‘Share what you’ve learned’: Amelia Walker in Conversation with Samantha Faulkner

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Amelia Walker

Samantha Faulkner is a writer and poet from Badu and Moa Islands in the Torres Strait and the Yadhaigana and Wuthuthi/Wuthati peoples of Cape York Peninsula. She is the author of Life B’Long Ali Drummond: A Life in the Torres Strait (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007) and editor of Pamle: Torres Strait Islanders in Canberra (Kuracca, 2018) as well as the forthcoming nonfiction anthology Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia (Black Inc, 2024). Faulkner has represented women and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander interests on local, state, and national boards and is a Director of the ACT Torres Strait Islanders Corporation. She is a current board member of both the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN) and Us Mob Writing Group, a Canberra-based First Nations writing collective.

I connected with Faulkner through Invisible Walls, a project I co-facilitate with Seoul-based Australian poet Dan Disney. Invisible Walls pairs Australian and Korean poets to enter intercultural dialogue and produce new poetry based on their learning. Faulkner was one of twelve Australian poets chosen for the project via a competitive selection process from a large applicant pool. Faulkner’s poetry gripped me with the vibrancy of her imagery and emotion. Through our project-related correspondences, I came to recognise a similar vibrancy in her warm personality, generous spirit, and care for those around her. When I travelled to Ngunnawal Country (Canberra) in late 2023, I invited Faulkner to sit down for a chat about her writing practice, her insights into community work, and the importance of nurturing new and emerging writers. I was thrilled and grateful when Faulkner agreed. Below is an edited transcript of our exchange.

Amelia Walker: We acknowledge that we are meeting on Ngunnawal Country. We pay our respects to the Ngunnawal people and their Elders past and present, as well as other First Nations people and families who have connections to these lands. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. Samantha, thank you for sharing your time. I’m grateful for the chance to learn more about you and your writing. We’ve met a few times now and worked together on Invisible Walls. But I don’t think I’ve ever told you that I use your poem ‘Home’ with my university students. Its depiction of a man from the Stolen Generation coming home to search for his mother always has a profound impact on my students, especially the final stanza. Although I’ve read it countless times, it never loses its power for me, either. I always get a shiver in my bones. I’m wondering if you could tell us more about the poem, its background, and your process of writing it.

Samantha Faulkner: Thanks, Amelia. I would also like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, the Traditional Custodians of the Country we are meeting on today. I’ve had to go back and think about that poem. It was published in Cordite in February 2019, and for me, it is a special poem. It tells the story of a young man reconnecting with his mum and, just that final stanza, where the mother says: 

“I know who you are”

I touched his hand

Tears welled in my eyes

“You’ve come home”

It has that real immediacy of connection as it’s told in the first person and speaks of belonging, coming home and finding family. For me, that’s what this poem is about. The poem came to me, if I can recall, in a writing exercise – and it was an image when the man touches the screen door and opens that door. It was like a comic strip. There were a couple of images where the man is standing there, maybe an Aaron Pedersen-type character, set in the outback or country Australia. He’s obviously from the city, wearing jeans and a shirt, and is a little bit out of place – but he’s searching. He finds some information and wants to reconnect and find his family – so he pushes open that door.

The next image is where he’s in a shop and his mum is behind the counter or at the counter. When you enter a shop, the first person you talk to is the person behind the counter – that’s where you ask for information. I think the poem emphasises this connection. What if this man, just by accident, enters the shop and it’s actually his mum who’s working there? She recognises him first and it’s a bit about him, but also about her, like: ‘Oh my gosh, it’s my son who’s come back, I know you’. But the poem creates a sense that there’s more to come. It’s about connection – because even in the 1970s kids were still being taken away – and no matter if you were taken away, your family still knows who you are. The Elders still know who you are and where you belong – where you fit in the community. It’s touching, it’s emotional and it’s poignant because it closes an open circle. I think for a lot of the Stolen Generation, they don’t have the opportunity to close this circle. For me, in a way, it was showing that there are stories of meeting family again – not just of displacement.

AW: As a Torres Strait Islander poet, your culture is distinctly different from those of other First Nations Australian peoples, which are also, of course, all unique and distinct from each other in their own right. Within what protocol permits, I’m wondering if you could share a little about what makes your Torres Strait Islander culture unique, particularly in terms of your traditions of poetry, storytelling, and related art forms.

SF: Torres Strait Islander culture is close to the Melanesian Pacific culture and the Torres Strait is found between Queensland and Papua New Guinea. It is a part of Australia as sometimes a lot of people think: ‘Oh, okay, you’re a part of Australia…I don’t need a passport to go there’. I think the population is maybe about 70,000, but a lot of this population, about 60,000 or so, live on mainland Australia. I guess what makes the culture unique is the closeness to the ocean. We are seafaring people and navigate by the stars. The ocean is our supermarket, it’s our livelihood, it’s our recreation. For the inner islands, the Kaurareg People are the Traditional Custodians of Aboriginal land which is Waiben/Thursday Island and some of the islands close to mainland Australia. So, the Torres Strait also has that connection to Aboriginal Country as well.

We have a lot of different history when it comes to the explorers who have visited. We’ve had a lot of explorers – Spanish, Dutch and even Indonesian people have come over and traded for decades and hundreds of years before 1770. We’ve always had that exchange and I think even across the Top End of Western Australia and Northern Territory as well. So, we are not strangers to other people coming in to visit, trade and go back home again.

I think for a lot of the Torres Strait, the ‘Coming of the Light’ or the coming of Christianity to the Torres Strait is a different experience of Christianity than what Aboriginal people have encountered. Torres Strait Islanders embraced and welcomed Christianity and made it a part of life in a way that it didn’t overtake but balanced with Torres Strait culture and concepts such as different languages, singing, dance and the visual arts. Our culture is all about colour and vibrancy and the food we eat is from the ocean – dugongs, turtles, crabs, fish, and so on. It’s this way of life that I think perhaps is distinct from the Aboriginal way of life and that comes out in my poetry and stories.

I was born on Waiben/Thursday Island, in the seventies and spent the first ten years of my life in the Torres Strait. Then my family moved down to mainland Australia for schooling and better education opportunities for me and my two sisters. I cherish those moments and those childhood experiences. I think for me, it’s just tapping back into those memories, those images and sights and smells that I write about today.

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3 Mohsen Mohamed Translations by Sherine Elbanhawy

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Sherine Elbanhawy

Mohsen’s poetry is very much ingrained in the tradition of poetry as a voice of resistance; his specificity to the Egyptian incarceration experience speaks to the broad themes of injustice, the harshness and the inhumanity of his time in prison, the friendships, and the community that the closeness of prison creates.

Mohsen and I met by chance at a workshop at the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts Studies (CILAS) conducted by one of my friends, Mina Ibrahim. His poetic voice immediately resonated with me, and I asked if he had ever considered translation. At the time, there was no publishing promise or anything, just a craving on my part to be drawn into his world and the beautiful rhythmic flow of his Egyptian vernacular poetry.

Throughout the pandemic, I worked on this translation; I put my own work aside, feeling the need to give voice to Mohsen’s words at that distinct point in history. At a time when everyone was complaining about the restrictions of being locked in within the comfort of their homes and surrounded by family, his experience and that of his fellow inmates was especially poignant. My mind constantly returned to the many unjustly incarcerated in Egypt and how their lives had been upended without due process. As the pandemic dragged on and the situation worsened on the outside, conditions in prison deteriorated even more given the lack of healthcare, hygiene, and sanitation.

Mohsen’s ability to convey his deep sense of loneliness mirrored the feelings of many across the world and echoed vociferously on social media. However, his prison is a beast with a life of its own, a creature that devours and consumes. He is constantly surrounded, but isolated; his poems are a retreat into self, a journey of reflection and profound solitude. The title, No One Is On The Line, reflects this enveloping sense of disconnectedness. Even after his release, Mohsen’s recollections show how the pain of prison and the feeling of isolation persist after incarceration ends, fed by the memories of friends and encounters imprinted on the soul.

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3 Petre Ioan Crețu Translations by Cristina Savin

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Cristina Savin

Heatwave

my city painted in green
and yellow, pale yellow
stained with the red of the sun
then the news bulletin the weather
all filtered through my hazel eye
in the glass screens and diodes
breaking news

we strolled together
having just met
the houses with red roof tiles crumbled
like a castle of cards holding hands
with the walls rolled up all the way to the beams
hurriedly we collided with a withering tree
stripped of bark and painted
then a thousand lost and forgotten cuckoos
in the ailing garden
surrounded by darkness and leaves
where I once wrote
a thousand meaningless poems

you knew I wasn’t afraid of the wind
or afraid of the storm or the arrow
I held your hand tight
to never lose myself to never lose you
we then slowly let go
and with a flutter we aimed for the sky
so beautiful we were
oh God, so beautiful!



 
Caniculă

orașul meu colorat în verde
și galben, galben palid
pătat cu roșul soarelui
apoi buletinul de știri vremea
toate trecute prin ochiul meu căprui
în ecranele de sticlă și leduri
breaking news

ne plimbam pe stradă amândoi
doar ce ne cunoscusem
casele cu țiglă roșie se năruiau
ca un castel din cărți ținându-se de mână
cu pereții suflecați până la bârnă
grăbiți ne loveam de câte un pom uscat
dezbrăcați de coajă și pictați
apoi o mie de cuci rătăciți și uitați
în grădina bolnavă
și peste tot se făcea noapte și frunze
pe care cândva am scris
mii de poeme confuze

știai că nu-mi este frică de vânt
nici frică de furtună nici de săgeată
te tot țineam strâns de mână
să nu mă uit să nu te pierd vreodată
apoi ne desfăceam brațele încet
și fâl fâl ne ridicam la cer
și ce frumoși eram
Doamne, cât de frumoși!

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18 Artworks by Nathan Beard

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Nathan Beard


Nathan Beard | 2022 | King Mongkut (1956) | Dibond mounted Giclée print on Hahnemühle Fine Art Pearl, Swarovski elements each named using the antiquated term ‘Siam’, Avery 3002 Blockout Vinyl Matt Laminate | 120 x 100cm | Photo by Jack Ball.

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Speak, Joy: Say the Words

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Omar Sakr

I am a working poet. I spend my days in search and celebration of words, a series of sounds I can weld, if I’m lucky, into insights about being human, and I confess it has never been harder to do so. I have a newborn son, I am a newborn father, and despite a decade of practice at crafting language into literature, this child, so small and insistent and terrifying and beautiful and language-less, has in only a few months shown me how useless, how entirely unnecessary words are for that most important and derided endeavour: love. This is a word, an emotion, a foundational way of living, utterly essential for survival, and yet by invoking it, I’ve erred already – there are few things taken less seriously, or more likely to provoke an eye roll, scoff or sneer, particularly in the realm of writing, which for all that it is deemed effeminate, is nonetheless strangled by a masculine manner and aesthetic1. There is an unspoken understanding that one shouldn’t ever be sentimental – meaning literally ‘prompted by feelings’ – and that good prose is ‘muscular’, good writing is ‘brutal’, a ‘gut punch’, a violence. I should know. My own work is often praised with these descriptors, and it’s true, I am geared toward pain, toward sorrow, toward a primal force that makes loss bearable, if that is at all possible, though I would never describe my writing as a violence in the same way that I could never plant a sentence about a flower and hope to see a bud in the soil come spring.

I am a working poet. By this I mean that poetry, or the creation of literature, is my occupation, but I also live, always, under Philip Levine’s jurisdiction, which means that ‘to work’ is to love, not anonymously or subconsciously, but directly and purposefully, those who are in our lives – to hold them, maybe kiss their cheek, to say the words.2 In the months leading up to the birth of my son, I read poems and books to my wife’s swollen belly, to a captive audience of one, and in the months after, I continued to do so because all the advice for parents suggests this will aid your baby’s development, speed up their eventual use of words. He is seven months old and has not said a word, which is fine – I’ve seen him wake, seen his eyes open, flick toward me, a smile bursting wide, and there is no more glorious a feeling, no more serene a sensation than the sure knowledge that love is moving through our bodies such, that without moving, we are still touching. I’m telling you this out of fear, because in these same months I was diagnosed with autism; because I have struggled to speak all my life; because my father’s mother, Yurdanur, had a stroke which paralysed her mouth, and stole her speech. A decade ago, my mother’s mum had dementia, losing language and reality at once – of the two, I find the former loss is crueller, because Yurdanur was still there, behind her eyes, hearing and seeing, but unable to move her lips, even to smile. I hold her hands when I visit. It is all we have.

I’m working to understand silence, the strangeness of words, how impossible it feels sometimes to use them. Feels, not is, because I have an autistic niece who is non-verbal, because Yurdanur cannot speak – yet the feeling often becomes reality. Rivers of silence thrive in my life: sisters who do not speak to their brothers or to each other, uncles who ignore their nephews or vice versa, friends who let go of friendships, parents unreconciled with children, and in each instance, on either side of quiet, these people would say, ‘Never’, when asked if they could speak to the other. I swim in several of these rivers. As a boy in love with books, I could go the entire day and night without saying a single word, and yet never have felt silent, not with all the voices in my head, the constant conversation. I’m coming to terms with the fact that my silence unnerved the people in my life, that it wasn’t the books or the way they signify an intellect or class or aspiration to such, as I assumed, but the quiet itself. They were always making noise and I was always retreating from it. I’m coming to terms with the million instances I was called aloof or arrogant or disinterested, a bad conversationalist, because I didn’t speak enough or understand the right social cues. I am thirty-three years old, and I have a word, autism, now painted on my tongue – I can write it, but I find it hard to say the words, which has been true all my life.

I am a poet, which means I have a thousand fragments in my Notes app that reach for profundity like, ‘Language is the means by which our souls can meet outside our bodies’, a nice thought that isn’t true. When I consider my failures to respond to conversations, to speak at all, I’m overwhelmed by the sensation of distance, a vastness behind my eyes that is exhausting to cross. Would you run a marathon for small talk? I have, not as much as I’d like, but still more often than I can count. Sometimes my wife urges me to talk to our baby more, and I look at her in surprise, because whatever words I have managed were significant to me, and because I meet my son outside our bodies all the time without saying anything. I have only to think of my wife to feel her inside me. The phrase ‘love language’ is ironic, given love transcends our ability to compose words, be it vocally, textually, or physically. Love surrounds us, and it does not, as Ursula K Le Guinn once said, ‘have to be made’3, it can but does not need to be a verb, it is not transactive in nature, it is in fact not natural at all but the province of the divine, and therefore eternal. My son does not need to do a thing or say a word in order for me to love him, nor is there an action that he can take which could undo my love for him, which is astounding to the point of terror, because it reveals the lie of rationality, it demonstrates that I’m vulnerable to him and will always be so, which, if I were a lesser person, would no doubt prove fertile ground for insecurity and resentment. My responsibility as a parent is to ensure that doesn’t occur, and that requires a clarity first and foremost grounded in language; having used vulnerable earlier, the words that immediately followed all invoked violence, ‘he will always have a blade to my throat’, I wrote, then deleted. Let me say instead I’m open to him, and must remain so.

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BABY Editorial

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Shastra Deo

We released the call-out for BABY on 30 May 2023. We were thinking of baby projects, the spark of something new, thinking of the person who we call ‘baby’, thinking of Liam Ferney, bard of the bubs, who writes the best baby poems this side of town. Case in point:

Get Away From Her, You Bitch
 
No ore tug this.
It’s a routine mission
 
fishing for profit
on Samburan
one of Weyland-Yutani’s
finer barques;
 
awoken from our
métier’s cryo bliss;
 
a hailing distance
from Hadley’s Hope,
 
when the Facehugger’s
hardwood scamper
twists Tad’s neck.
 
Its echo haunts blank space.
Heart racing, he’s peering
through the slats in the ducts
 
when from behind
the bookcase the infant
Xenomorph leaps,
 
lands slapped across
Tad’s dad mug.
 
From here, nothing
can stop the
Chestburster’s total triumph.

We were thinking of blank space and cryo-bliss and the routine missions that make up living. Some mornings, to wake is a total triumph. Most of all, we were thinking of Lee Edelman and the Child – how our happiness now, justice now, mercy now, is too often deferred in favour of the politics of futurity, the future child whose needs somehow outweigh those of us living in this forever-present.

BABY began with joy and ends with grief. Which is life. We still wake in the morning. We still work my job. As co-editors, we met the day after the Australian Indigenous Voice referendum results were released and spoke of embarrassment and shame. We still go to sleep. We feel shame. We feel shame when we must look away for a single moment, to work the job that keeps rooves over our heads or cooks a meal that ensures survival. We feel shame knowing these moments are impossible for the Palestinian people. Colonised people. Taking land means taking everything directly above it. Taking trees. Taking sky. Taking rainwater. Taking life.

You are reading this and probably expecting something, so here it is: we have published over 60 poets in Cordite 111: BABY. We were grateful to read every poem submitted – thank you for trusting us with your work. Thank you for sending us poems about your loves, your anxieties, your fears, your mortality. Poems that are ‘bodies full of bodies!’ Poems for ‘those narrow halcyon days.’ Poems that are ‘smoke signals guiding us home.’ Poems ‘making / the mutable world.’

Poems that get at the emotional technicolour of those early pre- and post-partum days. As Caitlin Maling writes: “there’s nothing/ wrong with khaki, butt you wouldn’t theme/ a baby shower around it”. Poems that throb with the pulse of other lives like the relentless throb of the clock at squad training that ELS drums: “Go at the six, turning, the nap stretches to 90 minutes, go at the six, turning, the/ garden gate left open open onto the grassy lane where the cats gather in the/ morning, evening, cat hour, a mysterious thing, go at the six, Thank you for sending us the full spectrum of human emotion.”

And then, as well, poems that remind us that most of us are safe. So safe, in fact, that we sleep soundly through the earth’s tumultuous night, our mattresses padded with our complicity in cruelty.

This editorial stands in solidarity with the babies of Palestine. We were all someone’s baby, once and still. We are thinking of you, grieving with you, dreaming with you. Until Palestine is free, none of us are free. Do not turn away. We will not be forgiven.

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The Linguistic Playground of Poetics: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry and Systemic Functional Linguistics

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Raelke Grimmer

I wasn’t entirely prepared for the Canberran rain and cold. Late November, ostensibly summer, and my last trip to the capital at the same time of year almost a decade earlier had shocked me with a week of perfect blue-skied thirty-degree days. Naively, I’d expected the same this time around. I’d packed a raincoat but no umbrella; still, I preferred to turn my hood up against the showers as I trekked through the centre to the bus stop. I sheltered under the canopy and boarded a bus Google reassured would take me to my destination. My memory of this same journey years ago was sketchy, and this city looked different shrouded in grey. My recall sharpened as I alighted and walked through the University of Canberra’s campus, searching for the lecture theatre that would host the opening keynote of this year’s Australasian Association of Writing Programs conference.

Historian and archaeologist Professor Elena Isayev from the University of Exeter was the invited speaker. She shared with us her research on uncovering the stories hidden within historical sites. Part-way through her presentation, she asked us all to take out a notebook and a pen, and to visualise a walk we regularly take. Mine materialised in my mind before she finished speaking. I could taste the salty air of the path I walked most evenings after work. Out my front door. Down to Bundilla Beach and along the stretch of sand in front of the Ski Club; up past the high school and down the curving path to Mindil Beach. Professor Isayev asked us to draw the contours of our chosen trek on the page, using a continuous pen stroke. I drew out my walk, picturing each turn, each downhill glide and uphill grunt; the wooden plank and chain stairs leading down to the sand and the concrete ramp leading back up. Clambering over the two boat ramps obstructing the beach. Once I’d finished tracing my steps, I surveyed the line I’d drawn. It could almost be mistaken for a scribble, I thought, but not quite: there was something too deliberate in the way the line angled around the page; sometimes sharp and sometimes soft. It’s a poem. The thought nudged into my mind. I scrawled a title across the top, pressed my notebook shut and tuned back in to the rest of Professor Isayev’s talk.

In his recent review of Simon West’s poetry collection Prickly Moses: Poetry in Australian Book Review, reviewer David Mason writes that ‘too often poetry is valued as if it were prose, exclusively by virtue of its subject matter’1 He argues that reducing poetry to only this analysis ‘miss[es] the poetry itself’. This speaks not only to overlooking the poetry itself, but to an overlooked attribute of poets themselves: poets are writers, but are also linguists, bending and breaking the branches of language to shock and surprise the reader. Subject matter aside, analysing the composition and decomposition of the words and symbols on the page adds layers of meaning that would otherwise remain unnoticed if the focus lingered solely on the subject. Analysing poetry under a linguistic frame can uncover these semantic and semiotic meanings, adding additional depth of meaning to a poem’s subject.

Applied linguists have long been fascinated by the analysis of creative works, most notably through the field of literary stylistics, where linguistic text analysis techniques are applied to creative texts to determine the linguistic patterns of specific writers and the linguistic composition of these texts. 2 The field of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), pioneered by Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan in the 1960s and 1970s, also developed frameworks for analysing literary texts. Halliday observed that ‘Literature is language for its own sake: the only use of language, perhaps, where the aim is to use language.’3. SFL situates language within its social context and argues that language removed from its social context strips away meaning. It is only when language is used for specific purposes in specific social settings that we can ‘make meaning’. Semiotics are a key component of this meaning making process. Educator and linguist Susan Feez gives the example of a stop sign. 4 The word ‘stop’ written on a page and the word ‘stop’ written in white text on a red, hexagonal stop sign erected by the side of the road each convey very different meanings. The addition of the semiotics (red colour, hexagonal shape, white text) adds additional context and therefore meaning to the language.

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Gender and Abject Horror: The Poetic Self

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Tyberius Larking

I recently woke to clothes and sheets drenched in blood. The sun, squeamish, kept its distance as I stripped off and showered. Outside, a glutinous rain fell disinfecting the streets; the bins begged and pleaded; have mercy on us. My periods have been heavy all my life though, until then, I hadn’t bled so profusely in years.

I came out as trans-masculine early in high school – a year or so after my first bleed. Like plenty of other transgender children, contending with the ‘the ungrievable, mortal losses of puberty, the chaos of sexual, emotional, and social impotencies that transness imposes’, I was prone to snarling and biting. Like trans-masculine prose poet Lars Horn, I still sometimes feel my body ‘moves itself – possesses its own will, character, its own thoughts … as other, but also as another. Slightly animal, otherworldly’.

It might seem contradictory, but going through puberty was actually quite subduing, domesticating. I learnt how to repress, how to contain myself and imitate the normative body.

‘What an angel!’ people said.

Female socialisation is a dangerous idea, and I agree it deserves the criticism it receives. However, if you asked me which, of all the seeds my girlhood planted, prospered and persisted, I’d have to say it was the belief that suffering, physical and mental should be sucked up, soaked, sealed – a woman in pain, in grief is histrionic.

When I transitioned and switched from using the women’s bathroom to the men’s, the support of fellow menstruators was severed overnight. While in the women’s, painkillers and pads would be slid under the cubicle door. In the men’s, you could be seeing stars, speaking tongues, you could be spewing blood and still be ridiculed for running out of toilet paper. I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, and tied my raincoat around my waist to hide the crotch stains. Being outed was worse than bleeding out.

Breanne Fahs is a clinical psychologist, professor of humanities at Arizona State University and radical feminist. The Menstruating Male Body collates testimony of the overlap between trans identity and menstrual health. While all menstruators ‘struggle in general with accepting their bodies as ‘leaky’ and ‘viscous’, masculine transgender and intersex individuals must be scrupulous in their endeavors to contain this ‘sex-revealing’ fluid. In order to ‘secure their safety, stay closeted at work or to avoid losing their jobs’, some of her patients regularly leave tampons in for ‘twelve hours at a time’.

*

Until I was old enough to refuse, I was dragged to church. I went to many churches, I met many people, and never really warmed to them. There was only one woman I really trusted.

Her face was taut and muscular. She wore brown woollen stockings, socks and crocs. Her makeup, alien, uncanny. Her eyeshadow dribbled. She never gossiped, laughed sparingly, and didn’t let me help her with crossword puzzles She never let me hug her- she took blood thinners and bruised just daydreaming of touch.

I sometimes pictured her climbing onto the roof after hours, skinny legs straddling the ridge. I pictured the church as a beast, a beast she could fly away on. Other times, I pictured her as the church itself- as castle, as king, as stone. But up close, she had pores, occluded as they were.

She was a retired janitor and had worked decades in hospitals, food courts and casinos.

‘Kid … I’ve smelt things you’ve only smelt in your nightmares.’

I wondered what I smelled like to her. Could she smell queer undertones, beneath the stench of humanity?

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A Lonely Girl Phenomenology

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Jenny Hedley

I am following a lineage of sad and lonely girls, women who diarised or even fictionalised their sadness, knowing that their words would be scorned by the men they loved, men whose so-called serious efforts were lauded and canonised, while their own projects were dismissed as personal, histrionic. I am infatuated with the hysterical, the abject, the ugly: I want to gaze upon my literary reflection. I am a Sad Girl, a Lonely Girl, not beyond reproach. I study my 2017-issued university ID, selfied between jags of tears. This photo reflects a girl who is writing herself a new life post-domestic violence. You can’t really blame her for being sad, sad, sad.

Chris Kraus was reeling from the rejection by the European festival circuit of her indie film Gravity & Grace – based on Philosopher of Sadness Simone Weil’s work – when in December 1994 she met cultural critic Dick Hebdige and developed a capital-C Crush on him. Once you accept the obscurity that comes with failure, Kraus writes, ‘you may as well do what you want’. You may as well fuck shit up. When a feminist’s work is dismissed by tastemakers (aka patriarchy) the next best thing is to revel in one’s debasement.

In Kraus’s autofictional I Love Dick she cannibalises her Dick-lust for autoethnography’s sake, gutting her emotions, opening herself to ridicule by penning hundreds of pages of love letters to Dick. Repurposing life as art in the diaristic style of gonzo journalism or cinéma verité, the writer/filmmaker is made visible: she will not be erased. I Love Dick oscillates between second-person epistolary address and third person, ‘the person most girls use when they want to talk about themselves but don’t think anyone will listen’. Kraus cites Hannah Wilke’s provocation: ‘If women have failed to make ‘universal’ art because we’re trapped within the ‘personal,’ why not universalize the ‘personal’ and make it the subject of art?’.

Dick isn’t ever going to listen to what Kraus has to say, so she pivots: ‘‘Dear Dick’’, she writes, ‘‘I guess in a sense I’ve killed you. You’ve become Dear Diary …’’. It is clear that Dick never mattered, he was only ever a construct which allowed the vertical pronoun to stand. Dear Dick is Dear Diary is DD: an interchangeable audience. Kraus makes a promise ‘(to herself? to Dick?)’ to write every day: ‘The diary begins: Dear Dick’. At one stage, Kraus replaces Dick with an orange candle because Dick wasn’t listening, no one was listening, and Kraus felt ‘completely illegitimate’.

Kraus is ‘moved in writing to be irrepressible’ as revolutionary action: a ‘paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive’ woman who dares to talk, to exist, in public view. The unrelenting rejection of her one-sided longing (aside from a pathetic fuck-fest that reeks of Dick’s ambivalence, with Kraus literally cast as lapdog) serves as self-immolation on behalf of all the Lonely Girls. Kraus looks back to her 24- or 25-year-old self who diagrammed George Eliot in relation to Ulrike Meinhof and Merleau-Ponty and calls that secret writing which had no audience, which is also the writing channelled by her 39-year-old protagonist ‘Chris Kraus’, a Lonely Girl Phenomenology.

Phenomenology is a philosophy that studies the experience of things from a first-person perspective. A Lonely Girl Phenomenology diarises the lived experiences of one for whom the world returns no love because it never was a world intended for her benefit.

Just before Kraus met Dick,

For three weeks I’d been bursting into tears so often it became a phenomenological question: at what point should we still say ‘crying’ or instead describe the moments of ‘not-crying’ as punctuation marks in a constant state of tears?

Kraus’s Gravity & Grace was unloved, she was a failure and Dick, who might as well have been a candle, fell into this vortex of sadness. Kraus knew that Dick had become a stand-in for the elite boys’ club which dictates who gets to speak and be heard. Kraus demands that Dick witness her becoming a ‘crazy and cerebral girl, the kind of girl that you and your entire generation vilified’. Kraus writes that the act of witnessing makes Dick complicit. Observing suffering requires agency: doing nothing implies a choice.

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An Evening Walk From Parap to Mindil Beach

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Raelke Grimmer

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If You Must Know

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Jennifer L Knox

We’re at our mentally healthiest when we’re
influenceable, a state that ranks #11 in the Top
Ten most-able states. A state Gen. George Douglas
MacArthur described as “flimsy yet motherfu*king
impenetrable.” Rigidity helps influenceable adults
keep on the sunny yellow line. If you lose the line,
like after the sun goes down, feel around for a strip
of unbroken smoothness surrounded by bumpy
asphalt, the opposite of Braille. You can’t feel the
yellow, but it will feel you! If the dog could talk,
she’d tell you, “Take it in, all in.”

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Graze in the genocide

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Omar Sakr

My son whose name is radiance
Tripped and skinned
His little knee. My god the wailing!
the wailing in my heart! A blot
Of blood, about the size of the sun
Or my thumb. It was ages ago.
I can still hear it.

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La cuna

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Tamryn Bennett

Mother has no baby
all the rocks are hollow

fears hushed to sleep
black and still as sonogram

Heartbeat an echo,
smoke between the boles

clothes burned, photos buried,
we feed holes in the ground.

Mother nurses herself, finds the fruit
returns home,

arms around the wind
little husks of existence.

What has been forgotten
mutilated, confused, sucked dry.

Sacrifice her love, how we ride the horse
a paradox since the beginning.

We live in her, braided into being,
we separate to find her and…

Once you…call her…
she absorbs you

Her own house of spawns
milk, blankets, kitchen, doctor’s waiting rooms,

Mother who does everything,
destroys everything…

And we never let her play.

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Bridget Jones’s Diary

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Nick van Buuren

Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001)

Each time that babe Cleaver walks into the room
Bridget Jones’s Diary must go mad as a bad
Christmas sweater with a gherkin up its arse;
in part because he’s found the elevator that opens
onto every turn-of-the-millennium interior,
only ever enters between parted chrome
in close up; in part again because Kafka’s motorbike
revs so hard at cocktail parties it harmonises
with flutes and postmodern small talk like Rushdie
and the politically incorrect arithmetic
of a 90s hangover, my mid-30s, and a skirt;
in part again ad infinitum because after a certain age
there are always Alsatians waiting at the bottom
of the next bottle . . .

I’d have done it. Shagged him.
I’d have done it and so much more just to replace food
with sex and stop singing each time Céline Dion came on.
I mean, how often does Hugh Grant jump at you,
from his punt, screaming “FUCK ME! I love Keats.”

I’d have done it again and again and again
and then written it all down in Bridget Jones’s Diary.
Because karaoke is more common than snow
and lovers rarely fight on the streets of Soho;
because if he’s not a knobhead without a knob
then he’s my uncle who’s not my uncle
and the only purple passage I’ve ever known
is the prolonged bridge of my mother’s lover’s nose
selling on the telly . . .

I’d have gone mad for Cleaver,
mad as a Human Rights lawyer on St Nick’s
mistaken again for the reindeer. But what are the odds?
My chances are up there with a sequel
or F.R. Leavis calling on the phone.

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VAMPIRE PROBLEMS

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Rae Armantrout

It took us just sixty years
to slurp up the Ogallala aquifer.

Poets keep asking, “What
if poetry won’t save us?”

It’s fun to say ”Whaat??”
I taught my granddaughter, Renee.

Now she’s ready for first grade.

But, seriously,
we needed that water

for alfalfa.
Isn’t it great how

things we don’t expect
still happen.

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Antediluvian Sonnets

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Laynie Browne

On the way to the end of artifice
On time departures, ancient bonds
Catalytic prescriptions for mending
Reluctance to say ‘loss’ when gain

Is in gathering through, for and across
Swiftly folding time or swirling, skirted
Triangular like a hat, orb-like as in water or web
Makes no difference except that bodies

Unknowingly pause hesitant to leave
Cultivated stillness and quiet for scuttling
A pilgrimage to Bernadette who is
No longer in Lennox or anywhere earthly

So we travel toward her laughter
One location she inscribed

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SPARKLING HEART EMPIRE

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Mia You

The greatest relationship I’ve ever had is with Empire.
Even before my mother, there was Empire; long after she’s gone, Empire.
My mother disowned me when I became pregnant, but not Empire.
I gave over my body to motherhood, in a country not my own, except for Empire.
Empire held me in its arms, Your child is my child, said Empire.
Parakeets burst out of the Northern sky, singing to me as a gift from Empire.

That my son has thick black hair and long legs is because of Empire.
That my daughter rolls her “r’s” is because of Empire.
That my children have Dutch names my parents can’t pronounce is because of Empire.
That my children have Korean names everyone approves of, but no one uses, is because of Empire.
That my children learn Korean history by watching K-dramas on Netflix is because of Empire.
That my children call themselves half-Dutch, half-Korean, half-American, that sometimes they also say English, not yet knowing why nations and languages have different names, that excess is also because of Empire.

My children are beautiful in a way I will never be, in the eyes of Empire.
But I see that as one way I’ve come to succeed within Empire.
After all, I gave over my body to birth to these perfect specimen-citizens of Empire.
Just like I gave over my name, at age three, to become legible to Empire.
Just like I gave over any claim to a home, just to be at home with Empire.
I’ll give you the world, anything you dream is yours, promised Empire.

But I rarely remember dreams, and if I do, they are only of Empire.
I post photos of myself with cat ears, anime eyes, my true emotive self in a shower of sparkles, “what cocktail am I?,” a spinning thirst trap for Empire.
All the Valentine’s Day cards I’ve ever written were really to you, Empire.
In fact, every word I’ve sighed or sung or screamed authentically was to you, Empire.
Every line I’ve loved from Dante to Baudelaire to Tsvetaeva I read through you, Empire.
Empire comments on my post in a language I don’t understand; I hit “see translation” and then feel grateful to my beloved Empire.

I buy Napa cabbage in an Utrecht supermarket to make kimchi for Empire.
I bury the French glass jar in my garden, next to poppies, as an offering for Empire.
At midnight, I turn on my computer to commune with other poets writing about Empire.
We’re lit with the light of three different continents, but we marvel at how space and time don’t matter for Empire.
In a movie theater I watch Parasite with subtitles I don’t need but were offered by Empire.
Don’t you know it’s because of you they’re given American names – like I was – a European family moves in at the end – like in my home – it’s the perfect Hollywood film – like my immigrant dream, I whisper in the dark to Empire.

My son points to the idols and asks, Why do they all look the same? and I don’t tell him that’s racist, I tell him that’s Empire.
When I was his age, there were such same-looking soldiers on the street, all in the name of Empire.
We ate spicy stew with pieces of hot dog and sliced cheese, tenderly prepared by Empire.
The radio played songs with nonsensical lyrics in English, and I danced along with Empire.
My parents claimed they tried to give me a better life by moving into the heart of Empire.
But it wasn’t necessary; at the center of my heart was always Empire.

They put me in Empire’s arms and said, Our child is your child, to Empire.
And if they hadn’t, could you have kept your body, name, home from me? asks Empire.
Could your parents have come to love you? sighs Empire. Could your children have been beautiful? sings Empire. Could you have written your poetry? screams Empire.

Posted in 111: BABY | Tagged

Job Speaks of the World Under

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Norman Erikson Pasaribu
“Are you still trying to maintain your integrity? Curse God and die.”
—The Book of Job, New Living Translation



In the beginning, there was light
strangeness in me as they, without fail,
wanted me to speak
about human rights.

It swelled at a Q&A
where a white woman grabbed the mic
and apologized because we had to
converse in English.

“It’s so harrowing none of us here
could speak Bahasa, or Thai.”
Even though NT
was Vietnamese.

After the panel ended
a man—complimentary wine
in his hand—might’ve gone to me
and started mocking his ancestors.

“Oh, how evil they were, ravaging
every corner, oh, every corner, of the world.
And murdered your people,
oh, your people!”

And then I’d feel guilty after I saw mountains
of books—unsold and mine—in the festival bookshops.
If I was being a lake that day, I’d purchase some
and sleepread my own words during the flight home.

O, Lady of the Ocean Blue, why
did I have people translate my work? Why
tf did I even write? Will I forever be seen
as a voiceless subaltern?

On my walk back to the hotel, I might
pull a hysterical cry and curse God.
In the beginning, I lost a job—now I’ve to do this
to keep my parents’ rice cooker steaming.

During these festivals, my main support system
was the room’s bathtub. I would slip my tear-
wet body into the boiling baby lake
and right away I would feel safe.

Boat-like on the foamy water, I’d miss terribly
the grandparents I never met. Ompung Boru
who died on a ferry on her way
to the mainland.

“Could never forget the sunset, as Omak
was on her last breath, how orange it was,”
Namboru Ana would say. Father said she kept
her only picture and she said she didn’t.

Alone like an arrogant God, I would just jump
on the bed lake-wet. Woke up at 7 AM in the lavish
hotel room and dragged my hunger to the McDonalds across
the street—since it didn’t come with breakfast, which would be $50.

O, my dear Baby Lake, it’s an illusion, all of it.


For NT

Posted in 111: BABY | Tagged

Patty Melt

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Richard Siken
When my grandmother died, my mother called me because there was no one else to call. I know we’re not talking but I need you to keep me from dancing on her grave. I met her at Marie Callender’s. A waitress with an engraved name tag brought me a patty melt and a glass of milk. It calms my mother when I drink milk. She had a chicken salad. I watched some cars pull into the parking lot, watched other cars pull out. The drivers seemed reasonable as they navigated between the lines. Some people think that parking lots are like the open sea but really, there are rules. At the funeral, my mother didn’t try anything at all, which was disappointing. A machine lowered the casket into the ground and we took our turns throwing dirt on it. I don’t think she had thought the whole thing through. There was nothing to celebrate or protest, just a hole in the ground with a box in it and no real way to prove a point or turn the afternoon into spectacle. On the drive back to my car in the Marie Callender’s parking lot my mother explained why we should return to not-talking, which we did. Marie Callender’s says they’re famous for their pies but really, who doesn’t say that? I was still in a wheelchair when my mother died. I had her cremated. There was nowhere to put the box.
Posted in 111: BABY | Tagged

Dry-eyed

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Lisa Collyer

Elder sister’s downy chicks
have lost their peep in butcher’s
twine. You pay in Dong 1 and snap
a Kodachrome and concur a Doi Moi 2
petty enterprise. And your own nan
too−a slayer of bobbing apples held
down. When mother cat adopts
a surrogate sock, you decry the cull
as birth control, mourning kitten coats
through UV tints.

Posted in 111: BABY | Tagged

Queerbaiting: The Musical

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Chris Tse

fellas, is it gay to queerbait? is it sleight of hand calling
attention to unspoken fires in each breath?

where there is space for quiet ache, the yearn you keep
to yourself until you find a trusted friend.

gay gaze in search of joy—ode to open shirt & hint
of cum gutters—ballad of bitten lip

all mixed messages—lust thirsts, in need of quenching—
to extinguish the names you call yourself

when you spit at the mirror each morning for being
so easily fooled by this cynical game—

head-in-hands realisation that we have played
ourselves, over & over—our needs

dumbed down & caught in every rainbow net. the bait
isn’t queer—it’s late-stage capitalism.

eventually, the 11 o’clock number—that straight men
are bad for your health—they complicate

attraction in exchange for your dollars & fandom.
what can we do but to will the walls

to crumble & reveal a stage where there are no velvet
curtains to hide behind at the end

of each performance—when the trend or TikTok
challenge has failed—when we have

seen through & beyond to where queer desire is canon
—smoke signals guiding us home.

Posted in 111: BABY | Tagged

BABY DOLL PYJAMAS

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Melinda Bufton

to even up the more stoic exactitudes –
If that is your intent –
arcing up the atmos with a little ambient fizz
can be the solution.
Would you put on
a baby doll pyjama?
It’s very cute of
coarse and strident, much more
than it should rightly be
as so much whipped cream, textile-wise.
And yet
A baby doll contains all the
best parts for yourself and
others if you (blink) hard enough
Hmmm.
Still…
Imagine a doll in a
Baby Doll. Imagine a barbie in a baby. Imagine if it were silk
or brocade and you wore it with your
Legs (bien sur) and sat atop a
fire hydrant as throne,
orating a verrrry long poem
in lieu of comedy, in lieu of desire.
And you were never cold in limb, oddly, maybe
If the baby doll were felt lined or velvet
lined or lined with ancient fur that
creates the best inner coating then, well…
is that pleasure for you entirely or for those who
come to see you
atop
the hydrant

performing…?


is this the Pleasure Principle, after all
 

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IL BAMBINO

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Bella Li

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Critical Failure

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Thabani Tshuma

[ Background Perception Check ]

**PERCEPTION FAILED**

You do not see it coming.
The greatest poem ever written,
guard it carefully,
garner a carefree attitude to art.
It intimidates life,
the dated schoolyard kind of flattery.
it flaunts to fawn the fault of fauna.
Stop.
And smell the flora.
(Read: Roses.)
(as in, Actual Red Roses)
as the image becomes artifice
by other name, by any means.
I was once bitten
at a biennial celebration of shyness.
Almost ironic
as I’ve been courting fame.
The score is love-none.
The melody of disillusion and loss.

Delusion is the opiate of the main character
and the antidote.
Add a passive buff.
[+1 Luck]
Nothing can prepare you
for success
like a good modifier,
reckless swings akimbo.
I came for the party,
stayed for the friends we made along the way.
Respec’ed for character development,
Save Scummed for plot.
Started over.
A dexterous D20 roll.
Games are made for playing,
Bard is still the best class.

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