truce: the humid handshake

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Joanne Burns

thunder in the border lounge
the carpet runs for cover
the apricot armrest wears
its amputation like an official
decoration, say the order of
australia, the bathroom
of the failed statistic steams
like a fragrant wonton
where are the rusks, here’s
the superglue to give
the toffee apple its
orthodontal gloss; the bow
of the world touches its
seven toes trying to find
direction, now that
the haystack monarchs
are sniffing at their
pyrex futures the proof
lies in the oven

Posted in 04: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Safe House

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Jennifer Compton

for David Quinlivan and the Wingello Rural Fire Brigade
caught in the fire near Johnstones Creek on New Years Day

Turn this house inside out
braced and joisted by a man with a builder’s smile
he hummed as he worked and hoisted tiomber and tile
turn this house upside down
he’s dead now and he built ir
likewise tree stumps out in the forest
I could tell you which man, which tree, which forest
he built it and he left it in our good hands
red lights hover over the oval
men are working
unloading the injured, lifting the injured, loading th einjured
men are loading and unloading in a documentary come to our town
I am decoding red lights that hover
the poet whispers in my good ear
Are uo waiting for a UFO?
That’s a helicopter, man!
this is my helicopter come to het me
this is my town, this is my safe house
the trees in my garden step in close to nuzzle me
stupid member of their unnumbered, numberless cabal
they put me down on the ground, give me their breath
uising me using them
the back door bangs
they lift their heads
I need you so bad!
they’ve melted into background
become scenery with a whisper
they’ve gone but not for good
the creative writing student
puppyfat and fringe
needs to use the outdoor dunny
I was trying to impress you. I’m sorry.
Now you’ll never know the end to this story.
I’m sorry. I’m not going to tell you.

Posted in 04: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Schlieren Lines

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Tricia Dearborn

imagine you pour a stream of
sugar solution into a beaker
of water, or pee into a bathtub
you see the twining translucent trails
as each solution curls around the
other, prior to their coalescence?

these are schlieren lines
my biochem hons supervisor,
the one who gave me to work with
radioactive compounds so old
they had no hope of giving me
cancer, let alone decent results,

taught me this much. I don’t quite
forgive him the dodgy materials
or for telling me in detail of his wife’s
travails with cystitis, over a cup of tea
and a plain biscuit at 11, the old
laboratory ritual, with the autoclave

busily hissing steam and the smell
of dilute ethanol drifting from ranked test
tubes in gradated hues of pink but I grant
that he gave me that unique pleasure
of having at last a word for
the thing I could never name

Posted in 04: UNTHEMED | Tagged

untitled

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Dan Disney

… I once asked a deaf magician the famed question: if a tree falls in the forest, will it always make a noise? He wrung his hands wretchedly, then signed “yeah; but what’s a man to do?” Earlier, he’d pulled me from his velvet hat, lipreading the gasps of a gathered crowd …


… if I was going to burn a hole into the night my inventory would include starlight, & a magnifying glass. Once the hole was made big enough, I’d scaffold it so as to hold it in place. Imagine that. Then I’d crawl in. What would I find there–the cure for madness? An undiscovered number. Simplicity. Perhaps the perfect shade of blue? Who knows. But I do know I wouldn’t take too many people in, because they’d just fuck it up. I’d take you, though.That’s for sure. I’d take you.

Posted in 04: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Rameses

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Gig Ryan

Pillar after pillar towers my name.
Not all of these could express the life I feel
flash through me.
My ideas span the earth

but now tours litter at my feet
folding their waxy guides.

Here, I watch life fall apart in front of me
as we hurtle towards death.
I hope you’ll last
but every monument freezes.


My Anatolian agent writes to complain
of my negative review.
Words cut me to the bone,

I wear what I wore to your wedding
but then the day glittered in sunlight.

Tomorrow I’m reading out loud
in services to hedonism.
I write my plaque on the spongey world
and hail the puny days.

Posted in 04: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Pulp

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Keri Glastonbury

In love
I’ll usually effect a threshold.

Usually a stream.

And there we splash and banter.

The threshold is my flattened-out organs
without a summit.

Or sometimes I dig holes
and think that I’m clever.

It’s a method of frustration
and deferral.

Although when I’m in love
like I am with you.

I’m a citrus orange
plunged chest first
on to a stainless steel juicer.

Waiting for a pure form
of domestic violence
to turn delicious.

Posted in 04: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Marked

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Mary Ruefle

Because I was not marked
Because I had neither fame
nor beauty nor inquisitiveness.
Because I did not ask.
Because I used my hands.
Because I ate potatoes in dirty jackets
fished from the rocks.
Because I used a pail at night.
Because when Betty C. explained
to Betty D. the nature of the problem
I did not understand.
Because I had no silver.
Because I was like my mother before me
and kept to myself mostly.
Because humanity used the footpath.
Because my backbone started to rot.
Because I finished my term on earth
and had no knowledge of either
fear nor care, no morning knowledge,
no knowledge of evening,
and those who came before
and those following after
had no more knowledge of me
than I had of them

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

The Glance Returned

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Anthony Lawrence

When you are seven years old,
lying in the back of a station wagon
while your parents play night tennis;
when the knowledge that you are going
to die one day comes through
the rallies, players’ voices,
and songs from a dashboard radio
left on like an audible night light;
you listen hard to the faultless
workings of your life: your heartbeat
mufled under a blanket; your breath,
painting cone-shaped plumes on the glass.
You trade sleep for the ache
of a nameless concept, and feel
the margins of your days begin to close.
You are not prepared for this.
You leave the car and look beyond
the capped, swinging court lights,
blurred by an attendant rain of moths
and flying ants, and you search
the sky for meaning. Linking stars
and smears of low, transparent cloud,
you find a wound in the side
of an overripe fig; a lizard,
its position on a stone betrayed
only when it blinks. But then
a tennis ball clears the fence,
a player laughs, and your parents return,
smelling of sweat and cigarettes.
When they ask why you’re up so late;
what you’re doing outside the car;
you’ve not the words for what you know.
On the way home, you lie down
and stare at the backs of their heads,
which are dark, then silver
in the lights of an overtaking lorry.
Your father turns the radio off.
Your mother turns to look at him.
They do not speak. You touch yourself
under the blanket, carefully,
and forget about death for awhile.
When the backs of their heads
flare again, you promise yourself
you’ll remember that moment;
and you do, thirtytwo years later,
sitting up in bed, when your wife’s face
is lit by a car pulling into the drive.
In the dark again, you sense her
glance at you. The glance returned,
you ask if she remembers
how old she was, or what she was doing
when her first thoughts of death arrived.
When she doesn’t answer, you say
Star, fig, lizard, and wait for the lights
of another car to print
the shadows of your heads on the wall

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

The Granary

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Geraldine McKenzie

He cracks his pain like stalks of wheat
sits at the kitchen table feathering
seeds from husks brittle as cicada shells

dulled gold in the gaslight which threads
a sound the colour of gunmetal through
the quiet eye of evening. Slowly pours the harvest

back into himself, rises and a heaviness
rolls against his lungs and he breathes
a silver whistling of grain shifting over

the clear membrane of his life. One night
checking the traps he finds a possum
forearm snapped, flesh and fur already

crisping back like peel opening to the white
pith. It goes for him as he removes the bar.
He can do nothing for it. Resets the trap.

Rolls a cigarette, smoke rills vanishing
like flickers of a movement, dark wing, clawed foot,
along the skirting boards. Nothing you might name.

On a day when the colour rings like the bite
of a swung axe, bird shadows
the scudding chips, the sun blades him

like a sapling cracked with the first blow. Toppled
he lies gazing into an ambiguous candour
of blue and mutters – Blow over. Blow over me.

He finds the contained patience of seeds –
if he waits long enough, threads of denim
will unwind to roots fringed with hair, confidently

entering the friable earth, toes and fingers
curl like ranunculus bulbs, hips and backbone
splay off as rusted strips of metal, scythe blade

curved beneath the winnowing jaws of diligent
insects. Hoarded grain sinks like skimmed
stones beneath a brindled mask of dam water

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

Traffic Lights

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Benjamin Gilmour

At traffic lights
is where I notice a man
waiting in the outside lane
for the same light to turn green.

Sitting with a stiff shirt,
licking upwards on his moustache,
gold at his wrist and
his rear vision angled on his hair.

He is watching and clutching
the blond pedestrian that passes infront,
but when she’s gone around the corner
his mind is a wad of bills again.

At traffic lights
on the road to the same town
is a man that makes the world
so heavy to turn.

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

I Got a Rock Nº 16

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Eddy Burger

I got a rock
then I got another
and I got that other
from the corner of a cave

That other that I got
was of another colour
and another –
it was from another corner of the cave

There was another
from the corner of another cave
and another of the other colour
from another cave

Then I got another rock
from the other corner
but this corner –
it was not the corner of the other cave

And another from another corner
of another colour
of the same colour
as the corner of the other cave

There was another from a corner
of another corner colour
coloured as another corner of another cave

And another in the colour of another coloured corner
was another corner of another other corner cave

And another that I other colour of another other corner
corner of another other coloured corner cave

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

In the Worst Way

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Jennifer Compton

I want to sniff your armpits
arsehole: I want to lick your toes
until they clench & writhe:
I want to nibble buttocks: strive
against your tautened breasts: sink teeth
into your clattering eyes: sing on a note
of garbled ecstasy: shout with laughter
at the surprise of gushing waters: hit
you for being alive.

I want to take your arm & shoulder
home with me: I want to be your Mother & your Wife:
I want to steal your poetry, give you marigolds
& drink your spit. I want to hit you
because I want to drink your spit.

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

Mortal

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Christopher Andrews

It’s amazing how old some people can get
before they even begin to realize
they’re going to have to die one day too as if
no-one had ever made it perfectly clear
the stuff about dying wasn’t just a threat.

I say that like I’d plied the Styx on a skiff
like my death was some sort of exotic fruit
ripening deep in the hothouse of my being
but how will having gone on about it help
when my body is definitively stiff?

It’s amazing how long you can go between
drinks I mean those moments when it’s clear as gin
that after all you’re not completely dead yet
there’s a survivor buried in you somewhere
I say all this like my life was pure routine.

Posted in 04: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Now, Some Facts

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Emma Lew

I’m related to Karl Marx
My great great great great great grandfather ruled Poland for a month
Anna Freud babysat my mother
My great grandfather never had a hole in his teeth
Stampeding horses tore my grandfather’s thumb
My great uncle wrote SUICIDE and ATTEMPTED SUICIDE
My great grandmother had two sets of twins
My uncle was a bankrupt four times
My great grandfather wrote poems in German
My other great grandfather walked from Russia to Palestine
My aunt and uncle breed llamas in Israel
I’m related to Helena Rubenstein

Posted in 04: UNTHEMED | Tagged

The Pathetic Fallacy

Posted on July 1, 1998 by John Ashbery

A cautionary mister,
the thaumaturge poked holes in my trope.
I said what are you doing that for.
His theorem wasn’t too complicated,

just complicated enough. In brief,
this was it.The governor should peel
no more shadow apples, and about teatime
it was as if the lemon of Descartes
had risen to full prominence on the opulent skyline.

There were children in drawers, and others trying to shovel them out.
In a word, shopping had never been so tenuous,

but it seems we had let the cat out of the bag, in spurts.
Often, from that balcony
I’d interrogate the jutting profile of night
for what few psalms or coins it might
in other circumstances have been tempted to shower down
on the feeble heathen oppressor, and my wife.

Always you get the same bedizened answer back.
It was like something else, or it wasn’t,
and if it wasn’t going to be as much, why,
it might as well be less, for all anyone’d care.
And the ditches brought it home dramatically
to the horizon, socked the airport in.

We, we are only mad clouds,
a dauphin’s reach from civilisation,
with its perfumed citadels, its quotas.What did that
mean you were going to do to me?
Why, in another land and time we’d be situated, separate
from each other and the ooze of life. But here, within
the palisade of brambles it only comes often enough to what
can be sloughed off quickly, with the least amount of fuss.
For the ebony cage claims its constituents

as all were going away, thankful the affair had ended.

Posted in 04: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Buddha, Birdbath, Hanging Plant

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Peter Skrzynecki

Three things stopped him in his stride
when he stepped out
into the garden – three things
under the great peppercorn
that he planted years ago:
the statue of a Buddha,
a birdbath and a plant in a basket
hanging from one of the peppercorn’s branches.

The Buddha pointed to the earth,
to the ‘here and now’.
The birdbath, filled with water,
reflected the tree above it.
The plant, a flowering hoya,
hung over the Buddha and birdbath like a crown.

His time of sorrow
vanished – as if pain and fear
had been nothing more than vapours
trailing through his imagination.
Somewhere, from out of an ancient past,
he heard a voice, “The centre of the universe
is a bellylaugh.”
The Buddha smiled; the water
in the birdbath rippled;
the hoya stirred
in a circular motion.

He stepped back, startled –
as if someone had pushed him.
Then he saw the great tree itself.

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

Bell Tongue

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Paola Bilbrough

Shingle under sole, walking over
Silvermine shore with Shelley. She says
with sorrow: ‘I’m not a detail person.’

Ferry to Lantau Island, each of us mistook
the time and destination yet we still meet. Beneath
fog thick as curds, the world’s biggest Buddha.

Japanese tourists snapping approximations:
What may be a leg, the stone petals of a lotus.
Faces in the fog: scissor cuts in pale cloth.

Sightseeing thwarted, the sea gives grace
to a clumsy day, heaviness of stored tears
lifting as we lie in the sand, light receding.

Sky darkening at the edges, old parchment.
Shelley offers the word ‘sonorous’,
the soul’s voice: bell tongue against sound-bow

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

America

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Bernard Cohen

In Minneapolis the water tastes of chlorine, bleached out
memories of old conflicts dissolving into themselves like ice-cubes.
In Denver, the water carries occasional whiffs
of ammonia, but who cares? Not me,
I’m wearing a new suit like a nationality.
I’m testing out America for effect, slipping it over
my namebrand underclothing
to see if it makes me feel that Bomb Alaska
is a joke about Canadians, or that people move about
only in order to fulfil national objectives – tourism,
for example. No more border-crossings
at eight in the evening for me,
not with this passport, no more queuing
for the wrong stamp which will serve you ill
at Athens airport in February when it’s snowing.

America, you have come to keep us neat.
You haven’t the time to commute death
sentences on the way to the president’s office.
No room for ‘I’m sorry’, having a very nice time
swallowing dozens of whoopie burgers at the 1982 World’s Fair,
understanding it’s not the laughter that means America,
it’s the actual punchlines – the what ‘upstairs’ means to the breathy couple
on the cream-coloured sofa behind the coffee table,
when it’s late enough the music’s changed and the pre-pubic
kiddoes are off to camp with trusted scoutmasters.

And I’ve done what I had to do, been born,
been to Nashville for all-you-can-eat, dry-fried
chicken strips. Americans will even swallow
that the Pacific coast was not the limit of exploration,
or that the dulling of stars (in the sky)
means something about development. Yes,
in Nashville there’s a full-scale replica
of the Parthenon as once it stood,
though built to last in red granite.
Sydney, too, has a Chrysler Building,
the announcement draped in reflective-blue façade.

America is everywhere, in all stages of compression:
the nation contained in a song,
its complicated down-home heartlessness,
the flag gulping back speech after speech and flapping
out again in the prevailing westerly.
William H Gass put it best, his story asking,
‘Where, after all, is Germany?’
America offers no space for quibbling –
‘Insult me, insult my country,’ maintains someone
from Wisconsin, advancing belligerently, oblivious
of two dozen Haitians raising their arms: ‘Excuse us,
Mr Melodrama, you’re disturbing our careers.’

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

X / incorrect

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Evan Dando

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

Fractured Adonis

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Michael Farrell

we are the dead hours of rain days in
the desert & like it alright compared to
breaking our bones over antarctic zones
shouldnt i be driven home tonight
whole as ever i wore glasses in the gardens
of pleasure or lifes little loves the ironies
so few accept im under a hot conception
waiting for the dawn dryeyed in the rain
theres trouble a police cordon & outofit
men collapse in the sand dont lose your cap
dont lose whats under it under a wire crown
this is where the queen came to sit & strip
someone else with a great chest modelled
for a bit of god the cigarettes are smoked

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

Arcana

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Philip Hammial

As do many in navy we contrive
a crux of vegetable. Get &
stay lean for a cranked
majority. Slam & how hard
a door. Straight
to majesty. Chic ribaldry
moving fast. Back
to front & what’s
between. Grass pains
for a handsome twosome who think
of money as a friend. What they feel,
is it on purpose or just
a lucky scratch? Probably probity enough
for a squeal or two so long as they don’t go
international. Count your blessings
but lick your postcards first. Make it
a solemn occasion. A blank
for the fill-ins. To button which
who’d dare? To be sure
your much touted celestials
won’t. Who, placed
to such advantage,
nothing do. Our cue
to switch to meat. Take up knives,
row for our lives.

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

A howling in favour of failures …

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Pam Brown

It’s time to lay my
zip-drive on the table –
here is where we all
washed up –
the caffeine failed,
the water pipes
hammering,
pink batts
making it difficult
to eavesdrop,
April Fool’s Day
on its way,
all the universities
look the same,
scornful undergraduates
plastered, clinging
to each new
generic era,
in every cloning
an undercurrent
insincerity –
every taunt you make,
our fond acquaintance,
(courtroom opportunists
losing
their appeal),
push a barrow
or an envelope?
many participants
lining up
for a career development
workshop –
managing win/win goals
& situations
this one’s called

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

Bread

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Philip Hammial

A slice – I’ll take it neat. I’ll take it
as a treat for the brethren, a tidy morsel
for their tedious mouths, who tried to tame me
with a stick. Poled (the outboard motor
broken down) for hours through a swamp,
the Okefenokee, surprise party, was it
my birthday? – festoons of snakes, dead friends
materialising from mist, how was it
that I came upon dervishes, that cemetery
on the outskirts of Khartoum? – dust wheel, trance
gyre, a pile of shoes in its center, at the entrance
to a shower, how was it that I came to Dachau,
was sucked down through the body
of a drum, a message of war, Mau Mau
in leopard skins, killers with claws? – a slice,
I’ll take it neat. I’ll take it as a treat
for the brethren…

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

untitled

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Martin R Johnson

“Some time, later,
we shall break the archive seals.
Sitting together then
we shall utter what has never been said before.”

Steffen Mensching – Born in 1958 in East Berlin


Riight. And what a night we’d make of it, hey! You
with your never-meant-tos but hadta, you know. Me
likewise, only now with pally arms slung round each other’s
necks, the urge to squeeze and choke gone from out our hearts.
Be something, wouldn’t it, you and me, the curled-up corners
of the record pinned down by our forgiving fingers. I can
see it, man, the empty tube rolling over the edge of the table and
landing with that hollow pipe sound as it bounces on the hard
stone floor. Directs our laughing eyes to its noise. To its
growing silence. The o of its open end. The
emptiness within, the grins slipping from
our chins. You yelling, hey!
Let’s crush it with
our boots.
Don’t
stand in my way.

Riight, I say. But what a night we had, your nose
colliding with my fist. I guess it’s not as simple as I’d
imagined, gambling on a perfect outcome like this, Steffen. So let’s
leave the seals intact. To break them open is to unwrap
a bandage stuck to a scab.

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged