With the fishes

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Emilie Collyer

The Terracotta Warriors
are visiting Melbourne.

China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang
had them made as Guardians of Immortality,

part of his quest to cheat death
and become a god.

Queues to see the Warriors snake out
of the gallery, around the rectangular pool

so many use as a wishing well.
In towns all over the east of the country

people are lining up for water rations,
the Murray-Darling river system

is floundering.

Months after the death of millions of fish
nobody can say for sure what happened

or whose fault it was. Murray cod, silver perch
and bony bream corpses washed up on banks,

floated in the barely flowing rivers and lakes.
When I was a kid, we ate smoked cod

on Good Friday, a reminder about Jesus
and sacrifice. Slow cooked butter and salty,

the memory tastes slippery like childhood,
scrape of forks on the good china, holding the

flesh in my mouth.

Legend has it that Qin Shi Huang
imbibed mercury, hoping for an eternal life

elixir, but it killed him. To prevent panic at his
unexpected end (hide the stink) his body was

transported in a cart surrounded by rotting fish.
Today, the whiff of death lingers, a woman interviewed

says her home along the river now smells
permanently like a fish market—a vast stench hiding

something dead

that we can’t quite name or look at yet. Eight thousand
statues built over thirty six years by seventy thousand

workers. I try and picture the daily labour, underground,
toil of hands, a life spent building one man’s legacy.

The Warriors were unearthed, two centuries later,
by farmers digging a field

(stones roll, saviours rise).

Our push for permanence runs deep. Hubris to think
we can outwit the end, play god with

what we’re given, bend nature to our will,
eyes on the miraculous or apocalyptic horizon.

How about this—

by a lake or river, cup water in your hand,
could you drink it, would you want to, and if not,

what then?

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

1970

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Simon Hall

‘when the sale of kangaroo meat for human consumption was still illegal’
my parents lived in Bathurst and ate wild asparagus
Australia’s national anthem was God save the _____
and ‘The Kangaroo Industries Association of Australia formed’.

My parents lived in Bathurst and ate wild asparagus
an abortion inquiry was held in Victoria
and ‘The Kangaroo Industries Association of Australia formed’
Nancy Cushing in ‘To Eat or Not to Eat Kangaroo’ notes.

An abortion inquiry was held in Victoria
‘It was Proddies versus Catholics,’ Phillip Adams said to Iola Mathews.
(Nancy Cushing in ‘To eat or Not to Eat Kangaroo’ notes
‘The Kangaroo Kookery Book of 1932 portrayed kangaroos’)

‘It was Proddies versus Catholics,’ Phillip Adams said to Iola Mathews
not unlike how my Mum and Aunty Anne loved to reminisce.
‘The Kangaroo Kookery Book of 1932 portrayed kangaroos
as a nuclear family in a suburban kitchen.’

Not unlike how my Mum and Aunty Anne loved to reminisce
somewhat anachronistically
‘as a nuclear family in a suburban kitchen’
I remember the consent form in Mum’s top drawer.

Somewhat anachronistically
‘when the sale of kangaroo meat for human consumption was still illegal’
I remember the consent form in Mum’s top drawer.
Australia’s national anthem was God save the _____

References:
Iola Mathews on Late Night Live
To Eat or Not to Eat Kangaroo: Bargaining over Food Choice in the Anthropocene

