Substitute

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Glenn Shaheen

Think about reason – bonk bonk. Well, at least let me tell you
about biography – bonk. My heaven is slight, eager to appear,
a lung full. I love my friends and some days I hate them, spirits
suddenly replaced in the night like the great changeling
of folklore. A week and I could make them pay for this. In a
Yankee state all of the citizens lilt their heads upward at certain
sounds, for certain parts of speech or syntax. They take pride
in it being a Yankee state, claim they’ve erased racism, yet
the schools still load honors classes with idiot white kids, white
teachers still say Detroit and Chicago are “dirty, dirty places.”
One school has an emergency plan for every possible contingency,
including nuclear attack, dirty bomb attack, biological weapon
attack, and stranger on campus. Determine what the stranger’s
nationality is, first, says the book. The principals, when I sub,
ask me where I’m from and look disappointed when I say
Canada. Sure I know what they meant but fuck em! Where are
they from? Bradenton? Aidenton? Thomsonton? My friends,
they’re nice people who would support me at a moment’s notice.
My heaven, it’s just silence, ice, and dark. Some of my friends
believe my successes were helped by my a) name b) “olive skin”
c) nationality of certain members of my family who are strangers
to me or d) all of the above. Those friends, they are close friends,
and some only think this from afar. The car, it needs another
expensive procedure. It has a taste for blood. I wish it to be
crushed at night by a tree branch, something quick and non-
injurious. Car heaven, is that dark too? Next to, I imagine,
cat heaven. All the heavens adjacent but I want them empty if real.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Porch Haiku

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Hayan Charara

On the porch
the men argue,
the cat sleeps.


On the porch—
we shut up for a minute
to hear cicadas.


On the porch
listening to the radio—
no survivors.


On the porch
I watch a dog
eat from the trash.


On the porch
the ashtray fills up
with rain.

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Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged ,

Love Under Capitalism

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Omar Sakr

The new joint around the corner keeps
changing its name. I get it. I am afraid
of growing old. I can’t afford this face
for long, this place for long. I still invite
people in. The barista wants to know
me. I want to trust his intentions, his sup
as I sip at what he just made and feel
a little more alive. I shiver at the usual
delivered by so many smiles. His dimples.
Large cap? Desire hissing. Four forty five.
It feels wrong to say don’t ask me
to be human. This is a transaction only.
I need to preside over when I am more
than money moving between machines.
That’s what all of this comes down to:
this is not my first coffee of the day &
won’t be my last. I rub my hand over
the silver band of my fade and imagine
it as his, as a distance closed, as a tug
at my trackies. He needs to be talking.
To be more than a service. A silence.
The cost of this moment is greater
than either of us knows or cares to
think about for the other. The radio
squawks: there’s been another attack.
A crack tears through the small café.
I take what I have ordered and leave
with what I need: no expectation
of a return.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

A Refugee Grows Old

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Zeina Azzam

for my mother

She is surprised by the pink cyclamen
in the pot, examines the foreign

petals, upswept as if reaching toward
another place. Her own journey seems muted now,

details as far away as her childhood in Palestine.
Where in one scenario she would have lived

in the same place until great grandchildren
played around the lemon tree that defined

her family’s house in scent and space.
Where in the real scenario

she fled for her life with a husband and baby,
in her pocket a key that rusted over the years.

Her memories are like henna on a hand,
splendid arabesques fading each day

until gone. She has covered so many miles
by boat, plane, car, on foot, measured

by oceans and clouds, gas fumes,
tattered flags left behind, driver’s licenses,

rental agreements, goodbyes to friends and family,
a lifetime unanchored, cleaved.

She continues to worry someone
is plotting to take away her home

while slowly hunching over, a downswept
bent flower weighed down by hallucinations.

She knows some things never leave you
so you have to leave them yourself,

takes small steps away
looking for some peace.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Skyping My Mother

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Philip Metres

Your fin-quick gaze
now swims into view, ex-convent eyes
long uncloistered:

a mother’s face is a lifetime
of faces, voluminously lined and luminous,
now distracted by this

real time letter. Each flourish
of your hand blurs its swish, the back
wash of bytes.

I’ve spent a life emerging
from my image of you, and now you’ve gone
amniotic. We were born

to each other, mother
and first child—our heartpumps that rhumba
when thrilled or exhausted,

lungs that seize in cold,
backs we throw out, lock us in bed for days.
In a failed poem, I once wrote

if the sky were a voice, it would
be yours. The years rub it to a fluted rasp,
raspier over the audio

of compressed memory.
My daughters—reason for this spectral
reunion—crowd the screen,

invisible bits of you
coiled in them, their binary pool
of ancestral light.


When we watch your eyes,
we see you looking down to where we must be
looking on your screen,

a frame below the frame of us
looking down to you. As if a picture turns out
to be a window—

though we’re locked inside
our distant homes, and the window itself
is what’s raining.

Something in us
loves this earth, this flesh, but not enough
to cease our flailing

against its faithful
magnetic pull. Only a day’s drive away, too far
to feel this close.

Wordsworth-worshipper,
you always read my mind, nerve networks
open as web pages.

Today, the headline—
“A mission to the moon with no return
in mind.” We’re digital

immigrants exiled
from taste of your breath, the hum your lungs
thrum when you’re happy

to see us, the bird
-quick movement of you in the room,
and the room in you.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

To Grieve for All Your Other Selves

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Lena Tuffaha

A golden shovel after Marwa Helal

Rationing cumin and sumac when
the last of summer’s reinforcements dwindle, you
offer us soup and unadorned fattoush at maghreb. Your hands move

with practiced grace, slicing radishes, stirring lentils around,
but the meal is mere facsimile, no trace of childhood or home, as
featureless as we felt on our first Ramadan here. Much

of what passes for memory is just hunger, taste buds posing as
spurned lovers. My body is revolting against what I
always assumed would feed me—I no longer have

a lexis for these transformations. What keeps you
loyal to your meticulous rituals? Is it too late to learn
to recite the words without translating them? Sometimes

my single prayer is for forgetting. Given the blade, I would excise the
verbs and the scar tissue that separate us—the emptiest
of all accomplishments is language mastery in the new world, a thing

of kaleidoscopic allure and little return on investment. It is
passport without passage. And do we ever pass in an
unaccustomed landscape? We’re given away by the overstuffed

filing cabinets, the crumbling certainties of ancestry, the ever-present suitcase.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

love poem for the newly out

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Zeyn Joukhadar

I dream a man I used
to love knifes clean
through the flesh of my name
out springs an orange dress
blood & kohl
he conjures my hair
it unfurls from the root
like a planted flag
 
sometimes my body fails
to revert to vessel
in these dreams
I become something else
something without edges
the point at which my forehead
touches the earth
or the unseen fist of gravity
bending light
 
sometimes I wake
before he drowns me
beneath the ocean
of his body
 
I kick myself toward the light
re-inhabit each nerve
each egg ripe
as a ruined palace
in the desert of my belly

my scars reinvent their knit ridges
& I am still made
of my own flesh
I unswallow the blade
from my own throat
tongue the clot of my name
in my mouth
smooth as a new tooth

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

salat the morning after a terrorist attack

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Dujie Tahat

—for the 50 Muslims killed in Christchurch, New Zealand during Ju’mah on March 15, 2019

[adhan]

My littlest’s small hands ask if I’m okay
this holy Friday. The alarm, and, minutes after, still
looking up into the square light
of my phone:

I’m weeping.

[standing]

On the train ride to the airport,
my ex wife calls to say, Good news:

No cancer.

and I’m weeping all over
myself again.

No one
seems to notice.

[bowing]

There’s a baby in a stroller
so I burst into tears.

Another’s beloved’s perfect shoulder. A child on an escalator.

TSA
asks if there are liquids
in my bag and I burst

into tears —sorry—I mean I’m weeping, ma’am. Rifling

through my carry-on, my contact lens solution hits the floor,
and I’m sorry
—I’m sorry—

I’m trying to put all this

water back into my eyes.

[prostration]

I count up to fifty
people on the plane,

and several are afraid
we’re going to die.

I want to tell them:
We’re all gonna die.

[prostration again]

I’m a stranger in California. I search
for the closest mosque by listening
for the weeping.

The sermon:

We’re all gonna die
and it’s a beautiful thing.
May Allah
make the angels at the time of your death ones of mercy.

Are we prepared to face allah subhanahu wa ta3alah?

[sitting]

I touch my people’s knees.
I grace my people’s elbows.
I hold my people’s hands.
My people. My people. My people.

May allah subhannalah accept them.

[salam alaikum]

I say to my perfect Santa Clara strangers:

Thank you, brother.

Thank you, sister.

And I never meant it more in my life. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah
subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah
accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them.
May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah
subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah
accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them.
May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah
subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah
accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them.
May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah
subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah
accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them.
May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah
subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah
accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them.
May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah
subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah
accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them.
May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah
subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah accept them. May allah subhanalah
accept them.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

All Summer, I Waited For Frank

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Hazem Fahmy

Speeding across Brooklyn on a hot July afternoon in Hanane’s car, Yasmin tells me about Harper Lee, how she had been reclusive and almost never questioned for it. She tells me this because an Atlantic article was just published, comparing the novelist to who but Frank Ocean, citing the time it took them from project to project; a fascinating similarity. Later, my feet in the sand, Adam shows me the memes:

#WaitingforFrank
#WheresTheAlbumFrank

We laugh as we get high on the beach, making do with what’s been given to us.
***
On a hotter July night, I wait for the subway with George and Julian and we talk about disappearing, how heavy that sweet impatience wore on our backs.
***
I think I waited so long for Frank because I came out of Ramadan with tired ears. I needed a prophetic rhapsody, some soft muscle for my aching memory, green hair for my body to grow in.
***
Before he leaves the city, Marcelo throws a going away party and invites me. On the Facebook event, he promises they will have different people on shifts, just waiting for the album to drop. This is August, so he feels lucky. I never made it up to Yonkers. I don’t know if this actually happened. I spent that night with Misho, planning what little time we were about to have in Cairo. This is joy, this is summer.

#WheresTheAlbumFrank

***
I woke up on a Thursday in Cairo and by the grace of God the album was just there on my phone. Mama told me to pack because we were leaving soon, but I stayed in bed, headphones in. I wanted to dance, not celebrate per se, but dance. My body had always trusted itself with Frank, at least more than it did with me. My father came in to remind me that we had to leave soon, so I paused the album for later, only to realize there were not that many songs I could really dance to.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Ticker

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Fady Joudah

I love my car. Old shoes
aren’t good for my knees and hips.
Two things in life
on which one shouldn’t skimp:
vehicles for feet
and vessels of spine—
he who sleeps well walks well,
but my old car hurts me none.
A reliability to run
capital out of business,
workers out of factories,
(though not in the manner
robots might), and out of crises,
our middle lives. After 100,000 miles,
my car won’t hear me say
“You don’t need to keep going
until you’re 120. I’m not afraid
to let you, irreplaceable, go.”
My car’s a sage,
has signed a do-not-resuscitate.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Seismic Shifts

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Elmaz Abinader
Smoke.
Eruption.
Cicadas.
Night.
Fog.
Thunder.
Tide.
Growth.
Topography.
Dawn.
Dusk.
Humidity.
Night.
River.

I smell my coffee in your mouth. You use my body lotion. Almond
Driving alone, my heart races. I call you. It’s a warning, it’s a surprise. Overwhelming, I say
Families bring baskets of food and then more. We eat with our fingers and our laughing cleans our lips
Five days before his death, you prayed with my father, snapped a photo when he put on his blue hat
We keep finding stories we haven’t told each other; repeat the ones we know
I count the booms, the seconds before the lightning and the time it takes for you to drive from work to home
I can’t get my bearings when hours sink me the couch. I stretch toward you leaning back in the soft armchair
I shave the back of your neck to clean. You fold clothes and place them on the bed
Your identifiable marks are contemplation and patience. I’d know you anywhere
You can name the places I have traveled without you and with you, we lust wander
You don’t ask, when will you be finished? You remove the cold cup of tea, dump the wilted bag
Your fine hairs float into pinwheels in the sink and in bed you regulate me to warm
You have prayers, I have storytellers. You live grateful, I sleep peacefully
We have rituals we haven’t done before. Old in love, muddied in the heart, on to the sea

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

pH

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Farah Chamma

They come back to me
like acid reflux.

One memory clings to my chest,
another lingers, floats
in my gut, my throat—

I begin to distract myself
with more alkaline thoughts:

my mother listening to Abdel Wahab,
humming along as she puts on her mascara,

or your neroli scent filling a corridor.

I worry these too might become acidic,
this heartburn a habit,
another void-filler.

How to live with my ability to remember?
Not everything I swallow is good for me.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

:3

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Nathalie Handal

Un posto ci sarà per questa solitudine

From a place where memory is a reservoir. From an old wound. A war. From a room of fantasies. From the faint voice of pleasure. From the view of our naked bodies. From the road that leads to mirrors. From the mirrors that lead to hums. From the pleasure we unlearned, and learned late again. From this rhythm we keep. From this passion we endure. From this mystery that tells us we lost everything in a one room, and found we belonged somewhere after all.

Un posto ci sarà per essere felici

Why find out who we are? Why remember all we did? Why think of what changed us? Why think of what challenged us; what kept us away from what we began? When a heart empties a gaze. When a memory turns on another memory, which of your voices is mine? Only mine. We slip through each other as if the cities we came from meant nothing to the world.

Un posto ci sarà dove si spera ancora la a gente porterà una storia nova

When we are lonely, the city opens itself to remind us no one is alone, all the time, and then the wind delivers a day, light moves to make space for nameless friends, a saint tells us what the heart didn’t dare to, and we come to know, each time we believe music is memory, the waters ask us to look into its eyes.



Lines in Italian from the song ‘Sicily,’ sung by Italian singer-songwriter Pino Daniele.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

From Istanbul

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Nusaiba Imady

I tell her I believe in god
nine hundred and seventy miles away from where we first met
I haven’t been this close to home in five years
There’s a child next to me
who will never say damascus is anything but inheritance
I am too lost in trying to find words
in a language I haven’t used in years
to eat food that is too familiar for me to taste

I am leaving again in three days
Putting distance between us
that I know fevered texts across an ocean will never fill
I am trying to explain why the divine still hasn’t died
That I can no more kill god than I can let her go
There is so much in theory I can speak of
Philosophies to extrapolate how divine doesn’t mean always good
but she knows as much as I do
This has never been about theology

It is about the sand that never really leaves our shoes
The struggle to say p instead of b
The smell of jasmine that follows us everywhere
This has always been about home
and I can’t stop believing in home
even if it means god always will exist in broken things

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Apologies to What I have Lost and Will Lose

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Marlin M Jenkins

There was the Mediterranean: You
could walk into the water and stay there.
— from June Jordan’s Apologies to All the People in Lebanon


I wished for the sea to take me
but all it offered to take
was the unweighted substance
pulsing the heart, synapsing
the brain. I stepped in
and it kept pushing me back
onto sand it forced into
its own image. I wished to look
for ruins. I wished to find
a paradise because the heavens
failed me. I wished to find a dome
of city starved of these wars. Maybe
I could, if only I could, swim
into the stormed sea to find
the source of a dozen severed feet
washed up on the shore
with shoes still on: each person
in the new-found city
adapted with slight gills, fresh
fins, telling me: something must
always be sacrificed, but
in this new place we grew back
something better.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Ain Al Hasouda

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Rasha Al Duwaisan

Mama said Ain broke Waleed’s leg,
burst the water pipes,
turned the Venetian skies upside down that one summer.
She even gave our new neighbor a heart attack.

I imagined her,
the sequined skirt suits, the frown,
the purple sacks under her eyes,
front row at every birth, wedding, funeral.
Only the name of God tamed her eyes.

When the war began, Baba disappeared,
us in a foreign place, our calls to Kuwait unanswered.
I scoured the earth for her, protested with banners
the size of elephants, yelled mashallah after his name
thousands of times.

He came back.




Ain Al Hasoud is the Arabic term for the Evil Eye.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

My Mother-in-Law Prays in the Next Room

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Rewa Zeinati

I hear her whisper
under her breath

picture her kneeling
over the prayer rug

palms face down
against the fabric.

She hides her hair
when her husband’s

nephew comes for a visit
and smokes lingering cigarettes

with her coffee
and after lunch

and sometimes she shows me
old photographs of herself

as a young mother, tan
shoulders, sleeveless top.

When she wakes up at dawn to water
the fig trees and the blushing folds of roses

I wonder if she reminds herself
that this bit of earth that she looks after

was snatched away for years, years ago,
and how years later it was taken back.

I look for something
we could bond over

no grandchildren to keep us up
trading stories of raising boys

and what our bodies may have lost.
So I tell her about the plant pots

on my balcony in the city
and wait for her to teach me

the shifting colors
of hydrangea

and the ease of growing jasmine.
How some leaves pass

quicker than others
and how some—

when you least expect it

— lift their tiny necks and
open up.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Big Song

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Naomi Shihab Nye

Under the bridge at Washington Street

a man with acoustic guitar

was plucking and singing again in Spanish

always only in Spanish

once I would have called him an old man

before I got old now no one is old

his voice amplifying thanks to the bridge

shivering off iron girders echoing concrete walls

becoming so huge as if through a megaphone

but sweeter rich and round giant sugar cookie

of a voice traveling to our side of the river

my three year old walking partner

twirled in place that sounds big

never asking why would a man be singing?

near our chattering ducks

who never lose hope we might one day

defy the signs and feed them

river reeds blooming yellow bells of Esperanza

only a few hours distance from camps of wire and concrete

thin mattresses aluminum foil sheets

sisters and brothers whose stories we can’t really know

whatever we think about them what happens next

how hard it has been

who is this man? so many years

singing in winter summer no cup beside him

not asking for anything people run past with their dogs

ears plugged their own music

I don’t know where he lives

secret stories under the bridge

all these years of echo

boy raising his arms

dipping and stepping

singer nodding his head

glad to be heard

raising one hand to both of us twirling

solamente por que?
siempre por que?

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Or Did You Really Think It Was the Path of No Return?

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Hedy Habra

after The Farewell by Remedios Varo

When we started walking along the winding road
of separation, did you ever wonder if our shadows
weren’t reluctant to follow?

What if they’d reclaim a life of their own,
decide to concoct a different ending to our story,
loosen their chains one by one?

What if they might have stretched and stretched,
retracing our footsteps towards the place where
words were last spoken or omitted?

And what if then, without restraint, without shame,
pride aside, they would have wrapped themselves
around each other in folds swirling tighter than

the twists of a rope, become braided wicks awaiting
to be lit, linger back there with no witness
save perhaps, an alley cat, a stray dog or a lost sparrow?

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Two Verandahs and a Lull in Gunfire

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Sara Saab

Our buildings are face-to-face in ’88–
towards Al-Raouché, ours is the five-storey
apartment block my grandfather built
with Latin American money,
coffeecake cement pocked with bullet holes
that birds nest in, my verandah a playpen
of flaking paint & pollution grit. I’m 3 and my game
is to peel coins of rust from the railing.
My knuckles are still puckered with baby fat. Rust
is the brightest smell I know
in a world where I’m new dough rising
in the midst of death piled on

death, a layer cake of death.
Her building is taller and less ravaged by the war,
a throne in a Parisian style I don’t understand
in toddlerhood, the awnings green as the shallows
of a mighty nearby sea we’ve never saluted
together. I never knew

who she was. She looked so old–maybe 110–
I wonder now, was she
50? 60? wrinkled by burning rubber
and TNT, her hair a magnificent wheat-yellow beehive.
I’d wave to her, there shaded, top-floor balcony,
on her throne beneath her birdcages of vivid
canaries, her pygmy palms in glossy pots–
we would watch each other chronicling everything
the street carried for those breathcatching
moments of a long war.

I heard you died, tante,
me too.
We all died, but our pummelled buildings
by some miracle,
stood.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Brendan Casey on as Cordite Scholarly Editor

Posted on December 2, 2019 by Kent MacCarter

I’m honoured to announce that Brendan Casey will be taking up the helm of Cordite Scholarly Editor. Casey is a doctoral candidate in the English and Theatre Studies program, University of Melbourne, researching Australian poetry and fiction through a postnational or ‘unAustralian’ lens. His research focuses on ‘literary visitors’ and their writing about Australia.

Says Casey, ‘I am excited to publish new and revisionary approaches to Australian literature and poetics, work which challenges established ideas of national culture or celebrates under-researched local authors. I am interested in Australia’s place within the globe, particularly among its immediate Pacific and Asian neighbours.’

This also means that Matthew Hall will be leaving the post after 11 years, though will remain on our advisory board. His contribution to Cordite Poetry Review is incalculable, and there is not a deep enough thanks I can extend for his commitment, insight and development of the scholarship we’ve published.

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged

Tell Me Like You Mean It 3

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Melody Paloma


Gian Manik | Mum’s Rembrandt paintings continued | Oil, aerosol, crayon, Posca pen | 215 x 231cm | 2018

Once I had a dream about a sea mollusc that latched onto the inside of my calf, and stayed there. The logic of the dream made me understand that the mollusc wasn’t actually a mollusc, but the mollusc was a poem, not mine, but one that I had read. The poem wasn’t identifiable, but the poem was a good poem, and I woke up with questions. What, exactly, do I want from poetry? What space does poetry hold (in the body, in the mind, in society)? What is the work of poetry? Why does it always return so persistently (that is, both for me, personally, and in a broader historical sense), and what makes it stick?

In curating this chapbook I’m not sure I feel closer to answering these questions: certainly they are never stagnant … but I do feel closer to poetry’s resistance to answer these questions, which does circle back to some kind of answer to my last question – we return to poetry not because we have an answer, but instead return in a process of regeneration. This is to say that we return with new questions. Good poems stay with us because we want to keep asking those poems questions, not because we’ve found answers.

Recently, in one of a series of frustrating attempts to read Jacques Lacan, I expressed to a scholar of his work my annoyance (and resentment) at not being able to understand a lot of his writings. There is, on one hand, the idea in which the concepts Lacan, and the field with which psychoanalysis grapples, are not easily reducible — the workings of the human psyche are expansive and not easily ciphered. But there is also, as this person pointed out to me, the methodology of psychoanalysis itself, which can also be applied to methods of reading and making meaning; a process of asking questions, not providing answers. I feel the pleasure of this process of making meaning most acutely when reading poetry.

Zoe Kinglsey: commute aka I need a haircut
Neika Lehman: For Katie West, after Clearing
Stella Maynard: the feeling of holding a fight in your hands
Ursula Robinson Shaw: VULTURE PHANTASY
Bridget Gilmartin: Getting Nowhere
Freya Daly Sadgrove: Tantrum in a Supermarket
Jonno Révanche: Yawning / cologne
Janet Wu: Forbid talk Hong Kong issu
Bonnie Reid: Yolk Together Ruin
Manisha Anjali: eat the rich
Harriet McInerney: ‘Three dots, pending text.’
Claire Albrecht: skullcrushing
Alex Creece: Birth-Controlled Dyke
Rory Dufficy: Elegy for Solid Snake 3.1
Sam Langer: Current Update
Timmah Ball: Her mother thinks she’s a lesbian
Prithvi Varatharajan: New Year’s Eve in Tasmania
Will Druce: great artesian nowhere
Grace Heyer: These are the things I say
Julie Jedda Janson: Crow

Brushing up with the resistance of poetry, with the resistance of language is, for me, inherent to the joy of it. For Lacan, in contrast to the Saussurian process of signification, it is the signifier (words, for example) not the signified (the concepts they denote) that should be prioritised. The link between signifier and signified, Lacan says, is not so clear cut. This focus on the materiality of language, on the complex relations between words and concepts, is part of what I think good poetry does – it’s poetry’s dealings in this Symbolic network that might push us closer to a collective and individual unconscious.

I commissioned the poets gathered here because, at some point, I have read their work and it has left in me a sense of curiosity about the world. In Tim Wright’s collection The nights live changes he writes, ‘Moving through the world / is what I am interested in …’1 It’s a line that always comes back to me when I write and read. Good poetry is this ‘moving through’, a motion that sweeps up a series of questions, a moving (in the sense of both affect and motion) that reproduces itself as it latches on. A truly freaky, dazzling thing.

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Birth-Controlled Dyke

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Alex Creece

Butter me up
with hormone heresy
Butter me up, butterfuck
so I don’t get
battered
in the street
consequence evaporates
like dormant
spiders in crumpets
doubling bubbling
toilet troubles
two-minute eternity in a piss-fingered cubicle
where our futures sweat with butter.

 
Butter me up
with a bulletproof body
Butter me up, buttercuck
so I don’t have to beg when they

S p r e a d m e
for break fast
threatening incontinence
and plumbing a pipe dream
just let me avoid the medical bill
of predators on parole
but you still want your bread and butt- butt- butter
from contraceptive camouflage
and
low-rent lesbians.
 
Butter me up
with barrenness
Butter me up
without excuses
that still m
e
l
t in your mouth
buttering
splu tt t te r ing
uttering
that I am
parannoyed by a delusion turned destiny
hysterical for hysterectomy
tongue-tied or tubular
lather us smother us
mother,
unmother us.
Just butter me up,
Buttercup.

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great artesian nowhere

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Will Druce

we live on liquified pastures
on thylacine-skin print
blown in from the curved backs
of armchairs
hung on walls in gully-dust paintings
in the saturn-rings of wine glass bottoms
upon the lips of drooling escarpments
where sandstone sponge seeps wet-season fluid
down through guttered labyrinths of savannah.

this is of course not where we live
because we live in the television boxes
of such places
in the fridges in the sheds
on the carpets of abandoned paint-shops
in the wake of road-train gusts
in silent stupefaction
of being here at all.

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