Cordite Poetry Review

Water under the Bridge (after Lucy Ellmann)

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Christopher Konrad

… how I don’t want this to be a memory thing . rather a you-had-to-be-there kind of thing . to feel the Pemberton breeze blowing through the dusk bush, to taste that sumptuous brown trout you just caught . trout, tout, face-about, snout, roast pig . and how I shouldn’t say that in these vegan times, roast pig I mean . and how that trout thing was when my child was just born, that was back then, and how, today, I was at my childhood friend’s funeral and listened to his grown children’s eulogies . how he was only two years older than me and how his wife of forty two years died two years ago and their kid’s kids will not know grandparents . paring, faring, staring into the gathered crowd of mourners . talking about the things we first-gen Australian-Austrians did as kids and how that really was a remembering thing . and how we all seemed to have lost track of each other over the years . and how sad it is to think that was over how-many years ago I had last seen them only to watch now as they slide the coffin into that weird ante-room where they will ‘take care of you’, like in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One . but how not so novel it all is out here, outside the purifying fires of the crematorium . and us kids, the things we got up to and how, brown cow, dig that plough, it’s all water under the bridge now

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged Christopher Konrad

Whatever wet the nylon field

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Satya Dash

of crisp new underwear made the night
inevitably dense. Whatever I sipped
from your mouth swirled into a fluorescent
world of waiting. I stayed indoors on the off chance

I was waiting for an idea. My hands stayed inside
my pockets. Everything was chasing
warmth. The world was on the cusp of losing
its nervousness until my eyes imagined

your body lounging on a beach chair
reading a novel and blood filled me
like fresh guilt. To my astounded friends
who asked me what the fuck

I was doing, I said I was going
with the flow. I wanted to be carried
by the world outside my door. I wanted
to carry my world inside it. It came as no surprise then

when the world crystallized into versions
of you, brisk and sturdy, full
of the unremarkable everyday—
small desperations and impulsive smirks.

When you waved your lit palm, I felt
like a child learning to read gestures, felt akin to those
who chose to feel, my chest besting its honesty
every passing moment of ravishing.

The jewel of each of my nipples rippled
their individual ambition. Whose eyes
delighted in this sinuous asymmetry?
It seemed there was a third pair

responsible for the blurring in the room.
The seer with a deeply pedestrian glare?
No, it was you smiling a terribly long smile
to sustain my waiting. At the door,

I thought waited some God who had
the perfect teeth, the niftiest brows,
the slenderest neck, in whose fear every night
I struggled to keep at bay the roaring

internet on my phone. Some days a mug
of beer kept my bladder busy, some days it lay
untouched. Most dusks I adored the air
the door let in. Some dinners it brought you along.

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged Satya Dash

chinaman fish

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Ouyang Yu

It’s a pain
Not in the arse
Not in the neck
Not even in the fingers
Searching for the word, e.g. in an online Chinese dictionary
Called youdao, Having the Way
In which the words, Chinaman Fish, is defined as
Miaomang Yu, an uncertain fish
Or distant fish, or if you rely on the expression
Xiwang miaomang, little hope or hopeless
You may arrive at the conclusion that it is
A hopeless fish
All, might I say, are correct
Even in this incorrect age
Trying to be correct in every sense
Of the word
One wonders why it was not called an ‘Australianman fish’
In the first place
Or an ‘Englandman fish’
Or an ‘Americanman fish’
Why, of all the appellations, Chinaman fish
Amazingly, though, there are no definitions for it
In a number of online Chinese dictionaries
Such as n 词酷 or 爱词霸 or 沪江小 d
Or even 海词词典, an ocean of words
None of one’s business
Although one fishes easily from one’s memory
This poisonous specimen from the Queensland seas
Where, one speculates, 150 years or so ago
A Chinaman, unable to bear all the Australian
Harshness and hardness and haplessness
Turned into a fish
Who swam loud enough to wake the living
‘Chinaman Fish, I am
the Chinaman Fish’
Till all the English dictionaries
Capture him
In their wordloads

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged Ouyang Yu

Tale of Monastic Life

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Todd Turner

My Imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk
—John Keats

Wintering in golden years,
Keats ditched the pen and donned the cloth.
He made good use of his time on this planet,
singing the co-ordinates of the sublime:
grief, truth, beauty; head-heart deep with love.
Torn. Tenacious. No filter! That’s what I like about him.
So, when Wordsworth was dubbed
the doyen of English verse,
he revered J.K. the way Ali regarded Frazier.
And in the twilight (when Fanny
joined the nunnery) ‘Dear Darkling, he wrote,
I’ve had it! I do not care a straw.
I’m going to become a monk.’
And He did!

