnight
After the thumping and burning like hell
the quiet strands of hair.
We give in to marriage,
sometimes a hum sounding like a sigh,
sometimes a book gesturing goodnight.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Heather Taylor Johnson

The Tickles of Mating

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Dermot Healy

for Jack Donlon

The cicadas of Ecuador
start the buzz by beating
their timbals
together in time;

the fireflies
do it by synchronizing
the sparks
in the dark;

the zigzags of Crete
begin by piping
a sac
under their wings,

while the snipe of Finea
whisk the song
out of the feathers
in their tail:

God bless the sky goat.
I’ve heard him
chase through the mists
and halos over Jack’s;

and I’ve seen the flies
shepherd the stars at
last into flocks
in the Valley of the Volcanoes.

From The Travels of Sorrow (2015), reproduced by kind permission of Helen Gillard/The Estate of Dermot Healy and The Gallery Press.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Dermot Healy

War Doesn’t Happen

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Michael Farrell

Face that way and walk out of the building.

Face that way and walk out of the
room. Keep it comic or dramatic – just not
tragic. Separation of drone and you.

Separation of drone and you
No revisiting past glory, or
tacking things back together
with your ex. A long day’s
journey into more: this is
family core. Smell the soft
fragrant cake. You visit a friend in hospital, there’s a
woman there, maybe seventeen? ‘She looks yum’, you say, intending young. Her
headphones cost more than your clothes would fetch flogged to the drunk naked rich.
She smiles at you, and says you look like a young Heidegger.

Touché, you’ll have to google
that later. There’s always something
phony, making life credible or
bearable. Right now, it’s you
Right now, it’s your fake Filipina
Twitter account, based on stale gay
Saudi gossip. The stronger the self
the weaker the planet. Try to only
hurt things within reach. Borrow
words to say. Bring faces, frappuccinos, fruit to
your own bed. Cultivate a new fate. Nothing else will happen today.

Toby Fitch remixes this poem for The Lifted Brow portion of this issue.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged michael farrell

The Souls

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Dermot Healy

On the way to a funeral
in Cavan
a crow flew into the windscreen.

On the way to another funeral
in Cavan
a rabbit went under the wheel.

Listen! I heard souls shoot up
with a thump
straight to heaven,

then I sat in the seat
wondering what was coming
on the next straight stretch.

It seems the men and women
I’ve grown up with
have sprouted wings

or turned into hares —
for a split second —
at the final reckoning.

So I’m going to no more
funerals in Cavan.
Soon there won’t be a bird

or a badger left alive in the country.
And if you happen
to be coming over the Curlews

and kill a ferret,
turn back, friend, the chances are
you’ll meet my hearse.

From The Travels of Sorrow (2015), reproduced by kind permission of Helen Gillard/The Estate of Dermot Healy and The Gallery Press.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Dermot Healy

Mortality

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Brogan Bunt

A smiling young man in a Godzilla suit towers above a small artificial city. Fetch TV – some kind of on-line movie delivery system. $9.95 a month, and for only $20 more, the full entertainment pack, with additional television channels. I try to imagine watching lots of television. Beneath this promotional literature is a large white envelope from the Australian Government. I am quite confident that it contains a bowel cancer testing kit, having already received one some five years ago. I pick it up, test its weight, squeeze and shake it – as though it were a Christmas present. Just a moment before I was contemplating watching a great deal more television than I currently do. The next I am painfully aware of my own mortality. I can hear the quiet bleeps of innumerable small insects in the garden. The bugs seem to be everywhere, yet I cannot see a single one of them. They lull me into sleep – despite the full yellow moon.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Brogan Bunt

Lawn Boy Gestalt (v2.0)

