Choristi

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Con Karavias

The graffiti furnishes
an apparition of manacles,
the metropolitan kapetanios,
a heritage of desertion to the mountains.

Here the enfilade
gurgled in attic bodies,
the Nazi tirade dislodged
for the Commonwealth titter.

Here the disciplined stance
scoffed at outstretched arms
and the emancipatory partisan
stood with effete vultures.

The memories of Ventimiglia
still stir in the cafés of Exarchia,
and the andartes’ tongues still click
in the boiling migrant camps.

Some distant conspiracy
still runs its fingers
through the hair of the Voulí,
and, colonel or commissioner,
eats the entrails
of the uprooted.

Little will allay it.
An agon of laudanum
curls the mountain’s haunts
into a clarion of graffiti.

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

On the Level

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Nellie Le Beau

Underground

Suppose your Grandfather,
metis in Trois Rivieres,
when a man comes up
from Providence
saying: you can come down
there’s work in the velvet factory: food and pay.
Bring your boy. It’s better than the Jeffrey mine
This is easy
I’ll take you down on Wednesday
I’ll give you everything you need.

In the census of narrow laneways
Your grandfather gives his name: Telesphore
Which means bringing fulfillment
and bearing fruit. All untrue.
He says: At least in the mine you could come up for air
Each lung sapped black with the velvet mud
of the lower Pawtuxet. Which means
little falls, accident, lost man.
All of it true.

His boy carries him home.

Mineral Rights

I’ve got a birch trunk for a hip bone
thighs like willow,
one metatarsal pointed south.
You are low wheat, a sunlit rodeo
next to the Telluride mine.

And the next day dairymen
blocked the roads to Spain.
When I walked up Cadillac barefoot
the man watching the gate said:
I was a fisherman, but that’s done now.
All the big pines, down.
His name stitched like planets
each verb a consolation
and here, cruise ships in autumn
spring oleander
the deceit-heart of the banksia.
If I keep it honest, this picture includes
the ruin of the world. After the long haul
of sliced logs, the weight of white gold,
the uplift of the oldest sea.

And on the last day, we see
rock pools filled with
sheep bone, saltbush,
Penelope and all her maidens
shipwrecked in the red earth, a nest of bees.

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

Revolution or Catastrophe

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Stephen Collis

I told myself
/ catastrophe /
is a revolution too
a sudden turn or overturning
more like for whom
more like what are the outcomes too

I will write it down then
call it revolution or catastrophe
call upon the dead
to stand by me
conjure what methods
I have / they are reading
sinewed love and hate
through riving impermanence
and dread through beauty thriving
of the unwritten chapters ahead
when we all will have become
dead authors gathered around
flames of no writing

And with what great fear I inhabit
the idea of what is to-come
what wrecks await / us there
I must get away / from here
unscrew the caps from the condiments
take the door off the fridge and heave it outside
invite what remain of the animals in
to look and lick and linger alone
in halls and rooms we long will not have been
living in anymore gazing back at
what will then be as Hadean times
when the something not us looks back
not reading any record we left behind

We will have done this some time / I will be saying
there is no accounting for it and some people
/ the measureless breath /
of some people and some who are not people but
on the very edge of measurement
animal or plant thought cascading
we will have done this one day / imperfect
when there are no more people / we
will have said all we have to say / perfect
our futures / perfect
I love you bees / thought of the heart
I hate you pesticide company / pessimism of the will
I’d take a future imperfect still
take it even imperfectly
revolution or catastrophe
oscillating and wild

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

Bravo

Posted on November 1, 2019 by KA Rees
I

There’s dust and black plastic instead of beach,
the curled tongues of lizards washed up

bubbles of air—the ticking shoreline.
Some beads like scattered rosaries.

There are diminutive shadows
shaped as organs lying next to stars.

Here, a heart there a lung slung next
to an empty can of beer. A peach

who had cause to forget? It lies among
the grit of sand, a broken ear.

Sand is the unit of time
roiling under the broiling waves.

A girl skipping stoops to where she found it,
smaller, more translucent than she was expecting

the politician, fingering
his pocket

looked so care free.
There was so much

of the world, here
on the edge.

II

A dug out pit—two dusty dogs
wuffing wooden air, noses holding scent
padding across curling dirt, snuffing the mouth
of the pit. Noise. Words, more: a stick—they split
past advancing feet moving the blood trail close.
The flesh goes
in and later, as the heat rises
—come the bones.

