Cordite Poetry Review

That green feeling

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Patrick Carey

So many novels begin on staircases or in hallways.

The only light in the house through the Venusian greenglass above the landing
Oceans of dust and the thousand shadows of childhood
Converging on the woven runner on this black wood
The occasional chair gnarled into the roots of the house

Memory is just a landscape
This is a city of blind corners and declining platforms
Sandstone disappearing into a vale of leaves
Staircases down into the flood

In July a leadlight rose is
A sacred heart
A clot
A drunkard’s eye

In August –

The sensuality of movement is
Sitting on the station platform
Amongst puddles like upturned mirrors
The copper air

Between Newtown and Redfern
Through spinning bike spokes, the stillness
I take a window seat
To stare at my own reflection

Every edge is in the misaligned stitching
Of this green jumper’s sleeve
Damp
Pushing aside the branches that overgrow the footpath

Every edge
Three ghosts
A transparent sky
After a decade of rain

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Patrick Carey

Interrupted

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Natalie D-Napoleon

Artist(s): Mother and three-year-old child. Materials: Ink and white-out on book page of Susanna
Moore’s The Life of Objects (2012). 15cm x 23.5cm. 2014.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Natalie D-Napoleon

How to live like a glass maiden

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Jenni Mazaraki

As a child I am not permitted in the good room
No small feet on the carpet
No touching
Ushered away from glass ornaments
My favourite, a flawless glass maiden
Shows me what is valuable, out of reach

At sixteen I think that if I can’t be hot I may as well die
How to win enemies and piss people off
How to get clear skin in 6800 easy steps
How to lose ten kilos in five hours
How to eat sh*t without getting a bad taste in your mouth
How to live

At work I am
How to fake it until you forget how you actually feel
How to fall in public to elicit the least amount of laughter
How to apply lipstick around the outside of your lips
How to blink to signal for help
Five easy tips for looking younger than—

The radio tells me what I must like, it offers me prepaid funerals as a good idea
I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottom of my trousers—
I am no vampire, I have not drunk from the fountain
I crumble, I crack at edges
My skin breaks
I stretch and frail

I have forgotten the shapes my body can make without a chair or a screen
I am over-stimulated
My attention drawn to the digital, the pixel, the moment of urgency
How to dress for Zoom
How to wear your hair so you don’t look like you’ve been awake all night
How to convince your coworkers that you are listening in the online meeting

My body is changeable, I am no glass maiden
Created in the furnace, poured into her forever form
If she falls, she shatters, if she is thrown, she cannot fly
You dust gatherer, you perfect fraud
Locked in the good room
Without affection, cold

And you?
Are you happy, did you get what you wanted?
Are you all that you wished for?
Are you a shape that can be poured?
Who catches you if you fall?

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Jenni Mazaraki

Pattern Making

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Shoshanna Rockman

After https://larivierefashion.com

The pattern is the foundation for the entire garment; pattern making is part creativity and part
methodology. The blueprint.

1.Assemble your tools
2.Take measurements
3.Add style and design
4.Grade your concept
5.Move to draping

1.When you are four, it’s easy for the big boy next door at Dad’s to tack on a head job.
2.And when you are five, it’s simple for the big boy next door at Mum’s to grade you in the
garden shed, where it’s dark and the cobwebs wrap grey rafters.
3.Then it’s a basic step towards a GP who toiles you, all the while darting lude sexual
references at the bust line,
4. Which primes you for that dentist, that physio, that locksmith.
5. An entire block; row upon row of partners who have not yoked consent.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Sharon Rockman

eat me

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Tan Arsa Sagara

i am offering you a bowl of rawon
and i expect you to scoop up my right ventricle.
my childhood is the black stew
and i am in every beansprout that you throw away.
in my country we do not say “i love you.”
love is a sin for fathers and the letters ‘LO’
take up too much space for mothers.
love is a countryside dream. this city has no benches
to sleep on once you are bored of me.
despite that we sit with this rawon between us.
“have you eaten yet?”—that is what we say.
why should you ask the obvious?
because we can only care for what we know.
the only way to show intimacy without
vulnerability. to hide your heart and a hammer
for your lover to find in case of emergencies.
“have you eaten yet?”
how are you?
do you miss me?
will you take me?
how do i look?
do you even love me?
will you bury me with a ring?
“that’s too bad. let me cook something.”
bring the spoon to your mouth and watch me unfold.
hurry and eat up now, the rice will get cold.

