Sarajevo Snow

Posted on June 30, 2008 by Lia Hills

as shells purr through darkness tomcat black
my palms read the stone between blasts
your letter folded twice over in my hip pocket
worthy of pilgrimage through fated streets

the summer dark turned to glory
I crawl into the square flames moon-high
a nation's books ignited
the library's roof splintering into the shy night
as facades lean in with the solidarity of age
cannon fire makes mockery of faith
and men like molten insects draw water from Miljacka river
to spit and sigh with impotence
sirens beginning their birdless choir

you wait on the other side by your silenced phone
facing a courtyard ringed with cacti your grandmother tends with deftness
not a drop shed
and I think of succulents the prick of mishandled devotion
breathe deep then run head down nape exposed to the shifting sky
a slalom of winking-eyed debris catching the light
to the other side
the cobbles salted with snow on this febrile night
I trace a circle in this summer fall and find it ashen
as more settles on my shoulder like a familiar bird
from a sky turned crematorium
a millennia of words on the charred wind

I stick out my tongue to catch a floating phrase

desire for the world has deprived man
of the object of his desire

turn skyward to face the fall
Rumi hung from my lips

your letter safe against bone

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

Late Winter

Posted on June 30, 2008 by Nicholas Powell

Sunday night. Faint sirens paint the town.
I am thinking of the forest at the city limits,
of tall pines creaking in the still air. How long

they have stood there waiting for the osprey
to return and fix their nests. Some will
arrive at first light, any day. Now, as you rummage

for the earplugs you've lost beneath the rubble
of sheets and pillows, their hearts are beating
over the Mediterranean.

Sirens drown out the sound of running water
coming from the kitchen- the sound of you
filling the glasses we will roll over and reach for
and lift to our mouths in the dark.

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

Snow in Linfen

Posted on June 30, 2008 by Andrew Burke

Pine trees bend with snow. In their essays, Chinese students write 'dialectically' and 'imperialistic', words I've not read in an academic while. Japanese teacher Yoko asks, 'Do your students ask personal questions?' Each culture is different, but ironing jeans, in London, New York, Paris, Rome or Linfen, is a bourgeois sentiment. Tree has no leaves but leaf-sized birds on every bough. It's not every day you can see your hand in front of your face. Shoebrush to brush away the dust, loses its bristles on first use. They haven't weeded that roof in decades. Well, it's life with a Chinese accent: fun and drama, upsets and pleasures. Toothbrush bristles too. I quote Du Fu in English. 'You read Du Fu? In English? You don't read Du Fu.' In the seat of Chinese civilisation, vines cover a rusted fighter plane. Yoko points at the word 'cormorants'. I answer, 'It is a bird that sits on pylons and rocks and dries its wings like this.' All writing is polis. Student essay: 'Chinese is hieroglyphs, English is typing.' Linfen snow is white in the kindergarten, black on the roads.

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

Recording not Thinking in Melbourne

Posted on June 30, 2008 by Linda Godfrey

The man wearing a pink plastic nose held on by his glasses is carrying an Adelaide Writers' Festival bag. Once off the tram he lights a cigarette, cupping the nose against the wind. 'During the night, there was a TV in this wall,' my friend says, tapping with her fingers, eight storeys above Little Bourke St. There are two utes with torn lounges tied on with rope. The drivers don't want the lounges sprawling on the curb and soliciting sitters. A woman pirouettes by, pink hair for her and pink for her poodle, 'It's great to have a window to peep out of when you're exercising,' she says, and she leans into a solid yellow wall. I eat chicken noodle soup in the Mekong Caf?© and watch a samurai movie on the silent TV, Shintaro is wearing a silver nose and eye piece. Subtitles, in Chinese, too polite to mention it.

A little boy in a robot suit walks down Swanston speaking secrets to a Banksia-man microphone. A perfect Enid, a character in a story, on a tram at Flinders Station, crazed hands from a lifetime of work, left leg wrapped in bandages, doesn't have a valid ticket. Octopus tentacles soaked in olive oil, potatoes with fried chorizo, churrozo dipped in warm chocolate, we want what the woman next to us is eating. Down Collins St arm in arm. Tables crowded at Babushka's, a line of people watches us eat eggs, a performance piece, we leisurely order sour cherry strudel and a second coffee. Alice cups, stainless Balinese lotus, Madonnas with strawberries on their chest split into bamboo curtains. Gertrude St cafes that never open, a laneway full of young men in vintage checked-wool suits, a window of workbenches and animal night lights, an orange cat curls asleep in a shopfront window, maximising the weak heat of an afternoon sun-shop assistant or merchandise? A broken wok in Caledonian Lane, the cracked shell of a metal egg. A woman sits in a room above the marriage registry, three fingers on her left hand. The middle two fused-an emu's strong back foot. Meringue brides emerge from the Windsor Hotel, dresses lifted for their carriage and groom.

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

Australians in Rome (the boys)

Posted on June 30, 2008 by Benito Di Fonzo

I was introduced
to some australians in rome

they were three boys
from the sticks of country victoria
blowing it all
on their big euro trip

3 days a city –
barcelona, rome, paris, amsterdam, etc.

they'd been drinking all day at a dirty beach;
la sporca spiaggia

they'd never attempted the lingo
even made fun of it in front of the locals

they were cocky all right
but terrified inside
and continually talked about australia –

how great it was
how much better than 'here'

they went into the julius caeser bar
where I just happened to be drinking

they stole the bar mascot –
a stuffed turkey above the cash register

they ran around the room
pretending to sodomise it

they forced the barmen
to sell it to them for ‚€50

they threw it in a bin
on the way back to the hostel,

filling the streets with australian phrases
that I thought were as dead as chips rafferty

I was introduced to them

I pretended to be italian.

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

Wards of State of Western Australia

Posted on June 30, 2008 by Sarah French

for Diane

They liked church
the way we liked Countdown
the man had a moustache
& the woman had one too –
a soft, dark shadow
that haunted her smile

Diane didn't like calling them 'Ma' and 'Pa'
because they weren't – we learnt
we had the same hierarchy of crushes
on TV Week poster boys
(over Jatz and Kraft
the adults congratulated each other
they'd done us both good)

I gave Diane my favourite pink jeans
because after she put them on
they looked so good on her
they weren't my favourites anymore

When I asked her about the couple
& their pair of moustaches
she put her palm over her smile

When I asked about her real parents
the answer was something heavy
she lifted it slowly with her shoulders
& her palm was still
covering her mouth.

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

Broome Beach Art

Posted on June 30, 2008 by Stuart Cooke

we sit by the o
cean paddocks sipping moisture
from salty scars this is the blee
ding the in
terminable drift sourcewards by opening
the wet eye we
can leave the bushy one c
losed losen up read
currents swells sand
bank accumulation with
confidence we turn back: an
cestral hints we're striding
inwards in
to the pasteofwhatwilldry to silt
ochre dust in your nails
scratching frying up the hurt the ants
swarm with shadows
attached the twine
of a thriving mosaic weaving
__in__out
of one another that
pale,
empty Sky:______
we sit and sing the drought
songless is the art this is
the art of a lost child (lost child)
trying hard to grow a new
mother like (new mother)
wanting kisses on your cheek (your cheek)
from lips too
old
to pucker. (pucker)

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

The Departed

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Liam Ferney

She was to have fled between the gaps in the revolution. But not a moment too soon, or a moment too late, the gates sliced escape like cheddar. In the morning he wondered about the transition. Orbiting across the dawning blue. Browsing the obituaries over coffee. If the sun or the moon crumbled they would leave. When bad news comes the good news kids split for the hills. In the prosperous times they research subscriptions for forgetting. Install the latest retro façade. Then later, across the empty room; he had known she had conquered oceans, before she had left his air. He grips a bus ticket like the final atom. The wind skulks off Port Phillip Bay, a discourteous cousin. He says: 'After all these years, I thought you'd know me better than that.'

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

Arcade Fire

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Liam Ferney

cul de sacs of desire
excised from the torn corner
of a new map
cyclone fences rubber
embers sick aerosoled
on the underside of
an overpass bootleg eminem
on a tapedeck the moon's
bohemian plots a
defection insert coins
grand theft mac fields
get points for joyriding
counter jumping crystal
meth transactions paint
bottles bouqeting
in storm water steal
flowers for teacher
infidelities of boredom
end them with arrows
days stocking stretch
like summer squatting
on the district a drunk uncle
all roads return there is no
shell beach dress up
for the strip mall
download ringtones
the polyphonic theme
tune for luke luke
and the mac boys
i'd rather be anywhere
but here boost a BMW
three suburbs over
a modified steel ruler
and yesterday's information
get away like a page
fourteen sidebar story
mark turf by the factories
hughes and helmsford
take the call the future
is a frightened horse
these stories resolve
themselves in a matrix
of chance velocity loose
gravel whispers in
the weatherboards
life's crumpled sculpture
injected through trees
picket crosses spring up
resilient GM crops
sweeping the bends of the
nation in mac fields
rumour spreads like weeds
a mother crying
through brick sound
escapes like a tiny gas
smell it wafting off
rooftops torn envelopes
gathering on top of a
bin do your best to
forget tomorrow fathers
flare like comets
there is nowhere
further than here
sedition gathers in
the gutter leaves or
rubbish rocks fly
riot police manoeuvre
night sets the kingdom
flint hard unmalleable
stars sing no songs
broken neon unhinged
in a black sky enforced
limited conscription
canopens 4AM
the cats don't squeal
the flag drops thistled
biceps princes of
the welfare barbarians
this is the end of a long siege
the good bread
will be broken

