Phoning home

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Bronwyn Lovell

i.
I am not so brave as Elliot, could never lay out
a candy path for hungry, lost forms to follow
through the dark backyard to my bedroom door.

ii.
I’m in awe of this pale, awkward boy peddling
hard in little red hoodie, riding his bicycle across
the blue moon through crisp pine-needle night,
with the brown heart-shaped head of his small
alien friend blanket-cloaked in the basket up front,
pursued by sirens and uniforms, buoyed by love.

iii.
Often, you are alien to me. When our fingers touch
there’s spark. You lift me over landscapes but I’m
afraid you’ll let me fall. I have allowed the wrong
ones to carry me before. Let’s just lie here on our
backs now, pedal each other’s feet above the floor.

iv.
Together we must escape the Earthmen who land
stern as politicians in the driveway to set up
quarantine in space suits — an adult intervention
so sterile and inhuman, it turns us both white.

v.
You’re killing him! Elliot shouts as E.T.’s heart
slows and stops in his small chalky chest.
The flowers droop and the body bag is zipped
and it’s cold as frost but the corpse glows red.

vi.
If you are sick and I can’t cure you, then we are both
sick. If you need family near you, I want them close
too. If sadness drifts in to settle ashen across your
face, then I must brave the boats, seek the mothership.

vii.
There will be times you will feel extraordinarily
lonely on this blue planet if you stay, my alien friend.
You’ll see the broken father of a washed-up child
and understand that nature failed with human hearts.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Hypoxia

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Claire Collie

Remember when we were young we worried about
polystyrene, aerosol sprays and refrigerants.

I dreamed for five years straight about chlorofluorocarbons
And stratospheric maps of the earth with the ozone hole,
a white cupping, like an optic nerve with glaucoma.

I cried small tears in the dark in a small room in the suburbs
with three sisters next door who thought about other things.

This hole could be fixed they said if we all agreed to buy
different products. Change our haircare and fast food outlet.

Consumerism
our saving grace
our solace.

It seems so twee to imagine battling just ozone depletion
when there are holes now in almost everything.

In the lists of biota that flourished no longer alive today.

In the craters left by every mineral mine scraped out of
the earth’s surface.

In the desiccated habitats leaking into palm oil plantations
and soybean crops.

In the emptied aquifers.

In the fifty million kilometres of tracts bored in search of oil.

In the cavities melting upward on the underside of glaciers.

In the fertiliser run-off dead zones where sea grass and
everything else doesn’t grow because there’s not
enough oxygen to survive.

Holes in the planet we’ve made with our greedy little hands.

But mostly, you can’t disagree, there are holes now in our
heart. And there’s no product to buy to save us from that.

The dreams the children must be having tonight,
after they tuck themselves into bed
are stifling.

They will haunt
us all.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

The Meadow Is Filled with Stones

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Romana Iorga
White stones, flat or round.
Some of them boulders, some small enough
to fit in my fist—the instrument
of a perfect murder. Blunt, faceless.
If I kill and let the stone fall
in this field, who’d ever find it?

…

There’s a farmhouse at the edge
of a Romanian village, lonely and thick
with shadows as dusk sets in.
People inside are afraid to turn on the lights.
Once in a while, stones fall
from the sky, dent the roof, chip bits
from the eaves. Stones fall, never bigger
than someone’s fist, never hurled
from great distance to burrow
through the roof and kill.

…

The rumor goes they sold
their souls to the devil. She sleeps
with Lucifer; he rapes his daughters.
Their cows, pigs, and sheep recoil
from their food, for they are fed
the flesh and blood of their young.
They keep idols inside their house.
The blind head of a monster
is perched high in the center of a room.
They kneel in front of that head
three times a day. They don’t go
to church for fear of bursting
into flames, of turning to stone.

…

The old man and his wife die
one after another—quiet deaths, nothing
spectacular about them.
The village comes to see them buried.
The woman goes first. Her grown-up
children, who long ago left for the city,
hold the casket with nary a look
for the villagers thronging around.
They speak among themselves.
Their gestures are calm, they show no fear.
They bury their mother in the field
close to the farmhouse, where stones
come out of the ground like clean old bones.
Their father cries. The priest is not there.
The village talks, but not for too long.

…

The old man might have had
a drinking problem but kept it to himself.
When he dies, the curious few
are already out there, in the field,
huddling in the dry grass.
It is fall, it is cold, it is windy.
They watch the sons and daughters
of that little-known man bury him
like a treasure in the same grave
with his wife. Later on, some would swear
the ugly head of a beast was laid
on the old man’s chest. No one
musters the courage to open the grave,
though many vow to do so.

…

The mound in the field bears no names,
no flowers. Stones cover it in the shape
of a hunter, the shape of his prey.
A year later, new grass swaddles
the grave and the pattern has changed:
the hunter is being stalked, the prey
has scattered across the pasture,
baring its teeth to new seasons.

…

Somebody buys the farm with its stones
and its graves, piled on top of one
another for centuries. This is a good
place for game, the word spreads.
This is a good place that death
comes easily to. After dark,
if you still yourself in this field,
you can hear the soft hooves
of deer coming to feed
amid stones and moonlight.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Conveyor

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Iain Twiddy

Standing in line in the supermarket,
watching the conveyor belt’s black current
snailed with stains, blotched with starry aftermaths,

watching the way it carries off objects,
lumps like limbs, plastic packets like armour,
boxes and tins fortified like cities,

this one from Ōsaka, that one from Seoul,
another somewhere on the sun-zapped, spray-
peppered, crumbling American west coast,

as the waves go, I think of three items:
one, how kings once had to go to sack cities,
and now those distant lands come crawling to me;

two, how long it has been since I was close
to a river at night, the slick run of soot
veined with city lights, if anyone ever

gets close to what a river is at night,
a whiskered black dragon of molten granite
twisting and shoving and glistening its lack;

and three, I guess, would be the synthesis,
I mean, what the approximate cost is
of the murky work needed to bring in all these spoils

through the air-streams and roads, river-grids, oceans,
as intimate now as the tracks of the blood,
how is it possible to filter that out,

to think the impact as distant as origin,
as if the dyeing filth filling a river
were ferried away like rats in the night,

and every figure impatiently waiting
not just wiped out by the next in line
in a line, not a latent cycle.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Lifting doom’s veil

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Bobbie Sparrow

Hope is the thing with feathers Emily Dickinson

Crows crumple like rags across a wreath of dry bristles
their raspy commands like phlegm from demented mouths
I think of sulphur and soot, of the sick trees of East Germany
how I stood in the dark silence with the wildness buried beneath.

Feathered arguments eclipse the quiet voices
for those who will not stop for stop you must
doubt is blindness to the wren in the wood
hope is listening to her song.

For blackbirds still rose above skeleton pines
dipped and arched in impulsive play cried in joy
or so I believed for reciprocity has taught me
to dance when there is music, to pause when there are birds

If I clap my hands a flock of love letters baptise the sky
words fall like leaves across my palm
counsel
trust receive
attached only to the wind at their breasts, the birds fly on.

The grace of flight is wind welcoming bones and the absence of expectation.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Cherry Blossom

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Susannah Violette

Sky scatters from the cherry blossom,
in their thousands they claim the space pink,
their endless, fluttering, clusters.

The street gives itself to them, pollarded,
scarred trunks squat like ego-broken mystics.

Pavements offer themselves up as a stage to all fallen things

and the cobbles dirt ride on their glamour.
The cafes, the shops, all bloom with those flowers,

perhaps the scent of the flowers is there, somewhere
beneath the chronic petrol,
the thick laced perfumes of our consumption.

A cigarette burns in the hand of a supplicant boyfriend
kneeling before his girlfriend, phone in hand.
she is a live stream of a selfie, bubbling for all to see.

Here is a crush of girls wanting to be seen with the trees.

Arms around trunks, each other, duck-face kisses
in amongst that overwhelm of blossom, girls

wanting to be seen with nature, by nature, wanting it
inked into skin, and posted on Instagram, filter/no filter! to look at later
and count the likes.

Sightseeing wildness,
as if it wasn’t already inside them.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

It’s Challenging

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Liam Ferney
i.m. christa mcaullife

Folks I don’t plan to change my plans.
It’s mourning in America.
Melania and I are given to meme
the tragedy of the challenger.
We share no pain with no one.
This is truly a national loss.

We’ve forgotten the courage of
terrible accidents, overcome
no dangers, do nothing brilliantly.
Last century we became acquainted
with atrocity’s efficiency
but still we scare quickly.
We are not daring or brave.
Only the strongman has
that special grace to say
“Give me a challenge
and I’ll meet it with joy.”

Take a chance and expand a man’s horizons.
The schoolchildren who watched
the shuttle incinerated will
be seasoned by the experience.
The future belongs to the frightened
and how they choose to invest their fear.
Always painful things happen,
it’s just part of the exploration of your love.

146 days ago Drake dropped Scorpion
today you will die in the manner
in which you lived your life.
We will wave good bye and forget you.
I let slip my surly lip you will not
touch my face of God.

They wished to serve, and they did. They served me.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

After yet another warning from scientists about the impending end of the world

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Peter Lach-Newinsky

Let’s look around the place, here, this farmlet,
southern highlands, late October in a year records are again broken.
I still don’t understand it. Even as I prattle on to visitors
of its few successes, many failures. Can I really see it?

Always that film of ideas, memories, comparing, imagining, like veils of mists
coming up from Bundanoon’s deep gorges, channelling the Tasman
up through sandstone ravine funnels hitting high coolth
to merrymake mushrooms, mood magic, droplet cobwebs, bee diseases.

Mostly though, wheeling skyscapes pushed by westerlies
from sandy ebbtide cirrus to rolling king-tides of cumulus
backlit by sunsets like last sputterings of some senescing fire somewhere
invisible just over the horizon blocked by tangents of trees.

Night tends to fall like a sentence, stars its letters
spelling patterns we no longer see. How to explain this longing
for something else? Something not to be measured in algorithms,
there and not there, central and peripheral, a bend in unbeing

bending you into Is. The Southern Cross wheels yet is always going south.
Although the buddleias have unbloomed, woodwhites, jezebels
still jinx and suck. Our slow-dying dog Billy stumbles in to beg for food,
his remaining passion as his legs give way, lungs rasp

louder towards some crescendo-diminuendo I am avoiding. Ask not
for whom the bowl empties, it empties for thee.
Soundscapes around here always mix machine, mind and wild,
the steady techno of swamp frog, dull sigh of plane or train

receding into the comforting abstractions of distance.
Magpies, ravens chase away raptors and are praised daily
in the rabbits’ subterranean temples. One rifle blast and I can wait
at least twenty minutes before another whiskers the air.

It would be nice to say these rodent moon-makers were my roshis
in patience and detachment from headcount and slow-cooked stew.
Farming is about killing things. Killing ancestors that made us.
Some say the expiation comes from preparing the food

with heart, mind in the right place. I wouldn’t bet on it.
Apparently some Buddhist cold-climate carnivores
foist the karma onto the man with gun and knife. No one’s perfect.
I used to only eat meat I’d killed, riding out the sheep’s

spurting spasms after I’d slit its throat. Getting too old for that, so now
it’s also others’ organic because it builds the soil. But who knows.
Vegan seems cleaner, thus suspect, and I’d miss the bloody mystery
of dark resurrection and dying-to-live.

This spring, with days of welcome wind-shifting curtains of drizzle
heading off another record drought, there’ve been more small birds.
Waves of yellow-rumped thornbills seem to share the insected grass,
trunks and air with red-browed firetails, the odd restless flycatcher

outwinging their flanks. For the first time variegated fairy wren,
spotted pardalote have sat at our sill demanding entrance
to our forbidden cave. May the tiny star-speckled wonders of their eggs
rest safe some place unknown to the winged, sharp-beaked

brains gracing the sleek black shoulders of corvids and butcher birds.
How much longer before the dark angel of blindness
touches my maculate eyes with his immaculate feather? I can feel him
shuffling in the wings. Will I navigate the final times

in the new tough light of sound, sense and senseless,
the metallic whir of robotic drones replace the oneiric buzzing of bees?

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

The time has come for you to lip sync

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Robyn Maree Pickens

Here you are – pulling another foal out of the Ice Age
as the moon files its tongue down to a shimmer. A frog

with a third eye leaps off a white plate & I can still smell
you on my fingers. We sit in the briny shallows with the bony

fish watching icebergs crack and calve with the spontaneity
of my mother’s spine. We have tipped sunlight into a kiln

& are left here grinding pearls & fighting over definitions
of tolerable risk. I open your freezer & take out one

of David Hammon’s Bliz-aard balls that you bought
from his performance rug on the corner of Cooper Square & Astor Place.