( Rawon is an Indonesian beef soup originating from East Java. It is best served with rice.)

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Tan Arsa Sagara

The women of Kurdistan

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Behrouz Boochani

I will talk to you of Kurdistan and mountains, of beautiful trees and rare flowers. I will talk of wild rivers, tall waterfalls and amazing music. I will talk of my father, the shepherd, who was inseparable from nature. I will talk of my mother who worked too hard to find something for us to eat and, when there was none, lay our heads on her lap and sung us beautiful stories to make us sleep. I will talk to you of Kurdistan made a battlefield, of a childhood filled with war, of 50,000 Kurds killed at once by chemical weapons, of our soil soaked in blood. I will talk to you of Kurdistan and the women I admire. The women of Kurdistan who fight, sing and dance. The women who fight, sing and dance.

First published in Writing to the Wire 2016, UWA Publishing, Crawley, Western Australia, p. 197

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Behrouz Boochani

Be careful not to slip on words like

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Abeir Soukieh

sleet
and Eucalyptus.
Scribbly Gum. Pause. And light is cool, close;
as in near but–
Ambush. Demonic ambu–
scade.
Local. Engbic or Araglish?
Regular. Green olives,
–she’s pregnant–
pitted. Conical fruit.
Current.
–married a global man–
Blood mouth.

I brush my hands through the Cypress-Pine,
and crush the leaves between my palms and fingertips (fragrant).
I wipe the stone clean,
and spread the leaves along his grave.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Abeir Soukieh

Concrete Butterflies

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Joshua Finzi

We have broken our oars and sharpened them into
paring knives. You remember the desert way the wind
sucked colour from the foothills, put a fluorescent eye
in the heart of the firmament. You
remember January cigarettes and January
porridge, your belly in the ocean,
how you made
lights in the heavens, augured beneath
the august sky a chord sequence and
wrote it on your palm with mud.
In mirrors, sunglasses, and sandcastles the
braying of a boar, a wildebeest, a
typewriter and a computer in a tavern,
licking port wine from their lips,
a January cigarette. Your belly
in the concert-hall.
Songs and dances in the pages of memory,
a guitar strung about your breast,
a pen, an amplifier stuck in your ear.
People in cars and on bicycles in the next room,
mothers, goose-farmers, toecutters, pneumoniacs.
Eating bananas, fried rice, January porridge,
your belly in a supermarket. Ears
living in trees, listening to telluric currents
and the new radio. Your belly on a
television.
You remember drinking crystals and coffee-beans,
two kangaroos and a hookah, stealing
a grape, a lanyard,
unclipping paper in a dream.
West of the waterways the wild city at night
congested with salads, cider, and prophylactics.
Your belly in the newspaper, your
voice becomes an antenna.
You are a mile and a league, a
pedestrian, a composer, a lunatic,
a thistle, a compost-heap, a ballroom,
a watchdog, a liturgy, a city-street,
a caldera, a
cup of soup when the wind and the steam
and the baritone voice of the
second generation are singing in gay harmony
and the dead are watching your belly
through a looking-glass.
We have broken our oars and sharpened them into
batons, and you are playing your heart,
playing your heart like kettle-drums,
playing out your life and
killing the clown.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Joshua Finzi

That Time You Took a Pick and Shovel and Swore You Were Going to Excavate the Living Heart of Wallhaven, Ohio

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Robert Beveridge

You posited gremlins in the asphalt, pixies
under the counter at Nervous Dog, a plurality
of health code violations hidden beneath
your burritos decebrados. Somewhere, you
said, in the sewers under Whole Foods
it resides, and by gum, you aimed to find
it, cut it out, eat it still beating with a gremolata
poached in an orange construction barrel.
In preparation you placed stacks of Marshalls
at every manhole, pumped She Walks Crooked
at maximum volume, knew you had just
a few minutes before the Woods of Fairlawn
residents reported you for noise violations.
The last I saw of you was on the ladder
in the middle of West Market in front
of the Fairlawn Taco Bell, tools strapped
to your back, headlamp ablaze. You would
approach, you said, from outside the perimeter,
a bottle of retsina in each hand, and follow
the aborted Google Fiber cables until you found
the core of the beast. The sun rose, my
bourbon is gone, and if I eat one more
seven layer burrito things will get messy,
and still there is no sign of your return.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Robert Beveridge

DRIFT

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Susan Fealy

Hard to believe
a thread could catch

and hold them still
against my skin.

Seed-pearl, turquoise
or bud of native flower?

Glass, its glitter and blade
whittled by sea.

A tiny bi-valve
stubby as stone.

A black pebble
resolved as shadow.

An oblong
cut from a long walk

on a cloudy morning—
strands of wind gust of hair.

Thread—
fine as a wren
begins

a threnody for water
a threnody for air.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Susan Fealy

Zuihitsu for Drying Flowers

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Gabriella Graceffo

Sunday, in the ribs of a bluebonnet field, I reach for their little bells—a floral alternative for inspecting my body.

My mother and I: hands in the ice bath, flowers a kinship between our fingers. This is all there is. This, and spring aches pressed between heavy books.

Someone once told me drying flowers is like falling out of love: flattening life to a millimeter, to bland colors we call beautiful, all the veiny things on display without any mystery left in them.

Twelve and I demand my mother pull over so I can collect trumpet flowers off the highway. Pruning shears and delight. How quickly I learn to distrust this feeling, staring at the roadside memorial’s coquettish silk buds.

More than anything, I want to be a tulip bulb. Sell me in Amsterdam even though no one knows my color. Let me be a craving.

April heat where porcelain is the only escape. My first cycle comes and I’m still on the tile, trying to loop womanhood around me like a bandage when it’s really a wound.

My grandmother taught me to search for aphid holes in everything: sepals, the ends of question marks, a man’s eye, just wide enough to slip through when he stares too long and there’s no way out.

Let me be clear. I do not want to find my body in old metaphors. But I can’t help myself.

Yucca does not press well. Two mornings after an attempt, a quiet rot between cookbooks. Thick liquid hot and cloudy on the counter, a smell I can’t open without thinking of what little I know of sex.

Hands full of thorns. Weeding fingernails for days. A sacred vow to the earth that when I look for its offerings, I offer my own skin in return.

After the flowers all dry, I have no language left for what they used to be. But the books will never lie flat again, the imprint of all those floral bodies stuck in their pages. And I am jealous of them.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Gabriella Graceffo

Mohole Flower

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Justin Cruzana

Ink on paper: David Medalla: 1967

Funny how we don’t need alcohol anymore
to get each other to open. There is a thin
em dash along our mouths where confessions
no longer shimmy, the silence becoming our own
way of telling each other: let me in. The last time
I let anyone touch me this close, I was learning
how to aim a gun. For the last few December
thirty-firsts my grandfather took my hands in his and we
shot at the bathroom wall. It was New Year’s Eve and everyone
in my neighborhood had something shaking
in their hands. How common it is to mistake our hands
for explosives. Napalm knuckles, dynamite fingers. Today my father
roars for the same rooster fight over and over, and my brother
plays Fortnite again, aims like a blind man
waist-deep in need for color, the way
koi needs water to breathe, the way I need pain
to remember. I shoot at the concrete again
and again so it remembers—a black hole in the wall
where a memory should be.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Justin Cruzana

A Poet Learns the Limitations of Her Craft

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Meena Kandasamy

I am singing a song that can only be born after losing a country.
—Joy Harjo

▅▅▅ ▅▅ ▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅
[Urgent]
This cannot fit into a poem.
This should be a political pamphlet.

▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅ ▅ ▅▅ ▅▅ ▅▅▅
[Scandalous]
This should be a white paper.

▅▅▅▅▅!
[Chilling]
This should be the slogan on all our streets.

▅▅▅▅ : ▅▅ ▅ ▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅ ▅▅
[Shameful]
This is apartheid. Who will boycott the boycotters?

▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅
[Horror]
This should be an HRW-Amnesty International report.

▅▅▅▅▅▅▅ & ▅▅▅▅’▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅
[Heartbreaking]
This should be a thoroughly researched documentary film.

▅▅▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅
[Disturbing]
This should be a long-read in The New York Times.

▅ ▅▅▅ ▅ ▅ ▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅
[Haunting]
History will never absolve us.
Their long march home is a story to be told to our future generations.

▅ ▅▅▅ ▅ ▅▅▅ ▅▅▅ ▅▅▅ ▅ ▅
[Oppressive]
When will our political class break its silence?

▅▅ ! ▅▅ ! ▅▅▅▅ !! ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ !!!
[Depressing]
When will all the progressive forces unite against Hindutva fascists?

▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅
[Outrageous]
Why does the state police women’s bodies with impunity?

▅▅ ▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅
[Devastating]
Such sacrifice!
When will we have our revolution?  

▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅ ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅
[Warning]
The price will always be paid in blood.

What is the use of a poem in this season of hate?
The regular cliches: A desperate cry for help,
an act of witness, a scream into the void?

What is the use of a poet in a season of bloodshed?

Tell me, dear ones.
Is she the one who grieves?

Is she the one who guards the embers
of a people’s rage?

Is she the one who mirrors
your shattered heart?

Or, is she the one
who speaks to show
she is not yet dead?

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Meena Kandasamy

The Art of Revision

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Leslie Grollman

I.
She crouches on the shelf, cramped, where she hid the blanket that hid her.

Spots of brown-red blood, bold on the blanket that hid her.

Her fresh skin brushstrokes against that blanket that hid her.

She charts the X’s on her left thigh, one cut for each failure
to snuff beneath the blanket that bid her live.

II.
(She is sorry her gripped words chipped into every held hand;
nothing could have rid her of that then.)

III.
In another version, not X’s
but goat-willows with fuzzy buds
like ones that grew near the field
where it happened; she loved
to brush the fur against her face
all over it felt like love.
She cut love
into her anxious thigh
so it could carry her. Now,
her forefinger traces
the vines the way a mother
traces her baby’s jawline. She lingers
on the buds,
remembering soft,
re-membering soft.

IV.
She segments the blanket-that-bid-for-her into palm-sized pieces,
calligraphies one letter onto each piece as many times through the alphabet
until each piece has a name. Arranges the pieces into a poem
no one will ever read: a narrative poem with a speaker, unspeakable.

V.
She gently pricks her left forefinger, anoints each piece, like the Passover ritual,
how the finger dips into wine, dabs the wine onto a plate once for each plague
until her people were set free. Like the ritual over Sabbath candles, she circles
her open hands three times over the words, gathers the air above them, draws her palms
to her face, closes her eyes, and sings:

blessed are you, O Lord our God; bless this one who is still, here

With an Amen, she jumbles the shards, sews them to form
a skirt, letters facing outward. Wears it to remind herself a sparrow’s song is always
the same— and isn’t.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Leslie Grollman

humans are happy

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Sofie Verraest

when animals are like humans
humans are happy

the monkey hand grabs
and the fork doesn’t fall

the dog has an attitude

when they live in small families
and mate for life
humans are happy

also when one strays
from the pack
to confirm the rule

they are happy with the one
with all the feathers and
the color the male
that’s into males

they are happy looking on
the way it either dies or finally
to its nature
succumbs

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Sofie Verraest

Winter Crow

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Margaret Bradstock

(for J.C)

Lockdown, an empty beach
pockmarked with yesterday’s footprints,
now sculpted by morning tides
coarse sand, the coldest of grain.

Driftwood lingers, and a solitary crow
eying the movement of waves,
undeterred by silence, isolation
transience, its own chill cry.
Beyond the flatness, sand hills
come and go, your artist’s gaze
freezing the moment in time.

You send me the photograph
as you trudge the length of the beach
nothing happening but walking,
just you, the crow and the sea.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Margaret Bradstock

Impulse

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Madison Godfrey

Months later, I am still thinking about the two teen girls who saw me and knew I wouldn’t tell. Everyone else in the supermarket was their mother. Every other mouth had a muscle memory snarl. Two girls huddled together like baby geese, that ran away the same season they learnt the softness of feathers. Whispering. Selecting. Spraying. Artificial flowers bloomed like factory fumes. Rotating. Sniffing. Too grown for giggling. Draped over spaghetti shoulders, the fragrance smelt like a sarcastic sorry. Maybe they used half the tin. Maybe I shouldn’t have smiled. Standing in the same aisle, I felt precisely halfway between the girl with cigarette sleeves and the mother who grips the hoodie.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Maddie Godfrey

poem in which I briefly know what utopia will feel like

Posted on September 15, 2022 by George Cox

Don’t worry, baby / there’s another one in ten minutes /
why don’t I read you this passage / from volume two / ?

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged George Cox

Anthesis

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Sharifa Tartoussi

ACT I: Marigolds

If I should drive out to the country in my most abjuring dreams
Let there be marigolds growing on the highway
Yellow and cheerful and hungry for sun
Constant and timeless and vulnerable
Let all the passenger-seat conjurings ask whether they were there the last time
Let my forgetfulness be a shoulder shrug the flavour of carefree youth
Let me become a highway metaphor a shade of openness I struggle to hold onto
Let holding on be the destination
A field of those marigolds where a cattle farm once was
The farmer’s husband buried beneath the grief she planted for him before the heartbreak killed her
Flower Angels I draw into the land of the secondary plot
Of the story that ends before I learn to carry them with me
The Naivety of permanence

The roar of engine as they germinate in my place

ACT II: Succulents

If I should make it to the dessert in the protractions of my musings
Let the succulents show me where to honour my grief
Weathered and hardened and thirsty
Determined and rebellious and resilient
Let a stew of loneliness and desert sun wonder what it is to grow in infertile ground
Let all of the small deaths within me skirt around the parts in the sands where their roots may lay
Let me lower my almost-dry corpses beside them and open my hands in offering
Let the offering be an exchange for learning
A hardened leaf beneath the hardened skin of my fingertip
The beads of sweat that roll down my forehead bid greeting to the tears on my cheeks
I wipe away at the salt on my face and vow to keep growing
In the tale that does not end with survival
The wisdom in flourishing

The crunch of sand beneath my feet as I make my own way

ACT III: Peonies

If I should appear as a b-plot in the escapisms of another
Let me be a field of peonies at the beginning of Spring
Layered and soft and blossoming
Vibrant and lush and rare
Let me be unafraid to flower so fleetingly they almost miss me
Let me be unashamed of my need for soil undoubtedly fertile to bloom like this
Let me have faith in all of the reasons I have always been worth waiting for
Let the waiting be the journey
A sea of pink-tinged petals reaching out to touch one another
The love I have learnt to give myself the only marvel worth noticing
A single moment in time when I am nothing if not the protagonist
Of this plot line in which I inevitably thrive
The sagacity of growth

The rustling of petals in the expanse of my anthesis

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Sharifa Tartoussi

Poem With a High Wind Blowing Over It From the East

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Jill Jones

It blows leaves around
like letters –
forms shapes to-
gether

in highs and lows
I can’t read
I’m distracted
scatter and branch

by voices a cloud
that’s now dis-
appearing

We need clouds –

I watch kids bowl
at the nets
serious / accurate
‘line and length’ –

A small dog sniffs me –
feet to knees –
I think I pass

At the corner I dodge
a yellow tripod –
‘it’s a boundary
survey’ says the guy
levelling a theodolite

‘Aim the crosshair
in the viewing scope
at the point
to be measured’

Boundaries linger
even if fences fall –
I’ll be trespassing soon
with or without strong measure

The east wind is hot
and doesn’t care
kisses me as it passes
and yes I let it

– again and again

I will not be forgiven, I will not repent

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Jill Jones

A Veterinary School in the Country

Posted on September 15, 2022 by James Appleby

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

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged James Appleby

Extremities

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Dani Netherclift

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

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

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

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

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

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

before the night
before the light
crossed over

and you were gone for good.

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged Dani Netherclift

Joey

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Sam Morley

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