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

Sign on the Dotted Line

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Liam Ferney

chase the fishmonger's asthmatic truck
clogging the warren's chambers
susan sangsters lounging on the hoods
of hyundais ajiima lugging cardboard
ajashi stoop smoking mild seven‚™
scooter delivery kim chi and pizza boy
sideways under a truck a michael bay hero
when you consider it skynet only considers itself
so we say to the fish go forth and conquer
they prosper on the fourth floor of the flophouse
propped between the bathhouse and the driving range
after the funeral they confirm it you were always
better than your caste there is no substitute
for thinking but abc asia and soju come close
channel surfing past desperately seeking susan
a dubbed version of point break the distance
a truckstop on the hume highway horizon
and that piss building in your bladder

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

Ballet In a Hair Shirt

Posted on June 29, 2008 by William Doreski

A sharp little mountain peak
capped with bare rock draws hikers.
Halfway up, I unfold a map.
A complex of dense modern towns
straddles a narrow green river
with only two or three bridges
in twenty miles of urban mass.
Parade City, one of those towns,
consists mainly of an open space
ringed by streets named for generals
like Germanicus, Kosciuszko, Grant.
Folger is warped with factories,
big crosshatched rectangles hogging
the good land by the river. Stevens,
named for the poet, makes a snarl
of difficult intersections
that look impossible to pass,
much like Reading, the poet's home town.
I reach the apex of rock and stare
into the valley and suffer
vertigo as salty as the sea.
What if I've imagined a town
called Stevens, and another
called Parade City, and a third
called Folger? What if that tangle
of streets below is actually
Reading, Pennsylvania? What if
this sharp little peak is a spur
of an ordinary coal ridge
in the heart of which a fire has burned
for almost a century? Dizzy
with my own effects, I lean
over a drop of several hundred
feet and force myself to vomit,
but nothing comes up. Nothing
except the conviction that the map
folded in my pocket hasn't lied,
and the town of Stevens lies below,
an actual place of people and things
on which I'm trying to bestow
everything that's troubling me.

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

To a Query

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Alamgir Hashmi

No, a quake,
downside
up to vibrations
that tell apart
the yard maple
from its bark,
inside being outside, see
that shag of brown grass
perhaps an old man's beard
show through the dirt
still hiding school children
from lessons in life sciences
whose last slowing calls
seize the essence of the matter
inside this earth
as it shakes
free of her burdens,
life races past
all attachments,
leaving you
oh but where

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

The Cutting

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Rose Hunter

      Waiting for the bus down the road
from the Freemont Street Experience
is like enacting the first scene from
The Power and the Glory, with Tench
trudging to the port for his ether. You keep
forgetting why you're there, and look
at the sky a lot. Instead of vultures,
overhead are helicopters taking
people to the Grand Canyon –
but they've got as little to do with you.
      It's hot, a woman announces. She's
draped in black, and wears a woollen hat
stained around the edges
with copper curls poking out
near her ears. She looks at the
sun, like there's something about it
she can't believe, but also with
resignation – like there's many things in this world
she can't believe.
Damn, it's hot.
      Sweat meanders
past the dark roots of her hair
which is the first layer of hair
under the volumetric licks
that give her head a knobbly
appearance.
      She surveys the others – perhaps
to see if any response will be forthcoming –
perhaps not. When the bus arrives
there's a sheet of cardboard across the money
repository.
      It's broke, the driver says. Happy Christmas.
      He keeps repeating
this, as the passengers heave
their legs up the steps, clutching the
handrails; gripping their sides. A blank-faced
woman is the only swift mover
and she stumbles on
as though something has taken hold of her legs and
is working them for her; an event the rest of her
body can't register. She is marked
with yellow and purple, and holds a bottle –
clunk – against the metal rail of the seat.
The bus stops, and the woman
with the curls prepares to get up;
the movement of the top parts
of her body not producing
any corresponding reaction
in the lower parts, for a certain, delayed,
period of time.
Is this Charleston? a languid voice
from somewhere, enquires.
            No. This is Sahara.
The woman with the curls is
easing herself down the stairs at a
diagonal.
      Can I get to Charleston, on this bus?
No,
Charleston is back there. It runs
the same way as Sahara.
      Oh man, I'm tripping. The response comes,
after a while. The voice tilts
forward; indecision has caused it
to become stuck, at some indeterminate point.
            You want to get out here?
Here?
            Charleston is back there.
You stay on the bus and you're getting
further away from it.

Ride the bus all day if you want.
Ain't nothing to me.
      Man, I'm tripping.
The woman with the curls

makes her way across the empty lot. This
empty lot is like no other empty lot
you've seen, because it is all the empty lots
you've seen. Cézanne has been here
and made of it something permanent, like
in the museums. In cream, and red. Barbed wire
like tumbleweed throws
a hump-shaped shadow, a sliced resemblance
of more terra firma. Cracked
concrete. Broken bottles. So
beautiful you want to weep.

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

They Might Be Giants

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Jeff Klooger

In films the good guys always are a little crazy.
George C. Scott (They Might Be Giants) chasing Moriarty
through the alleys and all-nights supermarkets,
the neon madness of America. As judge
he could condemn but never save;
as Sherlock Holmes he rescues souls, gathering
the oppressed, the stifled, from archive,
telephone exchange, asylum – here
the crime's sheer ignorance, the victim
mute, anonymous, until unmasked
and brought back to the world
as Valentino, long thought dead
and buried. 'You see,' says Holmes,
'it's elementary: a gentleman never speaks
until he is introduced.'

Well done, Holmes! Do you know
what you've deduced – how
the age itself permits no introduction, only
password, diagnosis, numbered file?
But knowledge does not solve. Restless, he maps
the city's subterranean soul,
pursuing evils a sane man overlooks.
He ends in light,
Watson, cured of doubt, at his side.

Together, against all odds, against
dark, faceless Reason,
they glean identity – not given, won.

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

At Pompeii

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Aidan Fadden

'Thus you remain with us, twisted plaster-cast,
Unending agony, terrible testimony
Of how much our proud seed matters to the gods.'
           Primo Levi – The Little Girl of Pompeii

 
 
Writing to Tacitus, Pliny describes
How his uncle, at first, sat back to watch
As Vesuvius wolfed into the sky
A 22 k cloud of burning ash and rocks.

'A most curious phenomenon; a great
pine – the trunk, the spreading canopy.'
Then he went too close. Get out or sit tight?
He lay down to dictate the joint obituary.

 

*

 

There's a certain pine that to give up its seed
Must wait first for the forest to burn. A lone
Fire-helicopter bellies water away to the trees.

This plaster cast; it could be anyone.
Hands over his face, knees drawn up to his chest;
It looks like he just sat down here and wept.

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

Mycenae

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Aidan Fadden

Stripping away each layer of earth and stones
to reveal the skeletons

of noblemen and women, wives and children,
in death-masks, aprons and tunics

of hammered gold,
Schliemann believed he had found

what he had been looking for all along
and was staring into Agamemnon's very eyes.

*

For me, you will be immortalized
at the traffic lights,

one morning when we kissed
before continuing on our separate ways:

your face lit up like gold
in the first and the last sun's rays.

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

Cemetery

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Rob Morrow

After lunch I talked publication —
not mine — with an editor,
then listened to a poet panel
make poetry sound very hard.

Reluctant raindrops slimed the pavements,
left pedestrians morose and damp.
The city, in the humid dusk,
a jumble of high-rising tombstones,
each wilted crane a single stem
left for remembrance.

I did not to stay to hear
the visiting world-famous futurist
for whose talk I had a ticket.
There are scary sounds in cemeteries at night.

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

no compass

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Fleur Lyamuya Beaupert

a horse and carriage
will operate
between alleys
strewn with trampled

top hats
quiver with forgotten
steps in time
overhead

angel inspectors
access no hours
projectors map
mumu dreams

of cloud forests
trekking breathless
at the mercy of
agile guides

in the community
library illegible
dusty bibles
scan imagination

comfort compass
the shape of power
in disguise
bright heros

aping apotheosis
palliating fear
whispers shatter
through musty

prisons of seclusion
like jackhammers
pyramids crumble
what about

the rights of
alien foetuses?
desperately seeking
window sills

to sleep on
before the next train
to arrive departs
trackwork continues

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

Year of the Rat

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Sam Byfield

Snow buries the country. Black-outs,
coal shortages, buses shunted
from highways. A man is crushed
at Guangzhou station. Here, the Spring City,
a month of blue skies, of quiet madness.

—

The slow crescendo of fireworks
as the New Year draws closer; gunshots
and ricochets, the lit horizon.
Saturday marks some turning point,
the noises are pincers on my brain.

—

Same time zone, but summer.
She's started running again
and it suits her. She shook the ground,
dislodged my assumptions.
I am most lonely in the mornings.

—

An argument happens, some stupid matter
of face. Hum of fridge and tv
crowds the room, emphasises
brutal emptiness,
my sudden hatred for this place.

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

South from Belconnen

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Emma Rooksby

The sign among the trees says City,
points into drifts of sclerophyll and scrub
to a fanfare of parrots, crickets, cockatoos.
There's a scenic drive up a hill, a kiosk,
a carpark, a view. There's a museum, no make
that many museums, of the sort you can enumerate
in a bored voice to bored visitors. And restaurants:
so many squares per head, fly-by-night chairs
and chefs, the patrons appearing grey however
they dress. And houses, packed in ever denser
as they radiate, the last few roofs pitched
cramped on yellow terraces, yellow lawns.
There's blow-ins, public servants, retired same
and other disconsolate lifers. None admits it
but their ceaseless complaints, voiced to currawong,
galah-song, give the place its little sense of home.

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

Flood

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Emma Rooksby

The water's bobbing higher against the markers;
it's no longer safe to drive the underpass,
where we'd disturb the drowned body of a fox.

Having always dreamed the ocean would rise
and infiltrate the city by the cuttings
you hang steadily on the wheel, undiverted,

winging the car through to our house on the hill
where neglect gives the world high colours,
and faces splay with the weight of creation.

There we wait, you and I and the troupe
of motley players, doubting the fine skies,
expecting the flood to make us an island,

preceded perhaps by a long stream of beasts
seeking higher ground, and at last a golden light
shone on corpses, debris and the shrinking peak.

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

Here and there – 1991

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Leah Kaminsky

for Nani

he winks from behind a gas mask
dog on his lap trembling
scuds whiz over Haifa

5 hours drive to Baghdad from here
500km wouldn't get me far past Albury
on the Hume – I've done it several times

this poem for him has no rhyme
or reason. It is for his junk, white undies
old postcards, Beatles White Album

we survive because of woodpeckers
mongooses, Palestinian sunbirds
and gossipy bulbul birds

remembering the baby kookaburra
with a broken blue wing
he saved on that Port Fairy road

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

Facing South

Posted on June 29, 2008 by DJ Huppatz

We were making revolution when the phone rang.
Hello, it's Lionel Richie here, taking you
to a past you never knew. Characters in horizontal strips
construct a street: Shanghai's longtangs fan out in zig-zag networks
while at noon in the capital all the shadows run north.

A dry look with frosted hair, he takes solace in wine:
'Who now can tell a common Magpie Flower
from a Phoenix-headed White or a Purple Jade wing?
And whatever happened to Brother Swallow,
banished to Hainan Island all those years ago?'

Come and see the dragon's blood oozing out of the city's
punctured walls, they say. Stacked for removal, chipped tiles
are ripe for recording. Here are manicured pines for the poet in you,
and for your kids we put the monkeys in zoos. 'These strangers
without ancestors', he says, 'When will they return home?'

In a browning photograph, a string of camels
laden with imperial gifts steps warily through the city gate
as the Northern horseman smells the leak of imperial air.
In Lu Xun's courtyard, wild grass forces space
between the pavers. New shoots of ivy bloom
rose, rust, sunset and cherry on the weathered wall.
Then: 'Five or six beggars from god knows where,
stretching their dirty hands towards me –
are these citizens of the capital?' Adding a third hand
to each watch, this is reform.

Outside the Workers' Stadium, kites fly higher than flags,
hollowing white blanks from the brown wash.
'Are the people of Huihsien County still doing fine?'
Gobi dust is a remainder that sticks in your throat, but so
is the faint vanilla aftertaste of silver-tipped jasmine tea.

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

Coco Lounge

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Alice White

Glen Waverley
7/7/07 3 pm

It's cold, it's raining and the restless smokers lounge
I hear the accents of Middlesex and Shanghai
The rain is falling
Dripping down the bonnets of cars
Everything that has kept me alive
Up until this point is completely mysterious to me
Two purple pansies lie on the pavement
Pigeons flutter and fall
Taking it in turns to be the first to tumble
Breathing
The air the rain
The blinking

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged