Russian Daughters

We stayed up all night
with the daughters of Russian
immigrants, lounging by the fire
in hobo coats and corduroy
trousers, listening to The Cure
in the dark, talking until dawn,
watching the sun rise over the bay.

After sunrise, we made coffee
and pancakes for the sisters
and their parents, unconsciously
auditioning for the role of missing
son or future son-in-law.

Exhausted and content,
we walked to the station
late on Sunday mornings,
caught trains travelling towards
home, slouched in near-empty
carriages, tried not to fall asleep
before we reached our stop.

We walked from the station
across a silent, empty campus
to our solitary rooms, unaware
that our comforting weekly ritual
would soon quietly fade away.

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Relics

Gretel
to
Hansel
My torn blouse and calloused fingers—
these were relics of our adventure.

Eucalypt leaves that clung
in my hair; the long-stale brick
of gingerbread.

The bandages
that wrapped my shredded legs after
we emerged from the bush.

And our picture on the front page.

I also have the same old radio
we went back to—
the one that reported
only cattle prices and water levels, that
put out alerts when the fires arrived,

then, for one hour on Saturday night
played jazz.

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prep school politics

The woman with red hair has 3 / locks Just Cut / or pulling it out? stands alone

amidst a cacophony of preppies & parents / loaded gun of single mum aimed at

the temple / yet I cannot bridge across. carlo’s dad tried to set her up with my ex

/ carlo is my sons best friend / carlo calls his friend cry baby / carlo is just like

his dad. Mothers, mirrored in our eyes / dare not peer / except the lesbian couple.

7 years of politics / click

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Paul Durcan: Life into art

Minor-major poet of serious humour,
cosmopolitan chronicler of his cosy little
island high on the opium of ideology.
Surrealist historian of the Troubles of Ireland
and Durcan, a snail past his prime,
still flirty in the autumn of his days
still toiling at his perfectly useless art.

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MY BRAINS HALF OUTSIDE MY HEAD IN TUNISIA

Usually, the things at war in my head have civil conversation
“We are going to execute Tunisia”,

or T as she was called,
was nearly six feet tall –

she arrives at a dig site
putting a fire alarm bell outside

in my vision, which only lasted a half-second
my brains were being rattled

the chances of meeting a half-decent Sudanese
brain with the spinal cord hanging down

Father, into your hands I lay my soul
Trinidad And Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan

there were loads of orange trees, and then it hit me
Korea had one chance the whole half and scored it

after freezing my brain out for 7 long days in China
I ran the Paris half-marathon

my head was jerking on my neck
I really regret having a film camera at the time

I felt as if all of my bones had been relocated to
the Jersey Shore, my ancestral homeland.

First of all, the United States is not “my country” and
after Royal Mail sold off the Queen’s head

a German Mark IV medium tank raced up a narrow farm road
dropping anchor and grabbing unwary Europeans to take to Morocco.

Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey,
but no dizzy spells.

Chug water while trying to recap last night
top notes of Calabrian bergamot, Sicilian mandarin.

There’s the half-French, half-Mexican party
princess from Buenos Aires Ben directs

them to the window they look outside
to see Locke standing.

At this point we headed over to the Vatican
about four hours later I was bored out of my brain

so we decided to head toward Shoreditch
there were at least as many Jews from Yemen

parking your better half outside a train toilet
Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Tuvala.

Our plan now calls for him to fight outside of New England
ironically, half is probably all that was left of the young Brazilian’s head

there are goat herders in Tunisia, an urban deaf-mute teenie bopper in
Gainesville, probably half the women – including me –

head up the west side of Seneca
with my head sewn to the carpet

and the US flag flies at half-staff outside the US
stock dip triggers protests in Bangladesh

Of Africa Egypt smile and Libya Tunisia and Algeria
I already learnt not to beat my head on the “capitalist wall” but

wet myself and put my knickers on my head to dry them
my brain was pretty odd –

when my father flew to Scotland on May 10, 1941
Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head outside London,

Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Spain, Italy, Lamu
I am really hoping this red thing just beneath the head of my penis

goes three friends leave their mundane factory jobs and head
for India people chant during a demonstration in Tunis

Arguably, my blog posts show new character since the exercise
machine crushed my head on a New Year’s morning

distraction from myself – we’re not about to recruit
a Yao Ming head of the Federal Reserve:

The Shape of Things to Come #2 – Teleportation in Tunisia
shot through the head, and leave no waste

Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia,
Turkey, Turkmenistan, Tuvala

I then proceeded to remove my kipah,
in most of the time –

also, I won’t feast on your brains
if you run mine instead

London, don’t shave their body hair
on my head, and said, “Hey look, no horns!”

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Mogul

How long since he’d sliced and salted a tomato?
There was almost nothing he touched:
silverware and bed covers, expensive notebooks
sometimes the floury crust of a gourmet burger
the younger skin of a grandchild or subordinate.

Somewhere, another old man walks through
an overgrown paddock on a morning
without frost. Waist-high in feed and weeds
the tips of his fingers touch grass and thistle
the destruction he has fostered all his life.

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Mission Statement

We live in an information society, so our solutions must operationalise the leverage afforded by value-adding in order to achieve our mission-critical initiatives. We must take a holistic, pro-active approach if we are to touch base with a new paradigm; limiting me-time and maintaining an innovative workspace will be instrumental in minimizing opportunity-cost. Logistically, our outcomes should embody modularity and empowerment, and facilitate networking within our wider framework if we hope to implement dynamic next-gen synergy.

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The Man on the Gate

Oilskin keeping out the cold
the muscles in his legs wearing down
through the under 12s, netball, under 14s,
under 18s, reserves and finally seniors around two.
A job we all expect somebody to do.
A man who complements the scene
of cars nosed up to the boundary fence,
kids walking around with a piece of cardboard
displaying the winning raffle ticket.
Panicked voices rifling through the air –
kick it Moorey. The crowd by the clubrooms
groaning like an ancient ship – red faces, stubbie holders,
Club jackets sponsored by local businesses,
a gathering necessary as a pie from the canteen.
Certain women cheerfully hand over Cherry Ripes,
polystyrene cups with scalding tea. Each person
connected through marriage, kinder, school
or just plain proximity. Generations of neighbours
realizing their duty, lives flowing through moments
of a job – somebody has to blow the siren,
somebody has to cut up oranges into quarters,
somebody has to collect the footy after it sails
over Monk’s barbed wire fence,
somebody has to sit in a car with kids climbing over seats.
It is a scene that swells through the afternoon
like the feet of the man on the gate
shifting his weight on the gravel,
puffy, arthritic fingers fumbling
with the texture of crisp notes.
A small town’s investment in belief.
A community finding something to do.
Each year, he says, will be the last.

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Lunch with Mussolini

a rhapsody in four courses
Rome, some time after 1930

 
 

I should have tales about the politics we speak,
recount how the Great Man sees Fascism’s

future in the world but instead I recall how,
at first touch of silverware, the spatchcock melts

from the bone! How sublime the pasta – taglietelle
con sugo di porcini e crema. I have to taste that

fabulous infusion again (merest touch of tarragon?)
Benito is launched on a favourite theme – how hard

the Germans are, their total lack of gaiety or humour,
essentially barbarians still. Between mouthfuls

I nod accord. I hope he doesn’t think me rude
for interrupting, asking if the palazzo chef might

furnish me the recipe – I’m desperate
to add it to my files. Then filleto, processionally

from the kitchen. Maitre d’ at the head, cloched
silver salver aloft, next junior waiters in train

with vegetables (austerity be damned – six separate
covered platters!). At the rear the largest silver gravy boat

I’ve seen. It’s performance, as only Italians can,
theatre for an audience of two – Il Duce and me.

The beef in all its glory is revealed, monarch of the meal.
A flourish and neat bow by the Maitre d’. He carves

succulent slices for our plates. The fineness of the meat
almost finishes me. I could drown in the delicious

delicacy of the jus – butter, wine, caramelised filleto
juice, with perhaps a hint of stock. Semifreddo

for dessert – creamy confection to roll around the tongue,
relish the welcome bite of raspberry. To cut the cream.

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Knocking Shop

it’s like a Hiroshima of fun
then instead of buying scones
from the CWA ladies spruiking
at Camp Hill State School
we turn our attention to the candidates
and I remember I collected
how-to-votes for Hawke’s second
or maybe Ahern’s only and now
that elections have lost their lustre
we head off to the salon to vajazzle
but end up bitch slapped by editors
for dropping too much pop in the hopper
after all we’re only doing it to be with it
like burlesque is just a polite way
of getting your tits out for the skinny jeans crowd
irony is old fashioned like Camels
and cocktails sans mixers
Patrick Bateman had some things right
the money not the chainsaws still less
the Genesis CD’s and if you kill the kid
make sure your first call is to the celebrity agent
you want the deal watertight
before A Current Affair come knocking

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Josephine Bonaparte at Malmaison

A cure for a sick house in a sick country
is a garden throbbing with exotic life
I have brought the Antipodes to Paris
to heal and intrigue, to take my mind
off the sharpness of death

Kangaroos abound, their deer-like heads
cresting the foliage and cockatoos
flaunting golden crowns screech
to a halt on eucalypt boughs
Water moles burrow in secret mud

The swans are black as the natives
of Terres Australes or the trunks
of fire-ravaged forests
Some expect them to moult
to their natural white

Mimosa and boronia mimic sun and stars
hark back to my tropical childhood
They thrive in the hothouse like embryos
in the fecund womb I would love to possess
If only Napoleon could reproduce

by bud, cutting or runner
With gentle secateurs I dead-head the roses
This pink and cream with foxed petals
reminds me so much of my first husband
beheaded in full flower by his country

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Interior World

She is singing Stormy Weather in my interior world.
How did she get in there with that ancient fathomless voice?

Has she always been there, crooning one song or another?
Maybe it’s not even my interior world, but hers.

Or some place we share.  And eventually we all find her
here, waiting for us – the fat old Queen of the Night.

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I’m Jack

My head shaved
I look around
catch the mirror
outward bound

Picks me up
to look inside
with my hair
old image died

Born again
sharp new look
cover picture
Nazi book

Short and prickly
hair comes back
not like migrants
I attack

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How to Love Bronwyn

Don’t try too hard.
If it requires effort,
if it is difficult for you,
this is not for your portfolio.

It must come naturally,
like holding out your hand to test for rain,
and if you should feel something,
put away your umbrella.

Surrender to the pitter-patter
of unexpected kisses,
and if you get the urge to run
when they start to come hard and fast,

please do. This job is not for you.
I need a detective
to find the logic
behind my contradictions,

who will explain them to me patiently,
so I can come to better know myself.
I need a curator who won’t ignore
the chips and cracks,

who will study them,
run his fingers along their length –
an informed buyer
who knows the condition of his prize.

I need a break wall
to protect me from the storms
without and within myself.
Someone who will not ebb and flow,

who won’t come and go.
I need a man sure enough
of his own two feet
to anchor us both.

I am a body of water.
You need to know enough
of drowning
to know how to love me well.

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Honey

Walking home along New Canterbury Road
I pass under a eucalypt I can’t name – the rumour
of honey, the frayed brake lining of magpies –

and I think of our walk
around Manly Dam the first week of summer,
the day heating and finally loosing its energy
in a brief drizzle,

cooling the water dragons curious as we are,
as they retreat only the distance
we approach, and the shower

so short that after your father calls
your mobile, worried about Christmas plans
before you leave for Darwin,
and then puts on your mum,
the shower’s passed –

then there’s something we’ve already left behind,
we stop and turn back a few paces, sensing
we’ve missed – what? a hum
like a distant generator,
                                           or a narcissist’s sigh –

and two yards above us, a swelling
in an ironbark, inhaling and exhaling bees:

and knowing next to nothing about bees,
unsure if they’re natives
or feral imports, we watch –
                                                   some of them
burnished as museum medallions,
classic sheened bands of black and gold
pure as a home brand,

and others, their hive-sisters,
muffled stripes of dusky and tarnishing bronze
mixed with brown the colour of shit,

and, behind the honeycomb in the air
with summer dirt’s tang as it lifts, glowing
with the sun’s penumbra as it dips
behind the hill and trees –
                                                the after-image
that lasts, as we look away again,
is another thing gone from sight.

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Glad to be Unhappy

Tell me Martin –

I remember the tutorial,
(on who? Hewett?)
about Stalin’s midnight
Mandelstam phonecall,

but as the grey sky marshaled troops
for another assault on the swollen creeks
I did my best to forget
public service selection criteria.

Settling down to nicotine and the Pepsi Prince,
& I find that line:
there is room in the room I room in.
As startling as a parent revealing a disguised adoption.

Tell me Martin, did you tell us the line was from Berrigan?

Logging on to Soulseek
searching for Eric Dolphy tracks
because I’m still not sure

why anyone would be glad to be unhappy.

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Five O’Clock at the River

The approaching dusk could be anybody’s dark lover
but here you are by the river, begging for spare change.

I have a pocketful of Kleenex and the key to my mother’s house.
At your feet: top hat, a crow feather, broken glass.

Your drunken tongue is thick with history.
We forget some things, lose some, throw some away.

The song says, it only ever turns to dust
and this limping figure is surely not the one you remember.

It is true, the past never ages, as if it were yesterday
it throws itself at your feet.


This poem is comprised from two Maureen Scott Harris poems, ‘Ghazal 4: For the Clover-Strewn Verge’ and ‘Ghazal 9: Winter’, that first appeared in her collection Drowning Lessons

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Fathers

Cornelis

owned the smallest farm in Loosduinen
next to The Hague, now swallowed up
had my grandmother, his daughter,
walk the goat to the Malienveld
and graze it
she walking it through the city on a leash
once slaughtered a goat
maybe the same one
because it ate a ten guilder bill
killed it
and retrieved the money from its stomach
the bill worth more than the goat
drank his piss in the morning
but made my grandmother eat
from separate dishes
when on her period
died shortly after his wife
from a broken heart
having lived through two world wars
and the hunger winter

August

owned a plantation in Java, Dutch Indies
growing kapok
hunted tigers and other big game
bought new cars with cash
knocked up one of his planter girls
decades his junior
his daughter born in the kampung
until at age seven
when his mother found out
he formally acknowledged her,
a Dutch legal requirement,
retrieved her to live with him
her mother as well
whom he did not marry until
Indonesian independence was a fact
now or tomorrow
so he could take her with him to cold cold Holland
where she grew smaller until she disappeared completely
once hit my brother
a story oft repeated
my father, my mother telling him to never do that again
the felling of a giant who
just before the Japanese came
lent a friend ten thousand guilders
a veritable fortune
he saw neither friend nor money ever again
leaving the young republic broke
his possessions fitting in a few crates
after years in a camp during the war
to cold cold Holland
the mother country he had never seen
plummeting down the class-system
like it had no bottom
cold-shouldered by post-war Netherlands
which got rich of people like him
a nuisance
a painful reminder
of an inconvenient past
died unacknowledged without thanks

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Defrocked Priest

This clockwork day he joins the congregation
gathered outside the lunchtime T.A.B.
He smokes and watches the open-sesame
doors wink at punters, touting quick salvation.
He knows the truth of hope, tamps out a careless
smoke on a post; then, thoughtful citizen,
he puts the butt into a small throat-lozenge tin
he carries for the purpose. This is holiness.
Beside the twitching doors, out of the sun,
are footloose angels with nowhere to go
holding religious newspapers marked in biro,
scuffing toes and waiting for their race to run.

At two minutes to two he presses Four,
ascends with Paul McCartney in the lift
along with Mother Mary. It was swift,
a bishop’s summons showing him the door,
rage not that he’d lost his faith, but that he’d made
liaison with the Mayor’s wife, “a known nutter
who, whether it’s men or horses, loves a flutter”.
The search for this low-paid temp job’s been a shit parade.
The lift doors open with a magic ding.
He puts his password (pony) in and glances round
at Alison; thank God that he has found
another who can only hope, and cling.

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Cafe Paradiso

I got a job
behind the bar
at Cafe Paradiso

I can tell you it was no paradise

I worked with this guy
who liked to make short blacks
with a rind of lemon

he told me
that if you see someone
walk in
with a tough face
& maybe a scar
you make the coffee
nice & strong

he was only young
but already had a scar
himself
& I got the impression
that if he walked into a cafe
& I was behind the bar
he’d want me to give him
a double shot
without so much as asking

I quit the job
after 3 weeks.

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Bright Star

The Sun Also Rises is an earnest movie but without
Papa’s text it’s not quite Hemingway. Flynn steals it.
By ’57 he’s not top of the bill, not Captain Blood, no
swash, not much buckle, not Robin Hood, tights too
tight, but a perfect washed-up playboy, boozy, broke,
sagging in the middle. Flynn cared nought for Method,
wouldn’t need it for his Lolita, but died before clinching
with Kubrick, when Beverly was 17 and one month.

A month counts in a teenager’s life when her man’s
gone 50 and he’s got a wife someplace else, and
a heart that’s grown too big, and the old buccaneers
are all paid off, and Marian’s into a matron turned,
and tall ships rot on make-believe’s back lot,
and frost invades the merry glades of Sherwood.

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Beachwalking

I let a man take me to the sea
one night, when the moon was
cut exactly in half. I held one
piece in my hand and threw the
other into the tide, watching it
shiver underwater as though it was
only a reflection of itself. It was
colder than it should have been, and
we traced the lip of the beach at the
point where it slipped into wetness,
the sand shimmering, and watched a
horse plough its hooves into an
ephemeral route, and fire sparking
from the stalls of corn vendors. The
church glimmered in the distance.
When this man took my hand, I did
not even notice if it warmed me;
too distracted was I by the piece of
moon sinking, hopeless, at my feet.

You have been gone a very long time.
And so I wear a dress the colour of
night, ornaments like stars, and I
sing down the sky as though I knew its
secrets, as though I knew anything at
all. I confuse the scent of my skin with
that of the wind breaching the stillness
of the morning bay. I watch men leave
the country on boats like floating
lanterns and return as the horizon
begins to burn up in cinders. I watch
them throw and seize in their nets,
what they capture glistening in the
fading light, and think of how you
didn’t hold up your end of the dream,
how you left me waiting with my piece,
pacing the length of a forgotten coast.

I go to the sea with man after man
and let myself be licked all over
by tongues of water. But what good
is it to stand in the ocean, to break
upon the shore, to look out at
all this all this gravity and darkness
and sea, such sea, and find not even
one single ounce of salt.

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Albert Tucker’s Fitzroy

To sit on a milker’s stool in the entry
to your cottage, with the fallen carnations
and Fitzroy’s bitumen smell rising up like a cordon
between your disposal and your neighbours.
Here we are in fame state.
You turn the man in mustard trenchcoat away unmoving,
an interrogation on your constancy in this place
of a mode, this tableau of the spectres of Fitzroy lighting
their swollen heads lifted from the gutters
to haunt and doorknock once more. And would trams stop?
The storm of yesterday evening split the beech
at the edge of the garden beds, its slag remains,
bar the black stick, a vermiculate wool blanket and sparrow fluff.
Some are left that chirp above in the alcove
between gable and outside; frozen, you turn the man in mustard
trenchcoat away, this time snagging his shoelaces
which tangle through the hodgepodge paving of the sentinel’s station.
You’re an ankle-snapping dog in lieu of a dog leaving its catch
to blanch and encrust in the sun, and little wants burial.
Your mother says you look like a whale carcass, though to hear her
would mean to hear her over the din of Radio Fassbinder,
colluding where gas colludes,
replying where those whose abidance in silence is not revolutionary.
From the radio ebbs places confirming your stool
before the stoop, deaf to the fall of carnations
and the rising mists of roadwork.

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Again

Hansel
to
Gretel
It keeps coming, that night in the woods—
a strip of light among the trees,and each time the moon a different color.
It haunts me too.

It’s as if our small theory of happiness
had been irretrievably lost,
stamped out
just as our father stamps out the fire.

And it returns, electric.

Perhaps this, too, is a theory of happiness—
imperfect, damaged
as all our ideas of perfection are.

A cold clutch of unholy fear
marring that small lick of sweetness.

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