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged Todd Turner

Swearing into the void

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Tara Willoughby

The function of fuck
is to be said and to be
heard.
To add feeling to words
we use fuck freely.

Fuck ’s function is
to stand out in a sentence, but
not so far out
that it doesn’t fit in.

Functionally, fuck is a curve
but not an asymptote. Fuck
b e n d s around to
me.

Trust and fuck go hand in hand,
but fuckers breed distrust
exponentially.
When you say fuck, do not
say it in italics.

But in your mind
let fuck live italicised
so that your eyes

sparkle, just a little.

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged Tara Willoughby

UFO virgin

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Jamie Marina Lau

The evening we saw a white blood cell squirming across a black sky in the south he lost his key. Since the day we met, the only other thing we’d lost together was sleep. Still we’d always wake at the same time. Is the first heavy blink of the morning loud enough to wake the lover beside you?

It was separate from him: the synchronized seeing, losing, waking, losing sleep. It was something extraterrestrial maybe. Like a string tugging sound from knuckles I mean, the action of a piano, or a double rod pendulum creating orbit, joined by a nexus at its core

He’ll ask what our nexus might be, how can it bear the stretching of its limbs either side
stretching all the way across the world
Don’t joints decay from hyper-extension? Today he told me my knees are pretty
Connective lens, is that the joint the knee the middle? collective hallucination? Losing our UFO virginities together. That evening with the—

What is a white blood cell doing in the sky? Traversing gulfs of the troposphere above a park downtown. It’s supposed to be inside a body, scrimmaging infection between bone marrow and lymph tissue. Did we want to pull it down, split it like Alice’s mushroom to swallow, make him live forever. Like PLL a secret is a nexus.

They say if you choose to take the signs, the signs will take you.

Miraculously, we find the key in hours of grass after walking back across a city I’d been to twice
In the south, in almost complete dark our tiny halos of phone light searching hours lengths of grass, a key no larger than 5cm/2 inches. A found key a nexus, a flying blood cell: joint-dreaming

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged Jamie Marina Lau

Detachment

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Naomi Cammayo

The blonde tourist took her picture
before she walked towards my tuktuk,
pink-cheeked from the heat
and pressed colour.

Filipina, she confirmed.
That was all it took to charge her 300 baht less.

First, I’d have to take her to the silver shop.
She thought it was a fine idea.
(It was compulsory to the deal.)
Three temples should make her happy.

I took her to the holy white marble,
what was once the highest holy point
in Bangkok, then a sacred enclave
where she would get (enough of) peace.

I waited for her in parking spaces
while she surveyed the artefacts of
my religion. They may not deliver her
from clichés of momentary relief.

Nothing memorable can be said
in English, though I wanted to tell her
that Manila was probably
not too different from my city.

I went on being a driver
as she gave and withdrew smiles from
the traffic, an attraction of my daily travels.
Khob khun kha. Kamusta. Sawasdee. Salamat.

I could sense similarities in our tongues,
unnecessary trivia.
But she could mean something else.

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged Naomi Cammayo

The Moderns

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Daniel John Pilkington

Heroic Anagrams
after Ian Hamilton Finlay

D.H. Lawrence
HEWN CRADLE

Gertrude Stein
RESURGENT TIDE

Sylvia Plath
LAVISHLY APT

Ezra Pound
ZERO AND UP

Robert Lowell
BELL OR TROWEL?

Hart Crane
THE ARC RAN

Wallace Stevens
LEVELS CAST ANEW

T.S. Eliot
LOST TIE

W.H. Auden
DAWN HUE

Basil Bunting
BLABS UNITING

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged Daniel John Pilkington

Blue

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Terry Jaensch

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged Terry Jaensch

Citrus Grove: Land Back

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Joel Sedano

Ultraviolet rays, in position, dance 92.894 million miles
away. Yet sunlight wavers across multitudes of spatial

planes that permeate your body. And somehow, no matter
how far distance may seem, depending on point-of-view,

warmth presses the nape of your neck or imprints the apple
of your cheek. A vast-void sequined in patterns of purpose

might astonish you. At night, looking up at the sky makes
you wonder why so many ellipses mark sheets laid across

the zenith, but more importantly, what lies yonder. But right
now, you are among a grove of oranges, varying in size and

fragrance—buds greening into existence, pericarps leathery
and rinding terpenes-flavonoids. You’ve meandered through

the rows of oranges countless times, the area’s schematics
ingrained in memory. Your hands powdery and astringent

clayed on by oranges and dust, but another scent cracks
through the façade like a time-warp unpeeling. One you

remember clearly, amidst blooms, crates, and insectoids
droning throughout, another world bleeds beyond threshold

like white light refracted through the eye of a prism. Not
everyone is wary of this fissure, most are oblivious of its

presence, but not the few that are privy to its history. You’re
not the only one that remembers. This tear is evocative of

the wound inflicted on the land. Hooves, hands, mouths
incongruously defamiliarized topography, although they

tried to rip out the roots, a vast network amalgamated,
more than fruit grew from soil manufactured weave a

reminder for trespassers, that you and a legion still remain.

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged Joel Sedano

Of Freedom

Posted on February 15, 2023 by April-Rose Geers

I wake alone and dream
of freedom when the uncertain curtain
fails to block out the morning light
I ask myself do I know freedom

when the early tui calls dimly and
the crickets hum beneath my window
I swirl the leaves in my tea and see
the poet waver what of freedom

the cat yawns his collar glints
he does not remember his time
on the streets linen sheets
the cat is indifferent to freedom

those who march find their place
in the swell and the howl and the
blood and the belly breaking
banded fight for freedom

while in a prison ward cucumbers
are chopped and one green leaf
stark against the cell door
offers freedom to the openhearted

still the pen embarrassed
turns away not at the lack
of words but the flow of them
what right have I to know freedom

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged April-Rose Geers

O! Angaanga

Posted on February 15, 2023 by essa may ranapiri

for Shell

the moana washes up
what she doesn’t take
her detritus crackling gifts
glimmering on the shore
the sea in its own set of armour
the sea that puddles around on sand
like open mouths gargling
some kind of thought
that slowly assembles in the depths
and there it lives a very gay life
until the beach calls
and it knows that ia will come

O! Angaanga

the beach calls
or
is it some dumb gay poet
calling their friend on the phone?

O! Angaanga

rising from the waves
covered in molluscs
with a cap made of coral
you wear backwards
serving some ancestral fuckboi realness
covered in kelp that falls
like a kaakahu from your shoulders
spiders crawl from the places
that you hid them
to travel safe
under the moana

we watch as their legs skitter
with the glisten of the sand in the sun

O! Angaanga

those red streaked babes
find their homes
finally
in the driftwood
where they multiply
go look at my house
they say to each other
doesn’t it just
make you hot
to think about
such security?

sitting in a bath with
two locked doors
between you and the world

O! Angaanga

the seagulls
play a tune
that goes a little bit like
‘Mama’
and a little bit like
‘But It’s Better If You Do’
cracking creatures
against whatever hardness they can find here
whatever certainty

we dance there
arms waving at the sun
bodies reaching for something
close to stability
as the gulls continue
to feed

O! Angaanga

the sea is still draining from your ears
I go to say the way the water falls from
your open mouth reminds me
of that one Doctor Who special
where David Tennant plays up the worst
of his version of the Time Lord
which is umm saving people’s lives
when he’s not meant to
but I don’t actually say that

the episode ends with Captain Adelaide Brooke
killing herself to teach him a lesson
about fixed points in
time
is there anything in your past you wouldn’t change?

while the water flows you cannot speak
so you use your hands instead
and I try my best to understand
try my best to pretend

O! Angaanga

you’re on a towel now
dripping in the passenger’s seat
the sea creatures once alive
now folding off you in clumps
their reliable transportation
turned into a death trap

we’re stuck in South Auckland traffic
the car idles its fumes upwards

O! Angaanga

where do we go now?

in this imaginary scenario
do you still live where you did
in Takaanini
would we sit in your lounge
with kuumara creeping over the carpet
struggling harakeke into different
shapes
passing lines back and forth
about dear dear
Whiro
you would pull out an obsidian blade
and scrape along the leaf
till the muka
becomes something worth weaving
while I make increasingly deranged putiputi
I would leave on the table as a gift
when it’s time for me to go

O! Angaanga

when I write
I never cut
away from the heart

O! Angaanga

you’re unsure if you belong on land
after so long under the ocean
teaching schools of fish
what the hook means

this land is yours through whakapapa
any amount of time away
cannot be held against that connection;
a dull knife that makes the cord
sing rather than cutting
through

O! Angaanga

we follow the waters south
to Ootaakaro
tuna hugging the river floor while rakiraki
bob their bodies up and down
bills placed to snap
whatever moving thing would fit

when we get out
looking for the hotel I’m staying in
we only notice we’re going the wrong way
some five minutes’ walk past
what is the biggest building
in Christchurch

and a black statue of Victoria

she was never here but
she’s never left

O! Angaanga

I feel sick every time
the Tainui rules around
poowhiri are listed
a dress shirt and pants for taane
a dress with a respectable length for waahine
taane sit up front
waahine in the back
all black
thank God
for colonisation
thank God for the sorrow of Queen Vic
and young Albert getting typhoid

amene

O! Angaanga

God gave Noah salvation
in Uenuku’s peacocking
spectrum
said all the flooding is over
for now
except not really

the rainbow in the oil spill
the rainbow in the gay flag
the rainbow in the spinning crystal in the window
the rainbow in the Pink Floyd T-Shirt design
the rainbow in the paaua

O! Angaanga

you’ve grown obsessed
with dried seaweed
going through a packet a day
always offering me some
with a gritty grin
before popping the next sheet in

I always decline
too salty I say
knowing full well it’s not the salt
that gets me but the texture

you joke that it’s better than
filling your lungs with smoke
a prior addiction
that steadied you through
turbulent currents
in the homes of our kauheke
all those taonga paaua become ashtrays
the eyes of the stars
smothered with cigarette butts

O! Angaanga

there were twins racing toy boats
on the Kaiapoi river
when you told me you wanted kids
but didn’t want to carry them
like the arachnids formerly
hugged under your skin
which were all like real small
compared to a human baby

I think it was here where
I let go of a future I had held
so foolishly
and left it for all the trout
in the tributary

O! Angaanga

grey clouds hang at the Denny’s car park
like solemn watchers
we’re back in South Auckland now
never did figure out if the Ootautahi Denny’s was real

in this shitty weather we’re slow to move
giving questions to the dashboard
asking whether or not
suicide is a completely
appropriate response
to invasion

maybe the medication will stop me feeling
how I should
maybe the medication
is just muffling our ancestors?

O! Angaanga

I spent our separation inside of
a hollow heart (mine)
trying to beat it back
to shape
taking a mallet to its clay walls
my head ringing with
the question
can I fold the world into something
I want to live in?

I missed you
I guess is
what I mean.

O! Angaanga

I swam for the first time in the Waikato
the other day
stripped to just my underwear
in the warm awa
Tamanuiteraa turned into
an orange smear on the clouds

what part of me is clean here
while the rest rots?

O! Angaanga

Mary Anning allegedly
the woman who sold
seashells on the seashore
took the oldest and deadest
things and pulled them from the cliffs of
Dorset to tell a whole new story
about the earth’s ancient past
so not shells exactly (poetry always takes
some liberties)
but
fossils
and skulls

in the final shot of Ammonite
a film that is loosely (loosely) based
on her life
she stands on one side
of her discovery
while her gay lover
stands on the other

offering her a life that some thought impossible

O! Angaanga

I ask you about Hinemoana
and what it was like to live in her sea
and you just smile slightly
something moving at the edge
of your vision
that I can’t see
and sign something like
well, there is a reason
I’m not there anymore

O! Angaanga

I think I’m getting sick from
my own river
which would make sense
cos the council overseas a sewage system
that has the habit of overflowing
how much human shit into this river in
the last ten years?
let alone all the runoff that comes
from farms exploited by Fonterra

or is it claiming an awa
my ancestor already turned their back on?
I can’t imagine
doing that
but maybe I do that all the time
look at a mountain and say
I don’t even know you
anymore
without even knowing what I’ve done

but when I swim in the Waikato
my body becomes
something I can love
dissolving into
the paru water

O! Angaanga

how long can you hold your breath?

according to Facebook
I came out as trans 7 years ago
I sometimes wake up and remember
the boy I was still curled up
inside my stomach
like some dead meat I just can’t digest
that fluttering fear leaving
my house in a dress
my lungs shrivelled to the size of
what-ifs in my mind
but still they knew what to do
when I took my first breath in 23 years

O! Angaanga

I watch as one particularly clingy katipoo
makes its way out from behind your ear
and crawls over your still face
to rest in the centre of your forehead
like it’s finding warmth in some third eye
you have hidden their under the skin
it didn’t want the driftwood beach
the spider had grown attached
so it begins to weave you a veil

whether or not you should
you trust it not to bite
as it turns its energy into something
that catches the light

O! Angaanga

I remember in the early months
you bringing up binders
you would wear as a teen
and the others thinking you
were straight
I didn’t even think
you were cis
at the time

in your tino jacket
scuffed to fuck jeans
making some joke about LAND BACK

I thought then
that I would hope
to get to know you more
than just that taniwha who added me
on Facebook

O! Angaanga

I’m thinking about the bubbles flattening
to the surface of the tube
and our meme of Papa and Rangi
standing underneath a storm
of inside jokes and the knowledge that
if I did myself in
right here
and right now
you would just travel back in time
to make sure I had something else
to hold onto
with an arm outstretched
you would climb into Rarohenga and one-outs
everyone who would try and stop you pulling me back to life
or we could just stay in there together
and grow savage and old
collaged from a million different sources

oh to age as a waa is luxury
as a source of power
lets us grow fucking monstrous
fill the world with a kind of darkness
that chews the heads off men
or rewind to live
inside a single frame:

O! Angaanga

the pohutukawa blows up red
like it’s embarrassed
by all of the sentiment
our waka landed near one
bent into its own weight

we really go back
way back
to the Sunshine takeaways
me on the Friday
and you on the Saturday

I remember having a phase
where I would strip the batter
from the fish and eat both
separately

O! Angaanga

instead of different days
what if we went on the same one
and from then on
were never separated
even when things got real hard or real bad
you staring into the wall
and me bringing you back to the present
with a hey or a coffee
or a little meme I found
about being bisexual and depressed
oh aren’t we all
or like way too many poems
I read you down the line

O! Angaanga

imagine a world that wasn’t defined by capital
built on invasion and exploitation
I don’t know if I’m even capable of it
but I know
it’s not because of worker alienation that
I like shiny things

when I was a toddler my nan would get me to help
make mobiles to hang out on the porch
just driftwood with shiny Cats Eyes
(they were always my favourite)
watching from irregular stations on
glossy nylon

the plink they would make
a familiar rattle
like some other neighbourhood kid
was playing with toys
out there in the wind
lip to bottle hoping to get a song out of it

where by the right angle
capitalism could
just be blown away

O! Angaanga

how dramatic is this shit?!
if I was Byron or Shelley or Hopkins
committing my love to chains
in words
to clothing with many ruffles
saying your name over
and over again
until the calcium crumbles
or the moana passes her horizon
over our brows

O! Angaanga

you grow weary of the land and its politics
and instead of waiting the twenty or so years it will take
you have decided to give Hinemoana
another visit

we make angels in the sea lettuce
letting the tide move us gently in the foam
the impressions of our arms swinging
ephemeral at each wave
I make a joke about being wed to the ocean

you say in a voice like skipping stones
it was the beaches you always liked the most

cos on the taatahi there is always the option to run away
there is always a choice and if you change your mind
it just doesn’t mind all that much
the beach is used to things coming and going

O! Angaanga

no matter how much
I think I should be used to this
I’m not

over the course of the day
I shuffle back up the beach
while you remain below
as the sun dips
you begin to float
the great big sea pulling you back to her

I don’t remember what the last things I say to you are
probably something like
I’m getting cold
my stomach is sore
I don’t know if that means
I’m hungry or full

you just nod and smile
and sign: same
e rua e rua
seaweed still stuck between your teeth
you turn your eyes to the horizon
and slowly but surely
the sea
she takes you back

O! Angaanga
Auee!

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged Essa may ranapiri

Cottonmouth

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Jam Pascual

I call your name and the century turns.
In non-Euclidean geometry, parallel lines
intersect at both positive and negative
infinity. When I saw you last, you were
aglow with the halo of new priorities.
Fear not: the rudiment of therefore,
the agony of meanwhile. We bought joy
from the black market of drunk dusks.
We channeled Galileo with our backs
pinned to astroturf. Lately I’ve been
poaching the green tigers in my memory
palace just to hang their heads on the walls
like it’s good feng-shui, but that’s just a side
racket. The truth is, I’m a stenographer
in the courtroom of loss. Good on you
for getting out of that gig, but I’m not
ready to hand in my resignation letter.
I need to get the whole crime down.
I’m putting bull clips on my intentions
and childproof locks on my promises.
My appeals are nailed to sundials so
they mean nothing in the night time.
My mouth is an almanac of auguries.
My heart, however, is a glass knife—
I don’t care how good you are with it,
you can’t take it to war.

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged Jam Pascual

To The Governor Part II

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Blain Locke Jr

Imposing my will
But like a bird I am free
This is my chance
I up and I flee
The grass is real green
But I knew it would be
Through fire and brimstone
A new day called peace
I take with me traits
Once I seen to be stripes
I guess all that changed
When men take a life
So thanks for the lessons
And I’m on to the next
And yes it costs pride
And or more just with acts
My actions are mine
I’m not coming back

This poem is a conclusion of the ‘To The Governor‘ piece. Judgement Day comes – you come out of jail. The traits that you learn in jail / the stripes, aren’t going to work. The codes that you learn in jail don’t fit outside. It’s a reminder of what you do outside. It costs a lot of pride. My father taught me great ethics. That’s a great Blackfella thing in me.

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged Blain Locke Jr

huntsman

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Ren Jiang

Listen—
i am a sorry son weaving upward or
the spark in every raindrop shaken off somebody else’s web i—
want to sprawl across the stretching lifeline on your palm, plucking
at your favourite song.
Listen, i—
am often moved
by the temple bell rope coiling thick
around itself. i like to caress the fraying threads
and imagine it’s the pale fuzz on the back of a lover’s neck. Pull hard
and ring three times to call me home, the hushed buzzing an afterthought
to a long night.

I point my face towards the dripping ceiling,
observe that each nail rusts differently to the last,
which is to say that time gnaws at me and imprints
a different stain on each eye with each tear. My skin growing

cratered, i moult and hope to leave an intact shell with each season.
I am jealous

of that temple rope, entangled and disparate, whole in its swinging.

Listen—
there will always be leaving. Mind your step when you pass through, there are too many
splinters under this roof. There will always be crumbling i— think i lost my legs
somewhere i—
can’t see the trail behind me. Am i—
crawling backwards?

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged Ren Jiang

An Anatomy of Romance

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Julia Rose Bąk

Tomorrow I will learn that my body is romantic.
Romantic as in rounded, buxom; romantic as in
assumed to billow. Like Rose, lounging gingerly
in her stateroom, tousled curls lolling on open
shoulders. Like Rose, holding her lover’s gaze
much like a young girl holds a nectarine newly
ripened: tenderly; a question of hunger.

Tomorrow, when I carry my romantic body
to the water — which is to say, when I draw
her a bath — I will rub peppermint oil into her
aching wrists, at which she will sigh the slowing
pulse of a sigh, this sliver of breath an invitation
to press harder: a call to tenderise. Now stop.
Gentler.

Tomorrow, I will romance my body. But today,
under the three p.m. sun, I let her blister.
I click her dimpled knees as I lower us down
to lounge. When somebody asks how she is,
I will tell them she is doing well, as she quietly
unties her muscles’ mess of knots. In the evening,
with thumbs tucked underneath spaghetti straps
I will spell words out on the small of her back,
secrets kept by the curve of her spine.

Tomorrow, as she blinks her eyes into the black
of the bathroom, a single candle tacked to the
sink, the shadows lapping at the plaster will look
like a dozen running horses, and in the shadow of
a stallion, she will spill her own secrets, folding them
into the bathroom walls, and watching
as they’re taken away.

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged Julia Rose Bak

Toby Fitch Reviews Running time by Emily Stewart

Posted on February 10, 2023 by Toby Fitch

Running time by Emily Stewart
Vagabond Press, 2022

Emily Stewart is the author of numerous chapbooks, including Like and The Internet Blue. Her debut poetry collection Knocks (Vagabond Press 2016) won the inaugural Noel Rowe Poetry Award and reflected an assuredly varied approach as it experimented with multiple voices (not just in monologues but polyphonic within poems), erasure as a feminist poetics (with homage-like condensations of Lydia Davis, Helen Garner, Susan Sontag, Clarice Lispector and more), post-digital affect (extracting poetic value from online idioms in particular, though sometimes overwhelming the poetic value), all while interleaving themes of climate change, the cost of living, and more in an exploration of what it means and feels like to live in so-called Australia in the Anthropocene.

Stewart’s latest book Running time (which won the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award for a manuscript by an Australian woman poet) offers a shorter, more localised, more focused, though no less polyphonic, series of poems about her recent time (since the pandemic) living around Ashfield in Sydney’s inner west on unceded Wangal land. And while the poems aren’t about the pandemic, they were generated in the compressed time of 2021’s lockdown. Stewart wrote a piece every day over a couple of months, which gives the book its shape and iterative style.

Each page of the book contains an untitled poem (or fragment), from as little as three lines and up to nineteen lines, the majority falling somewhere in between, like purposefully incomplete or sketched, half sonnets. These fragments are grouped into four sections across the book, titled: ‘So contemporary and so likeable’; ‘Loafing’; ‘Facing the wall’; and ‘Silence is okay’; all of which are quotes from within the poems.

Running time’s syntax refuses conventional poetic devices (like musty metaphor, misty description, high diction, traditional stanzas, heartfelt elegy, starry-eyed ode, precious personification), basic devices that, let’s be honest, are having their heyday again, and that usually perform a guaranteed intensity, the way any genre trope (yes, poetry uses genre tropes too) sets you up to feel things you know you’re going to feel. Stewart makes fun of how plain ‘balsa balsa balsa balsa balsa balsa balsa balsa / balsa balsa balsa balsa balsa balsa wood’ can be because her poetry is developing its own idiosyncratic tropes while taking a stand against the staid, the emotionally manipulative, and the plain boring. And because poems are interstitial – they’re made everywhere, or anywhere, in between everything else (and whenever) – and should be inherently surprising, which Stewart’s invariably are at every turn. The syntax creates the illusion that Stewart is walking or running alongside herself, gathering and noting ‘signs’ as she goes along and then drops them into poems. The poems seem to know just when to drop a subject too; or rather they move swiftly between thoughts, ideas; or perhaps they are the movement of thought. In any event (and there are plenty hinted at, though the focus is more on how feeling and thought can conjure or be conjured by/into language), the poems move languidly from one piece to another, and are sometimes just left hanging, which is not an easy technique to get your heart around, especially if you need poems to end on epiphanies. The syntax might be critiqued as loose, emotional, but I think they feel released. Another technique that unshackles the poems is their eschewing of punctuation. These are the only marks that appear in the four sequences across the book: one comma, one asterisk, two slashes, three ellipses, four dashes, four hyphens and four question marks.

But what are these sequences of untitled fragments, accrued over time, all about? The Helen Anne Bell Award judges write, of Running time: ‘Amid doubt, shame, need and fear, there is courage and insouciance, the subtle pleasure of stretching meaning into a variety of imaginative spaces that open up the limits of conventional language and syntax.’ So, in these poems, what they’re about is entwined in what they’re doing – and Stewart has metapoetic stuff to say about that to boot:

‘I tend towards listing / showy concepts’
‘I can say a lot about the opposite side of things / the alluring challenge / of the unprocessed event’
‘I bring home epoxy filler / truncate an atmosphere’
‘what I’m giving off / is a feeling not a lecture’
[and] ‘of course the details matter’

Here are some random details that might matter:

‘Toyota Echo (intrusive image)’
‘the real work wives of publishing’
‘am I not the gender you asked for’
‘the brain’s rewards centre’
‘I’ll find a job tomorrow / afternoon’
‘dolphin coffee table’
‘dislodged brick / wraparound sunglasses / a toddler’s sock’
‘the building called Oceanic out near Mascot’

In the opening fragment, we find the biggest clue to Stewart’s mode (or mood): ‘at the new pool / I dive into my cerebral offcuts’.

From there, each fragment of offcuts is ‘pushing forward / conceding another day’, at times ‘trying to galaxy brain it’, at other times ‘giving some control back’. There’s a tension between Frank O’Hara-the-art-poet-guru’s manifesto of ‘go on your nerve’ and Stéphane Mallarmé-the-French-aesthete’s doctrine of ‘ceding the initiative to words’.

Pages: 1 2

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged Emily Stewart, Toby Fitch

Anupama Pilbrow on as Reviews Editor

Posted on January 31, 2023 by Anupama Pilbrow

I’m honoured to announce that Anupama Pilbrow has joined Cordite Poetry Review as Reviews Editor.

Anupama Pilbrow is a PhD student at the University of New South Wales researching early science fiction and representations of water. She is the author of chapbook Body Poems, released as part of the deciBels 3 series (Vagabond 2018). Her poems, reviews, and essays have been published in journals and anthologies including Rabbit Poetry Journal, JEASA, Liminal, Southerly and The Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry.

She was editor-in-chief of The Suburban Review from 2017 to 2021, and now holds the role of Vice President of The Suburban Review Inc. Her poetry often deals with delight, disgust, diaspora and the abject.

Posted in GUNCOTTON |

Introduction to Pooja Mittal Biswas’s Hunger and Predation

Posted on December 19, 2022 by Mani Rao

BUY YOUR COPY HERE

In this fifth book of poetry, Pooja Mittal Biswas’s voice achieves musicality. While strong themes lend coherence to the whole, the language cascades and moves forward with an inner force.

The collection’s second poem is in the voice of a pregnant Indian woman with a panoptic view of immigrants in Australia. It defines hunger as the hunger for freedom ‘to be, to be allowed to be, untouched and uncontained, spoken and heard’, and it ends with the resolve that ‘my child will speak.’ We quickly discover that this child, or childlike voice, is the poet herself, as she pores over memories, including those traumatic, to locate herself.

Biswas considers Nigeria her first country; however, in Hunger and Predation, she sets claim to her heritage as Indian. She conducts a dialogue with this Indianness, drawing from it as well as not fitting into its framework. She comments on the restrictive social mores that deny selfhood – ‘a ghost like all women are urged to become.’ By contrast, her own passions are blatant (‘a wolf hiding in the tall grass’).

Biswas uses Indian vocabulary with ease, importing her immigrant voice into Australian literature. Interior monologues with the gods of Indian mythology have a freshness and clear vision that can only come from a distance.

A second theme of this book is gender queerness, which is interrogated as Biswas works through a sense of being ‘agender.’ The yearning to be free of categorisations goes along with the assertion that she is much more than identity. In the poem ‘hir’ she writes ‘of gendered traits, a cartography of the mind that history has mapped onto people as borders are onto nations.’ In another poem, ‘anatomy of an orgasm’, she notes the dissonance – ‘the wiring’s off.’ In ‘glitch’ she writes – ‘& I ask myself one thousand times an afternoon/whether the way I perform gender/ is artificial or the real thing.’ ‘Immunity’ articulates the horror of having been sexually abused in childhood.

Whereas confessional poetry can deteriorate into fetishism, in Biswas’s hands the first person narrative soars – detailed, raw, palpable, her poems have a sense of immediacy.

Hunger and Predation ends with a transported long poem titled ‘madness’ that more than hints at the poet’s mental state and therapy. Stunned, I found myself anxious for the poet – so human is this book, her hunger and predation included.

Posted in INTRODUCTIONS | Tagged Mani Rao, Pooja Mittal Biswas

Erika M Carreon on as Philippines Literature Editor

Posted on December 15, 2022 by Erika M Carreon

I’m honoured to announce that Erika M Carreon joined the Cordite Poetry Review Philippines Literature Editor.

We have worked hard to develop a significant readership in the Philippines, and this posting is a long time coming.

Erika M Carreon co-founded the independent journal Plural Online Prose Journal and published hybrid art and prose projects under Occult’s Razor together with Neobie Gonzalez. Her poems, short stories and translation work have appeared in High Chair, Kritika Kultura, TAYO Literary Magazine, Philippines Free Press, Katitikan, Anomaly Journal, Kalliope X and in Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines. She is currently taking her PhD in creative writing at the University of Melbourne with a special interest in eco-fiction.

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged Erika M Carreon, Kent MacCarter

Submission to Cordite 109: NO THEME 12

Posted on December 13, 2022 by Caitlin Maling

We are now up to one dozen issues where there is no theme.

But Caitlin Maling mentions, ‘Probably because I now spend a lot of the time I used to spend writing with a two-year-old in playgrounds, I’m interested in the idea of poetry as risky play: poems up-in-the-air, working towards something new, clumsy, rough and having fun, but still with something real at stake’

And Nadia Rhook notes, ‘I love the claim of U.S. poet Carolyn D Wright that: ‘It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.’ I’m interested in poems that fill their lungs with permission. What internalised norms and expectations might be un- or re-wired through poetry, what zones of one’s life made free?’

Send us up to three poems.

This podcast sheds some insight on how Cordite Poetry Review (and Cordite Books) works.

Submission to Cordite 109: NO THEME 12 closes 11.59pm Melbourne time Sunday, 5 March 2023.

Please note:

The guest editor(s) has sovereign selection choice for all poems submitted.
Masthead editors will also contribute to the issue.
We will only read submissions sent during our official submission periods.
Please place up to three (3) poems in one (1) Word, RTF or PDF document (unless specifically noted otherwise for special issues), with no identifying details in the document itself.
We are not able to offer feedback on individual poems.
Submissions will only be accepted via Submittable …