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Kent MacCarter

Jim’s Meowing is Jim’s Cheesemaking and Jim’s Datum Pointing was Jim’s Nappy Service or Jim’s Husbandry for Jim’s Prescriptive Burning where Jim’s Reptile Handling at Jim’s Pawnbroking and Jim’s Wedding Portraits became Jim’s Plate Tectonics before Jim’s Flagpole Sitting or Jim’s Mammoth Spearing was Jim’s Wet Nursing because Jim’s Artificial Insemination became Jim’s Gene Splicing where Jim’s Rubber Compounds and Jim’s Orgone Accumulation was Jim’s Leather Tanning is Jim’s Particle Collision and Jim’s Primal Screaming with Jim’s Feng Shui that Jim’s Crop Rotation did for Jim’s Door Knocking under Jim’s Barn Storming got Jim’s Speed Dating and Jim’s Flying Buttressing had Jim’s Interracial Faith in Jim’s History Revision of Jim’s Freight Forwarding went to Jim’s Late-term Aborting for Jim’s Graffiti Removal or Jim’s Spoonbending because Jim’s Radar Detection and Jim’s Oil Refining became Jim’s Love Making in Jim’s Epidemiology for Jim’s Tie-dyeing so Jim’s Ballroom Dancing with Jim’s Carpet Bombing got Jim’s Sex Surrogacy while Jim’s Consciousness Raising and Jim’s Flax Sewing had Jim’s Y2K Solutions for Jim’s Goldfish Swallowing wherever Jim’s Laser Waxing was Jim’s Whaling and Jim’s Wealth Creation was Jim’s Hara-kiri inasmuch Jim’s Sock Darning was Jim’s Piano Tuning and Jim’s Ore Smelting because Jim’s Blood Letting did Jim’s Arse Kicking for Jim’s Steiner Schooling if Jim’s Gregorian Chanting went Jim’s Skeet Shooting for Jim’s Rod Divining became Jim’s Life Coaching and Jim’s Ice Fishing did Jim’s Intrauterine Cannibalism with Jim’s Crop Rotation or Jim’s Flintlock Repair for Jim’s Immolation.

Okay?

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Kent MacCarter

Bearing False Witness

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Jill Jones

Stories of the heat rise above the boards and the walls bounce them, like lies. Walls are made of stuff that hides from me, those measurements, the mason’s spans. Dust is the choke, and across vision there’s a bar. I wake countless times and find again a repetition of minutes, those divisions where I may have shifted but didn’t, a history turned out like a mediaeval manuscript, beautiful but brittle, and my life being a dream, a discard, as though a century had passed and I forgot. But there are minutes that remember me, misprints in a car park. I was lost with words that made no sense as answers, but sung for me bound with the blindness that was thrown upon me. And walking one day over the asphalt past the library and the church, I knew I would repeat this. One day when I still did not know myself. It was both a fault in timing, and maybe a gift of light that I kept trusting. It was a birth I didn’t want, having trusted in a kind of truth that leads to lies. You know, an exchange such as books speak about. After that, his tongue tasted stale and although his hands insisted at something, I could not speak. Not in any way, not in that way. At least I learned about timing, how silence carries it. How to break and how to turn, even if I still mistrust meaning.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Jill Jones

Five ways to skin an orange

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Petra Kamula

          I’ve said it before: love is an accidental geometry. You can inherit ways to go through it, or you can create your own, which invariably takes longer.
          Me, Liz, and this room. The cabin smells of wet wood and the lily-heavy perfume of girls toiletries. Liz stretches on the bottom bunk, the slit of her stomach above her shorts, and I say, You’re fleshing out.
          You bitch.
          Outside, the glint from the lake, the water never quite still. I think about the way it doesn’t sting your eyes or burn in your nose when you go under. It’s just cool and slightly earthy, thick with weed. The colour of early night. Footsteps go past under the cabin window, kicking up the smell of pine.
          I lounge against the opposite bunk, drink milk straight from the little square cartons we’ve stolen from the Rec Hall. Each a cube, each coaxed to pout its cardboard beak. Thick, creamy and the taste of the glue along the edges. She gives me the finger and licks it. I throw the carton at her. It hits the frame of the top bunk, covered with pictures and photos, and bursts, spraying her body. The milk transforms from a white brush stroke into a thousand droplets, blossoming on the tanned slope of her shoulders, chest and neck. I crawl towards her and suck on her left shoulder. It’s like putting your head under water and bobbing for apples. Salt of skin and milk in my mouth.

The two women, together, on the road. The road slipping beneath them, tidal, miles on the odometer. Tape in the tape deck, long guitar whine. Dark suburbs with dim streetlamps and glowing motel signs. Back in town, the police bide their time.

I tell the scratchy-faced woman at the motel desk that we’re sisters. We look nothing alike. Liz has bright blonde hair and clear peach-coloured skin and makes it up to my armpit. The woman scrunches up her nose and slides my card across the laminate, towards the machine.
          Where you girls from, then?
          Liz says, Massachusetts.
          I say, Australia. Our Dad was a sailor, you see.
          I put my hand beneath the waistband of Liz’s jeans, part the lace of her underwear from her skin.
          The woman breathes out. Her breath makes a slight whistling over the cracked skin of her lips.
          Room 215.
          Liz grabs the keys and throws the woman a smile. She’s used to people looking at her.
          We pass rooms 1-12 and circle up the concrete stairs, at some point in their lives painted light blue, and then a dull moss green. At the top, a large drinks machine, lit up, humming. Liz grabs my hair, parts her lips and licks the side of my neck, up to my ear. She pushes her hip against me. The machine stutters, then goes back to humming. Below, a car chews up gravel.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Petra Kamula

Binaries / About Beyonce

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Amarlie Foster

This version of Microsoft doesn’t Beyonce
and that’s a fault of the computer and of
myself, sitting under drapes of wet clothes before bed.
The opposite of TV
is when it’s switched off.

I want to tell you about my dreams but they’re not very imaginative.

i.e.
having a fever / I dream I run late
or we share a bed /
and I dream about our arms.

Here you are: apologising to a white spider
finding it-self, outside a window
one hour before bed.
‘Sorry human perception-’
something Nagel said.

Roll over, wait for an interesting dream.

No two clocks
say the same thing, (flicker-
ing eyes of a TV-movie screen-)
assign a silent kind of depravity
one unanimous minute/ (life is but a dream)

A certain catch of daylight dress
unintended, underneath a bedspread
muggy and apologetic,
I looked up the word visceral;
meant the total opposite.

Movement
in the car you say, men create maps,
get lost-
women look for patterns/ this is non-spatial/
a success.

Morning
I am surprised this windows works.
If you blow on a thing with flyscreen lips
it stings and it will go away.

Collect a semblance,
turning up as a bat
while in waking you walk, your monkey-brain
out evolving itself.

The wake and tuck, scene at a library:
black-fingered undies into hips
Can you watch this-

I never took a lone gunman
seriously.

‘Well if this were a long, long car ride I’d be asleep’
lean into a window, and don’t play Beyonce
It says I like you for
dream terrorism

Fall asleep at the wheel
a hairdresser’s chair and then-
you are Beyonce or you are not
and one of us can’t take good images
pretty much useless.

Holly Childs remixes this poem for The Lifted Brow portion of this issue.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Amarlie Foster

Plenish

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Harriet McInerney

On the top of the mountain the cacti stopped for a rest. Exhausted. From there they could see the ocean. These cacti were making their way from the desert to the coast, trampling one clean line through the sand. They were thirsty, on a pilgrimage, looking for transcendence. Wanting to find that there was more to life than the desert haze.

They were all part of the same family. Each a little different, but sharing the same unlikely obsession. With tracking and mapping their way around. Dressing and readdressing each other and themselves. Seeking new growth. The largest hoping along first in line, and each one smaller than its former. But when they see the ocean, woah, it is greater, vaster, bluer than they dreamed. The stories of birds and insects had been true. They work out a downwards path, and then race towards the shoreline.

They reach a fringe of homesteads along the mountain’s base. A dog runs at them. There’s no way they can escape. Not fast enough. It catches the third largest. Puts his jaw around. Can’t eat it up, can’t chew it, and recoils and coughs the cactus out. But it can’t cough up the spines stuck in its mouth. It runs off whimpering. But the third largest cactus is already torn apart, mangled up. They stop there, sleep there, for many days. The others bring water, and tender care, but it does no good. The cactus withers up. Can’t replenish. The others travel on to the coast.

By now it has been months since they left the desert. They are homesick for the dust and the scorch. They’re looking for transcendence in all the wrong places. The water is whirling and sickly salty. The waves crash loud. This ocean is not what they had hoped.

They crawl around, find themselves collapsed against a fence. They soak up in a storm water drain. And they choose a new home for themselves one cloudless night. Crawl around the house, creep in through a window. There’s a woman asleep. They discover. Alone in a large bed, curling up under blankets, but they aren’t covering all of her. There is hair spilling around her neck, and her torso bare, stomach flopping over the line of her underwear.

The smallest cactus crawls over to her. It can feel the warmth coming from her. The woman doesn’t stir at all. The cactus coils itself up, and crawls between her lips. Up onto the roof of her mouth. The space where the warmth collects. And inside there it’s warm like the desert, wet like the ocean.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Harriet McInerney

Altogether Elsewhere

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

(Auden’s hundred)

Your first words that I read were “Look, stranger,”
which really stuck.
You hymned environmental danger
and illness welling up from bottled anger
in the out-of-luck.

Stranger than any of us was your
thanatology:
mental mapping was a chart of war
but lust for the diagonal metaphor
fed your geology.

Ominous uniforms and the sexy furs
you parsed as threat
like acid rain in silted aquifers
the Romans left. From gaunt commissioners
an each-way bet

gave your calciferous frontier the chance
either of Left or Right.
You didn’t much approve of France
for their symbolist poetic dance
was a downright

draught of colorless Coca-Cola,
not for grown-ups,
a canker in the thinker’s molar.
You could have liked Savonarola,
but in his cups.

You’d have known the date of each bubonic
outbreak, or heresy;
you knew that most blokes were moronic
and your blow-job poem was merely platonic –
well, ostensibly.

Ambiguous Europe has its weather still.
Expert in exile,
you turned the twilight into chlorophyll
soodling along beside the sacred rill
mile after lucky mile.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Hung r

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Stephanie Christie

strugglue pamphletamine
Don’t be dull. You took off with the edge
of your senses, you trashed them
and now I can’t affect you deep enough
to teach you how it feels to love me.
original skin a holding position

My attention gets more intense, till each detail
resonates in the rich high chamber.
Immaculately conceived modern language
inside the head the birds

There’s safety in numbness. She has his limits.
hole punch mouth so bluntd
In a digitised world, nothing develops.
supermarket safari monstrosity
You make war sound fun.

It’s spring, and I’m filled with a drunk’s optimism.
The nothing is living now under our bed.
We give it sweet names but it still terrifies me.
Anything left on the floor disappears

please learn fast so you don’t hurt
yourself any more on me.
My streetheart in an ungraded moment
I can’t work you
out. I’m a coded gem.

This is how it feels to be in language,
feeling. Sight comes out of our eyes
and falls over things.
let it out run
you are going to have
to be or not do
You really get to choose

Untangle
your limbs from the great machine
and dream your way towards me
all white light and work.

There’s no stopping
and no resisting
and no stopping resisting it.

Geryon remixes this poem for The Lifted Brow portion of this issue.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Stephanie Christie

404 Not Found

Posted on October 1, 2015 by James Renshaw

I read your tl;dr —
a poker face within
a one line

lol

hiding tfw a
lack of fucks to give —
not sure if choosing
the best and dankest

format cat.png
cat.mp3
cat.mkv
:\

Concerndoge inb4: you
bait a trigger
troll a rant on tumblr —
le me gusta of Derpina
reblogged once
liked tagged deleted
once

after rustling jimmies
and (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

orz

I can’t help you
when I ask if you’re k

afk

iirc three hours later
>links me reaction gifs
>logs onto ~~WoW~~ ~~gw2~~
minecraft and you’re

ಠ_ಠ

mundanely crunching sand
blocks to smelt to glass
blocks to craft to
windowpanes to
shatter —

I can’t even

Jackson Eaton remixes this poem for The Lifted Brow portion of this issue.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged James Renshaw

Sophia Sestina

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Miro Sandev

the Athena school, despite clearly sounding Greek
is a scientology seminary for kids in Newtown
near the Carlisle Castle, just off King
street, nestled in between antiques and pretentious
home wares boutiques; I wonder do they teach translation
or anything about the venerated Sophia

goddess of gnostics and new-agers Sophia,
pure virgin spirit wedded to divine king
nametag for wisdom in the ancient Greek
if leaning on the classics is pretentious,
Sofia also directed Lost in Translation
dislocation is a readymade trope in Newtown

I once quivered beneath the dome of Hagia Sophia
her gambrels were both humble and pretentious
like the terraces toward the south end of Newtown;
there’s a kebab joint that screens Turkish MTV on King
street called Istanbul, that’s Constantinople in Greek
some things aren’t made for translation

gentrification is blooming in Newtown
witness the unfaithful translation
of warehouses into Alpha & Beta, pretentious
apartments hoping to scrape gravitas from the Greek;
abstract nouns abound in the block names of Sofia
where I rote learnt the deeds of a Bulgarian king

Plato was holding out for his own philosopher king
who loved wisdom and hated being pretentious
Rudolf Steiner too was a big fan of Sophia
my friend went to his schools and needed a translation
when he left – the whole world was speaking Greek
so he dropped out and slinked to bohemian Newtown

let’s fly now to snow-capped Sofia
with our meagre earnings we can live like kings
I’ll help you with the Cyrillic translation
and you can be my crutch for the Greek
our fucking will be bat-crazy and pretentious
unbound by the straitjacket of Newtown

I’m working on a new translation for Sophia
one the Greeks will probably deem pretentious
Newtown thinks it’s full of philosopher kings

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Miro Sandev

Animals and Children

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Lauren Aimee Curtis

When we divorced I turned infant and my mother waited on me hand and foot. She cooked my meals and made my appointments, at night we slept in the same bed. About my husband––what a soft cock, she said, and nothing more. She was washing the bloodstains from my underwear and stitching all the holes in my clothes with a dramatic red thread, but we did not hold each other, and in bed when her skin would accidentally touch mine her legs would jolt back to her side of the bed. There was no warmth there. One night I felt the bear claw return to my heart and squeeze with as much force as it had when I was with my husband.
Please, I whispered to my mother.
Quit it, she said.

It happened like this––one night my father appeared opposite me as I sat in the bubble bath my mother had run. He was old with sunburnt skin, silver hair and green eyes. We stared at each other for a while before I adjusted the bubbles so that they covered my breasts. He asked me what I’d expected and I told him I thought he’d look different, more fatherly. No, no, he said, I mean in your marriage. When he asked if we’d had any pets, any children, I told him I was certain I was allergic.

It was after this that I went to see a skin doctor about a mole on my back. All you have to do is show up, my mother told me. The doctor suggested I dress in a cotton sack with all my underwear off. He was an older man, a little thick around the middle, his black hair receding and a small fat nose. He wore round glasses that were an embarrassing shade of orange. When he returned to the room and found me lying on the paper made bed he clicked his tongue. He asked me to stand in the middle of the room and I stood with my arms outstretched and the afternoon sun coming in from the window and warming my body while he went over every inch of my skin with a magnifying glass, only real slow. He inspected my arms first and then my neck and my breasts. He got down on his knees and went up and down and over my legs, never touching my skin, not once.

He was gliding that magnifying glass all over my body in smooth, precise movements. He was muttering to himself as he went along, something reassuring, something like––yes, good, yes, very good.

And then he did this––he lay on his stomach on the dirty floor, his head arching upwards, and told me to stand on the tips of my toes while he inspected the bottoms of my feet. Still not touching my skin. Not once.

Later, when my psychologist asked me about the significance of this, about how I felt, I told her that all I knew for certain was that I did not want him to stop––I was wishing it would go on for hours.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Lauren Aimee Curtis

Headland

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Nicholas Powell

You slept on a bench and woke to trace a con-
trail to dim rooms where you and I are inseparable.
And yet you are alone, staring at wall-
paper fairytales, hearing rumours on the lawn,

tennis, tinkling cutlery and niceties at the change
of ends. A fly lands on the glass slipper in the gloved
hand of the kneeling prince. That the child was me,
and I, he, is a fraud pulled off with charlatan ease.

You’ve been driving and disassociating, and look
at you now, Rumpelstiltskin, twisting fists in blood-
shot eyes, tracing a pair of carved initials separated
by an upside-down heart. Cupid’s arse.

Caminzind, Barry Lyndon et al. — hurt early and
irrevocably by the crush that sews the chameleon’s clothes
now reduced to loincloth, pith helmet and layers
of foundation that make you up for the umpteenth take.

You haven’t changed a bit: a nice lie in the bunker.
A face translated at multiple removes, translucent
turtles all the way down. I contain a crowd that misread
the big beards of its’ Bildungsroman.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Nicholas Powell

What Was Left

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Paul Hetherington

A towel and bathing cap remained, and a tattered copy of a novel: The Red Room. They belonged to 13-year-old Lena, his Swiss pen pal, who stayed for five weeks during a ferocious summer. Nearly every day his parents took them all to the beach—his sisters, friends, the next-door-neighbour’s kids—where they ate canned beans on balmy evenings. An uncle took them to a riverfront resort. They played table tennis and quoits, swam in a long blue pool. Twelve years old, he felt shy, while his sisters kept company with their dolls. Lena made friends with older boys. Twice his uncle brought her back to the resort—but negligently, as if enjoying her truancy. On the last night someone saw her in a dinghy near the falls. Rescued, half-undressed, she left the next day. His mother would not speak to his uncle. The novel lay for months in the spare bedroom like a remonstration.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Paul Hetherington

Stampede, the Many Small Big Men of History

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Liam Ferney

“It’s Time, It’s Time” retranslated

and the smell of her
obese slander and propaganda.
A republic
of disappointment. We may never
escape our consumption, a tractor beam of destiny.

The optimist says he bulls-eyes womp rats
in a T-16.

The new year ends old and
Braque with translation software

declares: It is time for the prime minister of public announcement.
Our tree goes up
while the Tibetans rehearse
in exile.

What things did they see beyond the Empire?

There is the murmur of the trick and the smell of her.

“On the path, you can send a bill. You’re friends.”
It never occurred to him
that things would end this way.

He had bought hats
for every occasion

save this not-quite-chaos quietly inching towards catastrophe.

Contrary to anything his renovated lungs tell him,
he feels no comfort
for abandoning cigarettes.

And the poem ends with a funk as incongruous
as a single wife surviving a Mongol slaughter.

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged liam ferney

Advice from Every Woman’s Book of Love & Marriage & Family Life

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu

Originally published in the 1930’s by The Amalgamated Press Ltd, London
(original publication date unknown).

In the East, it is ruptured by the midwife’s fingers as soon as the baby girl is born, but in the Western hemisphere the unbroken hymen is felt to be such a definite sign of chastity that the idea of an artificial rupture is rarely considered.

If you think, “I like him awfully but I hate being kissed,” think twice about continuing the courtship.

Can you run in double harness successfully?

No longer need you marry in an ignorance which was once miscalled innocence.

So ends the fairytale beloved.

Economy is necessary, but, generally speaking the honeymoon should not be sacrificed.

How does it come about that even in countries where the youth of both sexes are allowed to mix freely with each other and select, according to their own hearts, their life partners, there should be so much sexual frustration, so much married unhappiness, so many cases of infidelity to marriage vows?

The wife who wishes to get the best out of married life must prepare her mind for the sex act by banishing any fears and any holding back of her true nature.

But it must be remembered that these glands only function when the wife’s desire has been sufficiently aroused.

A man, as a rule, regards the sex act, more naturally. As his satisfaction is more easily attained, he must teach himself to be patient.

He must act as teacher and initiator; in the carrying out of such roles lies his special mental preparation for sexual union.

We would suggest to the bridegroom that the idea of consummating the marriage on the wedding night should be given up.

Such a course in most cases leads to disappointments.

Delay the sex act until both have been refreshed by sleep.

The wise bridegroom may not take the final step for several days.

At first it might seem that such a situation involved much self-denial and restraint, but it is not really so.

How are they going to reconcile what is apparently more or less of an animal instinct with the view that in the sex relationship lies one of the most valuable and uplifting experiences of their mutual life?

The ova are released into the abdominal cavity and gradually, through the waving motion of the fringed ends of the rubes, they are swept into the womb.

The nature of the sacrament.

Experience has proved that thousands of married couples never get past the experimental stage.

The sex instincts of many wives are never awakened, yet they still have big families. But some doctors say that the children in these families have not quite the same vitality.

Retard the moment of his own satisfaction until she, too, has reached the climax of her pleasurable sensations, the “orgasm” it is called.

The great point to remember is that the act should on all occasions be spontaneous.

A husband who has never been repelled or made to feel himself a creature of brute impulses, will be safe from other women.

Is there anything in the world that could make a girl more happy?

Posted in 70: UMAMI | Tagged Jessica Yu

Issue Launches.Submissions Windows.

Issue Launches.
Submissions Windows.