Poetics

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Stu Hatton

read the poem many times
wasn’t sure i liked it
a bit landscapey
like walking west at sunset
not deletionist enough
too bound in boundedness
probably best viewed at random
kind of poem that doesn’t return calls
but nevertheless keeps talking
with its heavy mouth
as if silence needs feeding
poem written but not coded
no anarchy postcard
trying to tune the light
rather than lick the room
or trying to lick the room
rather than tune the light
too many free hits
not enough chanting
or maybe i’m just reading out of my depth?
maybe i fail to see its wild seed
or things i don’t want to see
looking in at me
maybe this poem’s
the very beginning of beginning?
wait here
i’ve gone to get help

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Routine Transfer (Maternity Ward, 1983)

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Lea McInerney

The woman whose baby died at birth
sits in the wheelchair waiting for the lift, a drip
in her arm. A nurse stands beside, in charge

of drip stand and suitcase, her eyes
on the woman’s grey face. She pictures
the textbook womb, curled-up baby

scooped out, the woman hollowed. This
is no routine transfer, it should be
funereal, a silent procession to the ward.

Another nurse stands behind, ready to push
the chair into the lift. She talks
of tonight’s date, her new winter boots,

asks if it’s nearly lunchtime. The nurse beside,
her face hot with shame, watches the words
pelt like hailstones on the slumped body.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Foliage and Grace and a New

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Kay Are

foliage and grace and a new
cup and saucer, a laugh and a
lip and a laid climb sudden
and at the same time
patient and staring and
too late and later all this and not ordinary
noise and distance and even dust
spitting and perhaps washing
and polishing the lamp and the
cake and a sweet singing
trimming by length and
by doubling in the stem
and in starting it
shuts and it lifts the six
and the seven, a glass
and a cousin, the bug and the
post, nearer and farther
a meadow, a stroke
astonishing
and difficult in mercy and in
medicine, a lining
and the shape, the cut
and slender joint, concentrating
the illusion and the illustration and soap
and silk for cleaning, readiness
and eyesight scatter and scattering
are guided and guided
away old ladies and mild
colds, a sweetness and some of
that, a whole sight and a
little groan and sometime a collapse
and a sold hole, habitual and tyrannical and
clean and cleansing and sometime next best
nearest a pillar a cause and no curve and a hat
and hurt, and courage and a clock
and matches and a swan, three
and more and no more
than three, a red thing and a
white thing, noon and moon
leadish
and nearly set in

I made this poem first by tabulating a Gertrude Stein text, ‘Objects,’ from her Tender Buttons, in a
spreadsheet. The spreadsheet’s functions were then used to locate mutually overlapping verbal
rhythms and syntactic repetitions. I manually arranged the resulting fragments in order to accentuate
the further correspondences they shared – but found repetition generates its own differences.
This poem is extracted from a set of 24.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Postcard to a Sibling

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Carolyn Abbs

‘my love letter to the planet’, Sebastião Salgado,
Genesis, Natural History Museum, 2013.

i.
I perused the shimmering images of Salgado,
chiaroscuro palettes of black and white:
penguins cormorants whales sea lions,
volcanoes the Antarctic glaciers of Alaska…
afterwards, I chose a postcard of African elephants —
then back home in Australia
I leant it against the photo of my father
and the carved elephants he brought back from war.

ii.
I recalled the house of childhood the sounds,
back-drop of war — his portrait on the dresser,
khaki uniform how the light stroked his brow,
chink of teeth his smile,
the row of elephants alongside and, on Sundays:
silver cutlery on crisp white damask,
the meagre roast,
grown-ups’ stories of the black-out, ration books,
nurses and hospitals, underground shelters, the blitz,
the silences.

iii.
in winter, we scattered toast crumbs on snow,
then indoors, beneath a table, its folds of dark cloth,
we looked through the cold glass of French doors:
sparrows blackbirds specked the whiteness —
the room droned with the voice of BBC news.

iv.
today I will buy a stamp for the postcard,
write nothing but my name —
she will remember.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Pollard

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Pauline Ryan

Do they still pollard the trees in Tokyo?
Here in obfuscating avenues too much is left to grow.
My daughter visits: she cleans my teeth,
wraps me in mohair battening
my ankles to the wheelchair.
Her breath is warm in my ear
heaving as she pushes up the hill.
My head thrown back to the foliage-matted sky.
Impatient of their green hemmed frame,
I see the clouds hurry by.

Lunchtime walkers smile at her,
they know they mustn’t identify with my
aged skin and unleavened inscrutability.
The Chinese tourists are of a different category
Ni hao: yes they may have my photograph.
I pose to ensure I rest, some creased old man,
on slit-eyed mantels unhewn for posterity.

My daughter loiters with her eyes,
that beckon me to speak of nights hunkered
on canvas stretchers in the overhang of alang alang,
or of the trinket boxes I carved from coconut shell.
In Rabaul we were sick on grub cooked in ten-gallon drums,
in huts thick with dysentery, dengue and beer.
I can no longer hand out memories.
The crow demands and never says thank-you
but we are not in Tokyo—here there are only peewees
whose plinking interests me—so neatly sung in unison.

My son visits on Sundays and joins the dinner table.
In this place his wits are clear,
top man—he may give a speech.
I watch him amongst the dribbling and crumpled residents—
amongst dirty wheelchairs and orthopaedic cutlery.
His thoughts scattered in realms like wheat for chooks,
clods, shaken from sheaves of downy thistle.
Is it black there too? I want to ask.
I am glad the birds will start at five thirty—
and enthusiastically.

The pollarded trees in Paris are persuasive,
and more brutal than Tokyo, their limbs contorted
like prize fighters, sallying in rows.
They murmur in the wind and I have joined the whispering
it is lonely if you go but no different if you stay.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Rallying

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Quinn Eades

At twelve I was sure. This body
would belong, even briefly, to no other.
I had watched my mother
with my sister and I, the two
children that were meant to change
her life (we changed her life),
and it did not look enticing. The days
had an edge to them, and I remember
it not like a knife, but something
blunter, something that scraped,
and was rusted, and hurt
in a slow and dull way that rarely
showed. Sometimes I wished
for blood, as if that would make it easier.
Bruised. We were all bruised.

Her voice was this beautiful thing, low
and strong but with a break. She insisted
that she couldn’t sing, but she did. She sang
me into each day, and carried me through
the night. Language that tore but also
soothed, her voice, the tone of her, running
through my lymbic system, coating my amygdala,
teaching my cingulate cortex about pain.

But sometimes we’d put Buddy Holly
or X-Ray Specs on the record player,
the plastic arm hooking across, the needle
coming down to rest and crackle across
vinyl, and sing, and dance on the floorboards.
Six feet banging down, chalk dust
and crayon crumbs flying up, and over it all
her reaching voice, that cracked on the no more.

It was 1979, and we were blonde girl children
with a mother who was cracking, yelling
bondage up yours and jumping off
second hand couches like we could fly.
It was 1979, and my mother was writing
for Spare Rib and wearing overalls
and gymboots and smoking rollies
and taking us to rallies.

We swam naked in the Hyde Park fountains
after Land Rights marches. Cold brown water,
one cent pieces glinting on the concrete bottom,
too far down to reach. The feel
of a metal turtle back between my five year old
legs, cool and hard and round. Balancing
on a turtle shell and dangling my legs
and looking up at the fig tree canopy, so green,
with the sun on my back, and looking over
at my sister dog paddling to the edge, her hair
gone stringy, so blonde it was almost white.

Don’t think it was all bruises and cracking. There
were moments like these. There were always
moments like these: metal, and sun, and green,
and cold to the knees, and later water
and apples on the bus home,
and my mother smoking (because
you could then), and us rolling up our white and purple tickets
and pretending to do the same.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Using Protection

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Lesley Carnus

Titanium is designed to withstand
all kinds of weather – fire-storm, alpine chill,
space shuttle’s lonely encapsulation.

Double glazed windows mute the shouts
of revellers disgorged from corner pubs,
door and window grilles protect
from pecuniary visitors.

Zoloft keeps your sanity secure
Lipitor strengthens artery walls
ocean’s tympani soothes
night’s unfailing malaise.
Wine sedates; fears
of intimacy are cured
by distance and solitude.

Furious seas keep outsiders at bay
graves withhold the names of their dead
razor-wire ensures that children cannot escape.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Movie

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Cyril Wong

Who knew we’d like the same movie,
Lost in Translation? You brought the DVD
(which, in the end, we never watched together)
to the hotel room, along with cigarettes,
tidbits, and other paraphernalia
to heighten our play; barely stuffing
the holes of silences that widened
the closer we got to realising we had
little in common. Yet when we played,
the way you touched and not touched,
kissed and not kissed, like a child
who had entered fire and was terrified
to meet it again, a light
flickered within me like inside a dark room.
When things didn’t work out between us,
the last moment from the movie
unreeled in my mind, when Bill Murray
embraces Scarlett Johansson in a crowd before
they’re forced to part, whispering in her ear
words the audience cannot hear; I wanted
so badly to know what he said I could cry.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

RSVP

Posted on May 1, 2014 by David Stavanger

You

Seeking a relationship with a Psychotherapist

My current relationship status Hyper-vigilant

My height Reduced

My body type Venus flytrap

Do you have children One previous episode

My Personality I like it when you smile, I love it when you don’t

My hair

My eyes A colour that doesn’t run

My desires Citrus fruit but not in a weird way

Religion Marked obsessive traits

Pets Mild panic attacks

Zodiac sign Cipramil

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Directions

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Caitlin Maling

Karinjini by way of Kataby, Geraldton, Dongara, Carnarvon, Exmouth; by way of the Brand; by way of driving out at midnight, by way of fences and flametrees and bardi; by way of moonlight and the dog-star, the cross and Corona Australis; by way of four am, by way of bone silence, by way of somnambulence amid truckies and road-trains; by way of midday in the banana fields; by way of midnight in the campground; by way of hollowed and halved water receptacles bearing wine, by way of pretensions, of West Cape Howe, Leeuwin Estate, Pendleton; by way of air-mattresses; by way of song of burrowing frogs; by way of days at the beach, the sea, the ocean, the Indian, the blue, the deep, the coral, the bungies, the reef, Ningaloo; by way of the wobbygong, escaping by way of currents and belly-up, by way of floating, by way of Turquoise Bay; by way of salt-grit in your hair; by way of saturation, of summer storm, by way of tents with broken ramparts; by way of electricity, of lightning; by way of the dunes, the thunder of sand, an inland tsunami; by way of your fingertips, cold cracking metatarsals and callouses; by way of tires, by way of gravel roads, by way of rust in the undercarriage, rust in the red-dirt, rust in the sunset; by way of fraternization in the long-grass; by way of fish-n-chips in Dampier, by way of the peninsula, the salt isthmus; by way of the boab; by way of turning inland, turning inward; by way of distance, the peaks of Mungaroona Range, the decay of Maroona Iron Mine; by way of wild donkeys, lost camels, far-off dingoes, gnarled goannas; by way of track; by way of Bee Gorge, Kalamina Gorge, Yampire Gorge; formed by way of Dolomite and Mount McRae Shale; built by way of granite, by way of tessellations and the fractal of mineral sands; only seen by way of the microscope, overlooked in the rear-view mirror by way of your eyes, the iris, the retina; by way of mistaking your tongue for the milky way; by way of waking to red dust on skin, ochre touch-painted; by way of hiking to Kermit’s pond, the cool of water in desert; by way of packing-up; by way of defenestrating apple-cores at 140kmph; by way of racing utes to no destination; by way of signs counting down 800km to Perth, 700 km to Perth, 600km to Perth

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

After Mutability

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Fiona Wright

Perhaps the best cells are the ones we can’t kill off,
a persistence of the fittest, although mutation’s
always painful. It’s two thousand and fourteen,
and I know no-one who has been
uninjured. It thinks in me,
this shadow. I put on sunscreen, and am surprised
to come in contact with my skin. In the same day,
I’m chatted up in a café
by an aspiring novelist who’s using boldface
and an ugly font, and the woman I pay
to tear the hair out of my legs offers a discount
because my skinny limbs
won’t need much wax. In the same day,
I watch a woman in pink boardshorts
hold out white bread
for a spring-loaded terrier,
an ancient cyclist on City Road with bubble wands
mounted on his handlebars, although they say
this place has gentrified: mutation’s
never simple. I dream my top teeth
splinter, turn to chalkdust in my mouth:
so I am in the world’s gaping jaw.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Scorched Implements

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Iain Britton

1

here the wind pushes / rests

snatches at birds’ feathers / sniffs out

body heat the thermal readings

of a day’s exertion

home-centred

i drop to the ground

stain my belly green

and crush wormcasts

toasted by the sun

2

the road to Ngamotu

is littered with stone emblems

facades lying flat

people in wrinkled skins


i suffer from the ingredients

of the night before

i look uncomfortable

sitting in my seat sitting on stories

left behind before walking

into the city through fields

of potatoes / homes specifically built

for soldiers / farmers / their wives

their maidservants

3

the road to Ngamotu

is not all tinsel-taped

and entangled /

leather boots have flattened it

for easy access

for viewing landscapes

rusty ploughs

scorched implements in their making


the neighbourhood

has retreated uphill

to live amongst the camellias

the rhododendrons

the laughing owls

to love amongst the sectarian adherents
wearing white flowers

4

a generation now dug in

stares skywards

under the weight of its hangi stones

its verbs silent


i suffer from the remoteness

of a woman

holed up in a dream of herself

her habits / her bucolic version

of staring at a gift horse

and smelling the fertile sweetness of its breath

5

the road is as it is /

dry dusty pot-holed / an appian way

plundered by workers every day


the horse knows best knows where to go

past the skypools of relatives / gates bolted to the earth

past forests arguing about longevity


the woman

sits at a table in the backyard

midges shape her thoughts / they

swarm

and spin /

her mind takes refuge

amongst tribal affiliates


a shamanistic resonance

influences this homecoming

and if i listen (like i should)

these outcrops of peaceful

solidarity

should be enough

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Saved

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Maxine Chernoff

“… the awkward, hybrid position of description.” Christian Metz


Between the tide and its remnants, sticks and small, dead creatures, there is water, which is never itself at the moment of observation.

Between the painting and its signature, there is caution and relief, chosen sutures and limits, patient listening as a furnace sputters and someone says death and taxes.

Between the eyes is the heart of the matter, encountered and touched without knowing. Thought lands lightly as a moth or fully as reason assigned to its grave.

Between the luster of day there are four occurrences, three grievances, two questions and a hand that reaches for something stolen from night’s ancient requiem.

Between the need for speech and the comfort of silence, there is a plane lost at sea and a tinsel left by the roadside.

Between what you say and what follows is the tundra of signification and the desert of signs. Thought’s omens strike. As a clock rings the hour, the saying becomes the said.

Out of time and reach, there is the possible. You say a word and meaning flees the frame.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

The End of an ‘A’

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Terrence Chiusano

“Small exact houses set back from small exact lawns.”
“Two yellow vapor lamps.” Mist. Rain. Mud. Main

street. Fogged glass. Wind. Wet gables. “Little rain-soaked
capes of lindens, birch groves, pin oaks.” Assume I was

once there (I do) studying the moss (okay?) between
rotten tree trunks; ant colonies; blackbirds; voles; beetles;

skunks; honeybees. The major (the history of it) was a minor
(the philosophy of it). The science of it assumes otherwise.

•

Honesty itself
is an assumption—
of guilt, usually.

•

So I assume—YOU, for
instance, studying

tree roots. It’s “easy”
to “allow for” such

“honesties”—bumps,
accidental imperfections.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Drowning

Posted on May 1, 2014 by David Howard

voluminous
shawl, blue with white

over her head

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

A Note.Notes.

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Jon Paul Fiorentino
Not quite done. Turns out. A turn. Turns. Not quite. A note. Notes. In terms of hope pinning. Demonstrably so. Listen to waves of not quite. And crash against. There are breath lines and breadth lines of influence and it’s hard to. Fucking ghost. A ghost. Ghosts. That’s all they do. Spring and reel around gerunds. Aghasting. Lung haul. Ways in. Strike it. A chord. Chords. When you clearly, demonstrably so. When you so. Melody. And though you should. Draft it. Please. Just draft it. We could sullen our way. Pine it. When there’s never a need to resort to prose. Not even. And it’s hard to pin it. Down it. A pin. Pins. And it means something down. To even risk a not quite done. Not sure if it can be parsed. A gift. Gifts. Not divine of course. Just. Adjust. There’s too much to fashion. The manner in which. A manner. Manners. Sprint it. Would settle for trudge. Just move. Just. Fashion it. A fashion. Fashions. Something choral. Risk it when the home rattles. Almost tune. A risk. Risks. When the score doesn’t quite yet. Just. That. Adjust. When the dream won’t die despite years of not quites. And yes. Not quite done. And not quite. Something here though. Something close to effort. Your part. So dependent on parting. And so pinned. Now there’s this song you know you know. It’s just a draft. It’s good though. Loop. Very good. Compose. A symphony. Positively symphonic. So. A draft. Drafts. There. Absolutely there. Very much. Quite done.
Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

You Yangs and Diving Boards

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Toby Davidson

Waves, gravitational
mind-mussings teem,

plunge for the jewel
in the clouds and hit clean.

Car-roar obvious,
Where can it bring?

You Yangs are slumbering,
no slumbering thing.

Refineries, youths
to the ultramarine

excite to become what they thought
they could beam –

low-lidded cirrus,
a hole in a dream

sucked from the slumberer’s
chimney-staked sheen.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Elegy

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Libby Hart

When you died there was death in every room.
I had to place my grieving in a box.

Three years round
I found myself weeping in a darkened cinema
as I listened to George Harrison sing, Here Comes the Sun.

I learn something
every time someone lets go.

With you, I wondered
how long does it take to perfect the method?
You tried and then tried again when no one was looking.

Now I ask,
what if it is rest and nothing else that we want?

From one exile to another, from one pain threshold to the next,
you gave me something I could never quite imagine without you:
poetry and subversive education.

I’d come away with books under my jumper, a quiet sky above my head.
In my mind’s eye your room still burns like the inside of a cigarette.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Pirogue

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Michelle Cahill

A boy, I dreamed of being a captain
in the ocean’s foreign policy, catching
the fast currency, binding my pirogue
with a rope to hold back the breakers.

Listen, today a jazz singer drowned,
the infringing Atlantic shipped pirates
who winch poaching flags as Senegal’s
men scrape in the grimy sweatshop.

If only stories were like driftnets hurled
farther than Rosetta time, but comets too
are spun, desiccating colonies. And oceans
a chagrin, a tattered trellis of sardinia.

Our fish are émigrés, there’s no mercy for
the spawning flurry: our blood flows West
dragged in undertows from Saloum to Seine,
where Europe serves sovereign ministries.

Banks, NGO charities flog our sick children.
We’d starve if not for bushfood: tortoise or
dolphin meat, our villages flood, leave us
licking silt-stained boabs, rum-soaked palms.

But I am one of Senghor’s thin-legged,
migrant sons, too proud to beg for breadfruit;
hungry for Spain. Listen, today we threw
a decomposing body overboard ─ and prayed.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

from the other side of the shark*

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Nathan Shepherdson

for B.R. Dionysius

cut with postmodern wit
i can carry the million pound tag
that will not release me
back into the wild

draw your outline on the glass
as you decipher the self
(in formaldehyde)
to witness again
how your mother pulled the teeth
you never knew she had
until you found them in your chest

the animal
you chose not
to cut in half
is the animal
known to leave
half an animal
in your hands

did we float
in this publicly listed company
along with other shareholders
who invest in the potential
for our death

this animal ←
was born when a photograph
could only persuade us
in the negative

so step back in the water

lean forward in the polaroid

your trial bite is free
unusual for a killing
to be launched
immediately

a bite made
so gently the victim
is unaware

as a survivor
you came ashore to describe
how you were bumped
by something →

← taken aback
by the sight of blood
streaming from a dozen incisions
harp notes on the skin
demonstrating how a life
could have been
unbuttoned

so step out of the water

many attacks are nothing more

( ) than a →

catch/
hold & release/
exercise/

your childhood never knew
the colour in a polaroid
would not last

this is a notable exception to there

a moment we re/hearsed
that cannot take its big idea to the grave
until either the lungs or the laughter
subside

this line was thrown out
because it was not needed
because one nightmare is efficient enough
energy equal to the substantiation of itself
fuel in a vein
pumping liquid cinema
into a lonely tank
rivets scalded to pinched sleep
where images combust in a rib brazier
intent on self defence
against our own cold thought

drifting in our craft
you offer the assurance
that with fourteen lines
you can pull in sharks
by the metre

on the fourth day
the lines yielded a large tyger
which you towed ashore
and opened on the beach
belt-tight in an underglow of rutile glare
poorly shielded by wind-shook hessian
as you felt the bulging stomach
you went cold as i ran
as you ran your hands
ran my hands over a smooth dome
→ obviously
the head of the unfortunate

you have altered the head
by not noticing
it’s there

you have altered the head
by not noticing
its face

this great blunt head
almost square edged
attacking a bait at speed
the teeth unmistakable
oblique blades deeply notched
rearward and cockscomb like
the flesh untethered from the bone
salted blue in a myth is deep fear
catapulted powerless to its red end

this great blunt head
almost square edged
abates its attack at speed
in its current life
unrolled over clean cartilage
is the physical prayer
is the swim in an uneven hunt
to bite off hands together in pairs
in communion in communion
incommunicado

your head was dismantled
by the fishbone
dreaming in your throat

every hour awash from every hour
the tide nothing but a broom
to sweep its infinite floor

items to recover
from the recovered animal
include

a lump of coal

a tattooed arm with rope around its wrist

a handbag containing a watch in perfect time

you have been sent here
to pay excise on lost memory

you are the only live bearer in this sentence

given the dubious honour
of evaluating every letter
to redecorate irrational probability
with the fresh stomach contents
from one suggestion

such an animal
is not easily brought
to the weighing station
much simpler to send it
to the auction house
to let an adman’s account
swallow gold value added as fillings
to a theoretic smile

white belly to white belly
position switched you stand above
lie below your uncut gnathic beast
held palm to sweated palm
its skin again the handle to an art
taut same-kawa on a Japanese sword
as sharp as sharper than mutual emulation
the price too to not cut it in half
to see ourselves in the same body
on this same line

we are hooks set back to back
only to have our animal escape
by straightening one hook
and breaking off the other

our kiss can only consist of teeth

we circle in the moment before
our spiracles ventilate cold steam
unthought through necessary instinct

our eyes will be reported as being
‘gleaming black’ protected by objective spirits
living inside transparent white eyelids
which will slam shut across our vision
when we launch the attack
on each other

this is the only known instance
where two lives were lost
in one shark

the physical death
of impossibility
in the mind
of someone living

in water
the shadows are too skilled
to pay their ransom

this broken ocean
will push these broken eyes
to the unfixed surface
of our last eye
in space

i was not said to myself
because you named me
without saying anything

*Or: remembering when B.R. Dionysius & Damien Hirst (both) wearing sharkskin suits met in the bar
of a luxury hotel – clinked glasses – but said nothing because they (both) knew Vic Hislop was still out
fishing.

Note: some passages, phrases and words were transcribed, copied or adapted from Fishes of Australia
by E.M. Grant (E.M. Grant Pty Ltd, Scarborough, 1987) and Guide to Fishes by E.M. Grant (Department
of Harbours and Marine, Brisbane, 1982).

