Ginger

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Danabelle Gutierrez

The languages buried deep in my tongue do not know
the taste of home, has tried to replicate tahanan
in English, auf Deutsch, bil Araby, en Français.
Gingembre in every city has helped me swallow
enough keys to doors my belly has learned to make room for.
I have been travelling since I was seven. I sniff for directions
nach Zuhause. I learned yasmeen is sampaguita,
but only one of them is steeped in hot water, the other,
bought from tiny hands and hung on rearview mirrors.
Four thousand miles whence, my hands have tried to build a house
on sand where my toes recognize the feeling of bayti.
I distract myself with growing. In every garden, luya, ginger,
Ingwer, zanjibil, the rough and spice of it, the root
abundant and everywhere. I trust the magic of the earth
will bloom flowers: common or precious or je ne sais quoi.
Above me, the birds in flight are singing a different song while
I have memorized the lyrics for this constant plucking and uprooting.
I am honeyed throat and ambered lip, I am sweet enough for birdsong.
But I will tell you plainly, I am tired. I am lost. Please help me
make sense of this — the salt of my skin longing for origin,
hopes for clouds, for less horizon, less gravity, else feathers.
Dear birds, tell me, what to do when the ocean cuts itself in half
again, the seabed trail beckoning me to walk between
saltwater walls. Dear birds, I envy the knowledge
your wings bear, knowing how to leave,
when to come back and where.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

The Neighbourhood

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Nicholas Duddy

A blue flame burns low on the horizon,
Whittles the wick of a July day
And kids scuttle like cockroaches
To moth-wing mirages called home
As mothers pull scorched chooks
And themselves out of ovens
And fathers waste in armchairs,
Statues in the shadows,
Dead still, or still dead, besides wrists
Twisting flask lids like clock hands.

After dinner red living rooms
Snap to black down the street
And wives huddle on mattress edges,
Crossing themselves with calloused fingers,
Listening to footsteps play
The nightly requiem on the staircase,
The crescendo a swinging door—
A backhand to the room’s dark cheek—
Before husbands bow,
Comatose them with a kiss
As the curtain falls, bedsheets
Embalming their bodies.

Behind duvet forts
Children stare at the world
Through cracked windows,
Piecing the jigsaw in their minds,
And conjure dreams with torchlight,
Holding empty corn cans to their ears,
Heads tilting to green plastic stars
Glued to the ceiling, whispering prayers
To a deaf god in the asbestos cosmos.

Streetlights bleed out on bitumen,
Skeletal oaks shiver with dawn,
Swinging mossed tyres noosed
From their silver boughs like clappers,
The morning bell rousing hounds
Asleep on frontyard thrones
Of broken glass and milk thistle
Who croon to marrowless moon,
Waking the neighbourhood—
All those lovers and loners:
A letter apart, a sentence together.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Lives of Mangroves

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Joel M Toledo
Before rich people-politicians dumped hectares of subdivision-soil in the town of Las Piñas in Northern-Manila-then-Rizal, the ocean had cut through the former-railway-slum communities, and tilapia farms had been all over and behind the house. Now and then kansusuwit would get entangled in the fish nets and we’d have more choices for game, and come summertime-low-tide, the neighborhood kids would leap one after the other from the Spanish bridge into the fresh murk that the ocean had left behind. Old folks said that whenever the infamous bamboo organ played, a new bakawan would rise by the shoulders of the inlet and, when they’d grown dense enough, fishermen would find a week’s worth of catch snagged under the tree, particularly during full moons. Then my friend Sexy disappeared, they said murdered by local policemen for being a snitch. The Tasaday turned out to be a hoax. More Camella Homes villages had ribbon-cutting ceremonies. An uncle who had been fired from Phillips went into rehab for years. Lolo contracted hepatitis. The sun shone brighter, hotter, on the surrounding tambak, and the rest of the water retreated back to the coast. Thankfully, the next-door-kid Almar got into a good university. But Mother died and I had no reason to visit anymore, let alone stay. I have two or three cousins left, and two uncles, I think. Memory is a fog and I believe most things come in pairs: a voice diving into a well and its echo, breath and death. During typhoon season, recent residents would hear something moving under the floor, trying to break through from the foundations. They all wake up having had vivid dreams of fish and drowning. In the now-city’s church, the organ keys moan their years and it gets really hot during mass. I’ve no roots there anymore, but I can’t be sure as it’s been so long.
Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Vermeer as Performance

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Lesh Karan

after Yoko Ono’s ‘Kite Piece 1’

1. Earring Piece

Sketch the ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’.
Snip it into pearl-shaped pieces –
as many as the original’s value.
Wear a cut-out on your left earlobe
(tack it on with a blob of glue).

2. Milk Piece

Dress like a 17th century milkmaid.
Visit the supermarket to buy milk.
Snap a selfie while taking a swig.
Print the pic and splatter it
with milk. Title it ‘The Milkperson’ 1
and hang it in your kitchen.

3. Painting Piece

Open a studio called The Art of Painting.
Paint enough replicas of ‘The Art of Painting’
to cover the walls, like wallpaper.
Invite students to study the art of painting
by wall-gazing (intently).
Offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

 

4. Hat Piece

Print 100 colour copies
of the ‘Girl with the Red Hat’.
Fold into origami fedoras. Wear one
to the races, offer the rest to bystanders.
It is possible you will have 99 left.
Float them as a parade of boats
on the Yarra River.

1 Title updated to reflect the times.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

I Have Been to Stranger Lands

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Faye Ng

In pictures:
the pockmarked plane

a landing to stand on,

cloud drapes and many moons
beneath me.

I wish I was made of something lighter,
so that I could float.

My dreams recall in phases:

in one, I was vagabond and heading
for Neptune.

I had few possessions.

In a supernova,

the Big Dipper broke.

Lying down once on a plateau,

spacetime swirling and stellar remnants

pulling in a collapse,

I arched my back
drinking in the light-years,
face tilted up,

my body a thin graft,
pliable.

Rim around a planetary ring, I gather
my moonlets with me,

horizon to distance in orbit,

reconsidering infinity.

In the dive of meridian, I am a

galaxy of want,

nebula pluming

the deep space
blushed.

If you move along the light in a straight line,

you will reach a point

where nothing suspends

you
except
your own gravity.

Giving as an act
of surrender, saying:

I want this yours.

The body is a caldera calling.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Thermal Readings

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Iain Britton

i crush worm casts
toasted by the sun

hawks sense out body heat


not all places are heat traps

or weed entangled

not all are scorched by thermal readings


this neighbourhood lives amongst flaxes & manuka
& stories of a mother
defined by her children’s stars


the road is hard baked

an Appian Way
rutted by traffic

every day she stares from her window every day
midges
worry her

they swarm & spin

& if i look
(as i should)

her existence relies on family
on tattoos etched into her flesh


i ask her

which placenta was buried first – under which tree

& do they remember

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Middle Quarters

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Beth Merindah

Worn women line the roadside waving cello bags of spicy shrimp
— burning with scotch bonnet — they’ve dug from the muddy
swamps hugging Wray and Nephew’s sugar cane. The asphalt,
eaten by rainy season storms, is scarred like skin sick with pox.
Cockpit Country’s porous limestone caves. Wait-a-bit. The chalk
bones of perch sit sun bleached, chewed clean, and neatly stacked
beneath burning Dutchy pots bubbling: fish head, chicken back
and cray tail. Middle Quarters is wet with sunlight, it’s slowly
dripping in from liana and limb. See the Manchineel Tree?
— la manzanilla de la muerte — down by the brackish water.
See the bend in the river? that is where the two girls died
for nothing. See the road to Accompong? that is where the Maroons
signed their treaty under The Kindah Tree. The waxy leaves of
Sweet Almond trees paint the canopy an artificial Autumn. It’s a
vacuum, fighting for air with: Blue Mahoe/Poor Man’s Orchid/
Poinciana/Breadnut/Sweetwood/Silk Cotton/Bull Thatch Palm/
The Holland Bamboo/Honda exhaust/John Crow vultures/distillery
vapor/spliff smoke. Inhale/Exhale/All hail/Haile Selassie: The
Most High. Above, burning cane bleeds into the blue and swells
molasses storm clouds. Tight florets unfurl, readying themselves
to pour dunder. Swallowtails swill every.last.drop.of.rum.rain.
Obeah men read the earth’s movements in the sky, selling
atmosphere as: store bought luck. Evil-be-gone. Bring-money-fast.
Luck-in-a-hurry. Do-as-I-say. The cane’s soft crackle drowns
the higglers begging for that hundred dollars in your pocket.

Wait-a-bit.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Love Notes to Bhanu

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Frankie Hanman-Siegersma

A photo of you on Venice Beach with the wind pressing the scarf to your mouth. You are here as I respond to a series of questions you assemble for a writing workshop, Describe a Morning You Woke Without Fear in the Colorado Rockies, a six-hundred-acre mountain valley property. These questions as a somatic experiment are intended to provide a generative, nurturing and wild space to generate new work. My responses follow here.

1. Who are you and whom do you love?

I have a body made by movement and sensation. Can you make an image not through language but touch? Chosen family begun with my pink bathers, your green. One could see this relation on a colour wheel. You dip your blonde tips in the shallow water and swoosh it all over my front. I wasn’t wet yet.

2. Where did you come from / how did you arrive?

I was driving through the burnt orange as if it were afternoon, the hue of dam water with sunlight gushing in wondering if pain influences the way we occupy space and time. “A political model of pain”, says Sara Ahmed, “cannot gather together all the different pain experiences” (2014, 31). Regarding this pain, the father takes you to a cafe where you cannot eat anything, but he orders a big bowl of meatballs and a slice of toast and literally inhales it as you spot the trains roll in behind his grey head. Orange flashing text as the train closes its doors to leave. He says–– swallow––chew. I go to say something, but like a snack, am totally withheld.

3. How will you begin?

I begin by chewing, knowing digestion and hydration are processes which both begin in the mouth. The words dry before they pass from tongue to teeth. Saying differently: I had never prepared for the death of sunflowers, but, when the day rose, I knew it was right to bury my brother and bring him to rest by their side. Be held in this sentence. Cut his white t-shirts into long strips and braid each length of material. How? With scissors. I begin this exercise such as I begun each reading session of Ban: with a deep breath.

4. How will you live now?

I learn to do so by paying neurological attention to fragments of sound. This is receiving touch. Such as, waiting for family to turn around and see you, suddenly, as if with a new haircut. This is reverberation. Light, on the one hand changes the way we might experience colours. On the other, the sweetness of the lolly was so severe, I swallowed it just to forget. Where I live differently begin on a spot of earth. Here we brought together death. Water also gathers here, and turns again and again over smooth rocks until, tugged by gravity, smashes down towards three fern fronds holding a triangle of golden light. We are chilly packets of sherbet shucked open on the pier.

5. What is the shape of your body?

Soft white cloth unrolling as if weighted by marbles in the stitched edges, upon the tall earth smouldering.

6. Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?

Shame is personified as a woman walking into a hospital ward after the white shock of a car crash. White walls, loose, rolled skin on upper arms. I am not interested in disclosure. She transferred that living body from one border to the next, leaving a war behind and joining another in its aftermath. I respond to this question as a poetry journal announces a theme in Blair Peach’s name: PEACH. What is the difference in replicating violence and representing violence differently? The taste is that of chalk, not the juice of a fruit.

7. What do you remember about the earth?

I live by remembering I owe something to this place even though I am not from it. I cross water that is heating up, coursing waves with bottle caps in the white wash, to reach a piece of land I was told I belong to. Our family fold up the years like a sheet and before long, barely any of us remember why they decided to leave. Kapil reminds me the earth is an active repository of memory, it stores the energy of events as carbon charcoal.

8. What are the consequences of silence?

Today we speak as if there were none at all. If we live, in retrospect, noticing the particular points of pressure a nervous system lived under, would that drastically effect our use of silence? I lay my cheek on the cold marble of the kitchen island. Its temperature orients mine. Noticing the change in surface between my flesh and other material, a line from Ban: “every cell gives off a tiny bit of light” (79). What molecules of air and speech are caught in our cells?

9. Describe a morning you woke without fear.

Was there a sound, a gesture, a smell that led you out of the human, into the garden? She used her hands with abandon as if wearing gloves and they were strong like her father’s. I do not mean this to say, we should aspire to be our fathers, however I did notice her bravery. Without fear? It is realistic to say any time I opened her book it was to see a line that shook with content, that petrified the material it held.

10. Tell me what you know about dismemberment.

Stories from loved ones about when their body was not a safe place to be. Did that man, who meant you harm, yes, but did not take the end of your finger, did he take something much more and much less? Yes and no. He took–––he stole–––is there is another way to figure the body than through violence it wears? It is easier to say loved ones, than to open mouth on flesh.

11. How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death?

Preparation? Sip watered-down coffee. Write a long, emotionally divulging letter to those whom you loved between the years of 1994 and 2021. That is a short time in the blip of the universe, said O, crushing garlic between the sentence and her knife. Finish your coffee.

12. And what would you say if you could?

When breath comes to live once more around the surface of my wet flesh instead of passing, like speech, between the diaphragm and lips, I will know again any measure of preparation is only material, and lightning will pull the debris I leave behind into a huge storm of lightning and smoke. Have I finally noticed what is human and totally mineral? Speculation or paranoia. I remember waking to dry words in my mouth––a towel––during what I thought was a dream. Writing the abrasive words turned the notebook a filthy texture. What would I say, if I could? There was a can, empty of its Coca-Cola, rattling away with the answer: on the street, in the night. What lodges in the body but is picked up by a gust? I will start again: I would ask a question, begin another, swiftly stop, and gradually release my breath.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Primo Alonzo

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Vincent Rendoni

Men that big shouldn’t be shot down
But deployment to redeployment,
Surface-to-air missiles
It’s just a matter of time

He was the second coming of Fernando Valenzuela
bringing the heat, teaching me the four-seam
sneaking me spiked punch at birthdays
Making me a witness to when he hung his eggs
over the bridge on the freeway
Shouting at the oncoming traffic to take him all in
Shouting at me when I wouldn’t do the same

No worries, primo, he says,
Even though he’s thicker in the waist
And he won’t ever step on a plane
And there’s this fucking ringing that’s
not happening right now, but wait,
haha, there it is again

I don’t mind, primo, he says—
It’s summer and we’re two beers deep
Looking for a third in his old Firebird
Trying to outrun the smell of
open-air garbage and jet fuel
The cicadas and their horrible sound
The humidity

When it’s time to fuel up, he asks if I can get it
He takes the back of my hand
and presses it to his forehead, skin to skin and says
Since I’ve been back, it’s the strangest thing
Every time I put gas in the pussy wagon
All that comes out is blood
No gas, just blood
The smell, texture, look
Hella blood

What do you tell a person with a curse they can’t lift?
You take it in, let the quiet hang, laugh
And believe them when they say no worries
and that it’s the strangest thing
and they really don’t mind
and hope it’s something another beer can fix

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

The Ghost’s Departure

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Emily Hockaday

I prepare for its departure. Spring is here;
it has been here. I swept the clumps of pollen and tree buds
out of my corners.
The more time we spend outside
the less paranoid I feel. We all know it is time
for the ghost to leave—even the baby has taken to shouting
bye-bye at the empty apartment
when we go. I don’t want her to remember me
this way. Neither do I want to be erased.
I must stop conflating the ghost with my father.
Wishing my daughter to hold memories of him
will not make it so. We ride the carousel together.
She sits with her father on the bench, and I choose a horse
that moves up and down without getting anywhere. She looks on
with delight. The faces of these wooden animals appear
frozen in motion: a lip curled back revealing white, white teeth.
Hair that mimics the breeze, taut muscles
in the legs and flank. Are my memories in motion? Are any of us?
I read a theory in which time is not motion but another dimension
that we can travel up, down, backward, forward. A dimension that is still,
can be looked at from an outward vantage. Even if this is so,
we are moving within it, seemingly in one direction. No matter
how much I’d like to believe otherwise.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Skiing on Mars

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Angela Gardner

into vapour clouds. it doesn’t get faster
with less or flourish. we ski in private raptures
of snowfall that dematerialises before us.
unresponsive volcanic peaks, laughing at the glide
and atmosphere. traverse postcard views
saying, they bruise while we’re inside the position
of its poles on the planet Mars, the inclination
of its axis, our heads of snow. the remarkable
appearances at the polar regions between
persistence and persistent field where wind rushes
data, weight (what weight there is) in this lack
so water sublimes. how everything slurs into vapour.
stoppered outer layer spacesuit not too loose
or bulky you sweep to the left through continuous
dark until two tiny lit moons of fear and panic
rise in your eyes. we skate over transparent frosted
dry-ice fields into unstable yellow clouds. who cares
if we can never leave? the dust storm passes
as orange snow dematerialises before us with less
flourish in temperatures lower than we have ever known.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

In Midsummer Blues

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Palash Mahmud

Yesterday I stalked my sigh till the end of the shore.
Borrowed the pattern as like an autumn dew
Sneaks the lashes of the couch grasses.

Like a crumble of a stone glides deep down in a pond,
Sibilant burst out from the violence, breaking
The array of slick algae, peeling the skin of water off.

When crossing a filling station near
the marine drive road, I met a sigh
once was mine, a splintered face.

Waiting since I left behind. It led me to
An Egyptian Tamarisk tree where it bridles at night.
En route I came across a groan of my father

Dead long ago, turning turtle on beach sands, busking
In midsummer blues. Showed me the catalogue
Of sorrows it lived in this meddling world. Told me

If our groans cannot swing their moods
With the shadows of dangling leaves on the waves,
Our sighs turn into whispers making buzz in our hearts.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Postamble

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Catherine McCredie

A new rocking chair
You can set your watch by its beats
when Grandmother sits in it
like Cleopatra in her canoe
in the crocodiled wild

Thanks for finding it sorry it was indecipherable
sorry you couldn’t find it

looking at landscapes
you don’t even know is
gawping

Grandmother likes to stay put
You can buy a ticket from the train conductor
or coach driver

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

#NatureIsHealing

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Rae White

Ibis are looking cleaner, snowier
when I go on my designated walks.
Less plump, more gloss (like they’ve bathed

in the very best hair conditioner.)
I don’t remember the last time
I showered. But I smell like exercise

and exercise is acceptable and jigsaws
are legal and groceries are constitutional.
If I get my groceries delivered, who else

do I put at risk? I join a mutual aid group,
cook food in bulk in my home, ladle serves
into name-labeled containers

and it smells like the preface to a potluck
in the park. (Bring a plate, bring a friend.)
I haven’t hugged my friends

in months. I’ve attended too many
Zoom funerals. (Don’t forget, turn video off
when you cry.) I want that damp smell

of early morning air, overturned soil,
brine of tears. I haven’t been misgendered
in months. The jolt of a pause before

a missing pronoun gasps me back
to the present like an echo.
I think I’ve been dis-

-associating. I think the glare around me
is too bright, as the person
with the dog tells us we’re both

‘good girls’. (I think I’m very tired.)
I just want that fabric softener smell
of home. I just want to go home.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Ngambri

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Peter Cameron

1

A convincing ground fort
prepares its shaded mask.
Foreign imaged constrictions
colonise a long capital
breaking ground circles
into lines of abstraction.

Ancient low singing hills
are wreathed with pedestal
monuments to a state liturgy.

Into dry air a gum leaf drops
spinning an old rising track
flanked in silver sepia trees
fading a green golden sun.

Puffed players perform a
masque parlé de l’absurde
winding vile blindness
against relational integrity.
Coercively controlled casings
shade mind consumed
by material mined.

I learned earth is good
clean cover is mother
I belong. You teach dirt
needs consecration by human
blood and innocent genitalia.

Your red angle bricks cut
out a ferocious periphery
to suffocate a gated nation.
From unseen hides ensouled
we still drain blood to satiate a
cross inflated body of space.

After long-time soaking
earthy flora, Sun restores
her gift whilst smudging clean
spaces between movement.

Whose time is it
when you’re being
where you are?

Some quietly listen to
grandmother trees gathering
old weaving pattern circles.

2

Between watery layers
earth spirits inject
a thin air seam across
a wide Ngarigo plain.
A pale morning moon
rides low in your chalky sky.

Capital ship constructions
lie behind state circles,
fenced views exuding
exotic presumption.

Sanctions on board
a sinking Babel leak
as required extruding
contagion, setting sales.
Ungrounded in believing no place
but yearning to cocoon,
a hided herd barricades
in fear of future reform.

Bound unsound
faltering vaulted
logic unravels in slathers
of sly soporific slurs.
Unseen convoluting pathways
continue their common flows.

Over hoary green dappled streams
mill slicing turbines gyrate
their flash charging protest
of soured powers.
Ransacked lands need care.
Mirrors echo in layers of
circuit closing madness.

Smudge pattern faces peer
through your dim window
glass forever minding the
corners until you turn.

A cast shell of identity splits
concealing its being in others.
Do you stay the old parts together
or newly live with case expelled?

Currawongs call across faun
roos watching passing cars.
Night gathers into itself
slowly preparing space
for dark opening stars.

Wend your way deeply into
broad porous boundaries
knowing centrally the sensuous.
A receptive belly gently
lands a felt surround
bringing your beginning.
Seeds flourish in
bright resolution.
We tender our hands to
stone rafts in stone skies.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Uninitiation

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Luke Patterson

to the hum of a subaru 4×4
they invent an escape

the uncles have it all planned
criss-crossing old lines
where that big serpent story
slithers west

a comic opera of black men
a wallaby and a brolga
and a boy emu dulled
with a too-long-in-the-colony look
follow highway lined scar
trees deep into sky country

from the back seat
boy takes in the mono-crop patchwork
picture-view flickering fields
weeping paterson’s curse
black dirt to red dirt
little dust devils curl their grins
in the tailwind

unc’ brolga notes how mulga
gently lifts from the horizon
a trick of that warm seasonal air
and begins a belly-song
navigating toward his mother’s totem
sparrow-hawks circling
in silent accompaniment
boy emu commits the rocky contours
of melody to memory

they find a place to camp
cut wood for the inner circle
for carving boy’s first war-boondi

in his crypto-tongue
unc’ wallaby
tells a tenuous fable

of those petrified great heroes
and villains painted ignobly
into landscape
as archetype
of reconciled australia
as blue
in a sea-foam girt
as reconciled
for show
for what
all to crack open
the few biomes left looking
for a composer-in-residence

a whittled boy
young and free
strung with another’s culture
begins to see the ground
beneath him
covered with axe heads
sees the scabs of a wattle riot
overflowing ruins
hears the hidden accents
inscribed in homelands he always knew

evening edges them fireside
quiet boy emu
uncle wallaby and brolga
lick into shape
clubs made from gidj’
sounds of metal on wood
fill the nocturnal ethers

uncles leave
their dreamcraft unfinished
for the boy
tell him the rest of the story-pattern
can be found in the stars
and tomorrow…

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Chasing Apricots

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Suzanne Claridge
I.

My thumbs press into the tip of an apricot, splitting its rounded body in half. I place a bet with myself on which side the stone of this stone-fruit will stick to – will it be to the right or to the left?

An apricot is:

a small, soft, round fruit

with yellowish-orange flesh

and    a          stone    inside

One half of the apricot cusps the stone. The stone nestles against the yellowish-orange flesh. The little spoon protected by the big spoon. Two halves fit perfectly in the palm of my hand.

While examining the apricot, I imagine it as a hollow shell – as if it were the shell of an oyster. Except, unlike an oysters’ shell, the apricot is soft and delicate. Oysters can be soft, too, but they are unlike apricots. Firstly, apricots are a fruit of the earth, not of the sea; secondly, we do not throw away the oysters’ pearl.

II.

Here in so-called Australia, fresh apricots are in season during the summer months of November to January. Dried apricots are available all-year round. The seasonal quality demands a period of hibernation. A temporary death before bearing fruit.

III.

God forbade Adam and Eve eating fruit from the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden. The serpent assured them that consuming the forbidden fruit would not lead to their deaths but to knowledge, granting them the ability to distinguish between good and evil, a status that gods reserved for themselves:

              ‘the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely
              die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof,
              then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods,
              knowing good and evil’ – (Genesis 3: 4-5).

Caving into temptation, their disobedience marked the origins of inherited sin.

In a Portuguese poem Sou um guardador de rabanhos, translated to English as I Am A Shepherd, Fernando Pessoa wrote:

              ‘to think a flower is to see it, and smell it, and to eat a
              fruit is to know its meaning.’1

to eat a fruit is to know its meaning

What is your meaning, apricot?

to eat a fruit is to know its meaning

I consume you, what will I know of you?

I sit with the apricot and resist the tendency for passive digestion, where sustenance is aided alongside superficial entertainment and doom-scrolling. Binge-watching and binge-eating is an erasure of nourishment.

Food is sacred. Food is historical.

I wonder, is regeneration karmic?

IV.

I think about the etymological and geographical contentions around the origins of apricots, how their historical roots are traced to trading along the Silk Roads.

Oracle bones dating back to the Sang Dynasty (c. 1558-1046 BC) were found to bear the ancient Chinese symbol for the apricot.2 Shoulder blades of oxen or the plastron of turtles were prepared and used for methods of divination, engraved with inscriptions for a foretold destiny. Engravings of something living against the remnants of something dead.

V

During Ramadan season, Amardine (a dried apricot paste imported from Damascus) is used to make a juice to break the period of fasting or to savour during the festive time after sundown. Translated into Arabic, amardine means “moon of the faith”.

VI

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre enjoyed apricot cocktails in the company of their friends in French cafes. The taste of the apricot also an elixir for existentialists.

VII

American soldiers during the Vietnam War grew suspicious of apricots. They feared them as an omen. These men carried the fruits’ preserved, and supposedly jinxed, bodies into a warzone. Their suspicions grew from a series of coincidences. They started to warn against the consumption of apricots – especially around tanks.

VIII

The Romans, learning of the apricot during the 1st century A.D, dubbed it praecocum, the “precocious one”. In Latin, ‘precocious’ is coupled with the prefix prae-, meaning “ahead of”, and the verb coquere, meaning “to cook” or “to ripen”. Together, these terms form the adjective, “praecox”, meaning “early ripening” or “premature”. In the field of medicine, the word ‘precocious’ is coupled with the word ‘puberty’ – paired together as a medical term to diagnose early developments of physical maturity in children.

IX

André Aciman’s Call me by your name disentangles the sweet and sticky histories of apricots and peaches – both different, but two of the same. A charged desire between an adolescent boy and a graduate student. A mediator of power between blossoming and early ripening.

X

Praecocum.
Cum. Early ripening. Premature. Praecox. Cocks.

Where do you fit? Where do you belong? Who bears claim to your or(gasm)/igins?

You are divine moonlight. A social elixir. A source of magic that arouses suspicion. A malleable category to fulfil summer romances.

XI.

I was bound to a habit of fixating on my inherent duality. I imagined my own flesh, torn in half, examined in the palms of those who decide where the dividing line should be; locating where to make the slice, the incision, the clean-cut.

Which one of my limbs belongs where?

The safety of remaining a solitary stone falsely promised a protection from harm. I want to allow the flesh to soften but not bruise. The stone is a grounding centre. It is a gravitational pull. I am docked to a harbour.

I have a stone centre, a pearl. It will not be discarded.

1 Fernando Pessoa, I am a Shepherd.
2 Robert Spengler. Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the foods we eat, (2019).

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

I stand

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Jane Gibian

in the place where I began, many arms
now broad and twisted
high crown overlooking all

but the tallest siblings of smooth-barked apple,
rough-barked grey gum

surrounded by cliff and rock:
my protector, my tormentor

upper limbs bathe
in sunlight, roseate skin uncloaked
beneath darker peelings

visitors both subtle and loud pass through
three claws and two
two legs and four

intermittent avian chatter
a silent white moth
wings folded at rest

steeled claws following forked reptile tongue

ribbed capsules mingle
with a neighbour’s clusters of seven gumnuts:
seven cups of blossom erupt beneath
seven pointed caps

surge of sap through xylem and phloem

leaf-drum
of distant thunder

a trickle of rain over curved spines, sweeping freshness
into the bark litter
that gathers softly at our base

runnels of sweet water
pool around the furthest roots

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Last Light on the Great Divide

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Simone King

As the day dusks, the bald foothills flare
with purple-orange light. The moon hangs low
above the mountains, and between them mauve
smoke pulls daylight’s flesh from night’s spine.

The plains are bare except for sedge and torqued
gums. Cockatoos screech, those punks of the bush,
demanding more of the light. Between what was
and what will come, a liminal dreamscape,

no, a night terror. The Broken River’s dammed
belly bulges at Lake Nillahcootie, digesting
the skeletons of flood-drowned red gums. Earth
still carries all that has been cleared away.

The sun plunges and is gone. The cool breath
of night descends and the land shivers.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

through the dust

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Wren Goderie
your blood knows the journey your body seeks,

the journey I am about to unmake.


under my eyelids, the vivid flicker:

the moths stir, flutter one last time in a

dance you were just now in the middle of.

see yourself moving, but not what moves you —

a song. perhaps it came from my mouth. there,

each syllable a bit of dust from wings.


covered in a cloak of wings, hear the song —

such a lovely wing-beaty quality.

look up and see my lovers dance above

me lightly, like the dust we’re both made of.

fill the serious space in the middle

with some of your poetry. that’ll make

curving lines ending in various points —

a fire. I will crack this dream wide open,

walk the path raw. our very own Silk Road

crawling behind twitchy eyelids, slow walk

back to an older conscience, a raw awe.


speak your way back to the beginning, when

the earth’s crust scorched our feet, the unremitting

fire smoldering at the tips of our tongues.

reach towards the light like silence reaches.

we almost hear the cut-and-paste

language — though a thought walks two paths at once,

twin bright-lit wings, identically shaped;

smile on her face and a fire in her heart,

to bend the poets from their comet course

with smoky kisses and melt with the heat.

the caterpillar is mostly liquid,

dissolving in amniotic syntax.

with this transformation, gone is my shame.

a world emptied of memories but one,

for all the light in the world to pass through.


those heavy wingbeats in the night become

the land of birth brightness of star and scream;

a newborn cries, and somewhere a mother

tongue kicks consonants like a soccer ball,

kicks round the universe when the earth tips

words into a bag & shake them, arrange

them with ease. the earth swallows me in turn.


back to the start, before you stepped into the

middle of an apocalypse, but we

few who choose to linger in this echo

think we can outwit the end — play god with

words that can be used over and over,

recite the words without translating them…


howling incandescent hymns…


listen, o poet, to this marvel of

messages into the air, light patterns

we can’t compute as we gaze into this

battery powered fake tealight candle.

Evelyn Araluen, Decolonial Research Methodology after the Bogong Moth

A.J. Elsequence, The Sorrows of Young Hippocrates


Vanessa Page, Moths

Joanna Stanlake, Icarus

James Midgley, Dance

Shastra Deo, Walkthrough

Dorothea Rosa Herliany / Harry Aveling, Married to a Knife

James McCorkle, Franklin’s Bees


Omar Sakr, Brothers

Michael Farrell, Mysteries of the South Coast

Rosie Brodie, pussy sand

Lucy Morgan, to be held is where hope lies

Samantha Walton, poem for you

Petronius, Satyricon (quoted by Caitlynn Cummings)

Caitlynn Cummings, Mezzo Millemetro

Davide Angelo, Year Zero

Tanya Evanson, Finishing Salt

Soyini Ayanna Forde, Poem for a Gunman

Joel M Toledo, A Record Year for Rainfall


Lisa Suhair Majaj, Journey

David Adès, A Line In The Sand

Ralph Fonte, Another Gospel of Fire

Lynley Edmeades, The Kangaroos

Geoff Page, The Anthologist

Diane Glancy, Tripod

Atsuro Riley, Diorama

Maya Hodge, daughters of the sea, sun and sand

Jean-Baptiste Cabaud / Jan Owen, The shepherdesses painted in blue

Sarah Rose-Cherry, she / he / they. you (I / we)

Jonno Revanche, Not ever

Francesca Lysette, A DREAM OF THE CYBORG AS METAPHOR…

Lucy Alexander, Crow

Hannah Jenkins, Enderman’s Lament

Dženana Vucic, natural sciences trivia


Alice Blackwood, The Bogongs

Ricardo M de Ungria, ɫ i b a w

Ohan Hominis, Beneath A City

Christine Howe, Somewhere in the Suburbs

Pip Smith, On the 36th Floor

Julie Chevalier, more work needed to make a dadaist poem

Lisa Jacobson, All Things


Vanessa Page, The Instinct of Sharks

Himaja Wijesinghe, if he asks you where you’re from

Dakota Feirer, Heal Country

Emily Collyer, With the fishes

Samuel Wagan Watson, Dust and Drag

Jennifer Compton, Under the House


Mathew Bate, Little Hank and I


Anthony DiMatteo, Penelope’s Poet

John Hawke, The Conscience of Avimael Guzman

Rachael Mead, The Waterfall

Lore White, I could eat LIGHTNING

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

My Film Pitch

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Sarah Hall
the context is some yeah right future where ethnographic values endure. a cyclopsian archeologist pulled from the brainstorm scrapbox of a Hollywood board meeting chances on a laptop powered by remnant coronaviral heat or some other time-stamped disaster and the set designer hangs turtles with straws up their noses representing just a momentary art phase in the destruction of our planet. the bones of a glass-bottom boat drift over coral graveyards and brass statues of colonial men bob out the sunroof of Shakira’s old Tesla in this: the brave new ocean. motorised Uniqlo mannequins, those once-apostles of the normcore zeitgeist now dressed in seaweed board shorts, a keyboard headpiece and a skyscraper window shard wedged in the side like a baby on the hip are still twirling like they once did in the flagship but now up on the great pacific garbage patch, a bluetooth mouse for a pet, floating around. the critics will remark how all these particular combinations of scrap oscillated into companionship by that great tidal conductor make them think of RhymeZone where chamois met with chutzpah and Tim Tam lay with syntagm, minced ham, swim team and San Tomé. I suppose the clincher for some viewers will be simply contemplating the inevitable death of Shakira, looking down from the film momentarily to nostalgically scroll through Super Bowl highlights, but as for the cyclops’ character development and given that despite growing ACAB attitudes detectives are still largely portrayed with panache cinematically, it will have complexity, and maybe even a referential Morpheus sunglass for the solitary eyeball. the writing process will be autopredictive and as a commentary on the fourth wall the screenwriter will be portrayed on screen in a Zoom breakout room decked in gumboots to the earlobes in a landfill of words. there she’ll sift through the stanzas for recyclables to trade for parts to fix the broken greenwash synonyms for a shallow retrospective on a world misnamed til the wind turbines got submerged by the sea and then we all thought of the same joke: I guess hydro’s the next big thing. the Ballina branch of the Hollywood board meeting decide to simplify the plot to make it more timely, accessible, punchy and narrative driven so the cyclops turns on the laptop from its steaming pile of keepcups, nurdles and perfectly preserved big macs and begins its quest to decode the 21st century from pure emoji
Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Lifelines

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad

Memory is patchwork. The last thing
you recall is sky – a sudden bristling of
blue, a wild wobbling. Missteps prove
costly. You fall through the thick tulle
of algae and pond scum, plummeting
past the hyacinths and lilies, lime green
roots glowing, squiggling in the dark
like fluorescent strings of binary code.

You plunge through the vial of ink,
panic ballooning, as your legs churn
amniotic darkness, sinking, sinking,
till at long last a demigod grabs your
placenta hair. You break the surface.

Splayed on firm earth your nostrils
spew slime. Air inflates your alveoli
You wheeze back to life. With bleary
eyes you trace the mocha arc on your
left hand, the old clairvoyant woman’s
words ringing loud and true: Strange,
this melding of mounds, this ebony dip,
this meandering pace of your lifeline.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Walking in Isolation (III)

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Lachlan Brown

what plinth-moment is this, allowing the display of bark:
twisted, straight, or notched with achievements? a swing-
set attaches pathways to opportunities, weaving shadow-
lines into an iron crown. & the real presence logs
in each morning by walking poems around the rocks,
alert to small movements beneath a crumpled tarp-.


-aulin. part-serpent, part windsmith, the shroud-tarp
wraps sections of darkness into itself. bite worsens bark,
at least in this imagined scenario, tripping on sharp rocks
in the rush to hospital or clinic, struck heel swing-
ing with painful defiance. then there’s a line of cut logs,
mute & afraid, like bystanders or disciples in shadow,


having denied everything by the fireside. each shadow
betrays its origins in the bruise of sky, like the flat tarp
strung up as background. heading out beyond the logs
of prophecy there’s a river & a tree, yet, the claim of bark
is the claim of a textured present. the expedition must swing.
between corrugations & smooth surfaces, between rocks


& hill-sliced moments. if people mute themselves, the rocks
will cry out. but if they unmute, then the hungry shadow-
folk gather on the edges of screen. knowing this, the swing
rises to touch the horizon, pausing for a second as the tarp
flaps with a measure of acclaim. a gap in the tree’s bark
can grasp the universe in its ocular supremacy, staring down logs


that have been portioned & measured. the tiny webcam logs
its own reality, light glinting outside the terms of reference. rocks
& stones like boxes ready to be ticked. mene mene… dogs bark
at the sight of a disembodied hand, those scrawled orders, shadows
of untranslated dawn in handwritten snatches. meme meme… it’s a tarp!
typo or textual variant, sun grasps pen at a banquet, time swing-


ing in massive arcs, psalming the hundreds of open tabs where swing
voters weigh the future. thanks to democracy then, the camera that logs
discontent, gifting small victories like sparrows. note the forensic tarp
descending as though the world consisted of sheer evidence, as rocks
tumble down the hillside, exiting the administration’s bubble, shadow-
blending the unthinking with the unthinkable. unruly grass, hard bark,


unused swing-set: what untraveled route sighs in the billowing tarp?
what shifts with the wind’s reversals, as silent logs prepare their bark
for an offering & a shadow catches breath between the rocks?

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Stumbling upon a brick chimney shaft

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Jake Goetz

what can a butter
of sunlight smeared on a leaf
tell us about morality
or family? that the underside
is a night one can’t
differentiate from morning?

or if i filled a bag
with pebbles from the Yangtze
and told you to take them
to the end of the sky
would you find walking
bottomless?
or collapse
from exhaustion?

could you watch the way
words float through years
only to get stuck some-
where on an escarpment
in a mess of lantana and flax
drawing meaning out
from the senses unmeaning
in their essence to locate
the self in some planetary
syntax of symbols

in search one might say
to let letters loose
of logic

or to a logic
let loose of letters
opting instead
for simple transfers
tensing muscles in blood
like ferns in soil
the oomph and ahh
straining legs
farting and sweating
to ground a branch
to stumble upon

a

l g g

o i r

n a e
e n y
t
i b rooted beside
r a a brick chimney
o r shaft which
n k channelled air
down to the
Kemira Colliery
where coal was
cut from
Mt. Kiera
loaded onto
wagons and driven
down to Wollongong port
along a track you now walk
tracing a coal path
through Country

* * * * *


in 1982 BHP sought to sack
hundreds of Kemira’s workers
but in protest 31 miners
stayed underground for 16 days
while mass demonstrations
filled Wollongong’s streets
and a train took thousands
of workers to Canberra
where they protested against
the Fraser government’s apathy
toward the retrenchment

when the workers arrived at Parliament
ALP leaders Hayden and Hawke
were waiting to address them from a stage
while a flimsy barricade and a few police
stood defending Parliament House
but the workers swept past the stage
broke through the barricade stormed up
the steps of Parliament
and smashed their way through the doors
chanting ‘we want jobs’
‘we want jobs’
‘we want jobs’ ‘we want jobs’
‘we want jobs’
‘we want jobs’ ‘we want jobs’ ‘we want jobs’
‘we want jobs’
‘we want jobs’ ‘we want jobs’
‘we want jobs’ ‘we want jobs’
‘we want jobs’ ‘we want jobs’
‘we want jobs’ ‘we want jobs’

* * * * *


Kemira Colliery coal works fatalities

1871 – John Cole, miner (fall of stone, leaving a wife and three children)
1871 – John Coombes, miner (killed by stone block whilst working with father-in-law, Thomas Allum)

1879 May 14th – Joseph Seal, miner (roof fall)
1880 Sep 24th – Thomas Allum, labourer (run over by wagon on incline)

1884 Sep 6th – Andrew Bell, miner (fall of coal)
1885 Nov 14th – Thomas Dumphy, miner (fall of coal)

1887 Jan 30th – Thomas Danby, wheeler (fall of coal)
1888 Oct 4th – Robert Kenning, points boy (run over by set)

1896 Aug 28th – James Goldrick, horse driver (wagon on incline)
1897 Sep 13th – Charles Benjamin Drew, shunter (crushed between wagon buffers)

1900 Oct 15th – Patrick Hayes (natural causes)
1906 Jul 10th – John Dobing, 71, brakeman (runaway skip)

1906 Sep 20th – John Dumphy, 35, miner (roof fall)
1908 Aug 31st – William McDonald, 56, Deputy (trip and fall)

1910 Mar 4th – Thomas Francis O’Brien, miner (heart failure)
1910 Mar 17th – Frederick Peterson, 30, miner (roof fall)

1912 Jan 19th – John Charles Wilson, 36, shiftman (fall of stone)
1915 Jun 17th – Joseph Hay, 53, miner (roof fall)

1930 Apr 15th – Frederick Walker, miner (fall of stone)
1939 Sept 18th – Antonio Carollo, shiftman (died from injuries)

1948 Nov 8th – Harold Whitehead, welder’s labourer (electrocution)
1949 May 25th – Keith Arnett, lamp man (crushed between battery loco and surface tipping ramp)

1950 Mar 28th – Eric James, coal cutter operator (crushed upon slipping under the coal cutter)
1951 Nov 15th – Walter Hurt, battery loco driver (fatal injuries when colliding with a derailed 6 ton capacity mine car)

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