my daughter walks
through the woods unhooded
no basket or breadcrumbs
she strays from the path
snaps free sugared fretwork
from frosted windows
wipes hands on the hide
of a wolf trimmed to fit her
its teeth a stringed toy
around her small neck.
or in something else’s mouth. The musk
of a shrew in a snake’s jaw.
The scales
of a snake under the bobcat’s fangs.
The polio vaccine-saturated sugar
cube melting away
in a kid’s mouth. What glee, to receive,
on a six-faced, twelve-edged
convex polyhedron, sweetness,
not a needle in the ass. A fat
lie on the lips of the skinny minister.
Candy on Candy
Darling’s tongue. The stick
of a Blow Pop wedged in the gap
between her teeth as she walked in her tall
heels into the DeVern School of Cosmetology. So
young,
on her deathbed. Oh,
her hair matched the yellow-white
pillow, and in her mouth,
a marshmallow.
Phoenicia,
Ouadi Qadisha
Levantine tongues–
the movement in the mouth of our ancestors
and things we will never come to know
in assimilation
our name normalised
(the inside of the mouth)
immigration restriction acts—
but really, in other times our name meant
of the mountain: Al Jabal
our ancestors tongues
bent backwards and buried,
like Juidi
who lay down to rest
in the Dandenongs, illegally
a sugar gum
darrang
he never spoke Arabic
until he went senile,
his tongue bent back—
assimilation
and blue Levantine eyes
makes one forget
Phoenicia,
Ouadi Qadisha
the movement in the mouth of our ancestors
There are the pork sausages
$4.99 for 500 grams.
Then there’s the BBQ pack
1.8 kg for $9.99.
The sausages in the BBQ pack are a funny pink colour
a plasticine pink.
The ingredients list beef, lamb and chicken as 71%.
No pork.
Pork sausages are the superior sausage.
Before children
Saturday afternoons were pork sausages on the BBQ
a couple of imported beers
and then an afternoon nap on the couch
in front of a lifestyle show about renovating houses.
Now
after a visit to Bunnings
with children
who are hypnotised by the smells of the sausage sizzle
and the sight of people eating sausages in white bread
it’s a decision between pork sausages
$4.99 for 7
and plasticine sausages
$9.99 for 24.
Really there is no decision
no choice
there are definitely no imported beers.
There was a disturbance of night a thrill of hills,
a whip of road worth watching.
You’ve dreamt him reappearing since you were a child,
from some crag of rock some crack of morning
and there he was slender fox
wending through the headstones.
I always knew my grandfather
was patient as slow-melting
snow, but when I say
his name I still can’t get it right—
some syllables cut like wind
others curl like wildfire.
So we’re by the road again ignition off
& everything glittering, frost
on the windscreen. My mother’s
blue cardigan smudges into midnight,
but we can’t tell if he’s still there
or if the night is a door
leading nowhere, so I write the poem
the song the score for breath
to fill the aching silence. If you find him,
I’ll be waiting. If you find him, let him go.
100 million tons.
That’s the mass of a sugarcube-sized pinch
of neutron star. Once all the gasses have condensed,
climbed the periodic table, collapsed in
upon each other, like some taxi-cab
flirters that can no longer resist…
I imagine it set on the floor,
like the old lost penny trick,
except this little thing is not glued,
it’s simply– unliftable. I envision it
sticking just from its own absurd density–
or maybe it doesn’t stick– maybe it falls
straight through, being so dense, so heavy–
falls through the hardwood, through
the foundation slab, through the ground
beneath, falls through just as if the Earth
were cloud- its atoms so loose,
so far apart, before the falling in.
Or maybe it does not fall through.
Maybe, the Earth falls instead into it–
drawn by the gravitational pull of its
irresistible mass. I see mountains, oceans,
skies, cities (taxicabs included) diving
into this little cube which I only thought
to give you, like a penny,
for good luck.
I’m thinking about this little gift for you…
Let’s say a sugarcube is a square centimeter.
That’s 1,000 cubic millimeters.
100 million tons/1,000 cubic millimeters = 100,000 tons/ mm3.
Too heavy. A cube that is a tenth of a millimeter per side
would then weigh 100 tons. Still too heavy.
A cube that is a hundredth of a millimeter
(10 micrometers per side, now quite invisible)
would then weigh a tenth of a ton- 200 pounds.
Down another tenth (one cubic micrometer) and now
we’re at something you can wear- 0.2 pounds, 3.2 ounces.
We’ll lose whatever color it has, with a cube so small.
That seems tolerable– since the color is a mystery.
I have prepared two lockets, each with a little
speck of star. They’re symbolic, like all
such gifts. But as we lean forward towards each
other, as we condense, we will be able to feel
that weight, to sense it in our shoulders and
our brows, as we collapse closer, closer, closer,
taxi driver and his roving eyes be damned…
Maybe it’s enough to sit on your bed with nothing
but a lamp turned on
The small yellow light emanating out into the darkness
Maybe it’s enough to make a new friend after so long
To feel the frenzy of electrons between
two people, the nervous flux
before the current settles
Maybe it’s enough if we never touch
But that I get to spend the whole night staring at the curve and drop
of your ankles.
Your bright orange socks
Maybe it’s enough to walk home afterwards
With a warmth blooming in my chest
To step out onto the street
And look up
There is a nimbus cloud forming now
You can see it – gray against deep purple
The night sky is changing
Justine – iced latte or chai if it’s chilly.
Marielle – a soy flat white to drown her white saviour complex.
Lee – GIANT cap. As big as your head! A bucket to swim in! (My favourite.)
Rex – long black (he’s dreaming), side-serving of mummy issues.
An itemised account of simple pleasures
intended to mute the monotony.
Office currency: a debt transferred daily.
I keep the punch-card to maintain a monopoly.
I want to give this half-familiar self
everything: a firm mattress for their
bad back, their favourite chocolate
cookie, too many greasy takeaways
because they aren’t perfect but they
already know this & that knowledge
is making them sick the way a dog
that thinks it deserves punishment
will try to make its body so small it
disappears so as not to be noticed
until one day someone reaches out
& gently invites them to trust that
a voice can be as soft as a light rain
in springtime just as the full moon
in Leo & some early miracle arrives
the afternoon heat nearly unbearable
we spill forth, naked, towards the water
cautiously picking our way to avoid
submerged rocks and broken branches
read the current, you call out
I am tired of reading everything
three cormorants perch on the riverbend
wet wings open to the wind
bird poems flood in without invitation
later I open tins of food by the fire
we lie under wide dark skies
the stars overhead pencilled in and labelled
verses follow one another
into opaque documents over the years
books left on the grass, sodden with rain
Our leader announced I’m too smart to be sure of anything.
Unanimously we agreed. How damaging it was to see ourselves
as docile agents of an economic workforce. Bloated on competition
and rank. Which as our leader assured us meant the same thing.
A sharp voice from the third row yelled I just found out my wife
has been fucking another man! Nobody said a word apart
from the sound guy who softly replied it happens. I turned to the man
next to me who wore an orange tie to whisper hey, I think my hair
is falling out my head. He shrugged. Told me to calm down.
I thought about what to say next despite the fact my hair
was definitely falling out my head, so I asked him why the room
was so dark. It’s not, the lights are just off. Well, that’s that then
I thought. Our leader approached the lectern like a great cow
rustled a few sheets of paper as a voice from the front row yelled
you’re the truth, Harrison! The whole fucking truth!
Unanimously we agreed. Each of us holding up our signed
hardback copies. As for me, I’d ordered a soda water with lime
about twenty minutes ago, so I thought to ask the man next to me
if I should go see what happened. I said hey, have you seen
a soda water with lime floating around anywhere? He didn’t respond.
Instead, he scratched his ankle then took a bite from his baguette –
Where did you get that baguette from? Are you ok with leaving
just the crust for me…then wow Jesus he flung the napkin down
and dispensed with the following:
look here you stupid little fuck my grandfather died for this country
he died because he believed in liberty and tradition he died
because he died and now here you are… he caught himself
wiped the white mayonnaise from his top lip, readjusted
his orange tie and stroked my face like a wall before turning
his attention back to our leader who by now had changed
into a whole new dress.
The planes came again. But instead of bombs,
they dropped flowers.
Lilacs, lilies, chrysanthemums, orchids, sunflowers.
Others that folks couldn’t name.
Purple petals covered the land and rubble. Covered
the broken houses. Covered the graves.
The children came out of hiding to see it. To hold
their hands up, receiving, smiling, dancing under
the blossom rain.
And when everyone had gathered together in the
open to wonder—
—the planes returned and dropped their bombs.
cantonese scribbled on scallion windows,
greasy windows, almost steamed-up
windows, but the special is always
very special — ‘Sichuan Pork Dumpling
Noodle/ 麻辣餃湯面’. and because
you and i live in this island
we are not from, this shitty island
with shit wind, we move
to an inside table, fresh bleach
on fake wood. our bowls of noodles land
after you list the best places to eat in your
faraway city: your mum’s, the best place for
Shabu-shabu, and a Tokyo
neighbourhood with Chinese restaurants.
i wonder if your doctor mum cooks better
than my cleaner mum. what
a beautiful day for lunch? half rain half
the sound of your smile folding. i ask
if you went running this morning,
you reply that you just have no other clothes.
today Mr Tse’s noodles are less salty.
i let silence sit in between your noisy slurps,
my clumsy chopsticks, the limping footsteps
of Mr Tse’s bad knee.
i don’t think i can talk poetry here.
i eat half my heart before i even get to
my scallion oil chicken noodles.
run out into the streets through the garden shrapnel everywhere is dangerous imagine begin again there are no streetsthere are no streets where the garden had been truth we choose our own everyone back inside where we began run out into the streets
where does the wind begin
and how to make my body fit
into the spaces left in the hollowed trees
I want to surrender to the clay and ash of this landscape
let the paper daisies remember
only a song
there has been a story carrying every night from the inland
see here the branches contour against the path it cleaves
when overcome I push my toes into the grit of this place
notice each flower gathered petalled and leafed
the generosity to keep the whole together
when every shifting wind is an invitation
to fall apart
It is a secret place, the land of tears
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ‘The Little Prince’
Sometimes a thought breaks from the body in liquid form:
O small seismic! Usually this is when we have no words.
Instead we taste our tears and are reminded of the sea.
Others may perceive these tiny flarings but often they are
overlooked in daylight or take place under cover of dark.
Once dry, the face from which they emerge is indefinitely
changed. Other times, eyes remain inconveniently tearless.
For this we have what the Germans call künstliche Träne—
artificial tears—bought in small bottles over-the-counter
to administer as needed. The inability to secrete natural
tears should not be taken for a lack of feeling, the same
way the effects of slicing onions do not reflect true grief.
There is no optimal word in the English language for the
inappropriate production of tears. Magnified one hundred-
fold with a high-resolution microscope, tears become
remarkably kaleidoscopic. Photographed, they form
vast yet intricate landscapes suggestive of names such as
Abandonment, Desolation and Loss, as well as the less epic:
Frustration and Dust. Every day, artists and scientists work
to uncover novel and authentic ways of interpreting tears.
They may well be our last remaining frontier.
For Inez and Frankie
As your nodes decide on legs, on arms,
and while your heart’s not yet enclosed, and your skin
translucent as those fishes’ pulsing bodies,
I develop backache, nausea – not quite phantoms,
but a song, measured against your mother’s
first morning sickness spew, on our house-sit
(she texted me congratulations – I smirked,
and wanted to be there with both of you)
the Friday after Father’s Day. Prolactin
swims milky in my blood, my testosterone
levels, studies suggest, are headed for the tiles.
Your brain starts now; your bones begin to knit;
your eyes are clusters, sealed-over, building patterns
to see worlds with, to be known by, and loved.
What a treat it was to come home again ! each weekend
freed from need to entreaty egress, ingress, the scarification
of waiting at the gate every night for love or its proximate
arrival: no, weekends were abandonment’s ceasefire, after
five days of school and unconditional grandpama coddling
the sanctioned right of return to that own small room, to the
sistermaking whimpers, to ‘70s pubes on well-wound
VHS in the hidden drawer behind the magic wand, to long
hours alone with matches and flammable newsprint. Eating
watermelon in pearls and heels and clipped-on studs, just to
understand the heft of another body’s mystery, just to try
to see how this meant being treated differently, how
to get the red stains out before rush hour ended. Reagan
rebuking the Evil Empire (Vader’s in Russia?), white Lotus
Esprit floating by in the flood (Bond’s in Toa Payoh?),
a thirteen-floor drop for fruit peel and poor grade report
(talks too much in class!) to long suffering grass, the child
being farther to regret. Not refuge exactly but retreat, an
undergrounding of overkeen senses, hallucinating safety.
Testing then, as now, howhat it is to be the one to decide
when to answer the call. What to admit or withdraw.
Text by Maria Takolander. Photographs by David McCooey.
First published in Korean in Hwanghae Review, vol. 121
According to Carson, who has the English name of Jesus’s maternal grandmother, Anna,
‘To be a whacher1 is not a choice.
There is nowhere to get away from it,
no ledge to climb up to.’
Anna was married three times,
and Maria was born to her and her first husband, Joachim.
She broke free from her biological father and two stepfathers,
and got pregnant before making love with Joseph.
Ever since I found out
that one of my Twitter friend’s
friends was an incest survivor,
I wanted to dedicate
a prayer poem
to the angel who always covered Mary’s naked body with her soft white wings.
Beginning with all the things that happened that I didn’t witness,
from the things that happened secretly without catching my eye—thank you, thanks!
With my eyes, I wanted to run away quietly,
because prayer is often like that.
Wrapping the seeds of despair in your warm hands
and desperately hoping that they will never sprout.
First published in Korean in Hwanghae Review, vol. 121
Anne Carson had an older brother, and Anne Shirley was an orphan and
Anne Brontë was the youngest of three sisters and
Ann Vickery was an only daughter.
What about Anne Hathaway and Anne Conway?
I don’t know. They were someone’s wives
and then they tried extremely hard to become someone else
or vice versa.
That morning, the break up didn’t find Anne Carson.
In her mind, Anne Shirley is chatting happily.
‘Today is like a duck made of strawberry cream. I feel sweet.’
They say Confucius’s Discussion of Poetry came out of a large tomb in China.
A bamboo book about poetry.
Ann, does poetry always emerge from a grave where something has been lost?
From the tomb of love, the tomb of fire, the tomb of time?
With red hair instead of a red hat,
like an orphan girl instead of a boy sent under a green roof,
I was delivered to my house by mistake, an eldest daughter instead of an eldest son.
After that, two more girls were misdelivered—Emily and Anne! Welcome!
Would my mother have been less unhappy if I had been a boy?
If I had brothers, this conditional clause would not be possible,
because I wouldn’t have been born.
If the fourth child, born when I was nine, had been a girl,
would my mother have been abandoned?
Wandering between the third and fourth children
what about the two baby girls gone missing?
Ultimately, was my first poem born
in the shiny stainless steel waste bins underneath operating tables?
On all those daughters’ graves?
My mom never looked sad
but her sadness comes to me by accident
and poems are written like daughters.
I don’t miss my mother. I only miss her sadness.
Everyone misses their mom, but I guess I’m a bad bitch — just like mom said.
I always hid behind my red hat like a tired boy
going around, stealing other people’s faces.
Walking back and forth across the bridge
between my mother and grandmother,
trying to
cross the past.
Anne’s hand tugs at my hat brim.
Yarn unravels bit by bit.
My face reddens and tangles.
Someday I’ll go to the park of different faces.
Like a beautiful thread between the trees and the sky
looking differently every time.
When I was young
I prayed to the women who didn’t want me, to my cruel goddesses.
Combining into one, Please love me.
The sacred marriage of my right and left hand.
Now, they’re split up.
The right hand. The left hand.
Each went to find its lover.
The right hand going to move the blind sun to its proper area, and
the left hand following Pluto exiled.
A younger sister and an orphan.
Either the only child or the third child,
or the stars of Anne, alone and still someone’s wife.
Between the fingers of the grave robber digging the dark sky of the park
stars slip and shine
like knives cutting through a black satin skirt.
First published in Korean in Hwanghae Review, vol. 121
—Joseph Brodsky, ‘Still Life’
Wooden crosses
fastened into the top of sand dunes
like God’s red toothpicks.
I only had one question
for the woman.
From that place
why didn’t you run? Maria
could do nothing, just stand and watch.
Forever waiting
arms outstretched
until pain’s weight in a human shape
forces your soul to collapse……
While I watched
and pushed helplessness’s big head out from between my two legs
I asked her the question.