III

The island is fire
arcing volcanic rock:

How was it was loosed—this coruscant. One care
less strike? Or, more—the low-fi buzz of heat like blood.

It winds its way on the back of noon;
a snake flechettes open ground to trees.

Tongues of ash are floating on ribbons
of light flicking the tide.

They fall curled: displacing topography,
meridian, lines of latitude.

Palm fronds ess. The razed air hits cracked opal,
salt water forks searching boundaries of sky.

We left deformities and mutations.
For a time, there were no eyes to see.

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

Kent State University—the Photograph

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Andy Kissane

I am still half asleep when I stumble
towards the fridge, take two oranges
out of the crisper and find the sharp knife.
I slice them in half, then press the skin down
on the green glass dome, watching the juice flow
into the moat below the ridged hill, twisting
and twisting until I shift as much pulp as possible.
I tip the juice into a glass and put a slice of bread
into the toaster. The newspaper lies on the bench.
I notice a number of people standing upside down,
their heads where the ground should be. I grin
as I turn the paper around. Now, I see a man
lying on the ground, a man with long, messy hair
like mine. He is lying on his stomach, his head
turned to the side, an ear held upright, as if listening.
A stream of blood appears to begin beneath his head
and flow to the edge of the photograph. The blood
is furrowed, as if an afternoon wind is blowing
across the surface of a river. There’s a tiny white
island on the concrete, in the shape of a chilli,
which his blood has not swamped. A woman
reaches out to touch his arm below the press studs
of a rolled-up shirt, as if she’s searching for a pulse.
She has a leather bag slung over her shoulder
and the jacket tied around her waist is adorned
with these dinky cowgirl fringes. The blood
running over the concrete is darker than her hair
and darker than the shadows of the people
standing around the young man. I don’t know
what to say, what to think. My toast is cooling
in the toaster. I stare at my orange juice.
I stare at the ripple of blood that must now be
flowing beyond the border that marks the end
of the photograph and, in a strange way, its beginning.

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

i wrote this poem while listening to Akon’s Sorry blame it on me and on seeing a notification from my phone about war and deaths

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto

it’s afternoon// hot // hot like an imagined hell/
i roll under a table/ and there i make up countless dreams―/
birds unrolling from my corner/ full stop//there’s blood alert on my phone’s
screen/ there’s blood sinking into the ground somewhere/ they say
there’s a war/ a burning place/ Borno/ and a small boy/ i read from the alert/
carries a gun heavier than his body/ and a small girl/ i read from the alert/
carries crushed berries around her thighs/― mistakes/ mistakes
that amount to too many holes/ and the sky turns into masked clouds//
i think of how we use our hands/ and unfurl fire/ and smokes/
and nobody/ i mean/ nobody says a thing/ just retweets for traffic/ and
i wonder what the number of retweets/ can resolve/ while death avalanche/
while people are bathed in dusts/ and their houses are shelled down/
―this is not what prayers can undo/ this is not what running can solve/
does God blames us/ though we are made in his image?/
how our cruelty begets his cruelty?//
the rivers wail with the disturbed night:/ voices from brothers and sisters/
who should have been here/ sharing bread/ and wine/ on a round table/

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

Middle Finger

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Brendan Bonsack

the middle finger
on my granddad’s right hand
was shorter than all the others

as kids, we fantasised
that he lost it in the war
shot off and buried in desert sands

but in fact it was
an accident with a chisel
working as a warfie, down docks in the 50s

a practical man, he
dropped for his first-born, before deploying,
the Jewish part of the family name

in case ever Hitler won

if God is there,
may he rest you, Granddad;
I wonder what you’d make of this:

Nazis in St Kilda,
draped in Aussie flags,
where you’d take us to the water

I think you’d get up,
dust your pants, don your hat,
and give them all the middle finger

you know, with your good hand

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

Improvisings. Of Sheer Now.

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Jill Jones

1: What I’ll Become
I am assembled
a history of what I’ll become

Far off there are holdfasts
cosmos winks, metal and darkness

The mind is also a swirl
needless opera

The divine numbers are a gamble
zero is a place to begin

Trees invent shadow

I cope with presence
a baffling besotted twilight
I sweep dust out the door

There is no pause button
in this immodest heat

I wake up in fragments
a prayer that never surfaces

I bless every idea, glance and jot

2: Full of Indirection
I wasn’t expecting a carnival
this perplexing delirious eclipse

I’m naked
or in someone else’s clothes
reinventing myself
from the thick weave of branches
full of indirection
unkempt endless thirst

I’m less articulate than grass
passing as a human
dreaming the immortal body
a large god of dust

I still smell it in my dreams
a name I’m not sure of

the hey-ho of unmooring

3: News We Carry
There is such beauty
in our runic flesh
Blossom dissolves darkness

Come out among
trees and wastelands
indecorous as poems

Hold my hand as we dance
new as rain

New as what we carry
in our pockets
like lost toys

Weather finds us draped
like leaves
curves of coming and going

To be with skin
held in tongues
of sunlight

The padlock drops away

4: Of Sheer Now
Everything ancient is
among flights
of sheer now
Even my hair is singing

I fall over days
vaster than history
I can’t put the leaves back

The dark is fresh
as rot, just the way
a room is
queer within

Lick plethora
the crushed rose inside me

Recompose me
in my profane air
my homely head

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

Burial

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Frances Olive

Kneeling by the dry pond, her shins
scratched pink are losing heat to space.
Her knuckles blossom violet, their nobbled bodies
flagrant; crude as mistakes.
They are loaded dice as her ring slips off.
This is how stones are made:
Earth compresses in her fist.
The box is a folded surface
just like her.
Soil shifts like a living thing
making speeches. Her arm is a thick trunk
with its tongue in the dirt,
knows Earth is a safe place
where time is measured
by warmth instead of numbers. If you dig
deep enough, warmth is constant
and under all this concrete there’s the quickening.

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

Gotta Eat

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Eva Birch

My colleague is
feeding chopped up snakes to the
snakes on the conveyor belt.

Kind of insane,
labour’s a redundancy,
kindness really good insanity.

Somewhere, the boss releases
his spine for the first time.

She picks up a fang
and sits down.

It’s just you and me, kid

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

Wake, [Anon]

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Sophia Terazawa 
i.

     Nam Phương
final empress bore her lake

     oak-white jade
continental. You are older than that.

     I turn history gold
dream-fallen ash, therefore, public

     amaranth republic
sweet of stem, crepuscular cosmology

     wept in dirty paws
wrote of monkeys—



ii.

                              for you, my flesh
                         wet silver, amethyst
                                 and rye

myth preceded

                       then
               centuries passed
                         Nam Phương
without pause, stabbed herself.

          A center held.
             
Gibbons swung
          tendrils down, baboon
     and ape.

                 I rite myself today
     detritus knock
               divine.

     And she who takes the hour
pits a chalice into stone—



iii.

                  darker queen of mercy
spare us—



iv.

     in 1858, allegedly, Campagne de Cochinchine
began, thus our child learned to swim.

Gibbons scratch an anthill.

Yes, the stairwell held us, bones. Gibbon cry.

A father slipped his finger in papaya, therefore,
I was born, queen of chive, milk. Spare us
automatic, bottomless thrones of light.

Lovers bathe inside of me, frayed—



v.

                    imagine us
              a crown

          Palme’s death
                              in Sweden

     later, learned
of Guernica

               imagine that
          lip surpassing massacre.                              

     Stories of my people
march into another. How is it love

     something more machine,
countries lost between us—
Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

Lament for a Friend

Posted on November 1, 2019 by John Stokes
From “The Last song for the hearing”


I am so sorry, my friend,
The funeral, it’s forbidden me.
When the time comes
For the final lowering
I will not be there
I will not be there for you

I am so sorry, my friend,
When you stipple the waters
When you go softly
Between yourself and the sun
I will not know
I will not be there for you

I am so sorry, my friend,
I am not of your mysteries
I will not see you again
If there are strange lights
On the water
I wake, but do not see.

My friend, you leave before the time
I will bribe the gravedigger
Such, now, is the custom,
It is you that lives behind me
With your black mouth you sing,
You sing, you sing.

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

A Day for Rain

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Derek Chan
“The EPA estimates that roughly 20,000 farm-workers are poisoned every year by pesticides, but because of many
immigrants’ fear of reporting incidents and inability to seek medical care, the number is likely much higher.”



It’s a terrible day for rain.
She showed me why
from stomach to neck.

She told me she was so close to heaven
but the waiting line was still so long.
God has so many forms to fill.

It’s a terrible day for rain.
After a while, even free ice-cream
makes you throw up.

I’m turning into a limón
she laughed – soon I’ll be bursting with citrus,
it’ll burn me up from inside.

In the Garden of Eden
where nothing decomposes
but nothing blooms either
how can we make a life for ourselves?

Even the blood moon
can be sucked to pale
by the endless silver fields.

Don’t you know,
you’ll never be dead
you’ll just be lighter
than a seed searching for wind.

Don’t you know,
angels don’t fly
they claw their way up
hair by bloody stem.

It’s so warm in here,
so dry.
Meanwhile outside,
it’s a terrible day for rain.

In her dreams
a tree grew from her stomach
as if the roots could feed on marrow
and she laughed because it was not limón
but melocotón that burst open to the sky
and when it rained
it was so cool on her skin
and there was a voice
in the way the drops fell
and it spoke
her name
so clearly so softly

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

mincemeat

Posted on November 1, 2019 by R C deWinter

so many things I want to say
to tell you
to explain
but the words skitter
nervous mice
scenting a predator

i cannot call them to order
they mutiny
at my approach
so here i am
left with nothing but
mumblings and excuses

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

No one Doesn’t Love You Like I Do

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Charlotte Simmonds

I don’t love you like I love
ten million dollars in my bank account,
peace on Earth, goodwill to all men
the corrective to global warming,
God,
me who is a normal person,
unconditional love love love, world without end, amen,
free, unfettered, blissful childhoods,
two good parents with two happy kids
and other things that don’t exist.

I love you like I love
sunshine,
the sun in winter,
the sun in summer,
black coffee & a cigarette,
a friend,
another friend,
one of my other friends,
tower cranes –
such things as exist.

I don’t love you like I love
the Frank Gehry submission for Te Papa
or Kengo Kuma’s, I’d heard, untrue, he entered too,
that it was more beautiful than a Danish museum of fairytales
like those books they wouldn’t publish and the plays I couldn’t write,
the kibbutzim I never lived on,
the travels I might have taken using sails instead of planes,
the trips throughout New Zealand I would have had by train…
Like an absence of trauma setting me sound asleep at night,
and all the things that should have been but never were.

But I love you like I love
the 800-year-old leaning mosque in Mosul,
destroyed like all crooked things must be,
destroyed before I had a chance to love it any stronger,
the way I love the things that were and are no longer,
disappearing Richmond Stoneware china,
Erskine College, Bill Toomath in Karori,
Taputeranga Marae, Futuna here and now but for how much longer,
the blipping time of homogeneous homogenous homo sapiens,
destroyed like you or I will be.

And I don’t love you like I love
contact with extraterrestrial sentient life,
or the colony on Mars that saves hugemankind,
parrots evolving to go to psittacine universities,
octopodes writing epic oceanic verse,
corvids discovering fire and bombing Dresden,
dolphins mastering the dative to outwit Leibniz,
the singularity, the cure for senescence,
and all my nonsense hopes that are beautiful but meaningless.
(They say that faith is for the future…

But I love you like I love
contact with extraterrestrial bacteria,
that there are robots on Mars at all and probes in deeper space,
and that some guy is trying to grow spider silk from yeast,
that those psilocybinetic fungally infected cicadas collectively live,
the way all life eventually falls to the ground
on this cooling dust ball heliocentring a hundred thousand kilometres an hour around,
purslane porcelane lithophane lithops and the desert blooms,
this present beauteous, slight and realistic hope.
…and that belief is for the present.)

I love you not tomorrow but today.

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

Tlatelolco

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Lucas Smith

Where
the market
met the church
and powdered stones
reminisce together,
the visible still
sits with time on its blood,
this hoary tropical day where
the sign proclaims Cuauhtemoc
fell to Jesus Christ on such and such a recent day.

Can all ruins look the same? Squint and the plaza
takes on a Celtic hue. The church grew like a lagoon from tidal stones
and the apartments grew from modern Aztecs. If God could wring the church
(of course he could) whose blood would soak the grass of distant modern ages? Idols have
a knack for coming back, coming back in time like an inescapable poetic rhyme
but proof of idol failure is pinned under lasered glass and man-made light
in the museum. There are three things here. I am imprisoned
by the new church with five minutes to close looking at imported nudes
and Canadian narcissisms when the spire, made of market stones, taps on
the plastic window. It’s closing time, the idols bearing stone fists, smash their prisons,
scamper to the windowsill and shimmy down the obliging cross to the bells, which
ring in soft haphazard tones as idol feet induce an ugly sway. And then to the
market and down the distant metro lines in all directions
to run forever and the glass bounces at my feet.

Security
stumbles in. Sir, what does this mean, what did you do?
The world has turned to glass again, and we are stuck
above the ground in shadow buildings, looking
down at Tlatelolco, spongy ground, and steely sky
for there is no land for us, or ancient times
of heroes, and we have no gods to fail us
only numbered notes and flawless cameras
and we can only marvel at those
autochthonous dreams of other idols
where the church and market meet

and idol drums beat idol feet.

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

N.F.S. (No Further Stay)

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Reagan R Maiquez

It is enshrined

how many steps,

how many minutes,

seconds or days

you can stay

within this home / land

as borders have been protected

on air, water, and all this vastness

of a continent, is-

-land.

You are only allowed,

temporarily, and permitted to become

a resident, provided

you adhere to these conditions:

• you must be an able, no violation,

• you must be under the law, lawful and legal,

• you must provide an identity, a valid and verifiable

and biometrically you,

• you must undergo all necessary checks,

no third-world disease, no tuberculosis, no form

of burden to the state funds, not a terrorist,

not arriving on a vessel that illegally beached,

nor on a plane without an authority to travel

and pass through this port

/ sentry.

• you will genuinely

marry and be in an inclusive relationship,

• you must work within this load (no cash

on hand),

• you must not get sick, or get

an insurance,

• you must assure and abide

by the rules, all the time, despite the law

and employer failing you for the nth time,

or else a rubber stamp,

an electronic record

or an officer will say:

no further stay,

no further stay,

and go away.

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

What I remember most of all

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Nick Visconti

Like a rolling siren, dead sounds
without a step doppler away. We flip
switches to tell each other how we hurt.
Yesterday, I flipped a live switch and heard
the indicator light pop—I didn’t have
the right bulbs—no one ever told me
there’s a right and wrong way to light bulbs
how a proper bulb can sing for months, a background
deluge. Halogen shatters within a surge.
The hurt flew out of me today
and broke the ceiling fan, hung off a blade
until it bowed to the hardwood ground.

My job is to feel something—sugared knife,
Dead Sea net ablaze with thread. Catch nothing.

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

Broken in Two

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Bronwyn Rennex

The entrance is lined, each time, with smokers
in absurd clusters, on beds in the sun.

The lift doors reveal, on each floor, huge orange numbers
and letters from 5A to 12C.

I think C is for Cancer.

My friend told me once that she heard a doctor tell a patient,
“You have cancer.”
Then he spelled it out.
“C.A.N.,
C.E.R.”

That’s how I think of it now,
broken in two.

She didn’t want to move rooms. She said,
“I don’t want to go up where everyone’s dying.”

In the lift to 12C, scrawled next to a message from a church it said,
“Jesus Wants Your $$”

Next time I found her, most alive in the Emergency room,
breath stunk of blood.

Her nose bled whenever she sat,
or thought
or ate.

Across from her a woman yelled,
“Oh shit! I want to go home to Israel.”

She’s right. Everyone on 12 C is dying.
Across the room, one says nothing.
One can’t stop.
They hobble downstairs together
I see them smoking when I pass.

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

nerve damage

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Jonathan Dunk

being gets fragmentary
but obscurely significant

thought hollows
but there are more edges
to peer over

you’re becoming cautionary & allegorical
but love is after

all,
a word

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

A Study of Cowardice

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Alfonso Manalastas 
            I will tell you now what I didn’t have the courage
            to say then: I was awake
                                                the whole time
when you pressed my glassy palms against
the soil,

let loose                      a wild animal inside my mouth
I’ve always had the teeth to bite back
            but didn’t,
                        how it dug its nails, savored the sweet
                        nicotine infestation on my purpling gums
                        as it crawled down with the intent
of slitting my throat from inside. I know
to cough                    something                    out
            when it is unwelcome; fervent, aching—even
the newest of bodies learn this out of instinct:

                                    Bitter gourd.
                                    Asbestos.
                                    A lock of a lover’s hair.

            I take the shape of a hairless spider to ward off
anything that will devour me and call it mercy,
which is to say,

I have arrived—here, with a gratitude for all
things that have not succeeded in killing me
            long ago,

when I exiled my lungs to the depths of the ocean,
it found in the chasms and interstices the secret
to my survival. Somewhere,

a lost city plunged underwater throbs harder
                                    than it did alive

            which my father calls cowardice, even with
his body fit more for flutter than for flight, and so
                                                             I learned to surrender
                        with cupped hands, like feeding water
                        to a parched mouth,
my long-held secret; a kind of weaponized submission
(or omission?) that’s kept me alive.

                        In the factory of alleged virtues, I learned
to swim without my lungs. Surrender, it persuades.

Learned to fight not out of need but out of will.
This is the only way, I am told, where

            bent-backed roses bloom thorn-less
in a garden full of sin, I linger a coward still, forgoing
                        even things not mine to surrender.
Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

Dirty Talk

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Alex Creece

I know I’m low in iron
when
I start craving the dirt.
I mix mineral supplements into my orange juice,
because you absorb iron more effectively with vitamin C,
did you know?
and then the cravings subside.
But the supplements are expensive
so sometimes
I just live in this state of side-eyeing the dirt,
like it’s a girl whose freckles I love too much
and whose boyfriend is inconvenient.
I’m happy for them, of course,
of course.
I flirt with the dirt,
I think.
I lather my face in a dead sea mud mask
and oops,
it’s on my lips.
I knead the earth to nurture my plants
and,
uh-oh,
I smear some across my face
or
scrape it under my fingernails,
a deep black midnight snack.
At the supermarket I always buy brushed potatoes,
because brushed means
still lush
with a cakey layer of soil.
They’re cheaper,
and usually
people buy them when they’re going
to peel the potatoes anyway,
or commit to a long, thorough scrub.
I give them a tepid wash, but leave them still freckled with flavour.
I paid for this dirt, after all.
It’s worse in winter,
when I’m bleeding constantly
and hungry for the warmth of gentle rain
on sleeping minerals.
Freckles sometimes makes me homemade play-dough
because it’s tastier to eat than store-bought,
basically organic free-range soy salt dough, y’know?
but it’s not dirty, not even a little.
She has bright, sober eyes and can eat soup
in a white blouse
without ever making a mess,
not even from the fickle splosh of a spoon chinking the bowl’s cusp.
Her dough is never dirty.
My dog snuffles around in the backyard,
a slobbery sealion
pretend-playing as a truffle pig.
Her mind is an underground blueprint
of latitude lines across every goat horn
and chew toy hidden.
She walks back through the dogdoor
with a telltale mudsnout,
sneezing on secrets.
I envy the trail of her whiskers
paving alleyways for ants
through a miniature wilderness.
I listen to Another One Bites the Dust,
and I wish I would,
but literally.
Just lemme fucking eat the dirt.

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

colonial levity

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Jerzy Beaumont

Stumbling through Botswanan delta, the poet’s wife
lines up and frames
the Okavango natives as arsonists (maybe!), his
words tripping
down her tongue. Her rubies flash bright in the face
of all that applause.
In her wake, he satirized the King’s Dream with
colonial levity
(during When Is White History Month) to tittering
laughter.

He tells us of the collected skulls in St Nikolai
Church, severed and shelved
to deter robbers.

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

Sanctuary

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Ian C Smith

Grunting for breath between gulps, he tears at a half-eaten bun not caring about the pain in his gums, garbage overflow lapping spongy shoes. His bowel hasn’t worked for days. He sees a piece of hamburger missed, squats for it as a novelty car horn freezes his thin frame in an athlete’s stance, a tatterdemalion ready to run, his mind an economy of survival. Sidestepping pigeons question his thirst as he drains empty soft-drink cans. Then he uses a puddle for a wash, rubbing greasy fingers against his dark face. He shakes a discarded deodorant can for a few feeble squirts.

The city smells of vehicle exhausts, concrete, burnt sugar, scaffolding, cooking oil. Early morning workers avoid him, each in his own space, air tangy. He feels a throb of hope, can’t allow himself the cushion of memory, can’t think beyond his immediate dream to work as a restaurant dishwasher, swap sweat for freedom.

He cuts and tugs sleeping asbestos, wearing a wee white mask of course, face hidden under lowered lids, not that he wants to open his mouth. The big ex-gangster who employs him, perhaps recalling his own beginnings, grins, silently checking the work. He is refurbishing an old restaurant. His expensive teeth often sparkle from the society pages of newspapers – his life could fill an opportunistic book – but our guy of the slashing sharp knife, the tightly-knotted bags of swirling unseen fibres that get taken for a ride come nightfall, uses newspapers for extra warmth, has only survival English.

He arrives and leaves by the rear lane, enduring nights in a Salvos bin keeping still deep inside utter darkness imagining passing vehicles as tanks, sometimes wakened by his strangled nightmare cries. He lets rip for $12.50 an hour cash, minus the cost of masks, saving some, wasting nothing, is advised, understanding body language, to continue keeping his mouth shut, a workplace condition he noddingly accepts. Imagine him, dishwashing dream down the drain for now, high on hope, doing the maths, buoyant with every breath he takes, aiming to be prosperous one day, fleshy like his boss, that grinning profiteer.

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged