I almost miss her
Told to look for massive tributes,
there are none.
Only a tumble of blue and pink
so voluminous
it covers up her name.
There are no poppies in October.
It’s borage and granny’s bonnet in June.
Snapdragons, and low-growing lemon
roses enfold her edges.
Bees come and go with a soft burr
that sounds like honey.
A single strand of sedge rides the air—
slow Ariel.
Silverback stride delight neon lime road bike
I can’t ride outside, the cars croak too loud, the magpies swoop too low
in our little cul de sac
Wait till Ba gets home, but he says it’s too dark to practice now
And tucks himself back behind the wheel
I can sleep anywhere except on a bed, he laughs
Fishing boats, sputtering sedans, late buses, full trains, paper planes
Symptoms include fatigue, uneasiness, dizziness and vomiting
If he stays still for too long, the faster and further
away
he is to who he was,
the better.
And so, I fold him into a frog like he taught me all those centuries ago
I tuck him into our letterbox where he can finally sleep
With no return address
I waddle back and forth under the shrinking carport
Throwing bang snap poppers at a head of weeds crowning out a
Split on the concrete patio
Slow down. Always have one foot on the ground
Our backyard is as big as a baby’s thumb, but I go fast until I can’t stop and
Tug the tire out the wall of our granny flat
To find a hole in space and time that I’m sure wasn’t there before
I poke my head through the gash and watch my mum
Hang a husk of my body on the rotary line
my arms and legs flail as she beats me with a tennis racket
I wheel the holy trinity of bins to cover it up
And beg to lie with you on the mesh hammock
I got here first! Wait your turn!
I fan away your tears with a palm leaf
And rock you back
You are eleven, youngest of eleven, lucky last
Nothing to eat but cassava,
even now you miss the taste of cyanide
I rock you forth
You are seventy seven, in bed by seven,
starving for sounds of me,
I try to catch you in the moment, as you are now
Before your tattooed brows fade green, before your brittle hands dry out, before you forget who you are
I tangle myself to you
We are bound
not by the red thread of destiny
pinkies
but connected by the tapeworm of fate
belly buttons
When you become a mum, you’ll understand
Next time
aroundnuora
I’ll make sure
You’re my daughter
So I can finally ununderstand.
“[] was only interested in uncovering the subfloor that he imagined would be a map to the fire.”
-Beyler Report
In ’92 they defined the standard of care for fire investigation and confirmed that plastics
can look like liquid spills after a fire. Since plastics captured the market after World War II,
everything we own looks like arson fuel. To live surrounded by your presumed guilt, drink
the evidence, breastfeed the evidence into infants, to be laid down in a crib of suspicion.
Your parents watch with a philosopher’s anxiety of the numinous, torn up floorboards,
a telltale heart. When Thich Quang Duc was candled across that intersection in Saigon,
what was found skulking around his luminous mind? Is this the hard, gem-like flame?
Is this the hard, gem-like light? A spring so silent you could hear the plastic in his organs
crackling like a fireside chat, which your parents hear ears pressed against your new belly.
In ’92 they advised all fires are accidental until proven otherwise. And with his five eyes’
foresight, our angry god dangled us over his furnace to determine whether we would catch.
It was an autumn of orange spiders and orange leaves, deciding to embody the philosophy:
one might as well live combustibly in a burning world. What is burnable will catch beside
a being made of blazing. The marshal will scry anthropology after they fill the final crib
of plastic, in the ground of plastic, in an age of plastic. At the body’s trial, they might argue
the fire tells a story, I am just the interpreter. A terrible point of origin, but how to burn.
What’s weird is that this morning
I woke up with your name in my teeth
I had a dream about you
or maybe it was about a cousin
on the Bugojno side
Someone I’ve never met
just seen
in photos
in front of the rebuilt city hall in Sarajevo
the rebuilt Turkish bridge in the town I was born
Standing
young and earnest
in the face of our history.
Not unlike you,
Hamza Hamza Hamza Hamza Hamza
Until it becomes a purr in the deep belly
of a lion.
I hadn’t thought about you in weeks
Not since you wrote
How bad it is!!
Trying to convince the world that you are dying.
That was months ago and
since then,
you have fallen silent and
since then,
who has been convinced?
At thirteen yellow was my favourite colour. I wore a daffodil gingham skirt, sewn by my mother. Paired with a giant orange t-shirt, to hide the bumps on my chest. When faced with a difficult moment, I would trace those checked contours like a way out of shy. A yellow brick road to calm.
Oxford yellow was found in kitchens. On buttery walls of the snug or carpeted bathroom. It made summer last through the grey lightless winter. Brought port meadow inside. Pressed shadow fossils of fly honeysuckle and creeping yellow cress, onto ceilings. A reminder of golden Ibiza sands between toes.
Melbourne yellow was the brilliant sun. Molten-wide in the agapanthus sky. The colour for my baby not yet known. A pasty lemon rebellion against pink and blue. The only two colours sanctioned for children.
Yellow was my son’s sons first pair of gumboots. Worn on opposite feet. Splayed with independence. Matched with a nappy and dinosaur singlet, he wrestled the garden hose, watering zucchini flowers, unaware his ureter was pinched top and bottom. Turning him jaundiced. As his kidneys began to fail.
I stood in the kitchen
scuffing crumbs off the bottom
of my bare feet onto the
cuff of my ankle.
I had said I loved him
and I did.
It didn’t matter though
because I didn’t want him.
The curry on the stove simmered gently
Large fleshy chunks of meat
rising to the surface
I looked at him across the expanse
of the bench between us
he stared back, angry and sad
perhaps afraid.
I turned down the
stove and let him pull me
up the single flight of carpeted stairs
sticky and hot he slid in and
out of me. Cardamom and salt
drifted upstairs. I’d
forgotten to add ginger.
I pissed him out of me
when he was done
and held wet toilet paper
to my raw skin.
He wandered downstairs
a while later.
and found me peeling a
thumb of ginger with a
carving knife.
He fought a bear once. He went to prison once. He started a vigilante gang once that was only mildly fascist. (Someone had to clean up the streets, okay, and there were real gangsters, not driven to it by economics, funded by a real estate developer, like usual, the big city pressing down on the river-split town, ready to fork its delta.) His father died. He played football. He disbanded his vigilante gang. He joined another gang. That one was driven by economics. He wrote songs. He wrote poems. He fixed a jalopy. He crashed the jalopy. His head hurt some days. He dated a teacher. He dated a student. He went to war once, he’s not sure which. There was a lot of smoke. In the smoke war looks like football. There’s another team. They tell him it’s that simple. It’s possible the bear took something vital. His dog died. His friend died. In the smoke a friend looks like a dog. He doesn’t know which to bury. He worked for the real estate developer. He stopped working for the real estate developer. He doesn’t know exactly what real estate development entails. Mostly he hit people. He worked construction for his uncle. He stopped. He went looking for the bear again. He wishes there was smoke. It opens its arms.
For Tisa
I was anxious, I clasped your hand a little tighter.
I was maybe seven, and you weren’t going to school.
Our tall dark aunt had promised us a lovely holiday
but when she had driven us to a remote and primitive
shack where she lived with her new husband, she knelt
before us and said she would be going to work tomorrow
and I was to mind you till she got back. This dereliction of
adults was not new, they often abandoned us to circumstance
but this place was off my map. As we had been hustled down
the path a row of witchy trees had cast shadows and creaked.
And the kitten had wee-ed where it should not and raised our
aunt’s ire. One bare light bulb burned above. The house smelt.
The house with her old husband had been grand. In the garden
the brook with the bridge arching over. This house was a shock.
But downstairs in the bathroom, her bottle of Gin Fizz by Lubin
from which I took frequent aromatic therapy. The shapely flask.
She doesn’t remember, my tall dramatic aunt, curled in her bed
like a quarrelsome baby. We were so many, us children, arriving
for no good reason, or refusing to arrive, which was even worse.
She doesn’t remember that her high-heeled shoes slopped off
behind her as she knelt, or how her chin pointed grimly to the floor.
I was so afraid of having to look after you. You cute button, you.
