Aduantas

Posted on September 1, 2022 by Dan Hogan

If dolphins could fly as good as they swim
we’d experience things like dolphin shadows
whenever we went to the ground to resolve
our undone shoelaces. This absence, too, is
a shape they don’t teach you at business school.
You ever kick it with a dolphin’s shadow? The thing
emotes homologous to the first time you witnessed
your smartphone screen shatter. The thing emotes
homologous to the titillation aroused by editing the
Wikipedia page for ‘ventriloquism’. In the darkness
I thought it was a corner but it was a sex joke about
two walls coming together. Getting closer I thought
cat or ghost, for sure. Strike me down. Shone my
phone and it was a bugle announcing the invention
of flavoured milk(!) I went to school with a kid who
lied to me about dolphins. Said exercise such as
running would cause my brain to release
dolphins. I was working my first job before
I realised he’d mistaken dolphins for endorphins.
Going to tell my grandchildren this was inconsolable
intrigue. Nondescript respite. Nature itself. Ego inquiry.
Selective abstraction. Unmanned nonsense. Sweet
menace. Misfired association. Cathexis. Honey.
Fuck honey. Honey is the reason I got my tooth
drilled out. I was one year old surviving on powdered
milk and honey. My tooth went black and the nerve died.
Going to tell my grandchildren honey is made the same
way as fancy wine. Like instead of stomping on barrels
of grapes, workers jump on piles of dead bees
and all that is left after an hour’s labour
is a puddle of honey. Workers
drunk on beesting venom
jar up the mess
with speechless hands
and no gloves.

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged

James Jiang on as Literature Essays Editor

Posted on August 4, 2022 by Kent MacCarter

I’m honoured to announce that James Jiang will be taking up the helm of Literature Essays Editor for Cordite Poetry Review. His care, craft and academic nous is peerless.

James Jiang is a writer, editor, and recovering academic based in Brisbane where he is Assistant Editor at Griffith Review. In addition to appearing in Cordite Poetry Review, his reviews and essays have been published in a variety of venues in Australia (Sydney Review of Books, Australian Book Review, LIMINAL Magazine) and abroad (Cambridge Quarterly, Ploughshares, Modernism/modernity). He holds a PhD in modernist poetry and poetics from the University of Cambridge, and taught literature and thesis-writing at the University of Melbourne for a number of years before joining Australian Book Review as Assistant Editor (2021–2022). His interests range across poetry (contemporary and historical), the history and theory of criticism, diasporic writing, translation and sport.

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged ,

Rory Green Reviews Theory of Colours by Bella Li

Posted on August 3, 2022 by Rory Green

Theory of Colours by Bella Li
Vagabond Press, 2021


Bella Li’s hybrid poetics of text and image are instantly recognisable. Her third collection Theory of Colours follows on structurally and stylistically from her well-received earlier works: Argosy (2017, Vagabond Books) and Lost Lake (2018, Vagabond Books). Here, as with her previous collections, alchemical concoctions of form and genre blend source materials into sequences with a commitment to the surreal and uncanny. Theory of Colours extends this eclectic approach into what is arguably the most thematically cohesive collection Li has published thus far, delicately threading abstraction and narrative immersion. It is a meticulous book-object, with her attention to detail extending even to the design of the cover and internal typesetting.

The collection’s title is borrowed from poet and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1810 treatise. Goethe’s Theory of Colours is a renowned historical oddity: part challenge of Isaac Newton’s physical theory of light and colour, part catalogue of colour experiments, and part philosophical reflection on the experience of colour. Goethe’s ‘theory’ is less scientific and more perceptual – his colour wheel contains a subsection for allegorical, symbolical, and mystical applications of colour. In contrast to the Newtonian view of colour as a subset of white light, Goethe argues that colour is the result of interactions between dark and light, and that ‘colour itself is a degree of darkness’.

Just as Goethe sees colour as emergent from the mixing of light and dark, Li’s readers find meaning and appreciation in the recomposition of contrasting elements and forms. Absence, and what we piece together in its stead, runs as an underlying theme across the book’s three sections. In the first and titular section, Li relates Goethe’s perceptual colour theory to photography and ghost stories. ‘Coloured Objects’, the entirely visual opening poem, consists of nine image collages in sequence. Each image juxtaposes colour theory diagrams and block colour swatches with black and white photos of drawn from a historical overview of New Zealand photography: sweeping natural vistas and portraits of well-dressed people sitting for the emerging technology are subsumed by the schematics of colour, obscuring faces and bodies and sometimes whole landscapes. One double-fold shows men in suits pose for a group portrait, their faces almost entirely obscured by coloured index tabs. In a later spread, women in light full-length dresses stand in a field of daisies, their bodies all but obliterated by a triptych diagram visualising the phenomena of refraction, where light through a prism splits into its composite colour frequencies.

In this quietly striking poem Li deploys several inversions that grapple with absence. Most prominent is the striking contrast between the black and white photographs and the bright yet constrained colour palette of the interpolated images – the subjects drained of colour by the technology of the early camera are refracted back into colour, but illegibly so. The title too suggests an inversion of the ‘subject’ nominally linked to the portraiture style dominant in the late 1800s; in this visual bricolage they are now objects, mere embodiments of colour phenomena in a scientific positivist lens.

Considering the Aotearoan context of the source images, a colonial spectre pervades this inversion. The early history of photography is interwoven with that of the racial sciences that pervaded the colonial empires of Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As advances in physiology challenged the reliability of human visual perception, photographs were purported to depict an empirical truth that was frequently used to justify notions of racial superiority and the wider colonial apparatus. When ethnic or Indigenous minorities were represented on film, it was typically either as evidence for racial science purposes or as an idealised exotic figure to export back to the white motherland. This exclusion has been continually baked into the technology of photography itself, from the ‘Shirley card’ swatch of a white woman which was for decades the sole measurement for colour photo processing to the computer vision algorithms which misidentify non-white faces due to their omission from data sets used to train these algorithms. Placed in this context, ‘Coloured Objects’ emphasises photography as a vehicle for the erasure of Indigenous culture by forming an erasure of the idyllic colonial vision itself. The well-to-do European subjects of this poem are engulfed in colour theory, transformed into objects of pseudoscientific obsession. This anticolonial reading is no doubt shaped by Li’s renowned poem ‘Pérouse, ou, Une semaine de disparitions’ in her first collection Argosy, which Aden Rolfe suggested ‘can be read as a kind of Pacific revenge against Europe, the natural world reclaiming the civilised, the colony subsuming the coloniser’.

Pages: 1 2 3
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Introduction to Harry Reid’s Leave Me Alone

Posted on July 1, 2022 by Melinda Bufton

BUY YOUR COPY HERE

In Harry Reid’s Leave Me Alone, we enter a nondescript door down a laneway, casually apply the secret knock, and the door slides open – just enough for us to squeeze through sideways before it shuts again. This is not the door to the reception, or to the the main office; it’s the door to the sly-grog palace of language inside our minds. It’s the only way to remove the taste of the weasel words and organisational knots the day’s labours gather. You can get a straight-up glass of viscous word-gin that you could stand a spoon up in. No ice.

To undertake poetry in and of the office is to enter into a pact: you will navigate and handle its materials to their maximal effect in diametric opposition to those materials themselves. That opposition, and the degree to which it’s cranked, is up to the poet.

The device deployed for Reid’s operation is poetic voice and it features as a set of pulleys throughout this book. The intricate set-up has the ‘protagonist’ gesturing towards the everyday layers of the workplace, while showing us how this particular duck navigates its surface and paddles below with bewildered fury. There is little choice (in a dearth of twenty-first century patrons) but also because it is a glorious-appalling game entered into once the ‘contract’ is signed:

what if prerogative turned outwards, as a verb?
what if a problem shared became mine,
entirely?
I make my own hours only
to run off with them,
listening to Luther Vandross in the museum
& still in the ‘fake it’ stage of career construction

This is the core: the poems unfold as a manual of tart and wily response to dire late capitalism, creating a suspended, constantly deferred ending. I need you for now – says the poem’s subject to the office, to its work – but I understand all the terms of this deal.

Reid has concocted, via the gambolling poetic voice, a portrait of routines and musings (some as thought bubbles, some conversational: ‘Ashlee! / please don’t go to New York!’) affectionately, and perhaps faithfully, reproduced so that they may be seen in full uncanniness. All of the office’s materials – its customs, its dialects, its equipment, the roles of its people – are flipped, and, as with a Jeff Koons super-scaled sculpture of the familiar, are made to ask: did you know that annual report contents really look like this? Now that you can see the belly, do you see what’s going on?

Corporate language has always been ripe for the plucking, but poetry’s job is to do something more than pluck. And poets must do more than whip out lunch poems – though O’Hara is a welcome presence through these automatic doors. Poetry of the office must crank the tension and keep true to the pact, squeeze every bit of delight from the ridiculous and permanent present, and keep a little juice over for after-hours, while that term is still remembered.

It is my pleasure to invite you into this nexus of art, precarity, skewering and sincerity. Welcome to the ‘heritage-listed foyer’ – they’ve ordered you a workstation, and your induction starts now.

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50% EOFY Sale

Posted on June 14, 2022 by Kent MacCarter

Uni? Library? College? Reader? Need to shrewdly spend the rest of your 2021-22 budget on #poetry?

Yes, yes you do.

Get 50% off your whole order of Cordite Books titles (as supplies last, and with one copy per title).

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged

Alexis Late Reviews Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist’s Care Pack by Ann Vickery

Posted on June 7, 2022 by Alexis Late

Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist’s Care Pack by Ann Vickery
Vagabond Press, 2021


In ‘Wintering’, the closing poem from her posthumous collection Ariel, and the last in her quintuple sequence about bees, Sylvia Plath writes: ‘will the hive survive, will the gladiolas/Succeed in banking their fires/To enter another year?’ At the time of editing, Plath was enduring one of the coldest English winters on record, one so cold that the Thames froze over. There were daily power cuts, her children were ill with the flu, and her phone was yet to be connected. All of these factors would have exacerbated the depression she was hoping to overcome, but despite the tragedy, much of Plath’s work celebrates renewal. This is especially true of the bee poems. In ‘Wintering’, she notes the hive’s resilience: ‘The bees are so slow I hardly know them, filing like soldiers/to the syrup tin … It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers/They take it. The cold sets in.’ The bees become a source of comfort, a reminder, and the poem ends with the hope for a new season (‘the bees are flying/ they taste the Spring’). ‘Wintering’ may be a paean to the strength of beings enduring hardship, but it is also part of a long line of exquisite writing about bees, from ancient mythologies through to the recent addition of Ann Vickery’s latest collection, Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist’s Care Pack (Vagabond Press, 2021).

In forty-eight multifaceted poems that weave together various feminist, eco-critical and postmodernist observations, Vickery explores this history of human relationships with bees, among other cultural topics, while also acknowledging their endangerment due to human activity. Referred to as Colony Collapse Disorder, the mass disappearance and demise of bee colonies worldwide has become an ongoing crisis since first discovered in 2007. However, instead of honing in on the literal disaster, Vickery examines how and why bees have mattered to us. By taking this slant angle, a la Emily Dickinson, whose own poetry is referenced throughout, she emphasises the wide-spanning tragedy the loss of bees would entail, not only because of their crucial role in pollination, but also, if that fails to move you, because of their place in our cultural history.

Leonardo Da Vinci observes in the collection’s epigraph that ‘the bee gathers its materials from the flowers of the garden … transforms and digests it by a power of its own.’ Humans, on the other hand, often take raw materials and transform them into something poisonous; consequently, we are the failed alchemists. The ongoing tragedy is that the solutions do exist, but are often overridden for profit, a state of cognitive dissonance that Vickery often touches upon. In ‘Diminishing returns?’, which incorporates found lines from Emily Dickinson’s bee poems within the economic context of the title, this unchecked capitalism becomes a colony collapse disorder of its own.

The poem opens with a mash-up of two Dickinson poems that become a descriptor for social media (‘fame is a bee that sings on tracks of plush’), as the poet leads us into a feminist commentary on Instagram, which is envisioned as a hive (‘each hexagonal space of digital wonderland’). Guy Debord’s notion of the Society of the Spectacle as a symptom of late capitalism comes to mind here. Vickery calls for women in particular to ‘abandon the ‘algorithm of killing looks’. She urges influencers to acknowledge and convey ‘the battle space’ of climate change. In her poem ‘Prairie’, Dickinson refers to ‘reverie’, to a looking inwards, a projecting of bees where there are none; Vickery points out that instead of this much-needed ‘reverie’, we are lost in ‘revelry’, amid a currency of images diminished by saturation. The word ‘revelry’ is repeated until it transforms into ‘revery’, suggesting an alchemic change from superficial and often self-centred entertainment to a collective mindfulness that is at once both meditative and active.

The meditative here also includes reflecting upon the absurd, which so often leads to poetic insight. Vickery examines this in ‘Interface’, which pivots on a premise that sounds almost impossible: in 2019, it was discovered that a Taiwanese woman had four bees living off the tears in her left eye, astounding doctors and scientists worldwide. Vickery links this modern phenomenon with the Greek myth of Niobe, who unfortunately made the mistake of boasting about her fourteen children in relation to the goddess Leto’s two; consequently, Leto had the children murdered. Vickery connects Niobe’s grief with that of the protagonist’s, who had been visiting the grave of a loved one when the ‘sweat bees’ (so-named for their attraction to human sweat and tears) flew into her eye, causing it to swell shut: ‘was it the sting/of salt that left her eye so swollen with grief?’. The inflamed eye becomes the embodiment of sorrow, without which the bees would not have been drawn to her eye. The woman’s grief sustains the bees (‘sustained by Niobe’s tears, the bees secured their empire’), but there is a contemporary twist: the bees are ‘livestreaming’, as they actively drink through the camera of her eye. Miraculously, the story ends happily, as both the bees and the woman’s eyesight were saved by ‘straitened resilience/ to bear pain’s grit’, the implication perhaps being that much could be saved in the long-term, including the bees and ourselves, if we could just endure the temporary pains incurred by change.

Pages: 1 2
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the strangler fig

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Tanya Thaweeskulchai

but upon whose faces
does the shadowed row of half-moons fall?
justly, the doorway beckons
with care exaggerated;
it issues an invitation: come,
provide these offerings
remember what you were like as a child
crossing this bridge, dropping bruised petals and coins
to guide them to their new homes

what use is beauty when so many are dying?

say, of your leaving:
a screech, tiny and hinged on rusted metal,
and a hook upon my waking without sight
where night is safest; in darkness
red house shrines calm us (there are tiny offerings)
but what do we know of sacrifice except
leaving and death, and asking without giving

yes, loss visits
we anticipate it all the time
in whose honour do we grieve, with whose permission?
I see nothing now, my mind has left
my body disappearing, look,
look how the zephyrs gently brush me aside
then gaily blow, then soaring—
whose counting do I hear, ticking
whose outside world are we in—surely not mine
ribcage happily broken then pulled apart
the juicy delicious bits primed
to be masticated
take me in, and in being consumed, digested,
            excreted:
worse than dirt. no nourishment.

since then, I’ve written your death on a piece of paper—I’ve always seen clearly, you know; I’ve even tried to slow down the process, to buy you time: the whole tedium of papermaking, mixing ink, controlling how the black seeps into the hair of the brush, then sliding down, and then, cutting paper dolls into images of you to tell your ghosts: he is not so interesting after all; and having stooped so low, me, reduced to begging for another’s mercy for your sake (as if you are worth the price) in a place where the windows are tinted grey and heat-resistant; below them, marsh and sand condensed like tiny winged creatures crushed in my hand. waste.

eat them, I say, eat these little corpses, that exciting taste of imminent, irrevocable decay, of swirling terror that wakes your palatal taste buds, just a little—and you think you want more?

                                                                                                                                                no!

waste begets waste, worse than microbes
scraped from under one’s toenail while listening
for the house bell, and inside the structure, what we’ve done flickers
there, then gone, and there again
fireflies—at first many, now one,
she eats the guts of children, relishes
the fatty linings of intestines, then
flying away, she rids herself
what remains when our hope is scattered,
no longer floating in water, but strewn
here and there, over the bodies of our ancestors
(encroaching on the lands of angry house-dwelling spirits)
left under the strangler fig; while parasitic, its shade
shields them from the sun, later to be cut down,
and, when unprotected, their eyes will open,
bright with laughter
saying, we love you and we own you, but know this:
you’re worth little more than a mayfly,
not worth the collecting, the pinning, the use
of a coveted, carefully carved frame

our sky-covered memories, bloodied
as if to say, love, speak clearly, and
see the sacrifices that hang in a row
right above our heads—
those who have come before us,
peeled away, and knowing what we know
of what has been stripped from us
Posted in 105: NO THEME 11 | Tagged

2 Nhã Thuyên Translations by Kaitlin Rees

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Kaitlin Rees


Image courtesy of photo by Đồng Thảo.

don’t hide the madness

this room’s determined to not let in anyone more, someone rumbles, so should i just leave now then, is there still time, sham, someone grumbles, so should i leave and wait for someone to invite me back in then, running that mouth, someone mutters, so should i just stick my feet right to this spot then, a shadow doesn’t just up and vanish, someone sulks, i’m not wakeful enough for thoughts to hatch, to turn inward the head to turn outward the head, to glance up to a ceiling, to look down at some feet, to furrow a brow at the door, to pin eyes to wall, to stand still, sit tight, squat, flat, stretch, lean, against a chair’s back, huddled into a corner, my throat sprouts hair, my throat snags fishbone, someone’s with me in the room, i’m in the room with some other, some other who doesn’t welcome some other one, some other who particularly doesn’t welcome me, so what more am i waiting for, a hot tea, a potent wine, a blank word to erase me clean or an equivocal grammar with the touch of a hand keeps me fluttering for life, i thrust myself toward wall, should keep a determined distance from our delusions, wall says, but in thrusting what’s left to fear of windstorms, i counter, i thrust again closer, don’t face the biting wind, don’t waste an entire life bewildered beside someone you’re unable to talk with unable to talk to the end with unable to talk without ending with, wall advises, someone pours, someone is lifting the cup, i invite wall to a little something, keep me away from light’s infection, wind’s contagion, and fragrance’s bondage, i am darkness-philic, silence-preferring, barrier-constructing, perfume-blocking and all expressive words-intercepting, wall states solemnly, i submit to muteness, my tongue cannot indifferently break open a word, i submit to muteness, lips part in a soul’s blush, my tongue doesn’t know wisdom by way of reason, i submit to muteness, my tongue vines crawling up crawling down, i submit to muteness, my tongue cannot be a wave slapping the face, i submit to muteness, wall suddenly looks at me, looks straight into me, i flush, keep speaking, keep revealing that blushing soul, keep opening words rapturous and naive, keep twisting vines and tangling intestines, keep roaming near and far upstream and down, just go on and howl out one slap in the face, wall reassures me, suddenly my eyes on wall’s face, my hair spills onto wall’s forehead, my hand fondles wall, my leg wraps around wall, my body slips into wall, my shadow melts into wall’s shadow, i flush, i tingle, i stop thinking with absurdity, i blabber babble, my tongue murmurs burbles, my tongue grumbles, my tongue guts tangle and twist, my tongue purrs earthwardly, my tongue reverberates skywardly, my tongue trills birdily, my tongue bobs butterflyingly, is tongue a butterfly or is a butterfly my tongue, my tongue stumbles worldly, my tongue shrouds underworldly, my tongue soars heavenly, my tongue surrounds me in holy traps and earthly nets, perhaps the only way left for me is to push the head in, wrap the self up, coiled tightly, trapped, a snarled knot, i coo, dear wall, i love you, i endure you, i accept you, i response you, i need to have you, i die from of you, i live from of you, like the smell of sweat, the smell of wet moss, the smell of stagnant wind, the smell of curdled darkness, the smell of strangulated fever, as if wall had just expelled a cold breath, as if wall had just been set ablaze, someone pours something, i am sipping something, i invite wall to a little something, keep me from light’s infection, wind’s contagion, and fragrance’s bondage, i am darkness-philic, silence-preferring, barrier-constructing, perfume-blocking and all expressive words-intercepting, don’t let any corner of mouth any slice of tongue any piece of tooth cut my cords and leave me swaying insane, dear wall, i love you, i endure you, i accept you, i response you, i die from of you, i die from of no you, i die beside you, i live beside you, dear wall, i coo, try to raise my volume, dear wall, i love you, i endure you, i accept you, i response you, i die from of you, i die from of no you, i die beside you, i live beside you, dear wall, grant me a crack in and out the antennae of an ant, wall, grant me a slab of broken limestone a stick of bamboo to scribble with, wall, grant me a block of brick the cat can scratch, wall, grant me a morsel of green moss, wall, grant me a scoop of sunshine, wall, grant me a wind hole that passes a fragrance, wall, stop growing any taller, stop growing ever-thicker, wall, my tongue has left only one desperate plea which no one comprehends, please wall, wall


đừng giấu cơn điên

căn phòng này đã nhất định không để ai vào nữa, ai đó rì rầm, vậy giờ tôi nên ra chăng, kịp chăng, vờ vĩnh, ai đó làu bàu, vậy tôi cứ ra và đợi ai đó mời tôi vào lại chăng, nhiều chuyện, ai đó quạu quọ, vậy tôi cứ dính chân chỗ này được chăng, cũng chẳng bỗng dưng mất cả bóng được, ai đó lầm lì, tôi chẳng đủ tỉnh mà nghĩ ngợi đặt bày, quay đầu vào hay quay đầu ra, ngó lên trần, nhìn xuống chân, nheo mày phía cửa, ghim mắt trên tường, đứng yên, ngồi lặng, xổm, bệt, duỗi, ngả, dựa lưng ghế, rúc xó nhà, họng tôi mọc tóc, họng tôi mắc xương, ai đang cùng phòng tôi, tôi đang cùng phòng một ai khác, một ai không chào đón ai khác nữa, một ai càng không chào đón tôi, tôi đợi gì nữa, một trà nóng, một rượu nồng, một lời trắng tẩy sạch tôi hay một ngữ pháp nhập nhằng kèm cú chạm tay giữ tôi phấp phỏng níu mạng, tôi xáp vào tường, nhất định phải giãn cách với điều ta vọng tưởng, tường nói, nhưng đã xáp lại còn e gì gió bão, tôi cự, tôi xáp lại thêm, đừng gió táp, đừng mất cả đời chỉ để hoang mang cạnh một ai mình không sao nói cùng không sao nói cho cùng không sao nói cho không cùng, tường nhắc, ai đó rót, ai đó đang nhấc chén, tôi mời tường một thứ gì, đừng để tôi lây sáng, nhiễm gió và lụy thơm, tôi đang ưa tối, thích im, dựng vách, ngăn hương và chắn tất thảy biểu cảm lời, tường nghiêm giọng, tôi đành câm, tiếng tôi cất lời đã khó lạnh lùng, tôi đành câm, mở môi đã thẹn, tiếng tôi không biết khôn qua lẽ, tôi đành câm, tiếng tôi dây leo bò lên bò xuống, tôi đành câm, tiếng tôi không thể sóng đánh vỗ mặt, tôi đành câm, tường bỗng nhìn tôi, nhìn thẳng, tôi đỏ lựng, cứ nói, cứ bày nỗi thẹn, cứ mở lời dại ngây, cứ dây cà dây muống gan ruột lòng thòng, cứ xa gần xuôi ngược, cứ gào lên vỗ mặt một lần, tường trấn an tôi, bỗng mắt tôi đã mặt tường, tóc tôi xòa bờ trán tường, tay tôi lần sờ tường, chân tôi quặp tường, thân tôi lẩn tường, bóng tôi chen bóng tường, tôi đỏ lựng, tôi ngứa ran, tôi thôi nghĩ về lố bịch, tôi mấp máy, tiếng tôi mập mà mập mị, tiếng tôi làm ràm, tiếng tôi tơ vò ruột rối, tiếng tôi âm âm đất, tiếng tôi u u trời, tiếng tôi lách chách chim, tiếng tôi bồng bềnh bướm, tiếng tôi là bướm hay bướm là tiếng tôi, tiếng tôi chập chũng trần gian, tiếng tôi mịt mùng địa phủ, tiếng tôi chấp chới cao xanh, tiếng tôi bủa vây tôi thiên la địa võng, có thể tôi chỉ còn cách đâm đầu vào, quấn mình, cuộn thít, mắc kẹt, rối một mớ, tôi rủ rỉ, này tường, tôi yêu người, tôi thương người, tôi ưng người, tôi phản hồi người, tôi cần có người, tôi chết vì người, tôi sống vì người, như là mùi mồ hôi, mùi rêu ẩm, mùi gió quẩn, mùi bóng tối quánh sệt, mùi cơn sốt ngạt, như là tường vừa toát hơi lạnh, tường vừa bắt lửa, ai đó rót gì, tôi đang nhấp một thứ gì, tôi mời tường một thứ gì, đừng để tôi lây sáng, nhiễm gió và lụy thơm, tôi đang ưa tối, thích im, dựng vách, ngăn hương và chắn tất thảy biểu cảm lời, đừng để một dẻo miệng nào một thửa lưỡi nào một miểng răng nào làm tôi thất thanh điên đảo, này tường, tôi yêu người, tôi thương người, tôi ưng người, tôi phản hồi người, tôi chết vì người, tôi chết vì không người, tôi chết bên người, tôi sống bên người, này tường, tôi rủ rỉ, ráng nâng giọng, này tường, tôi yêu người, tôi thương người, tôi ưng người, tôi phản hồi người, tôi chết vì người, tôi chết vì không người, tôi chết bên người, tôi sống bên người, này tường, cho tôi một khe nứt râu kiến thụt thò, tường, cho tôi một mảng vôi vỡ que tre nguệch chữ, tường, cho tôi một ô gạch mèo cào, tường, cho tôi một thẻo rêu xanh, tường, cho tôi một vốc nắng, tường, cho tôi một lỗ gió đưa thơm, tường, thôi đừng cao thêm, thôi đừng dầy lên mãi thế, tường, tiếng tôi chỉ còn một lời khẩn cầu không ai hiểu, này tường, tường,



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‘Thinking is not a problem’: Alice Allan Interviews Antonia Pont

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Alice Allan

Antonia Pont’s debut collection of poetry, You Will Not Know in Advance What You’ll Feel came out with the Rabbit Poets Series at the end of 2019. I went to her launch, where Antonia read in response to poems that her friends had written in reply to poems in her book. Antonia is one of those people writing poetry in Australia whom you may not have heard of – even though she’s been working at this craft for many years. Antonia is not only a poet, but an essayist, an educator of writing and literature at Deakin University, and a yoga teacher. Antonia founded her own yoga school in 2009 and is one of those people who has a very particular, very special, perspective on life. Antonia says things like: ‘you only want to lose your “self” once you’ve got one’. In this interview, Antonia speaks about the vicious momentum of trying. She also says things like: ‘writing needs a body that functions’. In describing how she spent time in the 2020 lockdowns, Antonia mentions steadiness laziness, pleasure, and kindness.

Alice Allan: I’d like to launch straight into talking about your wonderful book. My first question is around the title. The book is called: You Will Not Know in Advance What You’ll Feel, which on the surface sounds like an obvious statement but, as I was driving over here, I was thinking that there’s actually a lot in that. I’m wondering if you would like to unpack how you landed on the title and what significance the phrase has to you.

Antonia Pont: I know exactly where I landed on the title. It was in the backyard of a suburban house in Munich, where my friend, Bettina Thiel, who knew I was getting on a plane within 10 hours, had said: ‘I’ll make food; you just lie on the deck chair and relax’. It was a very kind thing. Sometimes there’re those magical moments when someone tells you to stay put, says: ‘rest there, in this nice place with a nice sky and a vegetable garden to look at’. Of course, if you’re a poet relaxing, it’s also: ‘wow, words are coming to me. I’d better write something down’. It doesn’t feel like work; it’s not like you’re working. So, that’s where the phrase came from. I was at a difficult point with my feelings, torn in a certain situation and – in the suffering of that – I was using this phrase to alleviate that suffering. Saying to myself: ‘you’re quite sure the feelings will be terrible, but you don’t know that they will be terrible. So maybe just try to imagine that you don’t know, rather than fixating on how certain and all-knowing you are that they will be terrible’. It was a comforting mantra that I was using to steady myself as I transitioned from Europe back to Australia.

Now, people keep saying the title of my book back at me when I’m in a conversation and I make some imprecise statement: ‘yes, but Antonia, you don’t know in advance how you’ll feel’.

AA: But sometimes maybe you just want to have the whinge.

AP: Yes!

In my intellectual work – or whatever the right word for that is – I’m very interested in time, and in notions of futurity that, in the last years, have gone via a certain reading of Nietzsche and other writers, via the eternal return and Deleuzian stuff about an open future. And, I guess, I’ve come to see that pessimism is very imprecise.

AA: That’s also very cool title.

AP: Yes. Pessimism is very imprecise.

AA: Back to the book, Lisa Gorton wrote some beautiful words. One of the things she says is that, like Woolf’s novel, The Waves, this work ‘creates the silence out of which it speaks’. I was wondering what you think about that comparison. Like, that’s a big comparison – to be compared to Virginia Woolf.

AP: Lisa’s very kind, that’s what I’ll say. She’s very kind. She knows how to do a good book blurb. I was very touched because we actually hadn’t discussed my thematics or original intentions around the book very much at all. So, I was both astonished (and also not, given it’s Lisa) that her reading was so astute. It was so harmonious with the work, as well as extending and clarifying my own efforts in the work. She reflected something back, and I thought: ‘I feel totally comfortable with that description’. And I wouldn’t have been able to say it myself [about the emphasis on] silence and time … but it is true; it’s what I obsess about the most. The confirmation that the poetry itself would deliver that [preoccupation] to the reader even though I’m not trying to write a poem about time or silence, and that Lisa took that from my writing, was very interesting. I guess it shows what a close reader of poetry she is. I think it was impressive.

AA: You mentioned the thematics, which is kind of where I want to go next. There are a few I wanted to delve into. I’ll start with this one: eroticism. As I said, after I’d read it and when I emailed you about the book, it’s a very sexy book. It is comfortable in that eroticism and joyful, and there’s even humour in that. I’m thinking of the poem, ‘Octofurcation’, which I think is very sexy and also quite funny; I take it as funny. Do you think that eroticism is off limits to poets?

AP: I think I’ve been a crusader for women’s having desire from a disturbingly young age, probably since conversations with my mother at 11, saying: ‘I don’t understand why sex is different from conversation. You know, some people you have conversations with, and other people you have sex with. Why is it different?’ And, of course, my mother was probably horrified, and immediately concerned about her slutty daughter – who was speaking purely from a theoretical basis at that tender age. She was like: ‘yeah, but it is different, darling.’ I guess you then spend a lifetime working out how it’s different and why – and making tactical errors along the way or clarifying and nuancing that area in your life, that aspect of being a person.

I’m a body practitioner – have done that from a young age – and if you engage seriously with the body, at some point you have to engage with one’s failures to respect the body and also with our learnt hating of the body as a kind of micro, daily practice. For me, as I got into feminism in my twenties, early twenties – you know, Melbourne University and the Student Union there – I ran this [earnest] body-image feminist group, where we might go away on weekends and do life drawing, and [eat and] … whatever. We were trying out ways of self-care, doing clumsy things. Because I’d acknowledged that, basically, feminists had to say: ‘yeah, I’m not my buttocks’, to quote Kaz Cook, a great statement. But I also saw that women could then feel doubly guilty, [guilty about their bodies plus guilty] ‘cause they did still want a different relation with their body. The body is this fraught site of stuff. I think for me there’s something that connects deciding to respect the body with a kind of eroticism that doesn’t feed off the abject.

So, some years ago, I began a set of poems that is partially in the book. (There’re other, more appalling ones that Jess Wilkinson at Rabbit and I decided weren’t gonna be in there.) But I really just wanted to try to write erotic poems from a woman’s perspective that were neither talking about ‘how great it is that you desire me’ (that classic thing of the woman’s position as desiring the desire of the man, if it’s a het-scene), nor celebrating abjection, which is a [common] way to go, but it’s not my style or politics. It was – like you mentioned – about a kind of joy and playfulness. So, I asked myself: can I write a sexy poem? Because sexy poems are often embarrassing.

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6 Aya Mansour Translations by Haider Catan and Tim Heffernan

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Haider Catan

The words of mothers

They didn’t allow me to collect the remaining perfume of my child, to arrange and hold it in my nose. On his return from the battlefield, he was impatient, and as usual he forgot many things: this time his right hand, and his soul as well, as he was satisfied with a bullet in his lung’s pocket, with a torn bag of second hand death. I — with no hope — begged them, but they took him to the cemetery without letting me see him, so many months of useless crying. I suggested they might pick my eyes, and feed them to the mouth of the grave, so the eyes could watch my son. There, if he needed water my eyes would shed tears. I hope that his hand grows back, or that my crying could wet his drying heart. I was surprised when I found the windows of the grave open, while the place was empty. The sounds of shelling and bullets were heard from a hole leading to the battlefield.

أحاديث الامهات

لم يسمحوا لي بلملمة ما تبقى من روائح صغيري، لترتيبها وضمها في خزانات أنفي. بعودته من الجبهة، كان مستعجلا، و ناسيا كعادته: العديد من الاشياء، هذه المرة نسي يده اليمنى، وروحه كذلك، كان مكتفيا برصاصة في جيب رئته مع كيس ممزق لموت مستعجل؛ لكني – ودون نتيجة – توسلتهم، و ذهبوا به الى متحف المقبرة دون أن اراه، و لعدة اشهر، من التفريط بالبكاء بلا فائدة؛ اقترحت أن يقطفوا عيني، و يطعموها لفم القبر، عسى أن تطمئن على ابني، هناك، أذا ما كان بحاجة لسقيه بالنحيب. عسى أن تنمو يده او يبلل جفاف قلبه بكائي، لكنني تفاجأت و انا اجد نوافذ القبر مفتوحة. بينما المكان خال، كانت اصوات القصف والرصاص تبنعث من ثقب يؤدي الى الجبهة.

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‘We’re masters at taking the way we speak and communicate’: L-FRESH The LION in Conversation with Simone Amelia Jordan

Posted on June 1, 2022 by L FRESH the LION


Image courtesy of L-FRESH The LION.

When I first heard of Simone Amelia Jordan, she was editing The Source magazine, the world’s longest-running rap periodical. I remember reading her articles covering emerging hip hop artists from Australia, exposing them to an international audience who have become accustomed to having their taste in music crafted by The Source. ‘She’s from here’, my friends would tell me. She’s one of our own.

From Burwood in Western Sydney to New York City, the birthplace and capital of hip hop, Simone Amelia Jordan has pioneered a pathway for music journalists from the most unlikely of places. We sat down to chat about our own individual journeys into hip hop and to share our love and passion for the music and culture that has shaped our lives.

L-FRESH The LION: In my eyes, you are a pioneer of hip hop culture in Australia. The work you’ve done as a journalist has taken you from writing about the small yet exciting and emerging scene in Sydney and Australia, more broadly, to landing one of the most coveted editorial roles in hip hop at the culture and genre’s home of New York City. However, before we talk about the barriers you had to break to get there, I want to start at the beginning. Can you talk about where you grew up and what drew you to hip hop culture?

Simone Amelia Jordan: I grew up in the Inner West and Western Sydney. I was born and raised there. I come from Lebanese and Greek Cypriot immigrants. My Lebanese family were one of the first Lebanese families to come from their village in Lebanon, so we’ve been here a very long time. I hung out in Burwood my whole life, that’s the hood that I claim. It’s changed a little now but 20-30 years ago, it was different. I also spent a lot of time hanging out across other parts of Western Sydney too, as many of us did in those days as teenagers of the mid-’90s.

I honestly gravitated towards hip hop from the moment I understood I was listening to music. And at that point, which was late ’80s when I was like eight or nine years old, that was when hip hop and R&B really married. And so, I came of age, I guess, as a music listener when new jack swing was huge and the two genres, rap and R&B, which had been quite separate up until then, came together. I was privy to seeing those genres marry and the magic that they made. I came upon artists like Mary J. Blige, like Heavy D & the Boyz, and all of those classic new jack swing artists like Father MC, Joe C, the Uptown Record vibe of Andre Harrell and Puffy. That was my entry into the music and it was just such an incredible entry.

LFtL: There’s nothing else like that synergy in the fusion of rap and R&B. I’m a generation or two removed from seeing that happen in real time but with that said, so many of my favourite songs when I was a teenager were of that fusion like Fabolous and Ashanti, the many rap tracks with the queen of choruses Mary J. Blige, Lauryn Hill and The Fugees. The list goes on. What excited me was the fusion of the melodies with the word play of the lyrics and the rhythm and style of the rap verses. And most importantly for me, the story telling drew me in. The songs I was listening to inspired me to become more than a fan by getting involved in the culture, and for me, that was through writing songs and making beats. I felt compelled to share my story through music. What was it that motivated you dive in and become actively involved as a participant in hip hop?

SAJ: I was writing raps at about eight, nine years old. I remember the first time I wrote rap lyrics was when my family and I lived for two years on the Central Coast, between 1989 and 1990. We were whisked away from the cultural melting pot of Sydney into this very homogenous lily-white environment. We lived in a suburb called Point Clare on the Central Coast and we were called ‘wog’ every five seconds. My sister started kindergarten there. The other kids called her ‘poo eyes’. My mum was a barmaid. She got a job in a pub up there and one man at the bar asked her: ‘what do you people eat?’ She turned around and said: ‘rocks, my boy.’ So against that backdrop of feeling very different, and coming into my own, and loving hip hop and R&B music, I started writing rhymes.
LFtL: Do you remember what your first rhymes were about?

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YEARN MALLEY

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Ursula Robinson-Shaw

THE END OF MY PUBLIC LIFE

I always thought beauty was important.
I always hated anecdotes. I only ever cared
for power, how I might
take it in my hand. I never want to write
about my mother. I love you, and one day
you’ll die. That’s the right approach.
Landscape of my affections,
It’s the thought
That counts, or the contour of it,
It’s your vagueness I admire.
I could drop a coin in your brain and it would bounce.
I’m sick of aphorisms too, but what else is there?
Short, high-pitched sounds,
Tram accidents of the heart. Pain is just an expression,
A way to survive this sharp spike
in sentiment. How many angels
dance on the pin
of your head? It’s unjust
how many guys are up there,
in heaven. I’m a
robber of dead men, a ‘delight’. It’s dreamy,
like a dream is a trick. What the mind conceals
the soul will out

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Portrait, Lyric, Code: Reading the Face Before and After Laura Riding Jackson’s Body’s Head

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Tyne Daile Sumner

HAIR

1506
A young woman sits partially side-on. Her right hand is wrapped lightly around her left wrist.
She wears no necklace, no rings. She sits against a blue sky. Pale blue, with a sort of smudge. But sometimes it can also appear grey, depending on who is looking. Her clothes are dark and unexceptional, enfolded by her long brown hair like a shawl. Or is her hair red? Cast in different colours, it takes on different forms. Some say: ‘Her hair is clearly red.’ Her hair, some say, is anything but. Her hair, whatever its colour, sits loosely around her shoulders. It fades in parts, dissolving almost imperceptibly into her head. Scans have revealed that she was originally painted with her hair tied back. A controversial 16th century Italian myth. Her surroundings stretch seventy-seven centimetres high and fifty-three centimetres wide. About the size of a wall calendar. About the size of a building tile. When most people see her for the first time, they’re surprised at just how ordinary she is. They expected something bigger, brighter, more animated perhaps. If it weren’t for the perpetual crowd who shove and nudge one another in front of her to get a closer look, you might be forgiven for unknowingly walking right past. But you’d probably stop and look. And you’d wonder about her hair. You’d think to yourself: what colour is her hair?

1925
Separate and silk,
A scarf unwoven,
Thin enough to strain the sun,
Thick enough to keep a little of it—
A little less brown the earth would be
If rain changed from silver to gold—
Lean out anxiously over my forehead,
Trembling and giddy and falling
At the top of skyscraper me.1

2022
‘In January 2021, OpenAI introduced DALL·E. One year later, our newest system, DALL·E 2, generates more realistic and accurate images with 4x greater resolution.’2

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NO THEME XI Editorial

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Emily Stewart

A lot happened over the months we spent working on this issue, from November when we published our playful, hyperactive call-out, to now, the beginning of winter, a date that marks a shift in the year’s trajectory. It’s time to take a breath and then what …

Our call-out sought to find poems that would energise us. We wanted some acknowledgement of the time that has passed, that is passing; we asked how you were going. We recognised instinctively that to gather a group of writers and poems together at this post-not-really pandemic juncture was to realise a new flux of tendencies and concerns, to recognise, collectively, the textures of change that have been revealed to us.

Editing this issue was pleasurable and intense. The Cordite Poetry Review selection process is famously anonymous and we surprised ourselves repeatedly in what we accepted and what we turned down. Each of us had our peccadillos, for sure. And as a ‘we’ we were emboldened by the opportunity to cast aside our routine tendencies and scripts. Most of all, we remembered how needy we are, beside a poem. How much we need the work of poetry and its sublime, strange tenterhooks.

We looked for thumbprints, for poems with purchase, a little give. We read each poem affectionately, amid the bluster of our daily lives, the only way possible. The sheer volume of works submitted to us meant we searched imperfectly, yet the selection here, in the final revision, is complete in itself, and we thank each contributor dearly for their effort.

It’s hard for us to bring to mind an individual poem without recalling its echoes and juxtapositions; our brains have thoroughly woven what we’ve gathered. At a certain point, the poems we chose merged together to become the singular long poem NO THEME 11, in all its variety and facets. On this windy morning, this is our offering. A collective poem, born in time.

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On Kinds of Aunts, Dorothy Porter’s Barbaroi and the Head of a Gorgon

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Micaela Sahhar


This essay his essay was developed during a Next Chapter Varuna Residency.

My youngest aunt, Irene, has a dream which she recounts to me, one unremarkable morning, when I am reading to my father over the phone. It centres on a relative, now dead (and about whom, with great generosity of spirit, Irene later remarks had some finer qualities) and although I call it a dream, what she describes is most certainly a nightmare, structured around her subconscious familiarity with Greek mythology (a universe of gods to which our own family has some slight genealogical connection), and her interpolation of this relative’s head onto that of a Gorgon.

Though the Gorgon (and Medusa particularly) formed a central focus of post-modern theorisation pertaining to the female gaze and the reclamation of tropes, such as in Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber – where a biological mother (elsewhere scant in her work) erupts like a geyser of staggering precision, to spume destructive fury against a voracious and violent husband while simultaneously snatching her daughter from his maw – this is not (I suspect) the intention of my aunt’s subconscious mind in conjuring this unbidden metaphor to her attention. Rather, what appears to her resembles the herpetophobia which is presupposed by the reptilian dimension of swathed snakes in the place of Medusa’s hair.

It is quite by chance that my aunt has this dream at a moment of consonance with the work I am reading my father, which touches in part on the role that cinema takes in his childhood and also Irene’s, these two youngest children of refugees who, also evangelists, are thus quite censorious of the easy consumption of popular culture. It is in large part owing to this mentality, combined with the exigencies of poverty and the decade they are children in, that theirs is a childhood which features very few films, so few that compared to perhaps you or I, the two youngest children remember each one, its name and who took them, because they are only permitted a trip to the cinema with trusted friends and family members, which had less connection to the feature proposed as to the perceived moral character of the chaperones.

For example, the first film my father recalls is Disney’s Old Yeller, in which the feature (quite mawkish) is no more significant to Dad than the women who took him, Mrs Livermore and Mrs Lindsay, both near neighbours of his parents and members of the Williamstown Gospel Mission on Electra Street. Dad remembers quite a lot about their families and business enterprises, one who had an adult child that never left home and died quite young, and who would only serve refreshments to my grandmother Ellen, because, (as he was unabashed to report in the lounge room of guests), she was the only one who was nice to him. The other woman ran a small shop in a shed at the front (or was it the back) of her property, which was not even the size of a milk bar, nor rightly called one, and which later burnt down. Dad recounts to me what he describes as the ‘Livermore smell’, a dubious distinction resurrected by this recollection, (and which I think must have tempered the pleasure of a trip to the cinema), to be engulfed in the darkened theatre beside a woman whose face you can’t quite remember, but whose indelible smell has hung across more than half-a-century, to catch you at moments like when you’re recounting a story about a long forgotten film.

There are naturally things one might say of the dead which can still hurt the living, and I will not recount to you the more vivid dimensions of Irene’s dream other than to say it impresses upon her a similar feeling to that, which I imagine, is impressed on both her and my father as still small children, when the woman who will become their sister-in-law takes them to a screening of Exodus. Dad and Irene are so marooned by this story (which is dismissive of who they know themselves to be) that rather than drawing strength from one another’s presence that day, it lays waste to their memory, and each now confirms with the other (and with aching hesitancy) that six-decades since they both sat in the cinema together, like two bits of driftwood, shipwrecked against the blatant fabrications of Exodus. Yet it is some testament to the inherent strength of their parents, or perhaps to the lateral bonds in families, that these two Palestinian children (who did not, so far as I know, conceive of themselves as political), experience this film then, and now again in their memory, as the insult it is to all Palestinians and which is now characterised, if it was not then, as a ‘Zionist epic’. And somewhere, in the two-hundred and eight minutes of the screening, these two youngest children both form a view of their soon-to-be sister-in-law that is impressionistic, but like any good impression captures an accurate shape of how things will be over the next five-and-a-half decades, (but they are also children, and they keep it to themselves).

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17 Works by Sary Zananiri

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Sary Zananiri


Sary Zananiri | Performing self, performing other #1 (2020) | Edition of 15 + 1 AP | Manipulated photographic postcard sourced from Palestinian family archives | 20 x 12.5 cm

From around the late 19th century a number of studio photographers in Jerusalem, Jaffa and other cities began to offer portraits in what was couched as ‘traditional’ costumes, provided by the studio. The phenomenon has been described as ‘cultural cross dressing’ and analysed primarily as an Orientalist phenomenon targeted at Western tourists and visitors to the region. Significantly less attention has been paid to participation in the practice by local Arab and Armenian populations.

The act of donning ‘traditional’ clothing for urban Palestinians was in fact a transgressive act, not so much culturally as with their western counterparts, but rather in terms of class. The misconstrual of such images today as authentic documents speaks to the lack of understanding of the modern urban middle classes who commissioned such photos. Indeed, a matrix of class and modernity distanced these urban middle class Palestinians from such costumes that – by this period – were seen as the purvey of the rural or the working classes.

Working with images drawn from Palestinian family photo albums, this series explores questions of identity and authenticity in images of ‘cultural cross dressing’. What emerges in these photos is the ways in which urban Palestinians related to their rural compatriots, the perceived authenticity of fellah identity, and a very modern process of reconstructing the past in line with the nationalism of the Nahda.

The pixilation of figures in this series disrupts the act of spectatorship, obscuring faces and bodies, but also intentionally references mosaics. With the growth of archaeological institutes in the region in the late 19th and early 20th century, a series of debates arose about the re-laying of Byzantine mosaics in churches in the West Bank and Jordan to remove human figures with the beginning of Umayyad rule. Western scholars argued that churches were forced to remove human figures in deference to Islamic proscription. Such theses were later debunked given that much of Umayyad visual culture included human figures. More recent scholarship has argued that the re-laid mosaics are likely an outcome of cultural syncretism as process of conversion took place in the early Islamic period. By conjuring the mosaics through pixilation, this series attempts to draw longitudinal correlation between Palestinian bodies, their effacement and periods of rapid cultural change.

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The melancholy of the inverted

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Matthew Clarke

A gilt-framed painting of Strawberry Hill, seraphs
carved in stone, chatelaines and belts, velvet, sad
little notes ‘for the jaded decadent to wonder at,’
the boy at the loom, presentation copies, gifts of
any kind, a monody, the telegram: ‘burn my letters,’
a white surplice, his photos of the Acropolis, a
polaroid stuck in a book, embroidery, an envelope
edged in black, burning eyes beneath the veil, an
antique scalpel, sonnets painted on a wall, a bedsit,
a cathedral, the dream of a seafarer, typescript in
boxes, a portrait of the king, rain on Magdalen
Bridge, fieldfares, a child’s play staged in a garden,
a hand mirror, a comb, an illustration of the proposal,
fleur-de-lis, a bone in the throat, a curved frame with
a spindle back, videotape, an ancient pose, white
embossed card, buttresses, eyes across a gangway,
an impression made in wax, brocade, a postcard from
Menton, the son of a judge, plovers’ eggs, violet ink,
a record of her condition, a ticket, the sensation of
falling, a motion picture, an index, a fire on the hill.

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Where did my brain go? Oh, it’s there again

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Nina Carter

After Camp Hill

When I see Felice I feel
the urge to write. Isn’t that funny felice?
I feel the urge. Maybe
you knew me in another life or
maybe you remind me of my life’s work
or that thing they call passion ‘find what it is
that you love and you’ll never work a day
in your life.’ how trite. like a trifle. like the meat trifle
rachel made in that thanksgiving episode of the cursed TV
show (already the subject of a poem called Monica so let’s not go
into it felice, okay?). I can’t find what i love as i love my
cats and i love bad poems and
i love using ‘bad’ words at the end of the line
the enjambment is more meaningful when you have to think
about it. think: why did you put that there, tracy brimhall?
why there, sinead morrissey? when someone says to me they love
poetry i say oh yes? My being coy
doesn’t help here because, according
to the five years i spent at university, only certain poems
are poems. the words have ruined me for other poems.
all i write now are: lists; letters; notes to self; journal entries.
journal entries. and according to michael e. gerber, weirdo, the turn-key
model changed the world but universities are not built
on keys and neither are poems. when i’m at Queens
the poets in tenure tell me my poems are too sparse and ask why
but at home in brisbane what is sparse is better—distil it Felice.
but whatever you do don’t write a bad poem and don’t
end the line in a conjunction, definite article or other useless thing. Occasionally
i write sondheim lyrics or recite
flight of the conchords—not to pretend anything—but
to harken to joy or at least to try. Felice
tell me, have you heard Meleika speak. no? well
you’re missing out.

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Flight

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Carlo Caponecchia
My first kite was a black garbage bag with strings. Not a red diamond crucifix made friendly with storybook bows – no. Jenny Porter’s mum made them for the school fete: cheap, replicable, repairable when the wind would inevitably claim one or a tree would claw at its face. Small slits in the plastic allowed the air            to vent making a pfffft sound as if the kite was just as careless as I was. Flight was only permitted on the flank of park by the sea – no powerlines. Electrocution sharks and perves were high on our risk list but there was joy in setting plastic storm clouds with their shocks of crepe-paper lightning against the sky.
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Chicken Bones

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Maria Vouis

My widowed mother at lunch
plucks filaments of flesh
from near-naked chicken bones.
She splinters each twig-leg,
vacuums the slurry of marrow:
They used to hit me.
Με χτύπησαν. Me Htipisan,
masticates a small voice
I’ve never heard before.

She hunches over the fowl’s remains,
rounded shoulders, arms over breasts
ball into a child’s shield.
Her head twitches like a sparrow’s;
left, right, her brown eyes flick up, flick down;
her plastic cataract lenses flash
the phantom of a chthonic hunger;

They used to hit me. Με χτύπησαν. Me Htipisan.
When I went to rock the baby, during the war, they hit me.
They didn’t give me much to eat. I starved,
mewls this babyish voice again,
now from the back seat of my car,
as I chauffeur her from doctor to doctor.

My knuckles whiten on the wheel
like a mottled backbone,
like the mountain range
that splits her island – Karpathos,
as this famishment spools
a spillage of secrets
so late in life,
like the small, silent histories
of unaccompanied minors,
refugees and war infants;
countless children.

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the notes I took on my phone when V Barratt took me on a tour of their garden and asked me to water everything while they’d be away in NSW

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Holly Childs

Hose/by hand
Jane’s garden
Water Andy’s “L”
And sunflowers along here
Succulents above
Sun hits at 7am, so before that
If it’s really hot, water also when the temp drops
Experiments on the bench, make sure they’re not dry
I’m trying to strike them
Lemon tree, water,
Do the 3 little plants left of lemon tree,
Tree behind, a little bit of water
New sunflowers in the cornflowers
Baby next to it, keep it watered
Watering the zucchinis, and the tomatoes
Water little things under the illawarra flame tree
Clear the pond
Pansies, petunias
Around the base of the babies, keep them free of humus
The native lotus in the high baskets with succulents
Water, water, water,
Behind the broccoli, an indigenous apple, should climb up the wall, so try to make it climb “bush
tucker” label, doesn’t need a lot of water
Little seaweed succulents on the wall also behind the broccoli/cauliflowers
And various bits of rhubarb
Erimophela in front of the cauliflower, it’s happy when it’s hot
Baskets in front of Tony’s place, sage, blueberry in top 10 trees pot
Compost behind, there in the willow bin
And how to turn it over with
5-6 enzyme sprays, add torn newspaper, egg carton and leaves otherwise it’ll get too wet
Another hose on that side
Succulents along toward the front door
Left of the front door, these will die off, new little natives there are happy in the sun
Styrofoam box, tomatoes
Butterfly net/shade: zucchini, eggplant, old broccoli in there and some parsley and maybe garlic, a
good water every day
New little tree, in front of the bay tree
Wild passion fruit vibe,
Pink flowers,
Marigold, chard, chilli, rosemary, water the purple flower tag, and orange tree
Darryl does around the lemon tree, we sometimes double water it
Don’t worry about Darryl’s herb garden
Leslie’s little garden area, V usually waters
Orange in the white pot is important and vine over Leslie’s structure are important
Happy wanderers and little natives need water,
And around near the car there’s another hose,
Natives, lamb’s tongues, and flower garden next to the white car and fig tree

Christine is caring for the ones along the wall
And upstairs…
Don’t worry about Christine’s
V’s are near the stairs
Watermelon in a pot
Tragic looking zucchini, pansy and calendula pot, and the frangipani,
Everlasting daisies that are just sprouting
Strawberries in styrofoam box behind the chair
On windy days, close it and tie it up (umbrella)
Some water in each pot by the bathroom door
Little zinnia flowers and a little lavender
Black tomatoes can be eaten when they go brown or reddish
Citrus needs extra attention
Jacaranda
And paper flower cut and turned upside-down
Baby lemon and curry tree below
If it’s gonna be really hot, get the shrouds out and cover things up
They’re in the plastic greenhouse and peg them over things on the deck
Greenhouse plants need water and are always covered up
Power feed: a capful in a whole watering can with everything
Do it once with the watering can upstairs
Don’t do it before a heatwave
And there’s diatomaceous earth and eggshells if you suspect snails
Gloves and seeds and clips for the shrouds in the drawers by the back door
A tiny bit of water in the tray of the monstera every 3 days
Experimentally pollinating the zucchinis by hand

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THE FOUR EIGHT HORSEMEN FRIENDS OF THE APOCALYPSE NEW NORMAL

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Dan Hogan

1.
mia (reverse centaur)
walks backward
into a fire station
eats most of a curtain
and all of two moths
that got in the way

2.
foiseach (one-toed, hoofed)
bolts face first through
a pizza hut window (ouch)
dies from injuries
at the salad bar (sad)

3.
ash (extant subspecies of equus ferus)
tosses a frisbee from his mouth
(there is no remarkable sound)
the disc takes silence with it
caught in the jaws of angela

4.
angela (of the family equidae)
(fixing a midnight sandwich)
is imperceptible in the light-hungry kitchen
(she didn’t even know you were home)
when you flick on the light

5.
cluain (equine-related concept)
eats a wallet they found
on the dance floor (amusing)
you don’t clock them chewing
on account of the deep house

6.
sylvie (equivalent of the human fingertip)
canoes into the centre of the internet
and begins the evacuation
by convincing a family of whales
to beach themselves

7.
aduantas (no foot, no horse)
licks both sides of a dvd
and reviews: one side is sweeter
but now I must disappear inside
the forest yelling about money

8.
evening (205 bones)
kicks a broken link (502 bad gateway)
into the side of a moving bus
and a passenger hisses
back with increasing urgency
and politeness: my tongue! it is
not unlike the fossil! of an unexploded
bonbon! remember this!
warmly!

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What even are we?

Posted on June 1, 2022 by J. Marahuyo

I remember calling you Donkey Kong
because it matched your initials.
And, you called me “Ate” (ah-teh) –
big sister in tagalog
because our culture is big on respect,
big on our titles for those older,
but I’m not sure what else.

As your older cousin
I did a poor job, didn’t I?
When I showed that hand, our family magic.
(I didn’t know it was a secret, but
I’ve learnt intentions don’t really matter).
That flashy crystal my mum used to love
to parade around on school day drives and shopping trips,
“Your uncle is addicted to methamphetamines,
Tsk, always asking your grandma for money”.

I laughed the way she did when I casually
mentioned your dad’s time on ice
not knowing how inappropriate until
I saw you blank
then blink
and say,”Oh.
…I didn’t know.”
You recounted how he would disappear for months;
no one ever told you, or your brother, anything.
Sometimes he’d show up only to leave.
You thanked me, you finally knew why.

We said we’d meet again
and we waved each other off.
I stared at the sky blurred with periwinkle blue
and delicate white
as I replayed the day on my way home.
I had finally seen you for the first time in years.

My dad messaged me
saying to leave your family alone
as if I had stuffed you all in a box
and shaken the whole goddamn thing.

Your dad took over your phone
telling me he would get me.
How he knew someone who worked at the
Roads and Maritime Service;
he’d get my address.
How I’ll never see you again.
How my father was no angel;
he had done it too.
But, here’s the difference:
I knew.
Not that he had dabbled in meth
but had smoke shrouding him all the time
or maybe I just didn’t have any expectations.
So, I didn’t care. I always tried not to.

Perhaps our fathers,
being immigrants, were easy enough prey
to the helplessly sweet caress
of a seemingly endless haze,
a glass full
of always happy
or perhaps it was a self-aware hesitation
toward the direction they were running.

I don’t know when it started
but I hate being Filipino.
Everyone is always loud
but not about things that actually matter.
Everyone always cares
but only so they can talk about you later.
Everyone always wants to sing.
Have you noticed at every Filipino party
there is always a karaoke machine?

I spoke to my therapist of my sudden urges to sing,
And he said it was a release: a way to gather oxygen,
and blow out the stale emotions.
Who knows if it’s true –
God? He doesn’t bother me anymore.

Maybe, all of us are a muscle, drumming though
and navigating this mapless, dusty,
copper landscape with song.

Maybe, it’s a shared subconscious trying to clear
and make way for something better than the past.

Or maybe we’re all just so traumatised,
don’t recognise it
and just keep belting tune after tune.
Everything hidden under layers of
of loudness and oily, fatty, delicious, fried food.

You and I, we should be careful,
heart attacks pulse through our family.
It’s the leading cause of death in The Phils
it transverses oceans
and is grasping to find
another rhythm.

Posted in 105: NO THEME 11 | Tagged

Chameleon

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Sarah Stivens

She al-ways said
I was a good
one—shape shif-ter child
heart like a spider web
guess it makes sense.

Surviv-al is adapt-at-ion and old
Black Hood has been at my heels since birth
yellowed forehead squalling
under humid-icrib lights.
Too-soon, too-small, couldn’t
hold me for days
maybe why I still hit the deck
inside hospit-als.

Can’t list-en to heart-beats
not mine, or any
one else ’s.
One Eas-ter she hid
a live rabbit inside
my back-pack its shock puls-ing
through ribs into my hands

I could n’t bear to hold it
can’t ever rest
my head on a lover ’s chest;
haunted by palpit-a-tions.

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