Slice through the inverse mappings of the plane
There are streets I can’t cross for the ghosts
And unsuspecting doves
Not sure that anything’s
amiss
That morning when I came
yilayi banggubuyal banggu ngaya mardin yidha ngunda they speak all country they speak our water to us yilayi gurdiny-maa made with fire, made with stone words carve like fire, like stone yilayi gurdiny-maa to sate and send gamu waalu yilayi yimba well full of words swallowed in darkness drawn in light dharri waalu words sate like water dharrimarra ganydjagamu dhugga dharri dharri-mardala yidha banggu ngiba galgara dharri-banggu a sentinel walk this page like Country yilayi made with fire, made with stone dharri ngaya mardin yidha ngunda dharrigurdiny-ma to sate and to send dharri warrawawayallook out stoneknowledge stonemap stones our people put there dhana ngalga gurra gurra yumbarramban ngalga gamu dhanalala nganagu I will tell it again gurdiny mardin yidha ngunda a waterhole our people put there a well yama burdi, yama banggu I must tell you in circles a well living water Here, now hear/listen/think living words handful of words swallowwater drink fetch word grinding stone words put the stone down there many stone words pile them up banggubuyal there now words our people put there wordwell words for all time
The morning is a thought field ignited by bird lark; a river of cerebration. I contemplate horse skins of light––the marigold sun through a prism of glass. One child emerges, then another. Their soporific faces reveal a discernment. I take from every gap ready to pursue the stratosphere of not myself. Between inhalations of hope, their focal eyes, their tender skin, is a euphonic indrawn sea. Let me trace these inner abrasions; a deaf-brae of not discourse.
//
I tread, retread repetitive lines––only in the margins am I wolf-blood. That’s what my daughter says, she knows, has known the primal horde at the root. Like menses––it will come soon. My daughter is articulate with a hormone charge. In this inarticulate world of anxiety that pervades her being she plays a game of running ‘blood from the ground.’ It is as if the moon is doubled, hung off the lobes of her fallopian tubes as ceremonial bling. My fresh pup is growing bold––treated to all of my luminescence. She plays ‘wolf notes’ on her guitar to teach me how to locate the score I had mislaid in my own heart.
//
What is wolfish, intractable? Reading for the bones, relocating a medicine story, of lore, diminished by conquest, religion and capital. Petitioning Loba, drawing on a kinship line, an auditory nerve––by the light of my ovaries I sing this song. A ‘liquid howl,’ drives rivers between rivers of soul, a vatic bird song that I mine. I go down to the wound as if I already know how. As if I’d done this many times with a flame in my heart––slipping into wolf-blooms.
‘Woolf notes’ and ‘blood from the ground’ come from the poem ‘Wolf Notes’ by Judith Beveridge, collected in Wolf Notes, 2007 [2003], Giramondo: Sydney. pp.39-42.
‘Liquid Howl’ is taken from ‘Wolf Cento’ collected in Trace by Simon Muench. Black Lawrence Press.
It was raining, dark, and the end
of summer.
I was telling the story
when I sat by the back window.
you were there, I was maybe nine.
voice and raindrops rose
and fell like tiny
little wet slaps.
A wake-up call,
some may say.
“Tell us your story,” and
we’d go around the group.
“I was nine,” I would say,
but maybe I was ten.
A hush fell in cocooned
shelter,
and there I was, looking out again.
Far away dream voices nagged
at me.
They were coming from up the
stairs, from behind,
my nose pressed up against
the cool glass
(it was summer)
as if waiting for an event
in the garden.
Then it all gained this
electric momentum,
accelerated voices a tousle of
limbs, my ten (or was I nine)
year old nose flush
up to the glass.
Never had I seen
a grown man cry and so
I stood there, the voices
propelling behind me with
diesel force, waiting,
as I said,
for the garden event.
The tree stood there totally
unashamed, perhaps unaware
of the role it would later play.
A fruitful tree, too rough
to climb, whose branches we’d
strip of apricots at the close of
every summer.
It was nearly time, maybe I was nine.
She was leaving him, the dream voice
said. She’d had enough. The
low branch readied itself, my wet
nose cool on glass, the heavy, angry
pitter patter of feet scampering
down stairs.
The slap –
backdoor released from its hinge.
A jingle bells of car keys hiding in
her bag.
“And where were you? They asked.
Under the awning, rain wetting
our feet, hair attaching
to foreheads with damp insistence.
“I think I was nine,” I said. “Or
maybe ten. He was there,” and
I pointed somewhere. Wet rain
wet my feet and hands, wet nose,
dog-like, again pressed against
the glass,
hot breath
making little foggy circle,
enveloping my view.
She had walked straight under the
branch of the apricot tree and was
halfway opening the car when
it hit him.
Maybe I’d never seen a fall
like that, maybe I’d never
seen him fall.
His back flush against pavement,
my nose, wet, flush against
the glass. When he
touched his forehead
blood appeared, a deep
red smear on
fingertips. No blood
I’d seen before. No
laceration, no wound.
The one with keys, her
dream voice rose and her palms
opened up and she rushed
to him.
Naturally.
Rain fell.
“And what next?” they said,
“and were you nine or ten?”
“I’m sure,” I said, rain
somehow seeping through the
awning. We were at
the art show and everything
smelled like cigarettes.
A girl squeezed past
whose white dress was
stained with chilled red
wine, like diluted blood,
like blood washed out
but still a fixture
of the fibres.
Nothing happened.
We went on like this for
some while, the
apricots stewing beautifully,
a lovely treat
for autumn, everyone moved
around, courteously,
enjoying the art, pretending
that it made them feel something.
So many novels begin on staircases or in hallways.
The only light in the house through the Venusian greenglass above the landing
Oceans of dust and the thousand shadows of childhood
Converging on the woven runner on this black wood
The occasional chair gnarled into the roots of the house
Memory is just a landscape
This is a city of blind corners and declining platforms
Sandstone disappearing into a vale of leaves
Staircases down into the flood
In July a leadlight rose is
A sacred heart
A clot
A drunkard’s eye
In August –
The sensuality of movement is
Sitting on the station platform
Amongst puddles like upturned mirrors
The copper air
Between Newtown and Redfern
Through spinning bike spokes, the stillness
I take a window seat
To stare at my own reflection
Every edge is in the misaligned stitching
Of this green jumper’s sleeve
Damp
Pushing aside the branches that overgrow the footpath
Every edge
Three ghosts
A transparent sky
After a decade of rain
Artist(s): Mother and three-year-old child. Materials: Ink and white-out on book page of Susanna
Moore’s The Life of Objects (2012). 15cm x 23.5cm. 2014.
As a child I am not permitted in the good room
No small feet on the carpet
No touching
Ushered away from glass ornaments
My favourite, a flawless glass maiden
Shows me what is valuable, out of reach
At sixteen I think that if I can’t be hot I may as well die
How to win enemies and piss people off
How to get clear skin in 6800 easy steps
How to lose ten kilos in five hours
How to eat sh*t without getting a bad taste in your mouth
How to live
At work I am
How to fake it until you forget how you actually feel
How to fall in public to elicit the least amount of laughter
How to apply lipstick around the outside of your lips
How to blink to signal for help
Five easy tips for looking younger than—
The radio tells me what I must like, it offers me prepaid funerals as a good idea
I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottom of my trousers—
I am no vampire, I have not drunk from the fountain
I crumble, I crack at edges
My skin breaks
I stretch and frail
I have forgotten the shapes my body can make without a chair or a screen
I am over-stimulated
My attention drawn to the digital, the pixel, the moment of urgency
How to dress for Zoom
How to wear your hair so you don’t look like you’ve been awake all night
How to convince your coworkers that you are listening in the online meeting
My body is changeable, I am no glass maiden
Created in the furnace, poured into her forever form
If she falls, she shatters, if she is thrown, she cannot fly
You dust gatherer, you perfect fraud
Locked in the good room
Without affection, cold
And you?
Are you happy, did you get what you wanted?
Are you all that you wished for?
Are you a shape that can be poured?
Who catches you if you fall?
After https://larivierefashion.com
The pattern is the foundation for the entire garment; pattern making is part creativity and part
methodology. The blueprint.
1.Assemble your tools
2.Take measurements
3.Add style and design
4.Grade your concept
5.Move to draping
1.When you are four, it’s easy for the big boy next door at Dad’s to tack on a head job.
2.And when you are five, it’s simple for the big boy next door at Mum’s to grade you in the
garden shed, where it’s dark and the cobwebs wrap grey rafters.
3.Then it’s a basic step towards a GP who toiles you, all the while darting lude sexual
references at the bust line,
4. Which primes you for that dentist, that physio, that locksmith.
5. An entire block; row upon row of partners who have not yoked consent.
i am offering you a bowl of rawon
and i expect you to scoop up my right ventricle.
my childhood is the black stew
and i am in every beansprout that you throw away.
in my country we do not say “i love you.”
love is a sin for fathers and the letters ‘LO’
take up too much space for mothers.
love is a countryside dream. this city has no benches
to sleep on once you are bored of me.
despite that we sit with this rawon between us.
“have you eaten yet?”—that is what we say.
why should you ask the obvious?
because we can only care for what we know.
the only way to show intimacy without
vulnerability. to hide your heart and a hammer
for your lover to find in case of emergencies.
“have you eaten yet?”
how are you?
do you miss me?
will you take me?
how do i look?
do you even love me?
will you bury me with a ring?
“that’s too bad. let me cook something.”
bring the spoon to your mouth and watch me unfold.
hurry and eat up now, the rice will get cold.
I will talk to you of Kurdistan and mountains, of beautiful trees and rare flowers. I will talk of wild rivers, tall waterfalls and amazing music. I will talk of my father, the shepherd, who was inseparable from nature. I will talk of my mother who worked too hard to find something for us to eat and, when there was none, lay our heads on her lap and sung us beautiful stories to make us sleep. I will talk to you of Kurdistan made a battlefield, of a childhood filled with war, of 50,000 Kurds killed at once by chemical weapons, of our soil soaked in blood. I will talk to you of Kurdistan and the women I admire. The women of Kurdistan who fight, sing and dance. The women who fight, sing and dance.
First published in Writing to the Wire 2016, UWA Publishing, Crawley, Western Australia, p. 197
sleet
and Eucalyptus.
Scribbly Gum. Pause. And light is cool, close;
as in near but–
Ambush. Demonic ambu–
scade.
Local. Engbic or Araglish?
Regular. Green olives,
–she’s pregnant–
pitted. Conical fruit.
Current.
–married a global man–
Blood mouth.
I brush my hands through the Cypress-Pine,
and crush the leaves between my palms and fingertips (fragrant).
I wipe the stone clean,
and spread the leaves along his grave.
We have broken our oars and sharpened them into
paring knives. You remember the desert way the wind
sucked colour from the foothills, put a fluorescent eye
in the heart of the firmament. You
remember January cigarettes and January
porridge, your belly in the ocean,
how you made
lights in the heavens, augured beneath
the august sky a chord sequence and
wrote it on your palm with mud.
In mirrors, sunglasses, and sandcastles the
braying of a boar, a wildebeest, a
typewriter and a computer in a tavern,
licking port wine from their lips,
a January cigarette. Your belly
in the concert-hall.
Songs and dances in the pages of memory,
a guitar strung about your breast,
a pen, an amplifier stuck in your ear.
People in cars and on bicycles in the next room,
mothers, goose-farmers, toecutters, pneumoniacs.
Eating bananas, fried rice, January porridge,
your belly in a supermarket. Ears
living in trees, listening to telluric currents
and the new radio. Your belly on a
television.
You remember drinking crystals and coffee-beans,
two kangaroos and a hookah, stealing
a grape, a lanyard,
unclipping paper in a dream.
West of the waterways the wild city at night
congested with salads, cider, and prophylactics.
Your belly in the newspaper, your
voice becomes an antenna.
You are a mile and a league, a
pedestrian, a composer, a lunatic,
a thistle, a compost-heap, a ballroom,
a watchdog, a liturgy, a city-street,
a caldera, a
cup of soup when the wind and the steam
and the baritone voice of the
second generation are singing in gay harmony
and the dead are watching your belly
through a looking-glass.
We have broken our oars and sharpened them into
batons, and you are playing your heart,
playing your heart like kettle-drums,
playing out your life and
killing the clown.
You posited gremlins in the asphalt, pixies
under the counter at Nervous Dog, a plurality
of health code violations hidden beneath
your burritos decebrados. Somewhere, you
said, in the sewers under Whole Foods
it resides, and by gum, you aimed to find
it, cut it out, eat it still beating with a gremolata
poached in an orange construction barrel.
In preparation you placed stacks of Marshalls
at every manhole, pumped She Walks Crooked
at maximum volume, knew you had just
a few minutes before the Woods of Fairlawn
residents reported you for noise violations.
The last I saw of you was on the ladder
in the middle of West Market in front
of the Fairlawn Taco Bell, tools strapped
to your back, headlamp ablaze. You would
approach, you said, from outside the perimeter,
a bottle of retsina in each hand, and follow
the aborted Google Fiber cables until you found
the core of the beast. The sun rose, my
bourbon is gone, and if I eat one more
seven layer burrito things will get messy,
and still there is no sign of your return.
Hard to believe
a thread could catch
and hold them still
against my skin.
Seed-pearl, turquoise
or bud of native flower?
Glass, its glitter and blade
whittled by sea.
A tiny bi-valve
stubby as stone.
A black pebble
resolved as shadow.
An oblong
cut from a long walk
on a cloudy morning—
strands of wind gust of hair.
Thread—
fine as a wren
begins
a threnody for water
a threnody for air.
Sunday, in the ribs of a bluebonnet field, I reach for their little bells—a floral alternative for inspecting my body.
My mother and I: hands in the ice bath, flowers a kinship between our fingers. This is all there is. This, and spring aches pressed between heavy books.
Someone once told me drying flowers is like falling out of love: flattening life to a millimeter, to bland colors we call beautiful, all the veiny things on display without any mystery left in them.
Twelve and I demand my mother pull over so I can collect trumpet flowers off the highway. Pruning shears and delight. How quickly I learn to distrust this feeling, staring at the roadside memorial’s coquettish silk buds.
More than anything, I want to be a tulip bulb. Sell me in Amsterdam even though no one knows my color. Let me be a craving.
April heat where porcelain is the only escape. My first cycle comes and I’m still on the tile, trying to loop womanhood around me like a bandage when it’s really a wound.
My grandmother taught me to search for aphid holes in everything: sepals, the ends of question marks, a man’s eye, just wide enough to slip through when he stares too long and there’s no way out.
Let me be clear. I do not want to find my body in old metaphors. But I can’t help myself.
Yucca does not press well. Two mornings after an attempt, a quiet rot between cookbooks. Thick liquid hot and cloudy on the counter, a smell I can’t open without thinking of what little I know of sex.
Hands full of thorns. Weeding fingernails for days. A sacred vow to the earth that when I look for its offerings, I offer my own skin in return.
After the flowers all dry, I have no language left for what they used to be. But the books will never lie flat again, the imprint of all those floral bodies stuck in their pages. And I am jealous of them.
Ink on paper: David Medalla: 1967
Funny how we don’t need alcohol anymore
to get each other to open. There is a thin
em dash along our mouths where confessions
no longer shimmy, the silence becoming our own
way of telling each other: let me in. The last time
I let anyone touch me this close, I was learning
how to aim a gun. For the last few December
thirty-firsts my grandfather took my hands in his and we
shot at the bathroom wall. It was New Year’s Eve and everyone
in my neighborhood had something shaking
in their hands. How common it is to mistake our hands
for explosives. Napalm knuckles, dynamite fingers. Today my father
roars for the same rooster fight over and over, and my brother
plays Fortnite again, aims like a blind man
waist-deep in need for color, the way
koi needs water to breathe, the way I need pain
to remember. I shoot at the concrete again
and again so it remembers—a black hole in the wall
where a memory should be.
I am singing a song that can only be born after losing a country.
—Joy Harjo
▅▅▅ ▅▅ ▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅
[Urgent]
This cannot fit into a poem.
This should be a political pamphlet.
▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅ ▅ ▅▅ ▅▅ ▅▅▅
[Scandalous]
This should be a white paper.
▅▅▅▅▅!
[Chilling]
This should be the slogan on all our streets.
▅▅▅▅ : ▅▅ ▅ ▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅ ▅▅
[Shameful]
This is apartheid. Who will boycott the boycotters?
▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅
[Horror]
This should be an HRW-Amnesty International report.
▅▅▅▅▅▅▅ & ▅▅▅▅’▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅
[Heartbreaking]
This should be a thoroughly researched documentary film.
▅▅▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅
[Disturbing]
This should be a long-read in The New York Times.
▅ ▅▅▅ ▅ ▅ ▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅
[Haunting]
History will never absolve us.
Their long march home is a story to be told to our future generations.
▅ ▅▅▅ ▅ ▅▅▅ ▅▅▅ ▅▅▅ ▅ ▅
[Oppressive]
When will our political class break its silence?
▅▅ ! ▅▅ ! ▅▅▅▅ !! ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ !!!
[Depressing]
When will all the progressive forces unite against Hindutva fascists?
▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅
[Outrageous]
Why does the state police women’s bodies with impunity?
▅▅ ▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅
[Devastating]
Such sacrifice!
When will we have our revolution?
▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅
[Warning]
The price will always be paid in blood.
What is the use of a poem in this season of hate?
The regular cliches: A desperate cry for help,
an act of witness, a scream into the void?
What is the use of a poet in a season of bloodshed?
Tell me, dear ones.
Is she the one who grieves?
Is she the one who guards the embers
of a people’s rage?
Is she the one who mirrors
your shattered heart?
Or, is she the one
who speaks to show
she is not yet dead?
I.
She crouches on the shelf, cramped, where she hid the blanket that hid her.
Spots of brown-red blood, bold on the blanket that hid her.
Her fresh skin brushstrokes against that blanket that hid her.
She charts the X’s on her left thigh, one cut for each failure
to snuff beneath the blanket that bid her live.
II.
(She is sorry her gripped words chipped into every held hand;
nothing could have rid her of that then.)
III.
In another version, not X’s
but goat-willows with fuzzy buds
like ones that grew near the field
where it happened; she loved
to brush the fur against her face
all over it felt like love.
She cut love
into her anxious thigh
so it could carry her. Now,
her forefinger traces
the vines the way a mother
traces her baby’s jawline. She lingers
on the buds,
remembering soft,
re-membering soft.
IV.
She segments the blanket-that-bid-for-her into palm-sized pieces,
calligraphies one letter onto each piece as many times through the alphabet
until each piece has a name. Arranges the pieces into a poem
no one will ever read: a narrative poem with a speaker, unspeakable.
V.
She gently pricks her left forefinger, anoints each piece, like the Passover ritual,
how the finger dips into wine, dabs the wine onto a plate once for each plague
until her people were set free. Like the ritual over Sabbath candles, she circles
her open hands three times over the words, gathers the air above them, draws her palms
to her face, closes her eyes, and sings:
blessed are you, O Lord our God; bless this one who is still, here
With an Amen, she jumbles the shards, sews them to form
a skirt, letters facing outward. Wears it to remind herself a sparrow’s song is always
the same— and isn’t.
when animals are like humans
humans are happy
the monkey hand grabs
and the fork doesn’t fall
the dog has an attitude
when they live in small families
and mate for life
humans are happy
also when one strays
from the pack
to confirm the rule
they are happy with the one
with all the feathers and
the color the male
that’s into males
they are happy looking on
the way it either dies or finally
to its nature
succumbs
(for J.C)
Lockdown, an empty beach
pockmarked with yesterday’s footprints,
now sculpted by morning tides
coarse sand, the coldest of grain.
Driftwood lingers, and a solitary crow
eying the movement of waves,
undeterred by silence, isolation
transience, its own chill cry.
Beyond the flatness, sand hills
come and go, your artist’s gaze
freezing the moment in time.
You send me the photograph
as you trudge the length of the beach
nothing happening but walking,
just you, the crow and the sea.
Don’t worry, baby / there’s another one in ten minutes /
why don’t I read you this passage / from volume two / ?
ACT I: Marigolds
If I should drive out to the country in my most abjuring dreams
Let there be marigolds growing on the highway
Yellow and cheerful and hungry for sun
Constant and timeless and vulnerable
Let all the passenger-seat conjurings ask whether they were there the last time
Let my forgetfulness be a shoulder shrug the flavour of carefree youth
Let me become a highway metaphor a shade of openness I struggle to hold onto
Let holding on be the destination
A field of those marigolds where a cattle farm once was
The farmer’s husband buried beneath the grief she planted for him before the heartbreak killed her
Flower Angels I draw into the land of the secondary plot
Of the story that ends before I learn to carry them with me
The Naivety of permanence
The roar of engine as they germinate in my place
ACT II: Succulents
If I should make it to the dessert in the protractions of my musings
Let the succulents show me where to honour my grief
Weathered and hardened and thirsty
Determined and rebellious and resilient
Let a stew of loneliness and desert sun wonder what it is to grow in infertile ground
Let all of the small deaths within me skirt around the parts in the sands where their roots may lay
Let me lower my almost-dry corpses beside them and open my hands in offering
Let the offering be an exchange for learning
A hardened leaf beneath the hardened skin of my fingertip
The beads of sweat that roll down my forehead bid greeting to the tears on my cheeks
I wipe away at the salt on my face and vow to keep growing
In the tale that does not end with survival
The wisdom in flourishing
The crunch of sand beneath my feet as I make my own way
ACT III: Peonies
If I should appear as a b-plot in the escapisms of another
Let me be a field of peonies at the beginning of Spring
Layered and soft and blossoming
Vibrant and lush and rare
Let me be unafraid to flower so fleetingly they almost miss me
Let me be unashamed of my need for soil undoubtedly fertile to bloom like this
Let me have faith in all of the reasons I have always been worth waiting for
Let the waiting be the journey
A sea of pink-tinged petals reaching out to touch one another
The love I have learnt to give myself the only marvel worth noticing
A single moment in time when I am nothing if not the protagonist
Of this plot line in which I inevitably thrive
The sagacity of growth
The rustling of petals in the expanse of my anthesis
It blows leaves around
like letters –
forms shapes to-
gether
in highs and lows
I can’t read
I’m distracted
scatter and branch
by voices a cloud
that’s now dis-
appearing
We need clouds –
I watch kids bowl
at the nets
serious / accurate
‘line and length’ –
A small dog sniffs me –
feet to knees –
I think I pass
At the corner I dodge
a yellow tripod –
‘it’s a boundary
survey’ says the guy
levelling a theodolite
‘Aim the crosshair
in the viewing scope
at the point
to be measured’
Boundaries linger
even if fences fall –
I’ll be trespassing soon
with or without strong measure
The east wind is hot
and doesn’t care
kisses me as it passes
and yes I let it
– again and again
I will not be forgiven, I will not repent
