graceland

Posted on October 31, 2021 by D'arcy Noonan

on the way to yamma’s
white lines paint the boundary
the fittest tyre on my back
curls
lance the navy-blue blues
son of a dogged captain at princes hill
used to drag like this, like me,
a struck nail in the morning

yamma said, swim laps, big laps
but now i do the drive-by
and the dust, (just) blurs

beeswax on talbot avenue, balwyn
it’s such a joke i don’t think it’s that funny
play strong radio and smell candelas
bend her a tune
and sing for long-life, for a digestive

biscuit,
you just have to learn to not take it to heart, she says in the morning

and yamma’s bed creases inside
organs above half-ferns
breathe baby, breathe
it’s like, pleasure
why do you look at me weird?
when do you eat chocolate?

move this frame for me
just one job for you dear
now that you are fresh

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Blackheath

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Sarah Temporal

It’s not right to be awake late at night, here:
there’s secret business down in the gully
between the darkness and the trees

and it must be obeyed. So I wait until
the morning’s walk to bear news of our liaison
to the discerning ferns. My skin carries

your heat. The daring stringybarks shed
their robes, and discard them in heaps
at their feet. They step lithely down to the creek,

dip their toes in the cool dark water.
(Sometimes we find they have died in the night,
and fallen headlong into it.) And today,

the thick old chopping block is shredded
to rags. I stand on the deck and watch clouds
whip themselves black, and you speak me

that impossible verse, twisting your hat
to a furball in your nervousness. Nobody
intervenes. But night falls again on Blackheath.

So we follow the law of the storm
the way the beasts keep each other warm.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Undercover at Battery Point

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Mitchell Welch

Gritty realism playing solo fruit box bongo
on flagstone stairs and heavy awnings

reduces the morning to a wet/dry sequence
cosying in doorways, dot-dot-dashing under

drooping canopies of parasols flanked with
oversaturated slashes of synthetic pelt.

Concessionaires in their snug shops concede
little too late to the ocean’s Aeolian bite

pricing their oblations of Uggs, felt mittens
and umbrellas on airlocked mantels as if

the townsfolk aren’t already Patty Hearsts
to the Symbionese cold front storming in.

For a spell our shelter’s a seven-dimensional
cinema’s foyer. A nature doco’s trailer loops.

Possibly apocryphally the director’s family
brought the first Italian bees here their first

giddy sips of Eucryphia lucida (leatherwood)
an understory dweller who — as it transpires —

revels in rain, whose pollen acts presumably
as the niggling pearl of pre-precipitation

in at least one finger of the tumbling nectar
the bumblebees on the foyer’s flatscreen

swim in hyper definition through sunbeams
and gently rising mist at all costs to avoid.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Zero Day.10.1110.

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Chris Arnold

The kid never obsessed for mathematics: thinks of it as language where everything’s
indefinite pronoun: its blades shear away names, everything from the kid’s to Latin binomial;
got his physics instead from wood and bearing: shuv and kickflip for medial axis theorem,
his one hundred eighty times table; how numbers’ mass irons the lines from space.

No longer ok on uneven terrain, the kid’s given up on old quarries—cuts flushed
with oxidation states of iron: red and black splitting grevillea thickets as sun dews
on the city quilted below. Once, an odd white light on the horizon line: sun-bright,
rain and dust a rug shaken out between the kid and it; a warp of not knowing reflected

sun from artificial: an Airbus beneath him, a swim in black and red cuts in stone:
once somebody’s job and sprayed over with postcodes: 6108, 6071, 6003. Another way
to quantise country, to grid the granite—a good year it pulses green to black: subpixel
that winks out feeding lichen, sundew, grevillea and New Holland Honeyeater; the whole

thing: a loss of productivity. Back then, in the hills, the kid couldn’t figure out the lines of it,
its striation—how that white light might look from a parallax angle and how straight
the 33kVs from flown overhead, missing the misdirection of topography. Reduced
to powers of two: Mersenne primes, perfect numbers, how to use them.

This poem was written with the support of an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Wairaka

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Michaela Keeble

gannet’s back

she leads
and follows

she does neither

she’s fishing

she’s blinding
herself on the hard
hit against
water

she’s so good at it

she checks herself
unfurls
falls through skin
like stone

with each strike
against fish
her eyes return
to rock

after a time

she will die
of experience

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

PINBALL

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Victoria Ramsay
Coins take me
snorkelling
through a pinball sea
turbulence

silver-ball salvos launching through
pyrotechnic scopes, melody storms, mind splits
wireless static, bubble pop, synthetic spiral shafts

to downtown
where New Year resembles
a grave-site of meteorites — gloss metallic alchemy
rampant, on the blink
flippers jerk the viewpoint
deadly halogen eyes beam, stimulation overload
pectoral fins
game-some turns erasing inhibitions
bleeding tamarillos

these diamond encrusted goggles
render anonymity
dazzling frames attract

galaxies
fluorescent krill, tourmaline and tangerine turn
iridescent algal green

and rupturing sediment
spurts
primordial haze consumes
the machine grinds down

the salvo stops.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Duplex

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Stuart Barnes

(Neomarica gracilis, Walking iris, Apostle plant)

Rhythm’s afoot. My fingers step to earth.
They put down roots. They stamp and stamp their whorls.

Worms lay down routes: a red stampede: air whirls.
The sun, another plantigrade, treads heat.

The sun, another plantigrade, spreads heat:
I raise a dozen incandescent masks.

Abuzz, I lower incandescent masks,
I blow faces, ephemeral but famed

bright-blue faces. Perennial and famed,
my fingertips tingle with certainty.

My fingertips tingle with certainty:
I turn and turn twelve diminutive selves.

I turn and turn twelve diminutive selves.
Rhythm’s afoot. My fingers step to earth.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

spooky action at a distance

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Georgia Kartas

I.

Something drops onto my left shoulder
as we dreamfuck each other’s outlines. I scream
A COCKROACH. They brush it off
but the threat is still there
and the bedroom is too messy and there are
too many places for insects the size
of THE FINGER to hide.
As much as I want to
keep us between our thighs, Kafka’s too real and I
stumble backwards through the
doorway.

II.

Sunlight refracts and glitters like a miracle.
I burst up from beneath the water
to the surface. An old beard on the shore is
jump–waving at me, not in greeting
but in warning. The ocean is coming.
I swim–run–crash to the sand; it breaks, consumes the mangroves,
the leftover lands.

III.

Reach into the independent world created out of pure intelligence.
Find the Eye of Horus fragments and balance them back together,
a reaction, a product,
a chromodynamic alchemist trapped in their own house–
X’s bedroom–childhood home,
underground tunnels blocked off by
bookshelves–cupboards–rubble.

IV.

I clamber further into the womb that bears no new life,
only that which has died many times before.
I know it is a trap.
Submit to the pursuit–earthquake–collapsing
lungs,
the red blue eyes that do not blink. A knife is never just a knife
but the intention.
I surrender / cease to slither. I am at the bottom of a hole
in the earth and all I can see
is the light I cannot reach,
diaphanous mercury
mutating.

V.

Until the hole is not a hole
but the outline of other people creatures.
I have so much space to move
between them, even nod my head in greeting to some,
share a knowing crescent moon.

VI.

I did not expect to find you here, waiting for me.
Your skin a forest floor,
your greeting that of a child
run–laugh–hiccupping
down a hill.
Open I LOVE YOU like
I’ve loved you for as long as
the speed of causality
which I have, since

\ the doubletake on the bicycle

\ a doorstep and scrolls of voice across the strait

\ a journey to \ the choir
the end of the night \ prescient fried
\ the backseat of a taxi vegetable dumplings

\ 4am fog \ the smell of the first fruit \ eight hours straight
of fig season along the Hume Highway

\ the second cup
of a twice-born panther \ , since I first saw you on stage.

VII.

I am inappropriately dressed for such an occasion,
swaddled only in the misery
we were assigned
but as we embrace, the cloak transitions:
a shimmering black cape,
a manta ray,
pale rainbow nacre,
the warp and weft of
sunrise–sunset.

VIII.

And though we are two separate knots
together
we disentangle.

Wind the loom’s prophecy
backwards then
reloop:

IX.

\\ Kαι εν κοιλάδι σκιάς θανάτου
η ΓΗ είναι ο ποιμήν μου –

\\ Yea, though I walk through the valley
the LAND is my shepherd –

X.

time travels south
into the gut
and pelvis

horny! for the tall copper tower
horny! for the many names of truth
horny! for visions bigger than revolution

walk the language
between languages

the breaking of the word

like bread

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Passport

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Peter Harney

(anthem / continuous loop)

Someday we will find ourselves
in a distant city

lost in embrace
without hour or minute

knitted

twirled

leaves to a bough
branches to a tree

birds will call us
in a chorus
(feathers to a wing)

to a window
explain
the heat of a million
neons fading

it will be us
found in caress
without hour or minute,

dawn disappearing the stars &
carillons engraved on us

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Salt Lake

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Ashley Haywood

Pulse:
peal of bone—

I open my mouth to empty out
this sphere. Soundless-sound hangs
its presence. Pale sky

englobes me—

Am I gravity-
free?