I hold up one palm-rolled compression of snow for you to see.
We remember what it felt like to arrange dancers

& sit bare chested in the dirty rain.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Cemetery Time

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Jessica Holburn

Have some time to kill before dinner, so I’ve come to the cemetery, which is quite extensive and doubles as a dog park. Phones, dogs, and picnics are permitted. Drones, barbecues, and alcohol are not. Some gravestones appear to matter more than others. The most elegant are neglected and overgrown, with a hint of cement peeping out from underneath. Others dominate the terrain above ground as brutalist tombs; obnoxious, imposing, even in death. This might have been an opportune moment to blend in. Any attempt to prolong the inevitable conversion into compost is futile. Perhaps I’ll come back here tomorrow to jog, alongside the acquiescent and the resentful. I won’t slow down for any of them. All before a morning cup of coffee, before the fullness of waking, among the dog walkers. I don’t want a dog. Though there is no doubt that dogs have rich conscious lives and exhibit preferences, I am aware enough to know that I can barely attend to myself. Closer to the mentality of a cat, I derive pleasure in the foliage of solitude. I suspect people procure dogs because they are capable of high-level self-sufficiency and patience. They are incentivized by the desire to have a companion to kith with, a perpetually needy infant to pick up after, an earthling to discipline and to abandon on a daily basis, who will almost certainly go before them.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

The Museum of Trees

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Susan Wardell

Maybe one day
you’ll visit the museum of trees.

Maybe one day, trailing behind the class
you’ll get ‘accidentally’ lost,
find yourself ducking under the ageless arms
of an oak, find yourself moving
quite alone, from beech to beech.

Maybe you’ll fantasize about a museum sleepover
where they let you set your spine
along the bough of a elm, in a mimicry of limbs
and maybe, when the museum air is still
and everyone else is sleeping
you’ll hear the willow whisper
through its thousand green mouths
behind discreet green fingers
the story of its youth.

Maybe one slow Sunday afternoon
you’ll beg from your mum
a few coins, to go again
and stare up at the myrtles
through glass, and realise
they miss their birds:

but the museum of birds
is five blocks down
on the other side of the subway.

And maybe, nearly in tears
in front of a case of maples –
august in their mysticism,
and no-one to pray palm-to-palm with them –
you’ll let the sadness sublimate
from your eyes, down into your throat
ball up, shoot like fire into your fist
which will smash the case
and you’ll reach through the shards
to touch them, hold them
and your fingers will find

plastic. Only plastic.
Each bark-notch and leaf-line
machine made.

And you’ll leave the museum of trees
bleeding a little, bleeding a lot
all the way down the street
and you’ll never, ever return.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Snow Fox

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Kyle Guest

On last of all rivers, Snow
Fox paws the black
ice crust, spidery thin
webs creaking silver-wet out
from paw pads.

Her ear pressed on cold
ice she auricular measures
thickness, fearing the dark
dense undertow rumble,
the digestive slush of the planet.

Remnants of heavy-boned beast behind
her knuckle the frigid bank.
Curlew, uncompassed, breaks
his beak on nuked-shut mud.
Dingo claw-flints on buckled steel,
gnaws on fallen light-
wires.

Snow Fox is the last, one-eyed
rare colonist, alone crossing over
into the last adaptive zone.

Her fur phosphor smoulders.

She sniffs limps

on mistings of species

in ice.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

The Language of Flowers

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Ali Jane Smith

The very glossy dark leaves of camellias
mean ‘boredom’

the papery bougainvillea
mean ‘turning out better than expected’

and the yellow and white frangipani flowers
mean ‘get it while you can’.

Some things
are strange, but not interesting.

Some biscuits
not ‘Niece’, only ‘Nice’.

Tonight the surf club is a dojang and people have gathered together
in their glamorous martial arts suits, sparring courteously.

Our laundry and the Parthenon
are both still standing, no thanks to the golden mean.

The dream you had that your bins moved in the night?
It’s coming true. Hear the rolling wheels on the guilty footpath?

There was something before and after.
Possum sits in the driveway.

Possum runs up a tree, but I can still see possum.
Possum doesn’t act too worried.

The bird is like the tree, the bird is like the flower
the wallaby’s fur is the colour of shadowed bark.

Been a predator? Prey? Know that likeness
means you’ll go hungry

unlikeness means
you’ll feel the snap of jaws.

Be a metaphor
or feel your own flesh rip.

Where’s Pop? He’s down the back. Oh.
Digging onion weed out of the lawn with a butter knife.

Onion weed means something’s really given Pop the shits.
In the morning, back to normal.

I’m writing happy middlings.
Endings can be downers, easy ways out, or revelations

but I’d like endings
to be estuaries, full of nests.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Under the House

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Jennifer Compton

I would put on dress-ups and run around our house singing. You could run
right the way around our house. I would run, a little bit skippingly, with
draggle skirts and shawls awry. And the song I would sing was not in words
exactly. It was sighs and moans and shouts and also laughing. It was given
to me. It had a tune. A toneless tune. Just as the dark came in one night I was
belting down the long side, singing, flapping, and I came upon my young
and beautiful father sitting on the back steps weeping. I stopped, and drew
my shawls about me.

I would slip away and push open the wooden hatch to the underside of our
house. I would creep in and squat in the dry powder of the earth. I would
hear the life of the house going on above me. There were unconsidered
footsteps, and above them, everyday voices.

To the left of me, in the gloom below our house, was a hump of earth with
stark prickles of growing things struggling upwards. These upright shoots
had no colour. Even then I could not understand how they lived, in a place
where there was no rain and no sun. But something was trying to live and
grow. I do not know what it was. It was probably a grass. I was scared of it.

I called that hump of earth with its strange bristles ‘the giant hedgehog’. It
looked like a hedgehog slumped sideways in an extremity of exhaustion, of
birth or death, and something growing up out of its hulk, reaching.

As long as I lived in that house, above, I knew there was a giant hedgehog,
underneath.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Upon the Passing of Tomas Tranströmer

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Joel Ephraims

The world has come up to my window
to tell me it’s not too late
to tell me yes yes you too are still alive

The gods and demons of the Śatapathabrāhmaṇa
have left their eye lids
along with their creation, destruction saliva
in recesses of the purple wood
where my monkey-self swings
watching shadow bubbles column
like oil from disappeared planes

How often I have felt like a gaudy insect
in those gloomy, effulgent kitchens where
gods and demons and poems
loom above my lamb steak
and the profundity is knowing
that they too will overlook the fur
that trellises me but I can’t see

My head anti-missile chaffs and flares
and it feels like the tails of the comets are conspiring
against me in my latest dark irrationality
Or is it my super awareness? It is it is in this fringe of the park
which is a page the drug lords also read

I will refuse to be a wolf beyond my white banishment
I will walk through the banistered puddles
of stated houses in the sense of an incorporeal cube
not slowing down

The sleeper trains are mating
The slender comets have treacled from their sky warrens
to be folded arm-over-arm
and fused as sun is into grass

Today it feels like sundown
The islands look violated and majestic
All the fire and all the black

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Rules is rules

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Jilly O'Brien

I started with an interesting title
to hook the reader in
added a bit of magic twisting balloon giraffes,
inspecting ice
holes
in Montreal waiting for the seal to gasp
I learned that taxidermists
prefer the term mounting over stuffing;
and realistic dialogue,
like “Oh!” and “no thank you”
occurs when offered a cinnamon oyster

or the way out.

I remembered to show, not tell.

I gave hints,
hid clues in the third drawer down and under stones,
waited for the smoke to rise in letters
that spelt my truth sold secrets in the souk
amongst sacks of turmeric and cumin
stuck notes like grillchecks on a narwal horn,
drummed
my
nails
against the harbour wall in a king tide
and followed the march of the lemon ants.

I’m done with showing

Today I’m telling with the whistle of a blue whale, vibrating
your vision, making it temporarily difficult to swallow

telling with the aural bullet train
before the earthquake

telling with the tiny snuffle of a newborn firstborn

with full mouthed hawking phlegm untuned bagpipe drones in A&E

rural volunteer fire crews in high summer

and the daughters of the river god, Achelous

telling you

that I don’t think your rules
ever fit my story

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Fatberg

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Damen O'Brien

Help, I’ve fallen in a fatberg and I can’t get out.
I have spelunked the greasy caverns of Johannesburg,
I have scaled the dripping chasms under Tokyo,
I have seen the tallows glowing under Texas,
and now I’ve fallen in the frying pan.
I’ve fallen in the fry and I’m worried I will die.

Rancid carbohydrates, rank oils send me visions.
Ahab skating over a white tidal wave
of fat in search of whales of blubber bubbles
far beneath Manhattan’s streets.
Whales and whales to wash away the world,
and I am in God’s glaucous eye,
balanced on the scales.

Fat angels, chubby cherubs
flexing their pudgy biceps in these clotted catacombs.
Michelangelo’s Steak Night. Raphael’s Taco Tuesday.
Pray for me, oh buxom angels. Pray for me,
oh big boned Venus, labouring out of the narrow confines
of a shell.
The fumes batter at my brain and I am undone.
Help me, you phalanx of broad Valkyries,
lay down your deliveries of Uber Eats,
set down Wong’s Dumplings, Bob’s burgers,
for they have laid me low.

Beware, beware. A clotted cream maw has opened
and it speaks of doom.
A maelstrom clings to my hips and threatens to
liposuction me in.
There are grottos here:
toilet paper lying in streamers,
tendrilled mucous, treasure to be found,
pound for congealed pound,
eddies which can take me under until
I scream. I scream for icecream.
I scream to the Lard, but it will avail me nothing.
I have fallen in a fatberg, and I can’t get out.

There’s a mountain of plastic somewhere in the ocean.
A floating island. Tir na nOg, Avalon, Brasil.
I’ve read it’s guarded by a Moray Eel
grown monstrous on microbeads of plastic.
Grey jelly shopping bags.
Heroes which scramble to its salt-drenched summit
must face an undying knight.
But that may just be fancy.
I’ve fallen in an oleaginous stew,
and I don’t know what to do.

The wise men of Shambala, Tibet,
must ascend one more peak of decomposing vegetables,
I’m told.
Ploughed over surplus crops, slightly blemished designer fruit,
rough homespun produce not allowed to float the market,
offered by pilgrims from a fleet of trucks with
Walmart logos on them.
But this is someone else’s problem.
But this is someone else’s nightmare, not my struggle.
I’ve fallen in the rubble of a fatberg bubble
and I can’t get up.

I’ve cleared the pipes of Shanghai and of London.
Scraped the running porcelain of Singapore.
I’ve marvelled at the marble under Paris
and seen my face in copper in Peru.
But somewhere on that journey, things have darkened.
The world’s gut has fowled with slabs of floating fat,
and all that was beautiful in these cisterns of hollowed heaven,
of the long intestines loomed under Sydney,
all ordered and shiny and all new,
are stretch-marked with colour now, in apoplexy blue
and while the world is hurtling towards a heart attack,
I’ve dropped my hose somewhere hereabouts.
I’ve fallen in a fatberg, and I can’t get out.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

this is not cinema

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Morgan Nunan

they found micro-plastics
in all of our food and in the deepest caverns
of the ocean and I don’t know how it got there
but it can’t be good

the ibis are eating nacho cheese Doritos®
on concrete perches by your local petrol station skip
and if you haven’t seen them yet just watch the trailer online with a narration
that ends: coming soon to a 7/11 near you

listen to the greedy honks & maniacal chews
of the much maligned ibis: newfound figurehead for our urban ecology
(sacred bird = sacred meme)

and by the way — Doritos® invented in Disneyland® (coincidence?)
more and more I feel we are living in a cartoon (the eyebrows
are the giveaway)
with the oh so many comic book movies
that make Scorsese cry: this is not cinema
from lower Manhattan balconies or on late night talk show television
or at card games in back rooms somewhere in Little Italy
(and now I am thinking: Doritos® Pizza?)

Doritos® Doritos® Doritos®….‘little gold’ in Spanish
(a poor and ungrammatical translation)

and the ibis lived in wetlands before the micro-plastics and invasive carp species
and I don’t mean to labour the point but goldfish
are a little carp species, which, adopting the Spanish,
we might call: Doritos® of the sea

(coincidence?)

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

I wish human destruction was like…

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Megan Wildhood

the exuberantly rotting nurse logs
all along the trail of the last hike
I took my antsy rescue dogs
on before the season closed.

I left my little girls with their fevers
at their father’s. I packed for what I knew.
I skirt a face-down river, flail as the marionettier
of my pack, dread that I wasn’t born

a hundred years ago, farther from
the end of the world. I listen for the names
of things. The cold sizzles. Branches, bowed
as if laden with snow, weaken with their own

growing weight. How do I teach my girls about snow,
which dark isn’t scary, what to do with wishes and love,
that the real fairy tale is when no one needs saving.
I excel at walks on the beach. We are in a woods.

We are in a woods because humans
aren’t working. Human relationships aren’t working.
I needed to be loved by someone who has failed;
that’s not (yet) birds, gales, soil.

I hit dirt with my knees; my dogs look
crazy at me. Cups of earth in my hands,
dirt on my dogs’ tongues. I hold their faces,
kiss them sorry, sorry. I’m so sorry.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Botanic Park

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Heather Taylor-Johnson
My son asks what colour is the sky and I say blue – just look at it, what a beautiful blue – and we stop and stare into the sky, see different things like the future (him) and the past (me).

He says ‘black’ for a universe of reasons including atmosphere, prisms and an astronaut who’s been there and knows it all.

I tell him black doesn’t suit Adelaide’s peachy veins in the bloodshot eyes of a lazy summer’s sunset, even with the pump and grind of black tyres, black roads and the burnt black crumbs waiting for me on our oven’s wire racks.

Black magpies cawk about their many white patches and I fear for my unborn grandchildren who will one day ask what colour is the sky and I’ll say just look at it, that rusty rust-colour!

We’re on a blanket and I’ve brought a picnic, we’re by the river – can you smell that river? – a sixty-year-old rock legend is about to sing, we’re a lucky country, the grass smell, the river stink, the waft of a joint; somewhere a child is eating Shapes.

Soon the sun will set, its sinking felt first on the crowns of our heads. My son will ask What time will we go home? and I will say When it is dark and the sky is glittered with light because that’s what it looks like in the black of night.

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Dark Crystals

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Chris Holdaway
“Fighting a fire that cannot be seen.”
Louis MacNiece

Rural news

Begin a new life with the pledge never
To fly again. Knee-deep in the debts
Of heavy machinery—reign of irrigation
—the only choice left to tour the velvet
Leaf’s black grass until your yoga retreat
On a climate denying farm comes to focus
On maximising carcase value. I’m using
My heartbeat to count a breathing
Exercise that has the effect of slowing
My heartrate—as if it were cool
Irony to breathe myself out of existence
Just like everyone else. Even tailwinds
Feel ahead of me. Dragging culvert
Pipe like a cross I see antibiotics
In the eyes of livestock and bank vaults
In bottles of milk—monoculture former
Weapons manufacturer trademarks
The science of pouring money on forest
Fires. Phoenix or bust. My new boots
Advertised as last rites wading into
Quantum cereal fields both antistate and
State subsidised—the Perseids as my
Herbicide for sheer abundance of gilded
Plants more dead than alive.

 
Industrial formations

We’ve taken metaphors to heart stream
-ing assets wedded to soul-searching
The statusquo. Everyone is a nature story
In lucrative environments even the moon
Bestowed upon us by healthy competition.
If only mindfulness meant remembering
Survival of the fittest was never Blitzkrieg
And not to get all instructional video in a
Poem but we owe the modern alpha male
Meme to a 1947 study of eight caged wolves
And when you observe functional packs
In the wild you see none of those dynamics
That are great tools for class warfare.
Causality was backwards: cooperation isn’t
A byproduct of harsh environments it’s
The engine—yet some razor-thin plateaus
Hold the ideal temperature range for loners.
Evolution is no arms race—what’re rockets
To penicillin for the clinically president—
What’s market for trying to escape your
Footprints. Look inwards and glimpse that
Early model capital and the spirit level of
Excess in your very own chemistry they say
—foreign investment like losing your house
Is just a state of mind. My goal is to never see
Another lawn again in the state wasteland
As privatised stress. The difference between
A peak and a valley is the brink of extinction.

 
Gravel highways

Here comes the wellness juggernaut boom
-ing intentions on sage water—gold cobalt
Sapphires quartz all part of the same old
Story. When did the rose of time get so
Complex from windup clocks to universally
Coordinated zones and confronting our
Death cult. The road only gets built when
There’s something they want to get out
—crystal concrete for the crystal coloniser
—bricks of angeline and labradorite mortar
Heaping these stones into my salt pyramids.
There is no budget even for child labour
Backs strained against the darkness polished
Dust in the weave of lungs like forgotten
Clothes. I suppose most people would take
Cheap healing power over clean fusion energy
And I want to mine lithium for FMRI machines
In hospitals just not laptop batteries. Number
One priority is to be surrounded by crystals
So why not try mineral uranium as an anti-
depressant: if it would mean the last sale ever
The final astrological lawsuit for there is no
Healing power in middlemen. Grass glitters
Like sharp knives through cracked earth as sun
-light bends out of sight through earth’s prism.

 
Loose wall

Drowning in powdered milk swept up
On the tide of facial recognition—
Rose quartz on wooden shelves ringing
Like an overture the bells of erosion.
Drill once for industry and twice for
Evolution’s random walk falling down
For you for the forever’th time.
Questions at all costs where forward is
Westward the very idea of “flaw” my
Closest allegory—a broad spectrum
Prophylactic doing thinking feeling.
It’s important to walk home in the cold
From the funeral even if you have other
Options. Headphones on your commute
Are the enemy and evolution is a terrible
Metaphor for technology. For all its supposed
Networking evolution doesn’t spend billions
Provoking love and care of social surveillance
Nets. Imagine one day analysing the surname
Manager just as you would Fletcher. Getting
Comfortable with guilt as it usually means
I have something I shouldn’t—so much so
Innocence feels like lack. More quality time
—handmade—where no loop is inevitable.
Opting out of natural selection. Walking
Away from even the idea of opting out.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Borisov

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Magdalena Ball

An object
travelling fifteen miles a second
in close collision course
trajectory

I thought of the earth
receiving the blow
in her solar plexus
radiating nerves and ganglia

two million hectares
rivers, forests, floodplains
exploded instantly into winter
such terrible alchemy

the crisscross of lines
across distended hips
tears to amber.

I could be there
first in the queue
taking the hit for our planet

sensing the shiver as the rock enters
a new species in deadly motion
riding shockwaves: exogenesis.

There are other scars below the crust
keloids of industry
we’re an industrious race
always working, metabolizing, metastasising.

Proof runs along the fault line
in warning shades of phosphorous green.
tailings, diggings, burning, tunnelling

liquid reserves in aqua blue
iridescent blooms and red tides
the trace of radionuclides

carbon spheres changing the signal
in sedimentary rock layer

arriving faster than the speed of sound
undoing all our fine damage
at the point of impact.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Storied Storage

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Bill Howell

“We can’t afford everyday life anymore, and I’m voting
on that.” (Street interview, Bob Woodward, Fear)

1
You wake up, stare through the smog, spot the bicycles
jamming the high-rise balconies: whatever you choose
to cheer you up. After this, nothing will be over the top.
Bikes will save us during extended power failures once
we figure out how to get them to the ground. But weather
on balconies doesn’t hoist or heist mathematical seasons
or mechanical reasons, so good luck on your way to
the street. Even if it’s under water.

2
You can say anything now: it depends on how floored
we are by your story. E.g.: The probability of a woman
becoming pregnant from a single randomly-timed act
is about 3%. Credibility is in the details you include
in the description of each lonely instance, and this relies
hugely on what we find most or least memorable:
“Nothing mattered. Then it blew over.”

3
Disparities between plot & narrative hang on causality.
If we could train SUVs to swim upstream like semen
and perhaps park themselves away from current affairs,
the transitive drama of everyday life might provoke them
to carry us away from consequences instead of forever
having to cloak everything in grief & mystery because
our best excuses are getting a little rusty.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Scandal Bag

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Beth Merindah
The scandal bag spilled its belly on the foreshore
filling the sand with foam, bile, grabba, and
a plastic film that suffocated
tamarind seeds studded with sugar.

It was a black jellyfish swimming in streams of squid ink,
propelled forward in a constant propulsion
of passive energy recapture,
chased by cords of fibrin and
streams of semen
ejaculated across a cloudy night sky.

It was gelatinous,
inflated by global warming,
a hydrostatic skeleton holding up
canals filled with cilia,
filaments flexing,
lobes, lappets, Viagra,
a manubrium fucking
mouth sucking
anus with umbrella shaped bells, balls,
tentacles with stinging cells and testicles.

Swimming with other scandal bags,
vast blooms in warm waters,
vessels, tangled ghost nets
clogging ship engines.

The scandal bag was without a respiratory,
circulatory
or central nervous system.
It was without color television, air-conditioning,
wifi or superannuation.

It was an all-seeing ocellus,
splitting itself in half, and half, and half again
in infinite fission,
until the sea was full of its proteins, collagen,
petroleum, ammonia, anxiety,
and depression.

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