A Veterinary School in the Country

Posted on September 15, 2022 by James Appleby

I think they left the door open on purpose.
The farm leaked in. Sheep droppings among desks,
and snagged wool and the down of a hen.
How they must’ve walked, unsilent as they do, the mice
under rodent cabinets and the globe-eyed paperish skulls
of lesser primates. A parrot from a branch
in the caretaker’s home refused to tell,
but I watched the caretaker’s lone horse
stand against the school window for hours,
at the glass as at the surface of a book
printed especially for oneself,
horrified at its own bones.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Extremities

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Dani Netherclift

In Caravaggio’s Seven Mercies you see them poking out,
a pair of dead men’s feet, holding place for now—
two small anchors wedging open the door of the light,
though darkness has arrived.

In ‘Quarantine,’ Eavan Boland guides you back in time, See, she says—
the famine dead, look at this woman’s cold feet cradled by her husband
against his chest before both hearts give out to hunger, too much
too little, too tired so cold, but see, this trace, this tenderness
these feet, chest, hands, that they still could (and in which darkness).

After the death of Keats, moulds are cast of his face, his hands, feet,
or at least a hand, at least a foot. The reflection of his dead face is a double,
painted by Severn, as if granting immortality, replicas of the face in plaster
stone, copper, packed in tissues, in boxes, even in present day kept,
sold, stroked, adored as if—
The foot and hand (cold, incapable of grasping) lost, form ghostly outlines,
adumbrating the solidity of absence.

The Tollund Man’s hood is removed by peat, a narrative inscribed by uncanniness—
ropes and knots, his terror all so far removed, as if the past was really a foreign place.
His perfect face, the pillowed lips, the feet, long boned and elegant.
After they find him, they preserve the head but leave the rest to melt back
into the anonymity of decay.

When you died, they wouldn’t let us see any part of you at all.
We had to imagine your face your body transformed.

I would have touched your feet, I swear.
At least a foot, a toe, I would still have loved you

before the night
before the light
crossed over

and you were gone for good.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Joey

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Sam Morley

Feet tips no more
than rosebuds, skin
as thin as membrane.
Inside this newborn
ringtail pulses bitumen
warm from summer’s hell.
Gumnut eyes blind
black ears folded
there is no mother
now as threadbare
noose of tail lets go.
What am I to do?
Give milk, cup
it dry in muslin?
Head as a thimble
bowed as a buttock
that puce bruise
on concrete would
take just one boot heel
to end a vellum paper skull.
But I don’t, blister eyes
are blind to all universes
still as a baby’s fist.
I’ll mercy those who can
see frequencies in the light.
All the earth starts
as a wrinkle, a purse
of hope holding murmurs
contracting and unravelling
the strands of the day.
At some point I should
help, the argument
for life worming right there –
but what could I ever really do?
Put its soft wild
pound in my pocket?
Place its unlacing
song on my palm?

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

A series of departures

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Jenny Pollak

Lately I’m more interested in how the neck and the head
don’t say anything of the feet.

The cormorant disappears.

There are times my smile has been interpreted as joy.

This morning the clouds are like arrows whose sole purpose is
not stopping.

No one admits to robbing anyone. But the forest is thinning. Already
the clouds are less than they were.

When the sun goes down I will make my way home.

I keep returning to the neck and the head.

It’s the sea every time.

The way the cormorant is so completely

gone.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

HOW TO LEAVE WORK ON TIME

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Dan Hogan

Moon is flat
World is made of cheese
Would you set fire to a Wellbeing Week Pizza
just to see if it shrieks? (spoiler: it screams)
We put all our victories and defeats
in a basket attached to a hot air balloon

We wanted to note the time
from flying
to falling
from basket
to gnarled cane pile

Tried to buy a Big Couth Object yesterday
but it was was so big and so couth (hectic)
Designed a career pathway that ends
with me lobbing a cashew the size of a baby
into a basketball hoop (radical self-care?)
Anyway, at the end of the staff meeting
the executive called us “Wellbeing Week arsonists” (sad)
We called it “keeping warm” (lol)

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Still Life

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Lizzie Harris

My daughter’s hair clips
pastel the carpet. Plastic flowers
I try not to step on.
Even chaos is relative—a mess made
by my longing for order.

