Glazed Glitter.

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Kay Are
     Love you, no he’s nervous, and we just now had a couple of coffees. An urban sock or about three avocados. No crap no yep. The other day. On the board, you do have milk if that will go away with for service, I saw Snickers ones the other, do it for the cash I had the capability they see it got me into are they there already. How to earn money from the custom well I’ll see.
     From AFL country I’ve been curious to know. And like just properly an architect. Lives an amazing. Isn’t she she’s a gorgeous. They will never see why they, will just need to be prepared two of the regular. Like when he was at my flat and saw me it was credibility to the venture I don’t know where I’m going.





I made this poem by transposing found phrases into the metre of a pre-existing text: Gertrude Stein’s ‘Objects’ in Tender Buttons. The found text comes from speech I overheard while in one of the four spaces in which I often write: a café in Balaclava, on an afternoon train down the Sandrigham line, in Bourke St mall or at my kitchen table. (The titles are Stein’s.) I wanted to maintain the spoken rhythms of the Stein, but the results only show up the constant skirmish between metrical rhythms and the phrasal rhythms of the vernacular, one-upping each other within the line. This poem is extracted from a set of 50.

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

KPTEA

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Jennifer Mackenzie

Lucy Guerin Inc
28 Batman St
West Melbourne 19/3/14:11.30-1

Dancing new work
Make feet swan neck swoop
Uh ha uh haha
Silence ooh! Wh whwh heel around heel
Everything depends on what happens next
Who who aspirated
Hahaha whwhwh
Uhhahawhwhwh
Landed uuup
Kptea
Stutter shoulder stutter chest
Solo 60 seconds/30/5 rest
Woh woh wee kptea
Hoo woo whit
Wahwahwah we
Woo woo chchchc kptea
Dsh dsh dsh dsh
In stay out in stay. Out
Yeeehy
He heeeer wrrrr wrrrrr hahaha yep yeeeh
Yeyeyeh
Whwhwh wwooofff ha
Image screen rest revise kptea

At the QV stout man (attempts to)
Runs
Flapping penguin propeller arms
Laughter approaching
Laughter following
Red light startled
At the crossing his gazing up to infinite lunchtime sushi blue

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Changing the Names of the Past in the Years of Curious Habits

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Michelle Leber

1. Melbourne, 1968

Except for thistle girl,
we never questioned wiping up
the hidden pools

of urine from under
someone else’s skirt.
Mother Eucalypt’s voice,

known as whip crack,
pitched to scatter even
the suggestion of ants.

There was no use for the yard
either. Outside the Morton Bay fig
tugged threads

from under doors. The four seasons―
did what they were supposed
to do. I swear,

for the well-thumbed chapter of a year,
we never left that room.
Inside the clock spoke

conferred with a no-way-back
roundabout of hymns, confessions,
multiplication tables.

Thistle girl, clever by account
of her ancestral belligerence,
keen to stand high-toe kilter,

described the yard through a porthole―
like us, the yard existed as if
never knowing its purpose.


2. Melbourne, 1970

Seven years old, caught under
the abstract glow of her grimace,
Sister Heath’s

bull-dog eyes appeared
at the palm-end of her
air-curling finger―

if you walk your muddy soul
in the gully, you’ll meet Death
like Mother Magnolia.

Sister’s neck muscles
snapped into inimical position,
tight bundles twanging.

And even though a body
would follow the black trail of her
into the dormitory,

her cold breath huffing
new lists of punishments,
my mind was back in the gully,

inside a vacant bower―there, looking up,
seldom a presence in the light,
pollen’s blanket floating.

Sitting in low-limbed shadows
with moths, the conversation
of leafhoppers, away from Sister’s

God, the one with his own troubles,
away from all
the bleeding bones.

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

An Enough [letter to those Melbourne poets]

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Marc Jones

putting an end to . to fin
ish . after an exhaustion , a sent
ence . not of a person . not a . ho
w of . much heaves . nor to ma
ke pure . nor change . most a how of dare o
r share . much of the space without the cu
t . first the sound them . sec
ond the sense those . first the poem the
se . second the theory . without the line
ar one is . prove to variety they .

yet half if just the said said later wi
th a difference . enough then . eno
ugh now and nothing bundled . and brea
th has less to do than ever . no
t barren . or rich . not this writ

istling . neither resolving the li
near nor solving the circle .

probably the atom more rearr
angeable than the alphabet .
a search for beauty nor to stump .
nor how thort followed think
ing . . no
r an intervention .

nor stating a th
ing a thing more appropriate under
neath . a somewhat flippant strange co
mment surface .

nor to make no . concessions be
cause of the difficulty . these poles ha
ve the between them .

the
re is nothing to show for th
is . the moral is honest eno
ugh to turn on quicksand .

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Streets

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Will Druce

twentieth century flinders st
was a salon throng
south eastern bitter tinny
tasting koala skull
psychofederation that tanned
orange into a current
sponge cake million fake
denim catwalk corporate
smoothie shop.

sydney road is a
pram sucking wedding
smothering gutter beer
swilling turncoat bubblegum
runway that can spit
further than thornbury
& looks shit but isn’t
& stretches like rabbit proof
fence.

elgin/johnston st will
sink into a nose blowing
green river of gold
detritus sweeping foolish
pregnancy testing ideas
people into dull trends
& will flatten into a flathead
bike tube esplanade costing
darebin.

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Worry rung (Wurrung)

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Lisa Samuels

The hour strikes and you strike
back a feathery blankness pre-Socratic
mean sets up a fervor specked with
broken elements, waking to the heat
and driving hither air and you particulate
the more like license of a congregation giving
itself an audience giving starry
bodies flashing on her head
that vent or gain conversion to
cessation made a ruse of pastoral

The observer stands in front of living loops
enhancement, aft of public stripping
further to a child’s order
inside out, a Circuit of the Mind becomes
monumental in the cardiac sense
you swallow the Museum the day’s
cavernous architect enfolding
the night we count invincible, as
in we swallowed continuously and naturally
sliced through, translate

you’ll end the weekends of your castle hands
moving your cultural life through earth
unaware as water on the floor approaches
rivulets translating red divides
the cave between a contact troupe
committed to a hall, entering in terms of
collage, hermosos hijos smiling in small loops
with an accent pretty city
ochre talking through the caves they meet
the red hands touching on the walls across the long walks
through protective stone you are providence to a fable
later made of teargas blown across the vowels
kindly, very nice

Turning fell to a machine, your body
swerves its balance inside shoes
in which we understand the peeled-out inhibitions of
comparatives blind history
waste arrivals only pelt the beautiful children
part the legs continuously performing axis
past the jacket a community gave
to get it fixed, burn on the design

stippled in text the bred reeds make
the images of sky fall down
the city as she walks to get
the famous bakery items crumbling in her mouth
she’s folding another country further asked
for body ankles and the touch
stones fresh positions for the hair
finger scales in excess proven instruments
gently take on kitchen splashbacks Wathaurong
Glass and stories, we’re really trying
feedback for a mock trial of witnesses
none of whom can be said to have seen

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Williamstown

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Laurie Duggan

1

low native scrub on the promontory
palm-ends splattered with birdshit

upper decks of ships
luminous in the Bay

cloud from the northeast gathers,
the poems dry up,

at the edge of the military base, leaves hang
awaiting scent release

the closest gum, a scribbly trunk,
red-tipped branches,

amid the foliage, bunches
of spherical green pods


2

turbulence on Port Phillip,
Hobson’s Bay out of sight, behind the station,
Corio behind the football stands

anamometers spin

three khaki trucks
two yellow outboards

cirrostratus as punctuation


3

rusted locks face south and east

only the upper level cognisant of light

the rail draped with spiderwebs

a loose strip of flywire

fur jacket on a collapsed settee

The Oxford Book of Jurisprudence


4

a kite, bird-shaped
above the depot

above a protected cove
of black swans

vessels silhouetted
seaward.

the brilliant device
perturbs local birds

hovering low
over the parade ground

an asphalt park’s
empty space,

wire fence disappears
over a hump, on which

the great one falls
entangled on barbs.

over the battery
gulls rejoice

the raptor, unpicked
lifts off, then plummets

gains altitude again,
then it’s gone


5

low coastal eucalypts, ti-tree, palms (introduced)
bend with the wind

figures leave the park
waves flatten

lights, port side
of a monolith

shades of grey-blue
above and below

an odd chromaticism
ship shape under cloud

chatter of settled birds
upstairs, under billiard lights

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

In Line

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Helga Jermy

.
.
.
If I stand here
with my references
and wad of cash
but I won’t
stand here
with my references
and wad of cash
I am tenth
in a line of
borrowed suits
and excuses
and my hair
isn’t quite parted
the right way
but there is no
right way
and nobody
notices the lack
of security
and dodgy leaky
gritty sink
taps on the blink
if taps could
blink
and if I stand
in
line
I might not miss out
on this des res
or I miss out
on this des res
and not miss out
at the tapas
van where
references and
wads of cash
are in short supply
and I am fifth
in line

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Melbs

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Siân Vate

pelt harbour / more of the ice-same. ‘memories’ make a ‘memory’ seem triffle / seem tripped. ‘i don’t understand why we’re’ memories make a memory bank extension no? ‘i’ no ‘you’ want ‘all my memories’ up. who knew there was a cave under the citilink so we walked through it / no ran & i ran back again / i ran back to call your father: ‘dad – don’t explain.’ i know what a trip down rock-lane explains: ‘are you bored?’ i said ‘he’s a pebble’: no refraining. a whole nother shelf reels extended in the back-lane. you don’t know coburg’s secrets cos coburg doesn’t know / they’re like the things that kids know / triffle. mums made this possible. who pulled all the cars in. who put each shoulder to a shelf – the only reason you know this is cos everyone kept driving their kids. memories make a right-lane extended: don’t trip. don’t call attention a: ‘don’t think about that’ guy clagged your hand-brace / made a four-letter ice-break / put a dog in a kind of open-ended family-type station with the radio turned to on / it’s tuning. always assuming there’s a station and what if all your ideas are in the bottom of the coopers and the beer’s done & it’s closing? quit: i call a favour. rabbits make this tangent. don’t expect them / don’t reject them. they bounce into screen / make a nuisance / make sense: a boy is just a simple returning. that is it is no thing to ‘don a bother’. open old streets onto a pale street theatre / call shots / call game / take a cake of salt to your craving and give it all kinds of names like ‘now’ and ‘elsewhere’ or ‘i knew there was no returning’. mice make for an indelicate returning. wherever you are they are / sorting broken glass from the future / HA. i see your door frame and raise you game / more than ice / it’s coburg door frames. it’s car doors whirring. in the present it’s your mobile making candy threats punching out your big-fame.

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Carrionblush Hotel

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Bronwyn Frances

(Abbotsford)

reanimating the squirrel stiffed
in your pocket. A light bulb holding you above the surface.
Keep yourself south of the sidewalk
Myself as girl I take a gin in the bathtub
Sixpence abortions round the corner of your
curled lips, widows peak
Grey hat on the corner of the League of Beautiful Thighs

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

The German Consulate in Melbourne

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Javant Biarujia

As seen from the street the building was reminiscent of a
German consulate in Melbourne.
— GIORGIO DE CHIRICO

… take any risks you like, but never listen to a deconstructionist.
— CHRISTOPHER KOCH
author, and grandson of J. A. B. Koch,
architect of the German Consulate in Melbourne


Abel Tasman, whose sea-faring adventures in the great southern oceans — having cartographed Van Dieman’s land out of the austral island, plotted an inverted Novaya Zemlya, and pondered Psalmanazar’s boast to have eaten human faeces or flesh in his Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa (2nd ed.) — found his most ardent admirer in one Johann Augustus Bernard Koch. As soon as Johnny “Kokosnuß” was old enough to dream (he was the kind of boy who would have asked to be born), he dreamed of the explorers’ strange land, where style stood preontological to Hegel, & prephenomenological to Husserl; where the body was subjected to nothing more than an ozone-depleted Atlantide or the brunt of a bronzed sun in paradise. At the age of eight — in 1855 — he was to journey, after a short circumnavigation (divagation) of Die Künstler, to Melbourne, capital of the British colony of Victoria, where he was to aspire to become a speculator on the Zeitgeist (for his signature was daedalian and case sensitive). — Which would not have taken even the most sittlich of the nineteenth-century golddiggers by surprise! And so he found himself flung into a quasi-respectable milieutopia. Like all those around him, he was from somewhere else. Two worlds: one substantial and legitimate; the other, irreal and exoticist. The island continent was more than a real frontier, however; it was the last “Other”. Yet, despite its quickly filling “emptiness” (terra nullius), it never did transcend for him the idea of the New World as such, nor counter the predominance of the transatlantic. It was, at base, base coin — from the silver dump to culture as exhibit. To the splendid mansions he built, to the German Consulate in Melbourne, which only a poet or painter could ever dream up …


Acknowledgements

The poem ‘the german consulate in Melbourne’ was first published in pointcounterpoint: New and selected poems 1983 – 2008 (Salt Publishing, 2007).

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

The Weather Broadcast

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Lily Chan

i could not look at you on the weather

when they panned across the nullarbor i kept my eyes on the floor til it swept up the gold coast

you reminded me too much of the boy


nevertheless you persisted. the third date i was cast into the iron-green crest of the state library you breathed me in a new ventricle, laneways unfurling. to university on a rusted bike and the trees framed with sudden clarity my passage to the horizon. you smelled right, old paperbacks in bookshops, lentils simmering, even my reflection glowed


i stopped dreaming of the boy.

there was no space on the couch for two, no salt on my tongue, no ghost of Lot’s wife gazing on the old city

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Plus Ça Change … 1981–2011

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Javant Biarujia

HOMO NEST RAIDED, QUEEN BEES ARE STINGING MAD

— JERRY LISKER: New York Daily News, July 6, 1969.
Report on the raid by the Tactical Patrol Force on the Stonewall Inn,
a private gay club, at 57 Christopher Street.

Listen. Whatever we do from here on out
Let’s for God’s sake not look at each other
Keep our eyes shut and the lights turned off—
We won’t mind touching if we don’t have to see

— PHILIP WHALEN

1: Move On (1981–1983)

[Chief Justice of the Family Court]
CALLS FOR REPEAL OF HOMOSEXUAL LAWS
[New South Wales government] COY
OVER RIGHTS FOR HOMOSEXUALS
HOMOSEXUALS GAIN RIGHT TO VISIT
U. S. [Stupid As a Painter by]
JUAN DAVILA GETS AN
R-RATING [at the Sydney Biennale, for
“explicit
homosexual material”] [Armed] SERVICES DRAFT
NEW RULES ON HOMOSEXUALS BAN
ON HOMOSEXUALS’
[Ex-Servicemen’s Association] WREATH BID
[at
War
Memorial
service]

2: Look Back in Anger (1984–1988)

EQUALITY FOR GAY DE FACTOS
A[ustralian] B[roadcasting] C[ommission] POLICY A TEST FOR
GAY RIGHTS SAYS LEGAL EXPERT P[ublic] S[ervice] BOARD
WON’T ACCEPT GAY PARTNERS — “I’M OWED SOMETHING”
SAYS BLOOD AIDS MAN [Anglican] DEAN [of Sydney] ATTACKS
ABC OVER GAYS/AIDS: A PHONEY WAR’S PALL OF
FEAR POLICE GIVE AIDS THE SPRAY FUNDING FOR
HOSPITALS SLASHED AIDS-INFECTED INSECTS MAY BE
TRANSMITTING DISEASE GRIM REAPER AIDS AD ENDS
EARLY REAGAN BACKS AIDS FIGHT AIDS WAR STARTS: 2
MILLION AT RISK BLOOD BANK EXPECTS NO LEGAL
ACTION OVER AIDS SHOULD WE ALL BE AFRAID OF AIDS?
AIDS CONFINED TO HIGH-RISK GROUPS BLOOD TESTS SHOW
AIDS PLAN PROPOSES TESTS FOR LONG-TERM PRISONERS

3: Boys Keep Swinging (1989–2000)

[Australian] GOVERNMENT TOLD
IT BREACHED GAY RIGHTS TAS[manian] GAYS
EXPECT TO BE CHARGED FEW BLINK AS HIGH COURT JUDGE
KIRBY GOES PUBLIC ON [his] HOMOSEXUALITY GAY [cabaret
drag] ACTS UNDER FIRE FOR
RACISM
ROMANS PUT
ON A GAY FACE LIMITS
TO EQUALITY [for gays]
MORE LAW CHANGES FOR GAY COUPLES
R[eturned &] S[ervices] L[eague] DECLARES WAR ON
HOMOSEXUALITY
POPE FEELS
BITTERNESS
OVER GAY FESTIVAL

4: Silver Jubilee On: And the Beat Goes On (2001–2011)

GAY TRIAL AN
ISSUE OF STATE SECURITY IN EGYPT
EGYPT JAILS 23 OVER [being in a] GAY DISCO
[Tom]
CRUISE WINS: HE’S NOT GAY
U. S. GENERALS ADMIRAL COME OUT
OF THE CLOSET MACHETE MAN CLAIMS
BIBLE PROMPTED
ATTACKS ON GAYS SPAIN:
SAME-
SEX MARRIAGES GET GO-AHEAD
ELTON JOHN TO WED DAVID
FURNISH RIGHTS ACTIVISTS RECALL A TIME WHEN
GAY
SEX WAS
A
CRIME
GAY HATE CAMPAIGN ROCKS DEFENCE FORCE:
HOMOSEXUAL SOLDIERS OUTED ONLINE AND VILIFIED FOR
“FILTHY LIFESTYLE”
This cento has been composed entirely of headlines quoted verbatim from the poet’s “serious” hometown broadsheet, The Age (Melbourne, Australia), over the past thirty years. Any elucidations or interpolations are indicated in square brackets and are printed in lower case.
Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Fed Square Spots Romantic Three Storeys Up

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Julie Maclean

Don’t think I can’t see you
thumbing your nose
at my reputation
Lady-of-the-Tennyson poem

You should know I am here
trumping Gas and Fuel ugly
Lame water feature, flat screen
no one loved
Volcanoes of bluestone
have given me up like a martyr
River pebbles
will carry you downstream
Just you dare

How many times
have I watched you
cocooned in a spider’s web
Hair down your back
to attract some dude

Four gray walls Four gray towers
Background scenery in your book
You can’t bear to look at me these days
Straining to see the reflection
of some flaneur punting up the Yarra

Remember, I am most dramatic
in silhouette at night
When white lights shoot shards
that should have been
Black suits imagine they’re in
some piazza in Rome as they sip
Pinot Gris, order tapas
Not that you can see

After a hard day on Collins
Off home to tuck the baby in
Kiss the wife Goodnight
Maybe more
Not for you, my dear

Back to your fantasy
Tapestry with the gaps
Peep through my honeycomb, Madam,
You’re done

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Simon Stone Circa Whenever

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Sam Twyford-Moore

I am Simon Stone. Or I am Simon Stone’s idea of his public image. I am Simon Stone’s publicist’s mother.

I am Simon Stone’s publicist’s mother, standing over a garden bed, looking at the sky, and thinking ‘Huh, good job I guess.’

Her daughter is on the phone sobbing because a newspaper printed an article called Simon Stoned.

Simon Stone in a rage this morning, we forgot to think about him last night, and he’s really upset his publicist didn’t embed those thoughts better.

Simon Stone tried to finish The Simon Stone E-newsletter tonight but lord knows that thing goes for 444 pages.

Simon Stone Fruit. He’s not even joking. He wants in your kid’s lunchbox.

Simon Stone is trying to figure out if and how that article about Haiti is secretly about him.

It probably costs like $7500 to fly Simon Stone to Melbourne to speak at a writers’ festival or playwriting event.

Simon Stone, sitting back, sipping a Bundaberg and Coke, imagining middle Australia; a hot dude telling me Belvoir Street is a dive.

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Orientation

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Antonia Pont

i felt sad when the NY man left
i was on a tram
travelling west on Bridge Road
towards the city
i cued a tune by Beirut to repeat
while i smiled through smeary windows
did some tears

in the centre i got down
took the alley
full of overhanging
awnings and windows throwing
the colours of people
crossed at the crossing
entered an arcade
remembered a birthday
late so
bought a gift
in slow
motion
for another man i love
then personal cosmetics
in the plain white light
of a day spa

i was lucky since a waiting tram
was mine and
travelling north along Elizabeth Street
at the market intersection
on the aluminium seats
i saw a girl
with
the thinnest legs
i’d ever seen
in tight
pale blue denim but she
was really laughing
(its blue was not unlike
the wrapping
on my
fresh present)

going up Victoria Street
i talked to myself
silently in imaginary discussion
with the NY man
whose body all the while
was in the tightness of a plane
travelling east
and mostly very north

in the inner west
and very south i left the tram
stepped between bumpers and
went breezeway carpark footpath home

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Grey, Green, Silver (elemental machine)

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Isi Unikowski

I had forgotten rain’s mechanism: how it doesn’t fall
but is requisitioned, plucked from a city’s plumage
that in its arrogance of towers has forgotten to ask,
windows like little green parks
peering onto cafes, consultants’ cases
arranged between tables like fat, black tails.

I had forgotten that only when those who are changed,
damaged, awry, stand beneath the peppermint
gums’ crabbed and burled witness, touch
the grudging tapers of its foliage, somnolent chandeliers
lit by evening unrolling like some honey
flowing fabric flung across market
trestles for those who have arisen and gone,
homing from their burnished councils

only when tiny paper boats
of chance and repercussion have navigated
beyond permission’s precincts, down acquifers
of possibility and hodge podge, a transit across
the river’s floodlit shimmer, tap dancing
for the gauged seasons—only then does the rain begin
sheets of pewter coinage poured
into that unexpecting, unresisting lap.

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Snottische.

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Duncan Hose

Richmond hotties are hotter than other kinds of hotties but harder
\ to find (trobar trouver)
They may not even be hot at all
There is a man with a bag of tripe.
I wonder is he thinking ‘Tripe Shantey?’

The hands give it away a little bit
The hands give it away every time
The hands give away nothing (prokoffief sneaky bitch!

Last night I was t the pub with five people I wanted to fuck at some
Time &
Last night I wanted to fuck them all last night! Hiho &
Aukenward.

Gorgeois Karen (Black) we called her ‘Death Bags Murphy’
Death bags Nasty. Death bags goes to Hollywood
\ as shae did
Which is this poem except that the real we
Sit in Richmond over late lunch for breakfast (for which we fight the supper-fly)
Judge the faccions of others with a less than sporting eye
Laugh rippishly – you know – ‘the flickering little victory’
O my bonton bébé be my little
Cobra in a box?
Xx

Vida: Nora Pike was married to a Victorian Lord, and spent much time at court in
‘Melbournen’ [which means at once ‘everywhere a swamp’ and ‘Triggertown’]. Though
she references others in her songs she seems to have been the only trobairitz of this
place, and so she seems to have believed whatever pleased her. She made and sang many
fine sirventes and canso, was red in the fur and was oftent’ called ‘the
greatest of gingers.’

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Lunch Poem, University Square

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Stu Hatton

When I say I have a tree for lunch
I mean I sit under it & eat something
I assembled from bits of a supermarket. Uni students
pass by, pointing out the sun, which they
have been learning about. Today’s half-moon
could almost be a cloud offcut. So much for
that window called the heavens; let’s talk
about the footy, how it’s most
exciting when (cloud-like) it begins to look
like other things & you forget
whether it’s warlike or erotic.

Look, there’s a guy on one of those
free bikes, wearing a helmet, but
without a strap, riding through
the ‘no bikes’ park! Everyone needs
a hero. Maybe he’s a student & this is
his public art performance assignment—
nah, would never’ve got past
ethics! More students appear to be
pointing at the sun; there must be
something special about it today.
Maybe loose-helmet guy’s playing
Icarus? So where’s Daedalus & his maze?

The campus looms, fenced by trees;
cranes stand over it like bored fishermen. But
where’s the water? What’s happened to Icarus?

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

I Spy

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Cameron Lowe

—after a line by Fiona Hile


Not yet drunk, or appreciating
poetry—stuck

on the highway—I offer
the male glaze,

you imitate the silence
of Werribee. Spot

any zebra? I spy—
one donkey.

I say: ‘the party
will be over…

I mean the poetry
…hopefully…’

I say:
‘the speeches…’

In the traffic jam
on the Westgate

you paint your lips
in the dark—

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

The Day after the Election in a Melbourne Backyard

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Anne Elvey

1.

The cone roosts
in the tree. The sky

responds with blue.
The radio crackles

and the pundit says
we get what we

2.

deserve, electing
a crowd of daleks

with their rind and their
heart of imagination

and a vocabulary limited
to a single word.

3.

Each Louis turns up
its half dozen pins

guillotined by air.
Such a thin moment

is forgotten, says
Luce reading Martin.

4.

Two coins rest
in a weathered palm

while rain
pocks the grey earth

and a sprout pushes
through the soil,

5.

emerges between
the large toe

and the next, uncurls.
This is not imagination

but the green kidney
in its pod, the stalk

6.

beneath the clothesline
and, in the overhanging

banksia, a shriek
when the wattlebird

knows the cone,
knows the tree.

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

After the Election – On Rye Pier

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Ross Donlon

After the painting, Rye Pier, by John Baird

With the sky thick as mud,
horizon steel edged, ship on its tightrope,
smoke from the stack smudging clouds,
the water at Rye flat as Clag,
flowerets of spume and seaweed
regular as scattered cornflakes,
Rye Pier itself stark
in the afternoon as an abandoned shrine,
Tony Abbott looking on like a bemused pit bull terrier,
tail upright, head judiciously cocked,
the empty beach like Ava Gardner’s
a good place to make a film about the end of the world
and with nothing to be gained but doubt
I dive into the election result and attempt a
Head-to-Tail with Half-Hip-Reverse-Twist
with the tide out.

*Tony Abbott is a former Leader of the Federal Opposition

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Melbourne Poem

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Cassie Lewis

I

A nightmare about two land masses, and the wind is too strong to fly across. Fashion photography of melting ice. Less and less control

archeology is all upturned faces
unexpected digs

anthropologists stumble on thawing soldiers in mountain slough.

Roiling warmth.
Trickles of sound where there was silence.

Maybe now the man can become unstuck.
The heavy gears of mind

might free him, and then it won’t be silence but the long stream of sound in his mind
overheard, for this level of cold cannot sustain life.

Maybe now the woman can slow down, not whir with desperate grace to cover
her mind with sound.


II

The thick air of almost forty years old supports
memory codes, layered events. Daguerreotypes of children in water

movement in silence. Body is the water
but cannot bear it. Almost forty shuffles through index cards fast.

Toy of my generation: Star Wars figurines that move, screenwriting that elates and wires up intelligence. Dr Who, I understand!

(The planet suffers fatal surgery and donates its eyes)

The other land is not a symbol.
I am the symbol.
Binary mind: man woman mind cannot encompass the third, the child and breaks.


III

Perhaps the son is more ancient than the father, closer to sense. The son protects the father from hurt by avenging his sadness or going in, to see what was hurt and where, only to find there is no mortal enemy and no lines even, and enemy is everywhere, friend is everywhere and thought fills all space so he cannot shoot enough to stop the sound of his thudding heart.

Please don’t follow me here, would the hero say this? Let me die
harmonized by godlike love, washed clean. I know man

and woman but the truth is in between.

The story of the woman is a painting with eyes that follow you.
The story is not what happens.


IV

Any daughter must be enraged before her body will move. Stunned still by her useless power,
she must pick up each leg and tell it move. While you are moving
there is hope, she could say this

or say altogether less.

Streams of words trickling to form decisions or cures.
Sound could drive us mad really.

Everything is kept online anyway – but maybe hard drives always were external, if basic memory stores much of it and what we do defines us.

Find a word in this stream of consciousness.
This is a word hunt game,
the woman says.

Melbourne has put on bulk and sways like buildings
except they are fire. Art

is fire. Sky might.

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Lucy Van Reviews John Mateer

Posted on May 23, 2014 by Lucy Van

2 x JM books2 x JM booksUnbelievers, or ‘The Moor’
by John Mateer
Giramondo, 2013

Emptiness: Asian Poems 1998-2012
by John Mateer
Fremantle Press, 2014

In his two most recent books, the prolific John Mateer presents work developed over the long haul. His concluding essay in Unbelievers is a reflection on the seven years of writing behind that body of work, and Emptiness emphasises in its subtitle the 14-year scope of that collection. Despite the years of writing they represent, both collections bear a freshness of focus, expressed through Mateer’s formulation: ‘the irony of Elsewhere’.

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