I take
a step

inside. Time rushes through me. A doorway
shuts—walls, walls—a gypsum tomb! I cough up

mummified leaves, stone
seeds—the forest is gone. A pulse, a pulse.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

THE SUNMILER

Posted on October 31, 2021 by A Valliard

From The City of Lost Intentions: The Temple of Fo-Elpmet-Eht.

Parchment formed the second door.
A brass being with a glass sphere head sat at a desk
in the corner, lit by a gas lamp.
Before it, a map bristled with mountains.
The figure traced the topography carefully with a quill of light.
“The Sunmiler counts sun-miles,” the Guide said pleasantly.
“What are—” began Plume.
“Land that the sun touches, obviously. Use that fanciful thing
you call your brain.”
The Sunmiler’s caliper legs scraped gently on the floor as it
drew them under itself.
“Mountainous landscapes have more sun-miles than deserts,
apparently. It has to do with surface area.”
“Is there any need for such observations?”
“Of course not.”

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Ride

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Cameron Lowe

—for Kris Hemensley

Thought of the line
the stops & starts
to the city—
Blackburn’s riff
on stations
his “Coney Island of the mind
to the Coney
Island of the flesh”
a signal flicker
for signal fault
right here
right now
in Lara town, the song, the singing’s
belated pulse—scoria thistle
You Yangs Day’s eye
Hold tight—

NOTE: Quoted passage—“Coney Island of the mind/to the Coney/Island of the
flesh”—from “Clickety-Clack”, The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn (Persea
Lamplighter: 1984).

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Two Headlines Trespassing

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Joseph Jude

For more than these past few weeks, for months,
I’ll say I’ve been having the strangest dreams.
They want to stick to me, between my skin and
The time that I’ll oversleep, they fear the next
Morning, and the things I’ll wake up to, that my
So-called, morning-routines, will sober and put
Them away. Well, these days, my bed clothes can
Foresee calamities, and they keep a log of our
Panic, of all of the new words, which we’re
Using to make sense of these times: As such
‘Breaking News’ and ‘Important Updates’ are
These tall, inimitable stems, a boundary of
Garden weeds that sit out of the grass and come
Up to your knees, they know to wait outside
Sun-smelling, where my car is shaking to a start;
Where I won’t notice them in my afternoon
Washing, and even now, nearly two years on
I find them ‘misunderstood’, whenever they’re
Trying to ‘play dead in the footpath’, well, I think
That they are hoping to be seen, that they prefer to
Be thought of as ‘troubled’, as ‘self-sacrificing’
And how they must get together on the night before
Bin day, where the aim is to appear, unassuming,
Skittled between bins in the footpath.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Questions

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Kerry Greer

The map was a body
And it all went up in flames.

Yes, that’s right I have his ashes,
Mostly here. Some were given

I can’t tell you favourite landmarks
Anymore. I liked all of it.

To his brother and his sisters,
To his mother and his father.

There was a place I often visited.
My son was with me. When I dream,

We walked his favourite trail, the
Piedra Lisa, and scattered his ashes.

I can find my way there again.
There are cottonwoods, wild clematis.

The wind blew the ashes against
My face, into my hair. I remembered

Next to a field, Ojito de San Antonio,
I often see a man. He is facing

Lying with my head on his chest
In the night, the way he smelled of cedar.

Away from me, into the wind.
Sometimes when my son looks

I keep the rest in a box next to my bed.
The wind doesn’t get a second chance.

Down at me, from his bed, I think:
This is the face of the man.

When I flew with his ashes from New Mexico
To Australia, the Customs Officer asked me:

The child will turn, and there
The map will be.

What is in this heavy box? My sister-in-law
Talked for me. Everyone else was quiet.

In a box, I have a map.
On the bed, sleeping

Scales tilted like a compass. The airport turned
Its eyes on me, the person with the heavy box.

There is a small boy.
He will know the way.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Dyemaking, a guide

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Jordana Infeld

I

Ascending rows of little onions, butts
in grooves,
their shedded skins like exoskeletons.
Vacant
and dry, protecting nothing, at what point is a skin
no longer
a skin? This skin never wrinkles, it is always morning
in the supermarket.
2.50 a kilo but the skins are free. So are the paper bags
which
also provide a thin brown layer between a world
and a smaller world.
I place a few onion skins into a bag, it becomes the skin
encasing the skin.


II

There are many ways to organise a pantry, by
name, date, colour
or the dewey decimal system. This one is an index
of places—
I am a place, a portable place—says a skin when I open the bag
its topography
of bald globes a coppery contour of absence. At around
912
I transfer them into a bag containing a crowd already—an atlas
of onion skins.


III

Shelves are blank, expressionless in fact
the entire
green grocer is empty like a cracked egg. The only
residue, fragments
of stained glass onion skin. I run
my thumb
around the inner shell like my grandmother would, that last drop
suspended.


IV

(That same grandmother had a habit of tying knots
in her hankies
little reminders lest she forget something.
It puzzled me
how this technology worked, how were the words contained
in the snot
knots embroidered with flowers and initials, and
how many knots
could amass in a pocket, and be carried from one place
to another?)


V

Another empty greengrocer, the greengrocer
cicada
sticks to the side of a gum stripping
its bark. So
named for its colour, it also vacates its outer layer
although
first it must exit the earth. The cicada repeatedly revises
its edges—
the first time is always the hardest. A crisp absence
a memory
in brackets. I’d like to know what it is like
to shed
your skin, to draw yourself a new outline.


VI

Lentils carrot celery onion garlic oregano bay
leaf
diced tomatoes stock and olive oil
is a recipe
for soup handed to me by mouth, you don’t need
quantities
apparently. I’ll take any excuse to peel
an onion
and sweep the skins off the edge of the board
into my pocket
until I open the pantry where I find
the same
old paper bag now soft with creases
and onion smell.


VII

A skin is a noun and a noun a skin, lonely
and deciduous.
I thought nouns were heavy but these skins
are light, several
bagfuls make only fifty grams. I fill a stainless steel pot
with
cool water but when its warm it brews like a bruise.
A pigment
will sit but dye gets beneath a surface. It has no skin
of its own
so it seeps into things. After one hour I drain
the dark liquor
and discard the skins—dark, soggy
and exhausted.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Soundtrack

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Isabel Haqqani

the Crab Cactus dies and gives birth to itself
Every Year. unfurling towards an imagined desire
it buds hastily, hungrily, reminiscent of anatomical
illustrations of blushing muscle fibre or the skirts
of a child’s synthetic pink gown, worn without fail
through the aisles. the meat section
of the grocery store
provokes within me
the feeling of:

[your palms, imprinted with quarter moons,
rough and foreign to me]

[the melancholy valley your hips cleave
in the lonely tether of night]

[the whorl of your hair bores into your skull,
pointing to singularity, Mind]

the lyric of:

two enrobed women
wheel an abandoned
shopping trolley from one side
of Buranda train station
to the other at 2 am
as though to peel
this imposition of nouns
from the translucent skin
of the land beneath

and as though to disrobe our serpentine inland sea,
bloating with translucent pollutants and dead fish
and swift Walt-Whitmatic catamarans. three donors
to private schools summit Moriah but cannot condense
the city into the shell’s hole, octopus-borne.
death spares the dental hygienist who bores
my teeth down to stumps with her diamond
incongruous light.

sometimes i recognise,
in perspex reflection,
the essence of me

and your muse
is the Sage archetype,
swilling mulberries gin

but i am your staunch
deuteragonist
in the waning of spring.

the blood is slow-moving, becoming the sheets.
the ancient cat loses weight while we sleep.
coiled like a nautilus shell, or a foetus,

the Crab Cactus and its identical spawn
flowering either side, like Plath’s snakes,
unraveling.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Sound Returns to the Whale

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Nellie Le Beau

avoid the amulet, the well meaning
songs of the hunter, I am not
meant for the dart, the tracking
satellite. I go down human
wake up whale, I stay
human, you become whale,
your long eyes
blinking back the sea, calling
me into the water, over and over
with fins waving back
the past, until you have forgotten
birds, the branches of
trees, clay streaks along
the gravestone’s edge.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Portal of Rings

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Angus McGrath
A merry melody of orange rings that fall inward infinitely.
Pitch bends up,
goofy.
When I am with you,
feeling in falling,
I am two places at once,
driving into a virtual horizon.

A circle is;
a retina,
a ring,
a hole,
a portal,
a hole (for sex),
a screen,
a painting,
or rather a painting is a portal.
I hate that painters would say that a painting is a portal.

An artist doesn’t make a portal.
I’m talking about a coyote in the desert,
working like a sign painter who literally,
literally,
makes a portal.

The characters are all flat pencil but they feel like plastic,
or fluid.
Blown out strings and cymbals,
they always crash.
It feels obvious but these sounds are very important.
It adds elegance and class to something cartoonish.

Paint a long long long long long white line through the desert with paint.
Paint a deep blue arch in perspective on a cliff face with paint.
Paint a light-blue light at the end of the tunnel with paint.
Add the touches.
Watch in amazement.
A friend once told me
“A circle [is] the shape of a portal,
where the future pours in.”

It’s a dream to run like a land-bound bird into the portal,
(screen)
, but we are forever trapped as the angry coyote.
I was so angry when my ex made a painting of Bugs that I dreamt of punching it.
The frame would be a portal I could break through,
but a rock is not.

Though the pencil-plastic people are angry,
they’re never hateful;
their alliances are open to change, even if they’re regular.

While striving towards what we wish,
falling flat on our face,
each one of our teeth cracks and we fall over on the ground.
What has defied us
runs us over.
The xylophone descends.
We may crawl out of a hole shaped like ourselves with stars twirling above,
but here,
we can always get back up.



An emoji of a bomb.




……………..
…….….
………………………………….
…………;




It’s a silly joke, but a poem should explode off the page.
Maybe they’re proof that jokes are never silly.
By TV I mean a screen and all the small glass shards will perforate your eyes and skin,
so even though you won’t live inside the screen, it will live in you.


An emoji of an explosion.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Strawberry Shampoo, Sweet and New and Not Meant for Cleaning Babies.

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Birgitta Inglis

I was washing heirloom dishes in her stone house when I first felt you slip.
A ping and then a hurt. You were a secret then, raspberry speckled toilet paper,
stuffed inside my pants.

I rode the 333 express to Brontë, but I was in no hurry.
Rough waves broke. Hope and anchor held, the surrender seemed to stop.
I smoked half a rolled cigarette there, on the wall by the sand, and didn’t fall.

It was after midnight when you really came away.
No hesitation in the rip: pain emptied me. Half-bent in a frosted glass shower,
I fished you from the threads.

There you were, an unformed thing, already loved by me.
A breathless, beatless, ember uncradled to the drain.
Sticky, I pushed you down.

Metallic aubergine and sick soaked through my skin,
in a place that was not our home.
So, I washed myself scrubbing hard and quick with

strawberry shampoo, sweet and new, and not meant for cleaning babies.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

Anxiety room

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Jumarvin Ridulfa

I

You wake in the middle of the night,

make shape of the bedside lamp

turn the switch on with your right hand uneasy,

wait for the yellow to fill the room

How familiar is this body, you ask

the moonlight concave, clothes restless on the floor

And you ask, what has become of you

Person that demands skin, demands shelter

But from whom, favoring which location, lost in the moment

You think, everyone rids their sense of self

anyway, what difference is my discretion but appetite

for argument, stupid in belief

In the discourse of purpose, I am

just another body yearning for warmth

athirst ego in the sheets, unkempt in hiding.

II

What does affirmation sound like?

III

I have no use for vocabulary

this mouth endures what is expected of it

except listen,

when the conflict starts all I take is what is in front of me

What else do I have to perceive

but conclusion disguised as liberty

And listen, when you call my name all I hear is assertion

Come on, you are better than subtlety

bring forth your rage, burn the room curtains,

make me forget the function

of discernment, or worse—decency

This is pleading.

I want you to completely refuse my silence as answer.

And I will speak only in gesture.

IV

How do we know if we have done anything right?

V

And when the time comes that we have to put out the fire,

what will we do?

I say, nothing. Just wait for the sea.

Watch people dance around our patio.

Stay calm, see if something else comes out.

Maybe smoke.

Maybe more dancing.

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

All tomorrow’s parties

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Anne Kellas

Consider in my river-vault
the bam-bam fish, the boat
— a line across the sky.
Consider in my trap the net,
the caught shared dancing fish
— the silver tail, the swallow-jive, the fire.
Consider too the incandescent forest
— the pitiful ash-stroked hills,
the shaved trees, the burnt skies, amber.
Floods of clouds — sky-mirrors dancing.
Fast cars. Tourist traps. Dancing birds.
Sky again. Dancing birds.
Consider in my forest all these things.

‘And what costume shall the poor girl wear
to all tomorrow’s parties’ – Lou Reed

Posted in 103: AMBLE | Tagged

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.

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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.
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