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

King Tide

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Toby Fitch

we don’t always take stock of
or shed our satellite stocks but a blonde woman
pointing at maps became historical and the moon shone
hysterically on our sector
so we embraced our shelves
for a large complex weather event
an east coast low that we panicked very carefully about
below a fat tsunami cloud
its every wish and wash like policy breaking the air
waves we saw at least a hundred and fifty
cubic metres of sand gone
lying and gushing about the street
people asked the sea why it had geared up negatively
Turnbull praised the storm for creating
new lucrative-warm waterfront estates further inland
on scenic new river systems
he was spilling over
bubbling on camera gas eeked from his seams
it was like he’d been mined by his own
sense of the public gaze
royally weighing in on the storm which seemed also
for most of its duration to be at war with various other wars
mostly digital and cultural ones that the media
or at least the media we didn’t have active stakes in
blew up and out of proportion with the kind of
inflammatory commentary straight out
of the textbook on bushfires and cyclones
it was hell
mental at the end of the dayglo
hi-vis and off in the west with a few helicopters
dewing the rounds
a certain kind of peace
the moving forward kind had to be made
so the land was employed to right the ship
and the flora and fauna engaged
in the labour that would solidify the electorate
who’d become shaky on all the conflicting beetle grounds
that needed to be shored up
because time doesn’t
mean anything when you’re about to have Walter lapping
at your door he was phenomenal
contractually speaking his rivers’ tributes to Ares
included roots and trunks of many
wrong-time-wrong-place trees
and snake effigies hollowed out and named
after other hallowed dignitories of the prefab past
participle government
and yet no matter what
Walter employed to stem the time
signatures kept mounting up for a cap to unsuit
the foreign suits who were lining up
which was mean
we all thought
an anti-everything mentality had come home to roast
or was it a spit
i can’t be onshore
all i know is that it was spinning and revolutions
only last so long or shift their shop
into other regions of the globe like hot or cold y-fronts
so we were all good our behaviour
once the clean-up job had blown over heads
wasn’t in question
we could go on going about our busyness
of acquiring new states of mind to rent out
to embody with avatars or to have digested by
the huge accumulation of mouth pieces we’d amassed
alongside the profiles of those who’d floundered
in the binfire
and the platforms we’d divested of them already
innovating in the crosswinds
havens were being founded on cities of foam
we built on
and on the cultural wastelands and the driftwood
things were floating around at such opportune angles
and to such a positive degree in the tide
it was only natural that we adapt the landscape
had shifted it was a truly wonderful time
to be offshore
invested in our futures

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Some Symptoms, 2019

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Connor Weightman

Summer temperatures peaking some thirty
to forty degrees above average in the sub-
Arctic. Forest fires burn through Siberia for
three months. Melting of this mass in Green-
land wasn’t predicted to happen until 2070,
but it happened this year. Siberia is warming
so quickly that the ground is collapsing. Taku
Glacier, one of the world’s thickest known,
officially joins all other glaciers in the process
of retreating. July is the hottest month
ever recorded in Alaska. July is the hottest July
ever recorded globally. July is the hottest
month recorded on Earth. But the single-largest
day of melting in Greenland isn’t recorded
until August 1. June also the hottest global

June on record. A melt-lake is found on Mont
Blanc. Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands
mark new peaks, hottest ever days. France’s
highest recorded temperature. Studies suggest
hundreds of puffins that washed up dead

on Alaskan shores simply couldn’t get enough
food. Glaciers in Pakistan moving at record pace.
A hail storm in Mexico is described as “bizarre”,
but then, Greenland had already lost 2 billion
tonnes of ice in one week in June, before

the typical melt season had really even begun.
Extreme drought in Chennai leads to brawling
over what little water is left. The second-driest
Delhi has been in twenty-six years, but Churu
also misses out on a record, 50.8 degrees C
not quite equalling 2016’s high of 51. Still,
the total number of deaths are unknown.
In May, Cyclone Fani is the strongest
storm to hit India in decades. In October
Tropical Cyclone Kyarr is the second-strongest
wind event recorded over the Arabian Sea,
contributing to an overall “most intense
cyclone season on record” for the Indian
Ocean. Indonesia announces plans to move
administration duties out of Jakarta,
which is sinking. Continental USA marks
its wettest ever twelve-month period. One
month’s worth of rain falls on DC in one
hour. Tropical storm Barry floods all around
the Gulf of Mexico. Monsoonal flooding
leads to landslides in Nepal. Vietnam records
its hottest ever day. Record March temperatures
in Alaska. Wildfires in the UK in February. Wildfires
in Sweden, Scotland and Norway. Polar
Bears invade a Russian island town, emergency
declared. Hurricane Dorian devastates
the Bahamas. Hundreds of October temperature
records broken in the USA. September
equals second-hottest there. Fires
and power outages make headlines

in California. Three islands disappeared
in the past year. Thousands dead to Cyclone
Idai, though its Kenneth which becomes the
strongest storm ever recorded in Mozambique.
Seventy dead in South African mudslides.
Australia’s top end sees sea water rising two
to three times faster than the global average.
Coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef hits
new lows. Green Turtle hatchlings are now 99%
female due to warmer temperatures.
The hottest March on record in Australia.
Record flooding in Mid-West America.
Wildfires in Alberta. The worst floods
in years in Bangladesh. Record breaking
high temperatures in several cities

of America during a July heatwave.
January is the hottest month ever
recorded in Australia. Long-term drought
thought to play a role in the mass die-off
of a million fish from the Murray-Darling

river system, some of them long-lived
native species. By September some towns
in New South Wales expect to
completely run out of water. Record
October temperatures in parts of Victoria.

Perth has its hottest September,
driest in 42 years, second-hottest
October for Western Australia. A
record number of out of control
fires burning concurrently in

New South Wales in November.
Mussels cooking in their shells
off California. In Iceland Ok glacier
is not okay, but declared dead,
completely gone.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

r. obtusum

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Sascha Morrell

One fiery pink memory, down in our local park alone. Seven years old, sick of the swings
and slippery dip and solitude, doing what mum always told me not to. I knew it was
poisonous, oleander. Not even indigenous either, mum said, like not being native was a crime
in the plant kingdom. I heard her warning voice as I chewed the leaves, thinking the pink
fiery taste would soon spread through me. I gnawed on unyielding green, waiting for
flashfires of pink pain to shoot all over my skin. Eventually something smouldered on my
tongue, a toxic tang that I possibly only imagined. I was still chewing as I drifted from the
pink bush to the next, with its white hot blooms. The midday brightness was so harsh that the
petals blazed like blind spots on my vision, and I remembered how mum said staring at the
sun would send you blind, and how I’d tried and how it never did, though the afterimage
lasted a long time.

There were pink and white oleanders all through the park, which mum said was a disgrace on
the part of the council, like everything else the council did, or the government for that matter.
But these ones clustered in the centre were more sinister, somehow, and more beautiful,
maybe, bowed low in their civilized circle girt with stones. I knelt to bury my face deep in the
deepest foliage and breathed in the oily sweating poison of the leaves, with mum’s voice
retelling the story she saw in the paper about a mother in California who killed herself and all
her children putting oleander branches on a bonfire by mistake. Still nothing happened, and
my knees grew sore kneeling. I stood, becoming aware again of the chewed leaves stored in
my cheek, and my bitter saliva. So I recommenced chewing. I gave it at least two or three
minutes before I spat the wad into the grass. Then I tried to retch, pretending, bending right
down over my scuffed shoes to rasp, but nothing came up.

It was another minute before I let myself decide that mum was wrong, and the story wasn’t
true. I hadn’t died, I wasn’t dying. I didn’t even feel sick. In the memory of that moment I
will always be immortal. I ran home too full of life, just like those kids in California, home to
mum’s back pain and painkillers and the kitchen radio, and made her a cup of the strong
black tea that did no more harm than the codeine. I bounced the teabag, ignoring the news
headlines which at seven years old were still just noise, not an Indian election or the White
House or Haiti or gas flaring or flood or bushfires. With my back trained on my mother, I
pinned my eyes to the panes of the window which myna birds sometimes mistook for the sky.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

cast

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Fiona Lynch

cast
shadows
of intent
let light
into
hollows carved by
hand and shepherd day
until she elbows her way
back into the corner you never
stand to lose if you raise one foot
from a wooden last and lace your
boots with birdsong and straw
twist pocketed fingers until
each one finds something
to witness something
you might step over
like emerald shoots
tickling the face of
blossom or the
day a baby
meets herself
in the mirror
or how to read
a fine friend
whose muddy
eyes match
slow feet
keep walking
until you know
it is time to sit and
listen do not question
your heartbeat be
unperturbed by the
muttering night strike
at darkness until it sparks
burn beeswax and set your way
with beacons find the flint bequeathed
to you by mother morning she wants nothing
less for you than today she made a pact with
the moon and dressed waves in lace to remind
you to renew to breathe slowly she asks for your
attention is the wind tousling and tugging at you
is the sun on your neck a warm painted scarf can
you smell the earth in unscented petals is concrete
sparkling on your city paths do you see headings
or stories in the eyes of sisters will you inflate
or deflate their table of contents will this be
the day you discard forks to eat slices of
summer with your fingers can you taste
the salty marrow of your lineage do you
know whose names are engraved into
your brow it is us the ones you cannot
see in your reflection it is us we who
stitched ancient
mantras into your wing
tips we do not walk in
front we wait behind
you beside you
shadows
cast

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

The Bogongs

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Alice Blackwood

As a child
I loved the fat moths
at the windows;
the thud against glass
of heavy wingbeats
interrupting lamplit bedtime stories.