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Film

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Susan Fealy

after Tacita Dean

i
A toe winces in the corner
As if inside a shoe.
So many frames
Inside frames.
Is a panelled door
A building spliced into rooms?
I cling to possibility,
Two figures blur to three—
Glimpse of lakes on the moon.
Spots of red
Spark like jewels,
Disrupt my living.


ii
In this tunnel of light
No paintbox of blood:
White noise
Flickers polka-dots,
Around its navel
The waterfall runs backwards.
The single pine at dusk
Collects pink neon spots—
Like wormholes.
Like cracks that distil
What light there is.


iii
My personal Everest
Seen from above—
Sharp as a shredded moon.
White nitrogen
Pulses its lost horizon,
A chimney blows pompoms
into a no comment sky.
The doorway clings to blue,
Mountains uluru the red.
Pale ocean sweeps in real time,
Sweeps it out again.


iv
Giant bubbles parry
Downward drift,
Stay intact,
Comply.
A black-and-white orange
Globes so close
It almost dreams a breast.
An egg sits on an apartment ledge.
The quality of flower-pink
Is a contract she clutches in one hand
Not like Mondrian’s return
To infinite flower-shops
Nor pared-back Chagall.


v
A white-barred pigeon pecks
The edge of a field.
The escalator offers up,
But only travels down.
Black slate is spilt
In filmic light:
The floor’s too deep,
The light too shallow.
Nothing lives
Outside its apparition.
Nothing not known at last.

Note: ‘Is a contract she clutches in one hand’ and ‘paintbox of blood’ are from ‘The Fall’by Jordie Albiston.
‘Nothing not known at last’ is a minor adaptation of a phrase from ‘Everythings’ by Alex Skovron.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Jeoffry

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Julie Chevalier

after Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart

I testify I was one of only four women going in quest of food
by teaching in the boys high school. Consider this: in my first class dwelt
thirteen Geoffreys, Jeoffrys or Jeffreys, nine Garys or Garrys, four Gavins
and two Garths. The Lord’s poor included Keith, Kevin, Kelvin and Trevor
of the tribe of Tiger. Sir Charles Kingsford Smith’s propeller hung
on the library wall keeping the Lord’s watch in the night
against the adversary. When the photo of Sir Charles looks up
for his instructions I ask him to spin me out of Sydney Technical High
over the parking lot, past the science and maths teachers’ Fords and Holdens,
their bumper stickers spruiking Billy Graham’s long gone revival crusade.
It appeared that the entire Maths/Science Faculty had accepted
English cats as the best in Europe. It was 1968.
The glory of god was in the air. As were drugs.

On April Fool’s Day as we car-pooled past the newsagency
Ray (Commerce) said, Look at that sign, ‘LBJ quits.’
‘Naahh,’ I said with a mixture of gravity and waggery,
‘Probably cigarettes. Not the presidency, surely.’ I’d picked up ‘surely’
trying to spraggle upon waggle at Sydney Uni.

If I’d known the tune I would have danced
Plath’s love set you going like a fat gold watch.
I sailed down the library corridor in the psychedelic spinnaker
I wore on odd days, just as a Third Form student
whistled, Yummy yummy yummy i got love in my tummy.
I certainly had. By stroking … i had found out electricity.

‘No, only seven months. Two to go.’ Afraid of detection I lied
to Principal Brown, who, by July, with the passing quickness
of his attention, still had no idea who I was.
Every family had one cat at least in the bag. But, catching the cork
and tossing it again, what to name the sproglet if it were a boy?

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Seven Ways of Mourning

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Marcelle Freiman

1
Your name bends out of reach,
the final spike shreds the skins
of my remembering.


2
Engraved on stone, words
tell: they came to this country
they lived here, and died.


3
To show you scarlet
bougainvillea in autumn –
your dark hound refused it.


4
Throw waiting hours
down like coins in black water:
lost, they shake like stars.


5
The name rests, a bench
by the sea: fingertip touch
on each breaking wave.


6
If everything ran
out, each vessel empty, clean,
would muscle turn to stone?


7
Forgetting is like
light on sharp edged fences,
clears spaces between.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Who Is to Say

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Lisa Jacobson

That Parisian woman who did not like
her children is long gone while I remain,
who love my own too much. Although

her red armchair still occupies the space
beneath the window in your study.
There was the day we tried to move it

but the chair refused to go, wedging
its bulk against the door frame.
Some things are not so easily disposed of

and besides, I like that chair; the way
it holds me when I sit in it to read.
Who is to say what makes someone leave

and brings another in her place?
Only that all past lovers leave
their sultry trace.

Farm girl, you call me, despite mid-age,
working in the garden or fetching mail,
still in my pyjamas, past midday.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged