We understand no love that is not in excess – Urvi Kumbhat
I never questioned why redemption
kept moving:
hilltop halls behind a yellow-
brick church, the Filipino congregation
evangelical in the valley
toward the river,
further west.
We tithed then
on stackable chairs, on knees
of kuyas and titos
our lips, tambourines
to sugared bread. /
By fourteen, we’d saved five hundred
for the Build2Reach fund.
The pastors were blue-eyed
desperate to own
second-hand buildings.
You were banking
By then, we’d survived pesos
in parking lots. /
And I earned too
selling three-piece feeds
gravy, breast
rib and roll
to older people driving through
custom spoilers
and a muffler scraping
to clear the gutter. /
You see if I write the browner poem
I get distressed
linen, a compostable toilet
cassettes of
Joni Mitchell.
(It’s been a long time).
And you’d be proud
I’m learning to squat
on Darkinjung country
Yarramalong
above a creek, inland from
Of course, I also grieve infinity
pools,
You are, in fact
pregnant –
before you left these parts
I listened to you FaceTime and fret
So let me cry uncle
I first notice in a poem the longest line
a place where I can lie down
come apart as a thing with no force of life
a place where a light has been left on
like in the other room
feels too far to switch off and how bright
whether or not someone’s there
Is this the merciful distance of disaster?
The earth senses me and I return
its light and tenuous silence:
I am on the brink of death and my lungs
I call them my wings
these wings were never a part of me
Say it might be dazzlingly bright
when it is over and I go the long way
home as the only disruption of light
perseus trips and cracks his head
medusa joins her sisters in a sunspoked field
returns to her research, the garden, the lute.
did not accept the sweet kiss of death
did not accept the gaze of another of anyone
listens to the earth with bright abandon
where flowers discuss the dead
on which they feed
behead the myth
and they are furious.
had no song for her
had no love for her
had no memory of her
but still they look.
when death forgets to avert their eyes
tell them to send another
a cold shadow flits through me
in her presence, but i like the chill.
are you hungry? would you like some bread?
wicked gorgon here is the plate.
beast, spectre of wrath, devil,
how was your summer?
damaged like the stumps of burned trees
barren as an opencut megamine
plastic litter in the stomach of manatees
the dull carapace, the cold-stunned loggerheads
poachers targeting dehorned rhinos
shanks in the noxious skin of the Murray-Darling
sirens at dusk, the gasping fish,
the Galilee basin …
I don’t want to let anyone else in
yet
but I remember being loved
the slope of your shoulder
as you pressed
forward and I
yielded, my hands knowing
the movement of your back
not
ever from sight
as now I watch outside the
memory a lurker
awkward and real
your love was felt
as safety as a rush
a ripple carried from your shoulders
all the way down my spine—
and they say you are so far
away you won’t be coming
back is it strange that
sometimes all of me
is very still
is hushed as
lake becoming glass
but look—
there
softly
like a shiver
the water, watch closely
it moves—
tell me how the wind works
why is it like being touched
pressed close
all the way up
my skin
to the nape of—
no tell me instead
what do you hold
where you are
so far away?
I untangle in this sky, this milk-white moonlight.
Earth’s satellite appears all night in moonlight.
Which country’s quiet sky did you design on this canvas?
I’m struck by the hues of your ever-bright moonlight.
This blue is a rehearsal for when our bodies are still.
I’ve lost sight of the fires in your swipes of moonlight.
For tonight, I chew dreams under lilac iridescence.
No classifications here, shapes suffice in moonlight.
In this dream I am fatigued, my language ossified.
Yet your palette is a relief invite to moonlight.
Your paint-knife is a landscape of dirt and skies.
For you Etel, I write, ignited in your moonlight.
After Roberta Sykes
Wake at 6 am to currawongs lifting the brow
of the Queensland box & shell pink clouds bleed russet
in the glass specks of dirt on scale
with black birds beyond the wires
unnameable at this distance, lost from the window frame
like Bobbi Sykes’ sentinel lines falling
off the edge/ of my flat brain.
Walking these nights out of lockdown
Keep strict to the path, it’s not safe
to slip through garden gates
for winter oranges Le Guin’s paradises lost
but now I understand the terror of flat earthers
Think of it: we live on the outside of a dirtball
in an incomprehensible sky.
Beyond my flat brain in the privet
a currawong swings on a branch
ripping off berries, this yellow eye
and that yellow eye on me
to a chorus further out of frame
singing currah currah currah-wong.
In this ink bleeding cloud in the sunrise
I might discern my emotional function
via intuition, algorithms or recollection
of a terror, not of writer’s block but Žižek’s intense hatred
of writing/ his take on The Shining illuminates
my spatial disturbance I keep in mind
a whole hotel might not stop us killing each other.
I remember my first time back in high school
the line that dragged me under my flat brain:
room upon room opened up
I was freefalling in mansions:
a sudden architecture against my teenage plunge
into vertiginous darkness.
Walking these days out of lockdown
to early morning saws, drills & grinders
but in these streets of compulsive renovators
many magpies hang out at ground level.
We make eye contact, I say hello
and keep trying to hear the universe
beyond B flat as textures of sound
held in bird space.
The currawong is exposed now
perched on the cold antenna
of the deep-pitched slate roof
whose skylights in summer refracting sun
to our window
burn our eyes out.
Stanza 4 borrows from Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek, Polity, 2004.
‘sentinel lines falling’ borrows from and ‘off the edge of my flat brain’ directly quotes Roberta Sykes’ ‘A poem for poets’, Love Poems And Other Revolutionary Actions, University of Queensland Press, 1988 (1979).
‘an incomprehensible sky’ borrows from and ‘on the outside of a dirtball’ directly quotes Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘Paradises lost’, Birthday of the World, Harper-Collins, 2002.
She had feverish dreams and when
keratin tips erupted from her shoulders
the shame she felt was a red slash.
Plainly, she was growing wings.
Her husband moved soundlessly
about the house. He pitied her awful scratching
and was sorry when she shifted
to the spare room.
Ah, such dun-coloured feathers
no crimson or kingfisher blue,
no delicate spots. And she with
her heavy bones, earthbound still.
Yet, on autumn afternoons
she lies secluded in the courtyard,
her feathers glossy with the heat,
napping on the pavers
and imagines her phantastical
shape viewed from above. She is
not displeased. Neither siren nor harpy
just her own, old, mutable self.
Wings. Not better, not worse
than the breast buds that years before
had ended her weightless world
of cartwheels and handstands.
Now the magpies on the railing
are more beguiling than her books.
And they watch her too
turning their knowing heads
as she dips in and out
of the sprinkler’s parabola
and droplets flung from her shaken feathers
cascade and catch the light.
Buy a rugged lawnmower
to caress domesticated grass.
According to Ibid, I suppose;
but not before we’re runover,
stumped by a snap in our trump quiver.
OK buy the Beamer not to notice
more strung strings = $ for shamus.
You need dopamine. And as matter
of fact, I’ve got it now.
Someone in the C-suite hides the likes
and an influencer lays a hashtag
by a creek to weep.
NAB jumps 365 points on an 11% miss,
because it beats expectations.
He’s got game. He tells all the ladies
it’s not timing the market,
it’s time in the market.
They try to find a filter that says
is he an arsehole or is this a phase?
Don’t mind me, I’m the guy
who delays the upgrades,
hopes he’ll cope toasting the cities
that were supposed to sink but didn’t.
I’ll stick with a term deposit.
Forget the folks who drown. It’s not your fault.
They chose to be born on sinking atolls.
Open the frog app. This is an app for collecting facts.
Record and upload. A singer’s added to the frog song map.
The frog app is a translation app. I record clapsticks
and duelling washboards. I record a zydeco band.
Common eastern froglet is what the Australian Museum sends back.
Thank you for being part of our census. Why not join us on earbud safari?
The green stream frog squeezes from a styrofoam package;
the southern barred frog shells peas in a box made of timber
the striped marsh is chopping; this fretsaw work is the wallum rocket;
the broad-palmed frog thumbs a comb nonchalant
as the eastern banjo who’s floating up lobs.
I once asked, like a fool, where the tennis club was.
But with the frog app I found acceptance, found the guide
who leads me from avant garde throat singers, hiccupping buddhas,
back to the science of relative spawn depths, months for mating,
species distribution maps. Getting up close
the frog tells me whose pupils are vertical, round, or flat
and bears unflinching witness to blemishes, spots, and bands.
The frog app will not curate online personae.
Its expert identifications are cleansing a twittersphere
shouting alternative facts. For civil, for well-informed discourse
open the frog app. Top up your swamp. Replenish the tank.
Some days are metal
I see my face reflected –
cracks in the steel
I write to rupture
I feel layered
until I read me –
I am flat and abstract
not cut onions dripping milk –
I use the same words
I use the same words –
not cut onions dripping milk
I am flat and abstract
until I read me
I feel layered
I write to rupture
cracks in the steel
My face reflected, I see
some days are malleable
i bought my hate a pair of earrings
the same ones i wear with my blue dress
the beads are tightly sewn and shine
along the light of my jaw
my unhung clench
she-saids packed in the space
where i floss every night
in all those pin-pricked holes
beneath tongue-shelter
releasing what both burns and heals
and used to finish the foldless
my dentist says be gentle with the break-down
i blur from watching too closely
i hear the crack of enamel
i hiss muted bile-rhymes
my decomposition of a throat
there is recession
of every white bone i never worked to grow
a shift of soundless teeth-beads
against the cave of melting ears
and with every swallowed sigh
i emerge like blown glass
my composition of a face
the earrings shine when light hits them
i hit my hate with whatever i have
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