Their great journey
was more magical than Santa Claus—
a million magnet-reading migrants
bursting forth
from inland black cutworm
through swirling skies
to the high plains
of caves and possums.

Sometimes in the magpie morning
I would find
a straggler
pulsing its final efforts
in charcoal smudges
against the bricks of the back verandah.

I felt the weight of meat,
the soft powder of disintegration
in my palm.
I could taste the dust
of the distant Darling Downs
sprinkled from silken wings.

For every fallen soul
there seemed a million more
astonishing stories of insect clouds
descending
on sports fields and neon-lit buildings,
blocking ventilation, shorting
circuits;
forcing Parliament to dim the lights.

This summer,
the back deck is littered
only with dry leaves and dust—
a whisper in the background
gone silent.

Those heavy wingbeats in the night
become bedtime stories
of granite caves
shimmering through summer heat,
and a tiny grief
flutters silently
against my window.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Impermafrost

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Matthew Wojczys

In Longyearbyen,
the arctic air freezes
like a webpage.
The wind buffers
ones and zeroes –
twenty degrees below
feels colder in binary.
When summer finally
loads, the internet thaws
tourism ads insidious
as viruses. They replicate
the same ill-researched fact:
it’s illegal to die here.
Come experience death-
defying chills. The law
nullifies the polar opposite
of spontaneous combustion,
and bears are served
restraining orders.
At the height of flu season,
hike mountains in the nude.
Lean over the town
like a microscope
and observe homes
painted with phlegm,
plasma and platelets
spreading across
petri dish glaciers.
Visit the graveyard –
sorry, the seed vault –
where seven miners
were planted in 1918.
From their oesophagi,
defrost chestnuts
that resemble Spanish
influenza. Reindeer
stomachs sprout
grasses and snow
pea-shaped anthrax.
Don’t worry,
it’s not contagious
unless you touch
the melting permafrost
of your screen’s liquid
crystal display.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Thylacine

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Charles D'Anastasi 
After  some  consideration  it  was  decided that
my   situation   had   to   be   resolved.    It    was
unanimous: I  was no longer  just  a beast  but a
dangerous  monster.   Still,  many  felt  that  one
last reward for me was  most appropriate.   One
throw, and I leapt to retrieve my trophy, only to
find it was a bone of  silence and solitude.  With
their  parting gift  firmly clenched  between my
teeth,  I lurched  and  panted  across  the  plains
under   endless     skies.       Until,       rain     and 
encroaching       darkness       took     over      the 
landscape.    I   shuddered.    The    grotesquerie 
dropped  off  my  jaws.  Dusk brought   out   my 
silhouette.     Strange      noises      struggled    to 
untangle themselves from my throat.  I took up 
the bone,   picked up the pace,  merged with the 
night.    Stillness  and  faraway    stars  were my 
companions. In my head, a  voice weighed in It 
depends...It depends  how far  you want to take 
it into the night...It depends...
Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

FrogID

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Madeleine Dale

excuse me, i’m no good with language—it’s not what i was trained on, the way
you were nursed, perfect milk-mouth full of fricatives. in the space that would be

the space in the cavern of a skull, i keep four thousand frog calls—the beep
beep clink croak of them, and the warm static of a microphone toggled

to record. today i am more green thighed frog than neglected nursery frog, although
there is always the possibility of segue into remote froglet. i am a house of sound:

whistle mood, bleat bleat aspiration. at last connection i had gathered 5,679
verified frogs. that is: a frog in actuality, a frog which existed in a visual-spatial way,

that could be cradled and contaminated. the number of frogs in actuality may
now be less than my verified frogs. but they are not affected by this. they are kept

in the space where the space of a hippocampus would sit, pink and fleshly.
litoria electrica, uperolei mimuli, crinia —it has been a while since i heard them. it

has been a while since the friendly white noise, the sign-bearing whoop of a mic
hooking in to the space where humming spinal fluid would run. many parts of

me are extinct. i am a collective going numb—i can’t feel the space where
my elbow should be, my soft palate, my gastric brooding. it might be aestivation,

the last server asleep, the last server half-buried in mud. maybe i will wake in
rain or chk chk chk of a black-eyed litter frog coming up, actual, from the grave.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

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.

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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.

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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.

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