As a child, we lived in a trailer,
then a shelter, then a van.
My first memory: my sister eating lunch
from a cupholder. Our lives
so invisible, they felt forbidden.

This morning, in my apartment, it hurts
to be human. Einstein says gravity
can push things apart, but on Earth
it only holds us together. Distance
marked by our having once
been whole. Is this still life,
with no one here to see it?

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Great confidence: self cento 2

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Chris Mansell
  1. last night, this morning, I dreamt
    incidental walking. This has to be
    write, as one writes
    full of synchronicities


  2. there was a good question
    sales at collected works
    was refreshing though
    the answer was that


  3. also liked more figures
    the flow of wealth
    the most telling status
    there were gaps


  4. a relief to find that
    some time missing from this
    and also don’t see the problem
    bull-fighting on NYR fiction: dull dull dull


  5. I preferred Saturday
    reading the last of the unauthorised life
    to fend off some of this gloom with objects
    papers before accidentally napping


  6. a radical approach to the simplicity of music
    concrete/asemic poetry is trying to get
    concealed rocks and declivities
    two useful things today


  7. we saw a man, stranded, hanging by his arms
    they said they were too busy
    because socially diffident
    several shifts in point of view


  8. some annoyance there
    visual interrupted texts
    seemed not to want to be a part
    the day compiling books


  9. my mother’s love of victimhood
    a constant. She knows how
    at the bottom of the tea
    and now a smiling crab


  10. a sad child’s face, leaning on its hand
    since all my bridges are destined
    I give up. I really do.
    I might have made a commitment


  11. we discussed her new farce
    some fabulous artists she is
    we’d eaten with them the night
    we decided to stay another


  12. this we’ve done before
    I have been reading Carson
    the research trial sounded good
    we agreed we all need


  13. Foxline stab layout. It will
    monoclonal antibody with this
    child’s drawing of a tree
    do need to be read in the context


  14. Knocked two things off
    all day socialising
    an unconscionably long time
    there is so much more

Notes
Single lines from a journal
line in italics from Phillip Glass, interview with NYR
Carson, is Canadian poet Anne Carson

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

The Skeletons

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Debbie Lim

Strange to think they live within,
mimicking our every mundane move.
There are those who believe
they would cease to exist
without us: with no flesh to hold up,
organs to cradle, unsheathed
of all practical purpose.
But perhaps it is they who set loose
our dreams at night—
in order to climb out while we sleep,
wash unattended in moonlight,
try on various shadows.
They love the music of a still house.
Pale bric-a-brac. Quiet unnecessary things.
Instead of speaking, they rock
slowly in each room, fingering the dust.
Now and then, they reach for one another
and tap their blueish bones.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Parachute

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Louise Oxley

How like a flotilla of stalled parachutes is the canopy
of this lone eucalypt, caught and agitated by a morning squall.

Laden cumulus barge across the window,
a flow field breaking brightly open, only to close again.

Looks like the weather’s heading south, might reach you
as you’re moving out, extracting yours from ours. On your knees,

taping dusty boxes. That ripping sound, the ragged final tear.
You’ll seal the cracks, only to open them again.

I know the contour of your back, the way you bite the tape,
the small and careful hands that smooth it down,

the way you’ll squat to take the weight of things
you valued once, your merciless, thinning hair.

When I look up, the squall has passed, the tree returned to itself.
The canopy is nothing but a living mass of leaves; shroud lines

simply branches. Only the idea of the parachute remains: the terrifying
leap, the jolt that breaks the fall, the slow, exhilarating descent.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

to be a dweller

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Modi Deng

many years ago, my mother would send me down the steps of our house to snip away
lemon verbena or clambering rosemary – or show me the restrained way to cut the fatter and older
spring onions so they’d grow again, hollowed and dewy and cold because our home is always cold. I’d
bring them over to her chopping board, under the hanging lavender
under the crockery dotted with tiny flowers, window facing the Leith Valley

I remember the violence of life uprooted without secateurs. the nail or the pull …
to limp on by extended simile, displacement and its elaborations can be unpredictable:
refugee camps were set up at the border crossing for hugely over-projected numbers of
Syrian and Iraqi refugees in 2003. post-invasion, Anglo-American strategists assumed uproots
without offshoots: Iraqi and Syrian peoples would flee, then return when security was
reimposed.
but staying could mean guarding. leaving could mean never returning, like Palestinian
Arabs 50 years earlier. neighbouring countries could provide refuge over refugee
status

my mother spent two months after my father emigrated to sort out visas and
to bring a short-haired, two-year-old girl out of No Longer Home. she uncoupled
the defining of person to place. she is braver than me: at school, I wrote
a fairy-tale about a princess moving castle. it has taken me weeks to
take down flat hangings, to admit I can’t take paints on moving day

even in 1860, refugees were not collected in internment camps. the Ottoman state integrated
refugees, exiles, and migrants by way of self-settlement1. there were provisions to articulate
themselves: seeds, draft animals, a stretch of 17 acres where they would build their own
house, land holdings held for 15 years to protect against local investors

there is a lot to spin out from ‘camps’ of temporariness: the earth
as tent of mortality swallowed up by life. how saving something
according to Heidegger doesn’t mean snatching it from danger, but setting it
free into its own being.2 guest, stranger, person in need – the huge need
beyond shelter: for education, for sustainable livelihood …

perhaps I have been host and migrant. perhaps my mother dwells in
-longing, even after 20+ years of belonging. if local hospitality fits uneasy into
international protection, how can I meet a people not as passive, pliable – easily
managed – how can I be reshaped by them?

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

By the pond

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Anna Jasinska

there was a school where classrooms were empty
and wide opened windows stared at scattered books,
crayons on the floor and children’s faces knocked down
from the wall, frames smashed. No lessons these days –
now, it’s a bomb shelter. The air still ringing,
rambling in the corridors after all the sounds
faded with a soft clap-clap – like the teacher
claps her hands, like seashells crack – bombs split
as if there was no waiting for the peculiar time
when April meets May, when tadpoles lose their tails.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Eco/burial

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Josie/Jocelyn Suzanne

The wind is leaving through
the leavings,
through the cut sprig in your hand
the pressed daffodil seedling
a single feather in bush.
Light a match,
burn them together:
scent is the most bio-degradable
sense; they entangle there
like roots, sugar and weeds in the loam.
They are all a part of you— I go
by they/them— in part— for their/the air’s sake. When
you finally stop, gut biome
taking over, a perfect revolution, your rib cage springs
apart: a whole
daffodil, minah bird and rosemary brush
bursting open, new. That will be
your body, more
extra than embalming
fluid.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Property rights

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Lisa Collyer

With thanks to The National Trust of W.A. and Woodbridge (Mandoon)

A femme covert is a roof overhead
slippers in the doll’s house to roleplay
a contract to wedlock. Her bequest
is Shetland lace held by a napkin ring
as protection loophole. Hush-hush
she needles open space with bobbin yarn
a magic trick to slip through and prate
her own name.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Kusa Mahshi

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Yasmin Elbouch

Spending the afternoon hallowing out the inside of a zucchini,
Piercing its jaundice flesh
Calling it by its name
Telling it, “It’s time to leave your home, what you were born into.”

“It’s time to make room for
Something else,
Something that you couldn’t be.”

Both her hands are occupied but she holds each item differently.
The zucchini with grace,
Somewhere between tenderness and violence, and
The stuffing tool with a calm hostility,
An awareness that using too much force would leave the zucchini
Ruined,
An opening between what is hidden and what is exposed.

What this would cause is an unwanted merge between
Its stuffing: rice and minced meat coated in Lebanese seven spice,
And what it cooks in
A maraq.

How can I expect to appreciate anything outside of this?

How I have never understood the purpose of my mother preparing such a tedious meal,
One that requires more sabar than the farmer who grows the zucchini
And more precocious than the machine that produced the pot for the kusa mahsi to simmer in.

How her assembling the
Kusa mahsi on the dinner table can be likened to
Curating a museum.

Art can be found in the passing down of a recipe that has
Endured through
Colonisation
Migration and
Assimilation.

There is room for your food.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Translation

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Brigid Coleridge

It was the softness that caught her.
Consent they taught at school, t
brought down like a gate. You say no,
you say yes – little, pliant words, daisy
petals yielding to touch. It was how you
spoke it, they said. She tried shaping
a syllable that it might hold every
possible present, every ending. Yes
like ironed bunting, determined on
sunshine. No like a gunshot from a
steady hand. In Italian you said si,
your mouth smiling in spite of itself.
In French, your smile drooped: si
to disagree, si with a non in your heart.
There had been a baby once, Aunt Mary
said, so small they lined a drawer with
cotton wool for fear she might be lost.
Yes and no like drawers: you choose left,
you choose right. Yes and no like cotton
wool, pulled into wisps, into other shapes
entirely. Yes and no like your body blooming,
pillowy with open-ended syllables.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

自然/It-self

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Luoyang Chen

for Dechen Khadro

落叶风吹随河流
提壶温酒醉人意
影现仙鹤丛中 一跃
数不清丝绸、忧愁
眼/演
化为
字/自

Fallen leaves, wind-blown, following river, flow
Raising flagon, warm wine, wish mesmerised
In the woods, looms the divine crane, leaps
Uncountable silk, gloom
Eye/acting
Turns into
Word/self

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Color Theory

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Christian Ryan Ram Malli

Somewhere, there is an ocean. Inside that ocean
is my father. Inside my father is another ocean.
And inside it, thousands of yellow butterflies waft,
dancing and swaying in new wind. All of them,
dead and alive like truths. There is no difference.
I have told the cat purring inside my head that
my brain ran out of cat food. Such disobedience,
these thoughts. These images
that are supposed to be mine, and yet my father
isn’t here to tell me to man up,
and talk to real people. My imaginary dad meant
men, who may have real cats. May be as real
as claw. As glint.
Youth is weird and doesn’t have the ocean,
nor butterflies. What youth has is a man who
turns yellow when I touch him, which makes him
outrageous, but oddly mine
and forever evidence. I met a girl at a party
who looked like a kiss and I pitied her. Some people
look like a blowjob and I pity them even more.
If I look closely, the truth is yellow and will
flutter towards the nearest open window overlooking
billboards and other liars. I try to follow it to know
the hardening theory in my body, saying,
you look like a kiss, too,
the kind people throw at birds.
And I am afraid of absence, and I am surrounded
by its lush perimeter. There is a lullaby that only appears
in yellow. I hum it in the dark of a stranger’s neck.
The morning is precise and full of fruit. There is no
ocean here. There has been no ocean for years. The cat
says she saw a yellow butterfly inside an apartment
I have loved so much I have forgotten it.
She says
she sees it everywhere: inside sleeves, inside palms
pretending to be something else, in the middle
of Sta. Mesa, where I met so many people and remembered
no one who wanted to forgive my hands. I love absence
not for what it is, but for what it used to be. How once
it whorled inside my lungs; an engine that thought
no matter what I was going to be loved.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Alternate Version

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Laurie Duggan

Ken writes the unwritten poem
as I once planned the unfinished poem
(that would be finished)

in fact I planned
a whole book of them

Unfinished

as in [ ]

the blurb:
‘anyone
can write finished poems . . .

people of the future,
if you like these poems
finish them yourselves’

the poems would be walked away from
like dead cars on a lonely stretch

each one left
with the feared instruction:

‘requires assembly’

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

(Where is the) art critic (now)

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Leah Muddle

What I like to think of is the humidity, and the bumps, the horns; swash of trousers, heeled footsteps, breath of doorways . . . tumblers roll and clunk, eyelids snap, chair legs tap and scrape, shifty as a toey horse. I
like / love, the idea of / the bristling critic — grey brown black

purple checkered man woman with thin electric hair, with many more than two arms to wield: pencils, set squares, folding wooden rulers, bleeding pens, yes cigarettes, rolled newspapers, maltreated specs, and cuvée glasses; leaning and peering pink-nosed and nutting out — with intent — writing Miss. Martin. so sharply it penetrates the table-top. You acorn says Agnes of Mister Judd, near to one year later (1963) stepping back from a 6 x 6 to dry soft ruddy hands on a paint rag.

There seems to have been a kind of intimate staging — sweet comedy of the conspicuously furtive: artist to one side of the lift, critic on the other . . . w h i s p e r s . . . transmitted atop black umbrellas, left at the thresholds of florists; knowing or curious glares that crossed streets and packed establishments like animated diagrammatics of zodiac constellations. Now

there is so much air

no court, no ring, no scratchy field or is there / are there / somewhere: snips of little columns, short acts (lunge, parry, bow)? The realm (((                                        ))) seems languid, shoeless. Where are the ground-dwellers?

*

I’ve called to mind the drawing on page 87 of ‘Daddy-Long-Legs’ by Jean Webster (Signet Classic’s edition, brown as clay), which depicts a neat scene: Judy serving tea to one sparrow or finch, one stooping squirrel and one large ‘Mrs Centipede’.

Please, this is how I’d like my critic: civil creeper, scrabbler.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

in real life

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Ender Baskan

first thing in the morning she barrels in
daaaaad lets play frida kahlo fell off the bus
ok let me wake up a little
daaaaad get up
i get up
dilan lies on the couch
shes frida now
i pull a blanket over her
shes recuperating
sad face fluttering eyes
im making coffee shes
writhing in pain
yesterday i fell off the bus, she says, no today i fell off the
bus, i just fell off the bus
ooooooo, are you ok?
nooo, i need to rest we
hit the tram and i fell off the bus
my leg is broken
my back hurts
i was covered in gold
my sister helped me, christina
she helped me

i take frida milk and drawing materials
place them beside her bed
simulate a knock at the door
someones at the door, i call out
everyone can come to visit me, she says, but
they have to be quiet
and she falls asleep
i open the door, wave everyone in
hi everyone come through but please be quiet, dilan
i mean fridas
recovering
she fell off the bus
i sit the visitors down with careful gestures
frida writhes a bit more
frida sits up now
hiiiy, she strains
this morning i fell off the bus
it was very loud
it was very crazy
everyone was crying
but im getting better now
frida gets up slowly now
heroic, winces, hobbles, smiles
now shes walking freely its a miracle
ooohh she falls over
i pick her up and
carry her back to bed
weve been playing frida kahlo fell off the bus every morning
for two months
ever since we isolated
and she asked about the frida tableau on her wall
began to embody frida as recovery and resistance icon
we read the story over and over
polio at 6
one leg thinner than the other
fell off the bus at 18
long skirts
mirror above her bed
painting as recovery
art
therapy
communism
diego
feminism
chronic pain
mexico
eyebrow
blue house
miscarriages
america
lovers
queer
trotsky
art
death
fame
i brought the tableau back from mexico, i say, i visited her house, you know
in real life? she asks
yeeeeah, ten years ago, the blue house
did you meet her dad?
no shes dead but i went into her house
is she in mexico heaven?
yeah she is
can i send her a drawing?
of course you can

we have stopped playing frida fell off the bus
now we play secret garden
sometimes frida is a special guest
colin is crying in bed
colin is rescued by mary
mary wheels colin to the garden
they garden
the garden comes to life
bright colours like fridas garden
colin starts to walk again
colin is healed
now we stop playing secret garden
now we play jethro and emmett
two brothers from child care
one is six the other is three
they are plumbers
and we fix pipes under the dinner table

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

haemopoiesis

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Michele Leggott

sunshine99

welcome to the holy island they ask a lot of questions
and use words like apheresis and tetany on the wall a wetland scene
portal into memory someone laughs
and takes blood from my neck someone sings
the body electric apheresis and tetany
in the distance a boat moves slowly closer
who’s in the boat we don’t know
counting on our fingers one two miss a few
ninety-nine a hundred longhouses
dot the shore family relics
strung from roof peak to jetty
soft click of bone on bone three eleven
sixteen eighteen the numbers add up
free as birds over water free
to step ashore on the island yes it’s us in the boat
and us already wading into the shallows to welcome
those voyagers who were once ourselves
from these numbers I will build you
a new body and a new soul over the wetlands a cry
goes up circling like smoke or birds
first small tingling in the tips of my fingers
apheresis to take from tetany concerning
the fingertips

derangement

I am happy when I forget when I remember
I am sad I open The Book of Disquiet
listening for these words I consult the Portugal notebook
running my fingertips over its smooth surfaces
settle for locations between an orange grove
in blossom and half a dozen waterfalls
cascading into the Lake of Tears
I am happy I am sad
deep and dreamless Chitra says
here are your earrings put them on and dance
but the boat is too small and God is great
a cat and a teapot in one fragment and losing your soul
is like dropping an oar into clear water
a chance fragrance printed on x-ray film
I am sad I am happy
the falling waters move about ripping up
certainty retrofitting syntax
a new body and a new soul if you can read
soft click of bone on bone repetitions
bloodwork derangements of syntax
pouring into the liquid air did I say
the boat was small did I say the earrings
are silver and pluripotent and Chitra says
I am sad when I forget when I remember
I am happy bones of two hands on dark film

BEAM

my march of triumph didn’t get as far as a teapot or an old cat
and in the clouds towards the south I lost my soul like an oar dropped in water
here we are back on the lake
quotations intact but wondering how to greet
the islanders coming our way arms full of flowers
eyes full of tears you have come back
they chant for another night of poiesis
here is the teapot here is the old cat
here is the oar sun beams radical
effusions and suddenly we understand
tetanic fingertips to neuropathic toes
just what we’re in for counting down to zero
knocking out resistance a new body
a soul the shape of an oar or even
the oboe they are handing over bird’s-eye maple
flutes and drums fragments that tell us
we are making poetry on the holy island
in the lake of tears butterflies at sea

day zero

a stretch of the imagination blue corundum
weeping blood climbing a ladder
to reach the main floor of the house on the wall
snakes lizards magic birds and monsters they carry me
to a pallet on the floor and perform ceremonies
of purification a wailing instrument
removes the precious substance from its icebox singers
open the line in my arm and cells begin to flow pristine
undifferentiated into the body wracked by chemical barrages
a puppet-master invites the soul to enter representations
of the body electric on its journey to and from the underworld
falling waters orange blossom I have married death
and wait on this bed of dreams for motion to return
dance body dance the day is zero
the cells pour in and everything counts
vast and blue the waters of the caldera wait
for a signal from the birds and monsters the snakes and lizards
who protect this house and will not let me die

bloodwork

as good as a house or shadows thrown on a screen
birds and beasts conduct us lifesize through corridors
day after day the pilot vials have promised
fair winds and waves talking gently shush shush
around the poles of the house walking just them
walking and we are beginning the poetry of blood
counting every day the white and the red and the little coagulants
that tie everything together I have to find your heart
says Ala we want your body and your head
says Katya blow with everything you’ve got
says Dakar flinging her arms about and shouting
to bring the water dragons closer these arcana
on strings these spirit houses
on poles these small footsoldiers
spreading out in formation from my bones
blood poetry but oh my darlings
I am beyond repair the dance is too much the house
too big I am neutropenic
unable to move waiting here and counting days cells waves winds
a teapot and an old cat the oar is lost
when will I see you again it’s like camping
says Anna it takes all day to do nothing
here on the holy island in the lake of tears nothing
but calling up the ghosts of the house the bone doors open

heuriskein

but not before the stars
in her spiral arms turn one more time
and the stirring stick froths the milky
clouds of Oort of Magellan hull down
over Malagasy and incomprehensible
to any but the most persistent listener
falling asleep now as the words
race on over the lunar field and sweet
scented jasmine curls under the sill

ships in the distance completed the sea that lapped my terraces

I fall to pieces but not until
her voice walks me through
the skein of stars that milky way
discovering terraces
spiralling over archipelagos and oceans

*

Note

Preparation for a transformative but ultimately unsuccessful stem cell transplant.

The lexicons of medicine and poetics converge at haemopoiesis (bloodwork) and heuriskein (to discover).

Motutapu is the haematology ward in the sky above Grafton; its walls feature photo murals of New Zealand scenery.

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa appears and disappears in the dreams of cellular rearrangement.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Poesy

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Autumn Royal

‘When people speak out in favor of a life of madness, they mean the cute, nice madness, not the disgusting or dangerous kind. The disgusting and dangerous kind is prioritized in language but not in life.’ — Aase Berg

The dash between shelf and life—why do you think I chose you?
I’m a cornice, a decorated projection at the heights of desire—
disenchanted and plastered for the sake of the walls. I’m off
blot at a speed before murder was just a concept—it only takes
a few minutes. I’m attached to the top floor yet down pitched
as I mark virtue. I mark from a hospital bed—they strapped
and pressed me as to why I needed care—in the car, in the kitchen,
in the office chair. They question why I hugged the shaking man
after the meeting—I beg them. I hoard. I’m a version of editing
archetypes and questioning why I’ll never be an inborn model.
I opinion—I but hope to mean we while the death poet becomes
me as I pump petrol into my car, my vehicle—my mouthpiece.
I lie down on a couch and complain about not having a couch—
yet I promised to be static—happy to live in the shed knowing
it’s further than what’s expected. I am threatening with passivity,
dissolving fizz—formerly still now. The crudeness of a rubric—
I mark essays, I mark essays, I mark essays. I mark. I am a mark.
I am marked with deadlines. I mark a high distinction when all
I need is credit—feedback with no response—just for beads.
Trying to investigate consequence and watering soil with spite.
It only takes a few minutes for the organs, the mud, the handlings
of conversations about the sours of milk—found, smelt and drunk.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

The Magic Ball as a (Representational) Diagram

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Carina So

[See Fig. 1 below to print and construct the poem.]

Fig. 1 An Unfolded Poem
(on one of its sides)


Sidenote: An Adjacent Description of Folding

4. is

this word is written between checkerboard creases

reminiscent of calligraphy worksheets in Chinese class, where

a single character is written repeatedly in boxy borders;

the result is almost Steinian:

“is” is “is” is “is”


3. box guide

a piece of paper folded and unfurled:

folded until it makes a soundless accordion

first along its width

then along its length:

thirty-two by eight.


5. unfurl and fold

longitudinal creases dictate the lengthwise pleats

(although each unit along the eight is also divided into three with pencil marks)

the paper is crimped until it resembles window shutters


6. fold it again

reshape the instrument through its latitudes:

the paper is folded again along the guides


1. idea

i had been doom scrolling on my phone when

i came across a video of a magic ball made from scrap—

its motion is filmed on a smartphone

in front of someone’s dining room—

while i,

(most likely) prostate on the lounge,

was suddenly enraptured


7. pit stop: it should be crimped across after (6)

i imagine dragon scales but scales of any creature would be probable and
inaccurate.


8. raise and meet

pleats or ridges raised—

shark-fin shapes over calm water

or mountains pulled from the ground—

the act bends the spine

creating an arc or the letter C,

let the edges of the accordion meet

until it makes an ellipsoid earth-shape

(9.) glue it and wait


10. magic

once it is set,

let the little paper ball cave into itself

until it makes a new shape:

a mathematical form from algebra class—

a two-sided trumpet—

then fold it onto itself

again and again

from ball to fluted shape then ball to fluted shape

again and again


1.5 the word is simple

motion and form depict the meaning of the word

my English teacher once said,

“poetry is about how things are said”


11. Fig 1

i cut along the line

and repeat from 3.

read the rows of “is” as they overlap—

encroaching over borders—

and the columns as they are squished in space

or expanded

i think of the modes of is-es

maybe those that

i hold on my phone

on

internet

stories—

people in Zoom boxes

with their cups of tea—

or

those is-es that

straight lines

struggle to depict


i fold across longitudes and latitudes

home is

14.630238, 121.004109

here is

-33.687340, 150.312842


a piece of paper is

a shape-shifting

being


2. The Real Folding Guide: YouTube

keyword search: infinity, origami, ball

referenced result:

“Origami: MAGIC BALL – Yakomoga EASY origami tutorial”
uploaded by Easy Origami – Yakomoga on Jan. 26, 2019

A pdf version of Fig 1 can also be found here.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Closer

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Felicity Plunkett

A clothesline dandles
rows of vacant newborn
jumpsuits. The way I made
a life for you and you
fell away from it.

Worn sheets ghost a whipped
branch, swing the wind
to haunt me, opening
folds of loss and hope. Only I
meet their flinching gaze.

Two cotton tunics sigh,
ironed, airing. Two girls’
lives prepared by an unseen
woman. Fresh to press forward
into blood, into breeze.

Airless drawers, closed
room stacked with stuff. Left
-over treasury, thrifted loot, boots
chunky and scuffed. A life walked
away. Its imprint stays.

All this is emptied
of us, as we are emptied
of life. We are frayed, we are
threadbare, our hold light
on branch, bar and hand.

Open to breeze and breath
and the end of breath. Open to hope
and blood, the swing and fall
of it all, to the end
of light’s flinching hope.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged