K A M A Y A N

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Carina So

( i.)

we eat with our h a n d s

ba na na leaf plate sp a nn ing

a table or two

how many h ands can we count covers

tropical banana (.) savannah of g lo s s y c h l o r o ph y l l,

ele phant -ic l eaves



lai d d own under:

ric e

pan- cit bi- hon

ini haw

lechon

think: ( red skin , crackling WHOLEroasted pig

“pinch the belly where lemon grass
& gar lic
Are.” )





in the city, we

think of: the word bu- kid

and smell(:) lush plant scent from

machete / i- t ak

cutting down banana hearts not exactly

bananas yet

( purple red )

still in parenthesis

br. eaK it open

see seedlings like dotted i s

o r


revert time t o let it grow

: saba

type of banana cultivar

boil it whole inside its peel t i l l charred brown and black

warm on hand

let

p(e)tals of brown black peel splay o u t

like: its canopy

as wings droop down to reveal

sweet. gelatinous. taste.





( ii.)

there are grains of rice on

the sides of my fingers

i lick it or kiss the skin to leave none wasted

it is salty from oils

sauces

mothers always say:

“every grain is a drop of sweat off a farmer’s head”

suffered abundance

in tropical humidity
my cousin’s head sweats as he slurps warm soup

my mother cleans h-
er fish bones like a cat’s tongue

colonized country taught to eat with
u ten sils

( although

spoonfuls of rice

remain more popular than forkfuls )

; hands understand

H O M E is in the texture of rice

spread out until

the. warm. steam r is es

which fingers then touch their tips for in

reconciling motion

—soft grains compact

in mouth.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Journal in March

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Petra White

Berlin, 2022


1
I write in haste, as if on the jut of the future,
the thinly veiled present stands still all around,
like a set of chessmen waiting to be knocked over.
We move dumbly, slow tractors
in a time of harvest, the sun falls on us
we don’t blossom into speech,
listen for heroes, angels. My daughter’s wild scribbles
evolve into figures and stories –
this starry canopy flailing open in her mind.


2
A man evacuated with his 10 month old husky,
dog and man, man and dog,
so this is love,
two beings in infinite fear,
one trembling at the knees of the other.


3
On Sunday we climb a hill
made of rubble from World War Two,
some bricks protrude, mostly the ground is smooth,
and a forest grows at the top,
we walk through brisk air,
delicate snowdrops that flourish, quietly.


4
What is paradise and what hell?
Is it this moment we should fondly remember?
Our home shattered only by a child’s tantrum,
when we leaned against the afternoon,
and the street was still.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Cranes

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Stuart Barnes

I made one
thousand for
you whose T

cells were done
for, dashed———or
so we, pea

pod, thought. Bun
of milk wore
my mouth, tea

of green. Un
-dyed squares bore
up, souled. The

autumns spun,
the seashore
shared blue sea

stars, the sun
-dial tore
up its ski

-nose. You, hon,
kept one oar
———two———in free

water. Fun
nurses swore
Luv ya, Swee’

Pea! but none
loved to draw
blood. High-key

legs———a ton
———reached through your
last pane, knee

bones undone
———steel streaked. Four
stars locked. Pea

-cocks furled. Kan
-reki ’s core
scorned esprit,

but in run
light your sure
cherry tree

booms. As one,
birds upsoar
———red-crowned key.


Note: ‘In Japan, the 60th year of life is called kanreki and is celebrated as a rebirth or a re-entry into childhood’, from Jessa Gardner’s ‘“Kanreki” — A Red Letter 60th Anniversary for the Garden’, seattlejapanesegarden.org, May 26, 2020

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Escalations

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Jo Langdon

The baby at my breast displays
manners of an astronaut [title
case —italics] —the poet’s face
clean in greyscale.

The baby’s face is opening
towards milk & sensation, close
reading—that is to say
resemblance budding

in the double I/eye
of those beholding—precluding
the book’s jacket & its poet.
My friend says sleep

when the baby sleeps, clean
when the baby cleans. Only
later do I think to figure
the corporal from domestic

(at least ostensibly). I’d like to cue:
‘Ladies & Gentlemen We Are
Floating in Space’. Other moments
Karen O’s expression

in song & acronym
to A— her shining face
through each slide
of voice & saline; red

profusion of mouth in the pop
and soar towards please
(stay). Say anything
inside another

word: letter to letter— Later,
the baby sleeps & I will
emote, emit enough
for everyone.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

A Fall Confession

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Georgio Russell

The autumn I tumbled down that lakeside,
flaking up a hill of lava leaves in my wake,
my uncle’s motor boat had been roped
to a sort-of stillness, the floating dock
reined and returned to the ugly umber bank,
a shame beside my remembered coast, the near-sugar
shade of copra
—I never lost my footing
when the neighbour’s labrador ghosted into view,
a black blur between the maples
so crowded their canopy allowed only portions
of Georgia’s sun upon the orange—
frightened
by the first bark, a baritone glock, I didn’t trip
just then, but turned on purpose, my towel
sloughed-off like the leaves bereaving that hill.
All these ages, my story was the suddenness
slipped me back, made me free roll down
to the sand I slandered like crazy, my limbs
and elsewhere flayed by friction, two great
herons at the mezzanine point of the slope
startled, preparing their wings and wincing.
The truth is that I aimed on instinct toward
the shoreline, then moved automatic
like the mother and son in one of Senior’s
Hurricane Stories, who saw reunion in the water
so walked to meet each other, continents
apart—
I moved myself like it was written
somewhere that danger feared the shallows,
would not follow me there where
the water wore its mossy skirt and sloshed
as I soared some metres from the ledge
into landing, toe-first into the brown beach
and the leg in question crumpling—
if it pleases
the reader, hold me there, in midair,
a pause to prep my life for limping,
the chronic knee nuisance, help me untwist
the Aboniki balm, the mutt of that moment
long since put down, pursuing me still
up each stairway, through the varied aisles
and every lawn I’ve let wild—
or rewind
my steps from fracture back to laughter
on the dock, do away with the grounding,
the moans I’d made to summon cousins
from the cabin, when, crippled, I caught
the small felt waves and let them in.
They flowed over the bone jooking out
my blood-shined shin, nudging the leaks like love.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

It rains and I’m thinking of spring, as in, sprung out of water, and there you are.

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Jack Morillo

I.

How the tree was made blue under the canopy:

in the moon’s air and water, or, painted blue.
There is no shape more tree-like than humans

thinking to shape it. The tree
hollows as bright canoes

spooned out of bark. What is the white-person
equivalent of a tree? It is a tree

so blue even in daylight,
insisting it’s been there all along

II.
We watch a movie on my phone. The headlights
too, dim and dusty, project an old film

on the road, something we hadn’t seen before.
Trees grow blue in the dark. Write me

poetry. Okay. The text balloons in the sky.
Atmosphere keeps our mouths in place

as geese-lake-water sweeps into shape: temple, then prayer.
The bayou around an iron pipe cups a great blue

heron. The wing is ink-smudged.
Fall is a place too. We sit in a cavity

playing a game where we lose all the words in hand
and win. We play a game where we grieve everything
left in the road.

III.

I want you to write me a poem instead. For me
the light in the road, thinned and moving.

I want to be the Michigan sun,
brief but possible. Before the harming and being

harmed. I know there is suffering
in the world, I know it. I know

we don’t go here often, but can I be in the mouth this time?

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Twelve Short Talks on Aspects of Origins

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Brent Kininmont

In the lottery for topics I got
obsidian—that appearance of glass
when lava cools;

at the margin of what it means
to be a rock. Good thing
I was adopted, at home

with loose connections.
This dark off-cut from our teacher
I am passing around

comes from the island-quarry
on my poster. Somebody
once sailed there to fashion by hand

a blade, a necklace maybe.
Obsidian can be traced back
with precision, the Britannica

told me, because each
hardened flow is unique.
X-rays helped to map

the Pacific migration of tools
(red on my chart)
and their peoples (green).

Local, though, is the volcanic
glass in this closeup
of a coral eye on Rapa Nui

where the statues—hands up—
face the ocean, or inland?
The way they look

fooled our teacher, too.
And it isn’t strange I cannot see
more of myself in that off-cut

now drifting along the stoic row
of parents watching.
They’re only slightly less opaque

than a bucket of water.
The mirrors, I mean,
that obsidian made. Pre-metal.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Please do not join do not join this train

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Jo Lyons

YESTERDAY WHEN I didn’t kiss
the IT guy, the whole world fell apart.
A staticky electricity
now fills the air as I wait on
a letter that might not ever arrive.
It’s been teeming down all week, windy
as hell, sideways rain. I wore leaky
boots so wet feet all day on Wednesday
and my umbrella broke on Thursday.

Footpaths are littered with abandoned
umbrellas like dead wet birds, over-
flowing bins. Trains are packed and steamy,
days are getting dark by four o’clock.
Good things do happen. A book cover
I illustrated arrives, I do
a little dance, the designer does
several, the author will dance a jig
when his copy arrives in the post.

But something else is still going on.
My All-Important Urgent Files dis-
appear. Digital mayhem ensues.
The typesetter wants the corrections
by fax or email. I try the fax;
it jams. When I try it again it
goes off like an alarm. I try turn-
ing it off and on again – and it
goes berserk. A fucking fax machine.

I give up and leave to meet my friends,
forget to take my new umbrella.
Walking from Central to the dumpling
place I keep seeing mail vans. I think
of the letter I long for and dread
that doesn’t seem on its way to me.
Of course I miss the dumpling place and
walk into a pub, walk back on out,
find the right restaurant and join my friends.

We eat dumplings and talk about how
the IT guy has a crush on me.
My friends say it’s because he wasn’t
at work today that everything went
haywire. I wonder if he’s thinking
about me, I hope he’s not thinking
about me. Is this IT madness
all bad karma for rejecting him
sent out from the ether straight to me?

I leave the restaurant and it’s raining.
I get stuck at Central for an hour
waiting for
the train on platform nine-
teen terminates here please do not join
this train the train on platform 19
terminates here the train on platform
19 terminates here please do not
join do not join this train on platform
please do not join do not join this train

At the other end I walk through rain,
I think of the train I’m trying to
get off, wondering where I’m going,
how I hope and dread there’s a letter
waiting for me at home. I hope it
says the things the IT guy told me.
I would marry you in a heartbeat.
Can we get a dog, even a cat?
Who cares what has happened in the past

what happens is
now walking the wet
night street, I think of how it will end.
There will be no letter waiting and
I’ll curl up in bed with the two cats,
I’ll think of my new painting of my
small bright candle in the other room
and its warm steady flame in the dark.
I open the letterbox.
It’s there.

I take it out and bring it inside.
I hold the letter but can’t open
it yet because everything will change.
I sit down to write. I draft this poem.
Shortly when I open it, will I
destroy it? Will I destroy this poem?
I see the stamp’s a rose that says LOVE.
A bug’s half squished on the envelope,
moving.
I know how you feel, buddy.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Deaf Sentences

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Rita Tognini

The audiogram
maps my soundscape,
plots landslides
in high frequencies.

The audiologist tells me
I hear like the elder I hope to be
in twenty years, or more;
says my cochlear hair cells
are in disorder— dead
or distorted, their thistle tufts
too limp to excite membranes
fire-up neurons,
tune in my brain.

I am snared by fricatives
and sibilants, plosives and nasals.
I hear ‘tedious break’
for ‘Finnegans Wake’;
detect the plash of ‘water polo’
but not the clarion of ‘Apollo’;
think it’s ‘in the Bible’
when it’s ‘about survival’.

Is it in my DNA?
For centuries my tribe
lived in remote valleys,
chose wives and husbands
as they bred cattle—
from familiar stock.

Now, new hearing aids
snug behind my ears
serenade me, rustle,
make me feel
gift-wrapped in sound.

I think of Ludwig
in Heiligenstadt.
At thirty-two,
surd to distant flute
and shepherd’s song,
he melodied
his mute landscape
in ‘The Pastoral’.


Ludwig in Heiligenstadt – Beethoven had a country house in Heiligenstadt, outside Vienna. In the summer of 1802, he convalesced there to
recover from his worsening deafness and wrote a letter to his brother, expressing his despair. He also started work on the Pastoral Symphony.
The letter was never sent and was discovered in his papers after his death.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

thinking about autumn in winter

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Maki Morita

here I listen to crisp air with cracked lips, to remember & forget
I paint my hair red, then rehearse the lines —
「うん、元気」
「26歳です」
「まだ結婚わしていません」
but the dye washes up a pale recollection
because I’m thinking about autumn in winter
and these mountains have bled dry

there used to be a toy shop here, where obaachan bought me gifts
and over there is the onsen, holding onto our sighs

the way here is simple
the path the shopping centre the moon the apartments
the path the shopping centre the moon the apartments
the path the shopping centre the moon the apartments
we’ve traced them over and over and over again
like photocopies, but if you knock they might sound hollow and
her apron still tastes of cigarettes in a dream
because I’m thinking about autumn in winter

I repeat my steps and repeat my lines —

「うん、元気」
「26歳です」
「まだ結婚わしていません」

「うん、元気」
「26歳です」
「まだ結婚わしていません」

did you know that to fold a memory into a neat circle, practice makes perfect?

now: we’re perched in containers
squinting through PVC, it feels cheap
her voice warbled like the sunsoaked plastic, frost melting
off her weird spindly branches

here, my carefully rehearsed lines answer nobody —
“Yes, I’m good”
“I’m 26 now”
“No, I’m not married”
it’s a non-scene
and translation clamps my tongue
and in 10 minutes we bring it to a close.

deflated, we retrace familiar patterns before ice claws over
the path the shopping centre the moon the apartments
when Mum remarks 「あ！紅葉の木！」
so we pause and look at the lonely tree, aflame like it wants to live forever
and I think maybe it will never grow old
and maybe we’ve both been thinking about autumn in winter all along

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Letter to Luoyang Chen

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Andrew Sutherland

Time is passing, just a little, and I am still
becoming something other than I set out to be.

Piecemeal translations of SHINee lyrics –
you heard this in your mother’s car, you said;
a child. We are not each other’s children,

we are not – but at the park –
under your moon – a birthday

Could you give responsibility of yourself
to someone else, you asked. I am trying,

over there, or in this moment, or maybe
less & less now, just a little –

Lightly touching the back of your neck,
perfectly silly mullet, or when you said
you feared you might forget yourself, mister

Ripley, mister Kundera, mister you:
the blossoming taste, the crushed ants

of your throat. Your goddess in the moon
above; I must remember, just a little.

Three nights ago my ex passed me
emergency sleeping pills, and I
dreamed of a world without you.

You were here:

atop your wolves. At one beach
or another, at McDonald’s, the books
on the train from Fremantle home.

I think I heard you howling. Just a little.

You told me you had dreamed of me
before we met. Pretend, now, you are
sleeping, Luoyang. What do I say next?

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Earth Apple

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Beth Merindah

You stack his limbs, like kindling, on an eggshell mattress
study his mottled skin. Yellow and bruised
as though bitten by late blight. Hanging
each breath’s a little dust-cloud
his halo
settles into sediment, raining
spittle flecks on starchy sheets. You peel them back
like paperbark
and find him buried underneath —

a lumpy tuber,
skin full of solanine,
hidden from the sun too long, until even bone and gristle’s
gone soft, spine folding back
into a fetal form: waning
crescent moon, a sickle,
something perennial, nested,
wrinkling, and almost ready to rot.

He lays in the darkness,
you stand under pearl-light, holding
his marble palms, the colour of a storm cloud. Asking them
do these fingers miss burrowing,
like earthworms, in the dirt?
do they remember pressing palm-to-palm,
to pray?
palm-to-phallus,
to please?
do they remember how to pinch,
ripe cherries, from spring-green bows?
were they ever painted,
rose-red1, in protest?
or were they already tawny and congealed?

You wash his limbs and bruises,
his hypha, every fold,
nail bed, axilla, callous, bristles, lenticels,
his flaccid penis, anus, navel. Tenderly,
thinking of the Persian word for potato —

You are a candle burning
in the oppressive arms of a man2
woman —
perfectly imperfect, baring fuzzy flesh,
caesarean scar, your eyes
lapis lazuli
bathing milk-tears
woman —
you bellow
in the language of the birds,
even your resistance is poetry
woman —
you cut your hair
tie it around a wax-waist,
your flame burns
brighter from a shorter wick
and this man becomes your shadow.

Tying stone-things to your lily-white feet
to walk upon roiling waters.
Sticking blood-things over the black-eyed CCTV beast
Humbaba, hah hah hah!
he’s blinded in his own cedar forest.
Burning fire-things to purify this city,
white-ash and lime mortar
veiling lid and temple.

You bury the soft bones of your lover, oppressor,
brother, your father and your son;
and from the grave of a potato
new life grows.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Uncer Giedd / Our Song

Posted on May 15, 2023 by M.L. Martin

this time you be the prey
& I’ll be the predator


this time you’re stranded
on an island of violent men

& I defeat them all
with the battle-strong
branches of my bōgum

this time I devour you
like a wolf

this time you find me
crying in the middle of the forest

& cover me with heavy branches
until I can barely breathe


this time I save you
from a tyrant husband


this time you be wyn
& I’ll be lāð


this time you be the wolf
& I’ll be the whelp


this time you are an island
surrounded by blood
& I have to drink it all
to save you


this
wæs mē wyn tō þon


this
uncer giedd geaddor


the weird
endlesss
aching song
we make together

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

icarus in the gloaming

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Michelle Cahill

i cannot deny the sky was alluring as Instagram
despite curfew, gulls flying south
into torn edges of violet-hued clouds.
the power of bigotry is a machinery, often brutal
returning from naarm, almost touching the moon
before the next cruelty-free landing,
you asked me, what did i do with my life?
woke blunders, small embarrassments in the precinct,
you know, the maze our fathers invented for our demise?
i started a mutiny, gave birth, scribbled on my palm.
bought an ostrich feather boa scarf on Etsy.
high as His Highness, i lived with blackouts,
lost sight of dad over chalk farm where the canal
meets the lock. like the mechanical buckle of a train’s
burning axle, like those delicious evenings
when schoolgirls walk the street, smoking weed,
lights flashing through the trees, i could hear traffic,
sirens at noon coalesce with whipper snippers,
frogs, cicadas, soon it would be the hour of bats.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

SORRY IM JUST A BASIC HYSTERIC!!!!!!!! a love & farewell letter to the clyde hotel on cardigan.

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Angelita Biscotti

hysteria might be an intolerance for the messiness of gender
a wilderness of being, no civitas beneath stockings
unclothed, i am most invisible to myself unclothed
was that the kettle?
fish be to god, glory, highhighhhhhHHHHHHHHHHsssshhhhH

there is no such thing as a sexual relationship (wink emoji)
sometimes the sexiest thing is not to.
what could be sweeter than knowing
what you could have gotten–
or gotten away with

getting what you want
changes your idea of what you can get
don’t even @ me about what you’re entitled to

jesus was a tradie who was gay for books1
and spoke up at reading groups, at 12.
when people swear “jesus christ on a bicycle”
they’re taking his relationship
with mary magdalene in vain

the social-justice framework you bring
to the redistribution of sandwiches
does not hold up for fucking2
angels are not owed embraces
the devil is fucking her raw
while you spell-check your love letters,
daydreaming of more-than-half-meant blowjobs

i want to meet the people who use dental dams,
and feed them gummy bears on blueberry yoghurt

i’ve heard it hurts when you’re born into a combination
of skin and bone that makes people think
your love is less than

sorry, im just a basic hysteric,
(constantly competing with sublime hysterics, the only thing i share with hegel
is a star sign)
assigned a bastard at birth
half-un-white

a pimple on the otherwise smooth backside of identity
children happen. (existence, suddenly/i didn’t ask for it)

the sound of transience3 is
the train you just missed,
from frankston to flinders street
sunday midnight.
holding hands at the gallery
might be nice

i don’t know how to hold
what’s worth preserving
love is a story you tell
when saying “that’s not enough” feels selfish

there’s enough of me to be 100%
to all my commitments & to poetry
i am thermopylae and tirad pass4
in the alternate timeline where the underdogs win

im just a basic hysteric, not those sublime ones
we discuss at the Clyde5 while Darlene6 purrs on the carpet,
das ding behind those refrigerator doors we’ve never opened,
the mystery
keeps us returning

the things i can’t say to your face
i write in Cordite.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

lifesong (anti-elegy for a friend)

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Matthew Platakos

She plays Chopin by the seashore
like someone in love // someone rubbed the wrong way—
days under drought & flood
evenings under ash & microbial mists
miasma invades & infects &
murders the will to play—
January inertia // full immersion
in absurd perversions // worst version
of the Self—cycled unconscious
re-conscious of-conscious if-conscious
reverberations in the cranial reservoir.

Men in iron masks came to take her away
to maim/reclaim/defame her melodies
but rage of the lyrical
cracks the liberal & the literal //
the mystical physical inimitable rebel
cooks florid with fluid flames
& wears a chrysanthemum
in her hair.

We’re doing alright these days thanks //
together searching for effervescent dynamism—
white wine realists & red wine Romantics //
truth hurts but it doesn’t harm //
breaking free from suffocating ecstasy
& homogenous hegemony
& analysis paralysis //
we harmonise with 12am streetlights
illuminating how strange the city is on sleepless nights.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

The Northern Suburbs

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Scott-Patrick Mitchell

i.

North of Warwick Road, The Underworld. We arDe caught in the flux: an Elysium dream. Our torment, Asphodel. The bitumen stretch of a buck, how pay-checks glimmer. MyGov is a dark god, a robo of debt. Inanna catches the 443, peels off her flesh, hangs her ego on a hook. She alights into golden hour: new names blossom across muscle and vein. A pair of Great Crested Grebes elaborate courtship, a ritual of shaking heads, ducking necks, turning left, right, algae in beak a bouquet gift. Another makes this place less other.



ii.

Glysophate bleeds the kerb, luminescent sprawl. The weeds curl back. Over at Duncraig High, kids play hacky-sack with the head of Orpheus. Blood-stained ankles, red sheened knees. They sing as they kick, exalt a poem to face down the impending tick tock tick. Anubis is the dog down the street who heralds them home, hounding joy. There is loyalty in knowing this will end. Meanwhile, on Lake Joondalup, an Australasian Darter rides low, submerges to spear fish: see death move down an elegant throat.



iii.

A tradie plasters as if pushing a boulder up a hill. Each night, crimson beaked, he reclines and gives his liver to the sprits. But his apprentice does not sleep, inhales permafrost with callused hands, an atrophy of dreams. In dust filled rentals, scales tip with feathered flesh. Walls crack, let out ghosts. In a shroud of chemicals, shadows talk if you stare at them for too long. In Yellagonga Regional Park, a Tawny Frogmouth swallows the sun with their flat lipped grin.



iv.

Our drones add more scars to the night. Eurydice walks home alone. Her knuckles glisten with keys as she threads a prayer into streetlight: dear man walking ahead of me, do not look back, do not look back. Elsewhere, teens stalk the suburbs, their faces illuminated by hand-held lanterns. They seek the soft spots of this world, places where reverie can yield thanks to a holy communion with goon. At dawn, on the Iluka Foreshore, a father fairy-wren sings to their eggs: this, a song we pass on.
Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Running Out of Air

Posted on May 15, 2023 by KA Rees

After Bertolt Brecht

From the cities we escape
in vehicles laden, but quickly
abandon them

On highways and back roads
leaving doors open and keys
in ignitions. We take

That which we can carry—
babies, animals, their wide
eyes questioning our resolve, everything.

On sides of roads youths
and middle-aged men explode
fuel tanks, as the props of their lives

Are lost—abandoned. Tweens
traipse behind asking, what have you
done—look!

No one answers, the old women
count wrinkles on their hands, look
what’s done is done…

Like coral in reefs all that’s left
are thorns,
the flood has come—taken all.

Remember councils, they pulled all
the fruit trees we planted
along verges.

And the child in her pram points to plumes
of dust; we eat fire and heat. Scientists
think of how to measure now machines

Have ceased and whether water drinks light
more or less, now it’s so humid, so hot.

Is anyone up there, can they see
if we’re running out of air?

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Nomenclature: In All My Beginnings, Fatherhood Is Erased

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Ojo Taiye

It’s June, and I am tired of writing the same pentameter – my father’s dark hands and poor heart. The air curls with stillness, ascending from my lips – like he had so many times, before his heart gave out. Name a prettier way to plead guilty. Everything that reminds me of him cannot be my mother’s fault, and in the bereaved room, a semicircle of faces crowing, as though the first sunlight reaching down from the window shade had not in itself come with rage. From the tops of a few high brush, the voice of a blue jay calls, untouched, and for a moment, the past sits still inside another song, made of flesh and bone. At last, after a night of weeping, and striding between the two long benches at the corridor, heartbreak is simply as teleological as any other thrust. As a matter of fact, what prospect did my mother have then, if not the wind spilling with blossoms inside her? Five and a half years together, and my prodigal father says: I don’t love you anymore. There’s a dark cloud so heavy we get lost in it, which means my father was born and reborn from a single mistake, only to be hemmed back driven by pleasure. How much unsated mistake is too much? My father’s hair purpled by goose eggs thrown in from a river he’d tried to cross over. It is important for me to say, I wasn’t born yet how I know – memory functions like any other forms of semiology. Always, I see in my mother a kind of beforetime. That’s the other thing about conditioning. I taste the salt where affection rusts and every other human face is me; sesame, pumpkin and sunflowers. Isn’t that what it means to love too much – the heart, a reliquary full and rising. I think of her almost every time I fall in love – how the rush of a name parades grief with tenacious hunger. In profile, my father is lying on the edge of the box spring bed, beneath a rich velvet quilt, and it is midnight, my mother’s arm around him, ready to root. Genetically, they were naked, talking together and nothing grew between them.

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And here, now, again

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Saoirse Nash

And here, now, again,
we fall as quick and deep and sure as ever
dive into the rush of it,
and settle to swim with the current
let my body dash against rock
and crumble
if that is the fate of it
or come up breathless
in the air of a new world
the sunlight at new angles
leaves, dappled in unknown dews
and you
endlessly soft
hard
sweet
and demanding
I crawl through dusk to kneel at your feet
proffer chains
to possess and be possessed by
to be dispossessed of.

no gods
no masters

except this worship freely given
this trust laid bare placed into your
unexplored hand explore me
show me the edges of myself

run along the lines of desire,

coax from me all royal arrogance
that you may offer such gifts back,

I learn to give pain
without injury
to trust my own hands and your words
and our bodies
taking each other to edge of the edge of the edge
of a new day
light
love
oh!

to you
to you

I would give myself freely and take without fear
if you will give
your
yes

yes
you, who I see in persistent sun
rising and rising and rising again,
celebrating mortal magic,
magic as ours to tap and share
a beacon to disciples in your ways of
wild/wise/queer/sexy/healing power,

oh! you
how I’d run for you

oh! you
how we’d
be living our lives
in infinite dancing
with laughter flowering
through our teeth

and you!
oh!

how you’ve learned to love
before anyone taught to teach you

seeking every scrap meaning
to offer to community
to connection
to art, magic and myth

I come to you with nothing by a mind and body
and hope for nothing but a glimpse
of the worlds you hold
of the thousand kinds of joy in your fingers

oh you,
you!
oh
I love how you love

oh, there is no world in which I would not
love you

no Earth great enough to pull us apart,
no city so small
we could not change it,

take my hand,
we are transformed

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{The First Time}

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Charlie Samuya Veric

The first time he saw snow, he walked
from the worksite all the way to the housing,

the road choking with snirt, the headlights

sweeping the lonely landscape, the polycrystals
glinting before going dark. Starless and cold,

the sky opened up with snowburst.

He was tired yet his body, as if of its own accord,

glided across
the white scene, the wonder of it all

a magnet that pulled his mind out of itself, and into the heart

of every snowflake that fell. The world stood

still. And he regarded the stillness with the awe
of a boy growing

up in the valley of his now distant country. Life then, there,
was slow, like a river deep in summer.

In Kurosawa’s Dreams, a boy had stumbled on a slow wedding procession
of fox spirits, each step a ceremony, every

move of the body a ritual in serenity.

In Niigata when the evening snow gathered
on the invisible ground, his heart went after

every wintry powder that drifted
in the wind,

his self unable to contain the bliss

he thought he could not have.

There was no time that time in Niigata—just a worker

discovering his happiness.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

And yet, and yet, and yet

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Noémie Huttner-Koros

The koolbardi-magpies on noongar boodja-country are thirsty. The water coming out of the cold tap is warm. A lonely ibis prowl outside the public library, desperate for the air conditioning, or maybe company and the blessed solitude of books. This city: its harsh buildings plastered with their logos – unbearable. The children’s metal fair rides burn our skin. I feel guilty lighting Hanukkah candles in this heat, watch them studiously (just in case). I imagine the headline: “bushfire started from abandoned Hanukkah candles in third-floor apartment”.

I wonder what I’ll tell my children (and their children) what I was doing with my life as everything was unravelling. (I should speak in the present tense. Is. Are. I should be more specific: ecosystems, species, sense of self. And you may find yourself living in an age of mass extinction.)1 Maybe I’ll tell those children about the point where the day tips over. The heat subsides. We come past the lip of a wave, the trail on a steep hillside, making it down the other side.

My most hated phrase is net zero by 2050. I know this isn’t a sexy thing to put in a poem. And yet, and yet, and yet. Here we are. Net zero by 2050, floats up from some millionaire or billionaire’s imagination, unconstrained by forces of physics or basic compassion. Spoken by people wearing suits who will be dead soon, for whom 2050 is a slow afternoon acid fever dream. They can’t even imagine one generation, let alone thirty years.

Children: the myth and promise of them; As elusive as net zero, as unsure as the reality that one day 2050 will be here. Or we will be there. Caught within its temporality. Time breaks open. Atoms split. Layers of radioactive dust and petroleum and now we have projected our presence forwards and backwards simultaneously. I was not born. These scales are not possible, and yet, and yet, and yet. Here we are.

Each day I count what I can, notice what is there, consider my steps
I spend summer in transit, watching sunsets through various modes of transport windows, orienting myself towards all the homes I have ever known
I spend summer purchasing jars of tahini and peanut butter, abruptly abandoning them in share houses and hotels for others to consume
I spend summer accepting that I’ll never get the Hollywood cliché coming out that I desire
It usually goes something like this: Parent and child sit in a living room. “I’ll always love you exactly as you are.” Then, tearful hugs and kisses. Cut to next scene.

Life doesn’t happen in that way. No Hollywood-one-challenging-moment-and-that’s-it. No net-zero-and-now-it’s-all-fixed.

only each moment, filled with suffering and abundance
as everything is unravelling, we balance or fight this dichotomy

create new ones, burn them down, tend to the seeds

our weariness carrying something of our ancestors and descendants

our palms containers of sea water

our fingers lighting candles

one by one

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Carrying water in an earthen vessel

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Manisha Anjali

I carry water in an earthen vessel. The jug is made from earth beneath the palash. I follow the birth of fire through the wilds. The lacuna is lined with fable and milk. Bone marrow flowers in the howls. There is a white swan by the lacuna. I will barter with the swan. Paramahamsa. The Supreme Swan. In my vessel is volcanic ash, lizard skin and burning cloves. It rains for the first time in this green village. I carry rainwater in an earthen vessel. The painter lines the lacuna with copper and wine. He is doubled over with an arched spine, like an Agnes Varda gleaner. He renders an image of the dictator with the thread from his mouth. The dictator stands under a fig tree, with Camel cigarettes in his pocket and a crow tattoo on his throat. The dictator weeps into an earthen vessel. The painter changes into a swan to flee the bowels of fictions. I carry the weeping dictator, swan and lacuna in an earthen vessel. The vessel returns to the earth as a thousand centipedes. The centipedes change into seeds for the workers to plant: anjeer, plantain, baobab.

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Another email to say they’ve thought about diversity

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Patrick Gunasekera

For T.B. and A.W.

In barren fields of fear I’m jolted by the inexperience of his words,
Plosive pleasure in defining our appeal
This scathes, rips us from a belonging to ourselves

The cacophony of colony in the air is beauty to them,
Heaving on its own poison as my heart pounds unheard
Unseen in a body once free, now commodified

I aim to reply with brisk hope but have hollow visions,
Chase wisps of a meandering fortitude
And by this overwhelming darkness am spurred on to be someone

The sickly flutter through my hands presses into keyboard letters,
With an old stealth I’m not grateful to have inherited
I manoeuvre around his white desire to be seen

In spawning warps I wander through my mind for miles,
Consider connection with the flailing tail ends of my pain,
Until a corner suddenly turned reveals the relief of warm light

For a moment
The violence of not being seen to have a body
Is defeated with a sibling’s words

Their cultures prosper on conformity
And while they are busy being afraid,
I remember you spoke of a way to see everything

I remember that afternoon,
I fell asleep to the refrain of your passion
Your essay’s melody revealing armour, my heart encased safely inside

The blood flows back to me in this new tide of belonging
The blanket is woven, knows my body is here
In the shimmering spaces between its fibres and me is an alchemy of care

I remember myself

I shake it off to run to his inbox, wish this warmth to stick to my skin

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