*
The first day we played in the garden and I thought up ‘collecting
caterpillars’. I knew I had one life and that is what I did. I thought
it up. The caterpillars gave outcry and writhed, they were squidgy
brutes, and they poo-ed black tarry dots. I felt no pity, actually.
I found a box on the sideboard within which to imprison them,
but our distracted aunt said, after the very long day, that it was
a special box, a lucky box, that a dear dear friend had given her.
I turned on my heel and scrupulously rendered the lamenting
bodies of future butterflies back to where they came from. Hungry
hungry caterpillars. I’ve no memory of the kitten after the first time.
I do remember her crusted bowls on the kitchen lino. As I pressed
the lucky box into my aunt’s hands, I gave her a dark child’s look.
When would this end? I didn’t know. No one told a child anything.
And where was our new uncle? I had overheard his aggrieved voice
from the next room as I lay shivering in my chilly bed and our aunt,
a little squiffy, almost shrill, explaining and explaining. Late home
from the pub I expect, later than usual. Because of us. One thing was
certain. We were not welcome. And you, my little sister, snoring like
a prickle-backed hedgehog, lapped by the moonlight pouring through
the window without curtains. And we woke to another day. This life!
*
I helped you to the toilet, lifted you onto the bowl, although you could
wipe yourself. I pressed the flush. And then we found the steps down
to the beach cut into the cliff. You remembered, I saw you remember,
and you were so young to remember anything. How we loved the beach!
Those seagulls with red stockings on who are walking with high heels.
At low tide a sand bar poked its shoulder out and I risked the rippling
shallows. I was becoming bold. I knew that we had been abandoned
but I kept it from you as best I could. All that claptrap about a lovely
holiday! Those grown-ups couldn’t tell the truth or lie straight in their
beds. I sneaked downstairs and took another snifter of Gin Fizz. Nice!
My own story is full of missing links, full of blanks
said Chantel Ackerman. And I do not even have a child.
In heaven, they say I will without the mediation of any creature
find some divine essence with an intuitive vision. Move forth, I tell them
I am nearing thirty and I do not even have one abortion to show for it.
To prove my potential instead I whisper incantations of hospitable
Martyrdom. Wipe my fingers on the edge of my shirt and apply different lip gloss
to different mirrors. There before me, the markers of my numbing are contained
in a single vision that my life should unfold in recognisable steps.
Yet the terrace of my future is not so bright as to reflect sunsets
Or idyll voices where the headlights turn off at night. Rather please and thank you I say
to populate some move for acceptance. Where stillness captures my breath between the waves
And I can solemnly say to you my Father that I tried, forever ago
To put my longing to good use.
Sunday mornings are for sex and to catch
on sleep. In the crook of your breath the bed sheets
are tenderness. Your arm reaches out and around our galaxy
of wants
only you can hold them.
Above the bed hangs a painting in an old timber frame, of a house
in Victorian style, with a pale blue pond, silent
outstretched in the foreground.
On the upper floor, in the left window you may see me drawn
peering down at the mess
of bed sheets, the cocoon, your crown. I live behind lace
and on Sunday mornings, I try to find my way out.
After the war, I went back to Beirut and the men that I knew there
had all lost weight. We forgot, they said
to eat. Amid the worry of bombs and guns
I have not tasted our life.
My father, who carries his sorrow pushed out before him
like an offering we must take up in order to love.
All of my life
My father, who sat in the backyard, accused me of not listening
the first time I said, I don’t agree.
high in a house.
In 2006, south Lebanon
still smelt of rubble and smoke. We drove
through the villages, shaking our heads. I saw a white house
lettered with spray paint as high as the roof
CLUSTER BOMBS HERE
A lament, a warning.
When cluster bombs drop, they fly into bright pieces
each primed to explode, and days or years later
children can run into fields, reaching for toys
that erupt in their hands.
I have walked to the brink but no further
outside
your promise
the most powerful storm.
We should weep for the children of Lebanon. We should weep
for the quiverful all east and west, born macerating
in madness.
But we are betrothed to the rage of injustice, barred
from grieving such loss.
My father once told me of a man who had written
some of my freest times were in prison
I choke at the memory
My father, who delivers his wisdom like unspent
munitions. In my father’s house
there are no mansions.
And, I am afraid of what I may find in these fields.
The bed sheets, your crown. As I dip into sleep
I smell the bread, in each house of the village.
Even after the world burst into pieces, people turned to each other
made sure each was fed. The men used to say
In Lebanon, no one will starve.
Last night the boys went to the
terrace—a bottle of gin, a coke, a large sprite, cans
of tonic water, Lana Del Rey’s Diet
Mountain Dew on speaker and nothing
else. Nothing. As in after the song was over
—twice, perhaps—none of us said a thing—
everyone quiet around eachother, even the drunk ones who’d struggled
taking the stairs only moments ago.
Now all of us reminiscing about our mothers—
as women who always fed us
before sitting themselves down for lunch
and for dinner,
and now we live in hostels, away
from our homes; and in some homes, still the absence
of mothers—and one says, tearing the blanketed
quiet of heavy January air
—they say our sons take from us all our flaws
like the shaving mirrors
from our Sunday routines, say
will mine understand grief exactly the way I do?
after Rosalba-Paul / Hurstville Station, Platform 4 by Paul Higgs
Here below, the platform is dim,
water rushes from sinks, gutters,
flushed toilets, sluiced through
reckless downpipes
and even though it hasn’t rained for weeks
the weep-holes are slick:
isosceles of soot, of fecal umber,
algal verdure, of lime condensate.
In the gallery hung between
polemics and disco, the work
appears stolid: ‘string, pins, wood,
mesh, acrylic paint on paper’.
He says brush marks are a thing, not an abstraction:
take any object, a yellow ticket say (or a word),
move it around until…
The trains are late and the Waterfall service
now leaves from platform 2.
There are no straight lines
just a recursive descent off the plateau.
I dream of ordinary days: precarious
carparks, arguing over shopping lists,
the last time we caught the express to the city.
Take the escalator up to the mall: a Coles,
a greengrocer with bitter melon, coconuts,
trays of khajuri and sel roti, Taiwanese boys
in line for bubble tea.
Me and you, one and two
the incantation goes.
1 2 buckle my shoe, 3 4 open the door.
The train grinds on the curves,
through cuttings, abandoned works
rucked beneath the scarp.
I’m in the last carriage. Across from me
are two explorers, she ruffles his buzzcut.
I envy them this spectacle: the tender rainforest,
gliders on bald hill, a glimmer of creekwater
even though it hasn’t rained for weeks.
How do we meet our dead?
In the Quiet Carriage, a priest opens the door
and it’s you, halfway along staring at the blackened
dreamscape. Coins of sunshine, then a tunnel.
My heart so loud it echoes and moans
and when day returns
there’s nothing (of course).
How do we meet our dead?
After she died, he reworked it,
hammered on a balcony, a string of bunting.
went back over, wrote her name
in capitals, talismanic like cutting
into a tree-trunk or a good arm,
staunch the bleeding with ashes.
He re-named it Rosalba-Paul,
Says he doesn’t want the work
to be a sentimental memorial
to a couple,
one who died;
I see nothing else (of course).
“These rocks
are so old, they have forgotten the singing
and the shouting of the sea, the violence
of the earth in the making.”
– William Wills
A tempestuous leader, querulous
and autocratic, Burke thought to subdue
this insurgent landscape, as he did his men,
to call forth great lakes or watered plains
from its arid centre.
Shouting matches and thrashings
as well as deaths, reduced the party.
Abandoning most of the camel train
and much of their twenty tons of baggage
(as useless in that sandy stone country
as Burke’s transported dining-table)
they journeyed on, rewarded only
by waterholes and mangrove swamps.
Fearing the Aborigines, yet reliant on them for food
Burke shot at a tribesman stealing oilcloth
and the natives fled, shifting camp.
Beset by thirst and hunger, Burke died
entangled beneath a clump of box-trees
fossilised forever in the rocky outcrop
eyes staring out past the unflinching sky
into a surreal desert.
The land claims him
as he wrestles against it
hands and feet carried off by dingoes.
After David Boyd, Death of Burke (c.2003).
The home I loved is no longer
No, it was not war
that bombed the buildings
Nor famine
that made the people hunger
Nor plagues
though there was sickness
We thrived through colonisation
now a type of chill settled, spreading
over years
I don’t know what to believe
between my parents and the media
Everything is fake news
curated by someone
an invisible hand hovering like
a threat or protector
You can’t trust anyone
and it’s best not to talk about it
at yumcha or anywhere
No one can agree on
What happened or
who are the bad guys
I know this
嫲嫲 lives there
with all of my aunts and uncles
and the neon lights still shine in my memories
but it’s getting hard to remember
the good times buried
under all the things
we cannot forget
三株苗 种在花盆里的种子发芽了 但不是花。我记得去年秋后 曾把几粒辣椒籽、苦瓜籽和 丝瓜籽深深地埋进了土中 它们果然不负所望，破土而出 春天我就蹲在花盆旁，如果 将这情景放大，再放大 就能依稀看见一个人回到了他的老家 但他已经分辨不出哪是 辣椒苗，哪是苦瓜苗或丝瓜苗 三株幼苗从土里冒出来 像三个刚刚学步的孩童 在阳光或细雨中乱窜 我要扶稳它们，等它们长大 自报家门，而这样一天 让平庸的生活有了盼头
Three Seedlings The seeds planted in the pot germinated but they will not be flowers. I remember after last autumn I had several seeds of pepper, bitter melon and sponge gourd buried in the soil They did not fail me, and germinated In spring I squatted by the pot, if we magnify this scene, and magnify even larger we would see a man returned to his hometown but he could no longer distinguish pepper, bitter melon and sponge gourd from one another Three seedlings popped up from the ground like three toddlers taking their first step and staggering in the sun or rain I am holding them steady, waiting for them to grow up to tell me what they are, and that makes life something to look forward to despite its mediocrity
ask them to pull their pants down and see the colour of their pantat! – my father
my dad always had a turn of phrase which we could print on t-shorts. he was referring her to our cousins in perth, the ones who had hidden among the white folk in their mown suburbs, who had two children and a dog, who had a barby in the backyard, who had a garden in the front, who said their yes and naur, who complimented that we were tanner than usual, who prayed by holding hands at the dining table, who looked in horror when we did not use the serving spoons, who gasped at using our hands to rip chicken apart, who called them chooks, who instructed us which sauces go with which dishes, who said chilli jam instead of chilli sauce, who summoned forth the wiggles to entertain a toddler, who drove us to the hotel, who gave dad ten dollars to buy a bouquet for his mom’s grave back in singapore, for whom we never saw again for the rest of the trip, for whom we gave the angbao and casually put it on the table without saying thanks, who told us moving from a bungalow to another bungalow was considered an upgrade, who told us about wildfire warnings, who told us about reading the bible right, who said he liked his curry mild, who said we no longer do those things here.
When the end comes
it is easy to live
Trust me,
you do not need much
a thick layer of
vegemite spread to
the corners of toast
shaving your legs
twice a year
and your pubic hair
even less
an hour-long phone call
to hear their voice
a whiff of the flowers
as a reminder
they only exist to die
and this is the way of things
using the thin-stemmed
wine glasses prone to shattering
and the left over perfume
from Duty-Free
the cold relief
of the ocean
and the pleasure
beneath a solar shower
your nose nuzzling the nape
of my neck in the morning
Yes. You are needed to live
Let us live these last days
together hand-in-hand
with the nice glasses topped
to the rim with red
drinking it all in
before the collapse
After injury, my father told me,
the house was so quiet he could live by listening.
Outside: rain. Cicadas bristling.
Our neighbour fumbling softly with his gate’s useless lock.
I remember the awful intimacy of those months:
your sleep was a sound I woke to.
All summer the neighbour swept leaves beneath his fruit trees.
It hurt me, remember, how he tended his awkward privacy,
yelling yes, I love you, no I can’t help you
at the shallow breathing of his wounded dog.
Sunday 15th September
One day here, one day there, me ho mfa me. I do not
know what has happened to the man I married,
where he has gone. We live in a house without words.
Loving him, it is plenty hard work, and there is a hole
where our future is supposed to be. I feel cold
about what has burned. Ekua and Kweku are gone,
scattered, like the wind, the sunsets, wɔyɛ mmerɛw –
no fire, no purple – and in this house,
the bitter brew of silence is hard to digest. Abeg,
believe me. Over barramundi and chablis, after church,
I had to keep reminding myself I am a child of the wind.
Just like you said. Remember when we used to race,
and I would always win? And you would say run, Steph,
run? Run like the wind? That is it. Like the Harmattan wind.
I want to know what it feels like to break free
from the hope that is always trying to choke me.
Isn’t it too soon
for the cicadas to be singing
like this?
When I was a child, I read
in a book that it takes exactly 14
or 18 years for them to emerge
from their burrows underground—in other words:
how long it takes a boy
to learn the meaning
of loss
or how long it took you
to teach me something else. Winged,
they leave their little
bedrooms in the earth
and fly straight for
the trees, never to look
back. They spend the rest
of their short lives there,
as music, rubbing
their brittle and see-through bones
together to find love and
nothing else. If they’re lucky,
they see the full moon once
before they lay their eggs
and die, and the cycle
repeats. Shouldn’t it still be so
silent tonight, and every other
night? I swear, I already heard them
last summer. But here you are
beside me, twilight’s chorus loud
and hidden in the canopy of branches
above us: the whole forest
humming a harana
and swansong to nobody
and everyone—even
the stars.
Maybe on this nameless
mountain where my mother dreamed
of growing old, the cicadas
are different.
I take your hand in mine
and you tell me
you hear them, too.
You look at me
as if they’ll be singing
forever.
‘If I wanted only to hold you I would hold you prisoner.’ – Louise Glück, ‘Circe’s Power’
The water you put outside for the possums has become a birdbath You forgot to hit send on that e-mail draft You usually make the opposite mistake Everyone you know is a Cancer (Something about you is catnip for water-sign men) Possum calls sound like acid bass The iPhone, a misery-delivery service Impossible for non-locals to distinguish Lebanon from Gaza on Instagram A blood-soaked teddy bear, fallen battler in the rubble That cellist playing the Schindler's List theme in a city flattened by Israel using American bombs enabled by Australian and global manufacturers 7NEWS winning the Walkleys C sharp minor is not mournful enough to hold the grief of the deliberately unheard Darfur women committing suicide to avoid being raped to death A Gaza surgeon raped to death in an Israeli prison A psychoanalyst earning 200+ AUD for <45 mins, in Naarm I look for your signature in all the Gaza solidarity statements because that’s where I hope to find the humanity I’ve been missing in our recent conversations If I wanted only to hold you I would hold you accountable
In the Museum’s
enfolding hush
the Superb Lyrebird
stretches splayed toes
on wooden platform
to rake leaflitter
tawny tailfeathers
Posterity preserved
glassy eyes peering past
Burke’s inscribed revolver
through double doors
to forest deep listening
as an axe strikes blackwood
her wild mate offering
A perfect imitation
turns her head to hear
hooves of half-starved
cattle High Street vagrants
sticking necks over
neat garden fences
eating everything in reach
A profusion of pink
roses & scarlet
passion flowers captured
inside a glass globe
a bouquet of prize-winning
petals modelled in wax
with precise fidelity
By Mrs De Jacques
pristine charm never lost
disposed of by Art Union
ticket 2-0-0-8
held by Richard Warren
now jostling for space
on a crowded mantel
Next to a clutch of eggs
cotton wool nestled
property of a large pelican
shot at Staghorn Flat
stuffed by an amateur
skin mounted for display
at the Yackandandah Athenaeum
I leave the UK
to emigrate to New Zealand
with a small day pack
half-full
it contains
22 objects
5 balls
3 clubs
(I learnt to juggle just before
we left
and had time to visit
Oddballs in London)
2 books: a Good News Bible
(which I kept for another twenty years
then dropped into the Waihi recycling bin)
a notebook housing
13 of my poems
culled from 700
(which I burnt in the garden) –
one of the poems is sort of okay
has a nice Dylan Thomas-ish
line,
“to where the sea and swarm of bluebells
chases the night-dark woods”
the rest can be forgiven –
a spare shirt
underwear . . .
the only object I still own
is that notebook
(I’ve changed juggling props)
I don’t miss anything
