Adam Aitken

Adam Aitken was born in 1960 and spent his early childhood in London,  Thailand and Malaysia. As well as numerous reviews, articles on poetry, and works of creative non-fiction, he is the author of four collections of poetry. Romeo and Juliet in Subtitles (2000) was shortlisted for the Age Poetry Book Award and the John Bray South Australian Writers Festival Award. He has been the recipient of an Asialink residency in Malaysia, an Australian Postgraduate Award and most recently an Australia Council Literature grant for new work on Cambodia. His most recent work includes a Doctorate in Creative Arts thesis on hybridity in Australian literature, and a new book of poems, Eighth Habitation (Giramondo Publishing). He lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Technology, Sydney. Adam is appointed Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai’i for Fall semester 2010.

 

 

Eighth Habitation

 

1

 

“Went up north for short holidays again last week.

And thankfully missed the floods in KL.

You have to pass Kelly’s (sic) Castle

before reaching

Clearwater Golf Sanctuary, right?”

 

Appeasing temple, or a Scots-Victorian Taj Mahal

built for the love of Agnes, English heiress by rumour.

 

Designed with “splendour in mind”

unfinished supplement to 1890s

tin-money, and rubber.

Filmset strangler figs “reclaiming civilisation”.

 

 

“While driving to Ipoh for ICT annual dinner (courtesy of zaman), we stopped

by kellie’s castle for a wee bit of look-see.”

 

 

“Not a haunted house, a haunted castle”.

Moorish. Built by Hindu stone masons.

 

Spanish flu killed Kellie,

decimated the master builders

& coolies too.

 

1926. Died

somewhere between Singapore

                                                & England

(some say Portugal).

 

Agnes went home to Scotland.

 

The surviving workers

built their avatar:

pith-helmet deity

in khaki and boots

standing between two fakirs

atop their temple

just behind the scullery.

 

I’m here for the “pictorial possibilities”, and like a good poem

there’s Juliet balconies

hidden tunnels and

the “doors and windows open and shut

                                                            by themselves”

light and dark.

My eighth habitation?

 

“Windows open and bang shut by themselves, we’ve been in there …

you can ask Joyce or Loo Hui. We spent only about 45 minutes

in there, and the clouds started to get darker and darker,

and we had to get out of there coz there’s no visibility in there

in case it got too dark. We walked quickly outside

into the open space, and I told the girls I HAD to take this shot

with the dark clouds directly on top of the castle, it’s really

a golden opportunity for a good shot that I think even the locals

find it hard to find! We got on our knees, frame a low angle,

and got these shots.”

 

 

2

 

Capitalist myth No. 357:

the workers deify The Boss

Capitalist myth No 358:

the workers poisoned his cigars.

Eccentricity that becomes the Boss,

 

for which the locals thank him –

 

            for Malaya’s first hydraulic lift,

            each room with a view,

the library of hardwood shelves,

 

much text that

rotted there unread.

Scott’s Waverley novels, Eliot, Dickins.

 

Now

the attractions are

 

ghosts, hidden passages,

a class excursion

or a promo

for “Ted Adnan’s Location Portraiture Lighting Technique Workshop”

(code for tropic porn

                       

            among the Gothic moldings

            in the equatorial boudoir

                        for heat-struck Ophelias).

 

Heritage? Thirty, quite useless, rooms

including indoor tennis court,

           

            graffiti

                        of graduated offence (from “Abdul 2000” to

the spouting appendage

                                    drawn from hearsay

to “Malaysia 20/20 Vision”)

 

In guidebook-speak: “a defaced labour of love”?

 

            Thanks to the haunted Celts

            the rubber boom turns to palm oil and tourism

 

plus a hundred or so internet plagiarism essays

 

Kellie   

                        just absent on leave,

one deregulated voice

channelled thru the living

                        on MalaysiaBabe.net:

 

“it’ll b a cute cute castle

wif lotsa hello! kitty stuff in there..

it shall not b spooky…

it’ll b like every kid’s dream castle… haha…”

 

 

 

 

Cath Vidler

Cath Vidler’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various literary magazines including HEAT, Sport, Quadrant, Turbine, Southerly and Cordite. Her first collection of poems is forthcoming from Puncher and Wattmann (www.puncherandwattmann.com) in 2010. Cath is the editor of Snorkel (www.snorkel.org.au), a literary magazine specialising in the publication of creative writing by Australians and New Zealanders.

 

 

 

 

Counting The Stars

 

Nothing left to do but count
the stars

 

(I could be here all night).

 

*

 

Like stopped confetti

 

their utterances
reside, bright-lipped

 

round the moon’s
pale head

 

(the abacus has gone to bed).

 

*

 

Oh chuckling stars
what can I do

 

 

but cut my losses
and count on you.

 

 

At the Botanic Gardens, Sydney

 

i.

 

Bats hang from branches

like pods of midnight,

 

asleep in the reek

of restless dreams.

 

ii.

 

Grass recollects

night-slitherings of eels,

 

their sibilant tracks

seeking closure

 

at the pond’s tepid lip.

  

iii.

Herbs cluster and build,

a storm-system

of piquancy.

 

iv.

 

Somewhere,

a drop of rainforest

 

falls, spreads

to full capacity.

 

 

Desmond Kon

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé divides his time between his art and teaching creative writing. A recipient of the Singapore Internationale Grant and Dr Hiew Siew Nam Academic Award, he has edited more than 10 books and co-produced 3 audio books, several pro bono for non-profit organizations. Trained in publishing, with a theology masters from Harvard University and creative writing masters from the University of Notre Dame, he has recent or forthcoming work in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Cricket Online Review, deadpaper, Dear Sir, Ganymede, Pank, and The Writing Disorder. Also working in clay, Desmond is presently sculpting ceramic pieces to commemorate the birth centennials of Nobel Laureates William Golding and Naguib Mahfouz in 2011. Works from his Potter Poetics Collection have been housed in museums and private collections in India, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.

 

hsuan tsang before the taklamakan desert

That was a way of putting it – not very satisfactory:

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,

Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle

With words and meanings.

          ~ T. S. Eliot

 

as lettered as song sparrows, finespun but ambivalent, purling rune, verse-love-elegaic

letters, ringing bells pealing-bowling-tolling, over-diatonic, dropping from belfries

a bunch of letters homophony-unwrapping-polyphonous; more becoming, becalming

as lettered as dash-of-love dreams, the scrunchy unscripted curves of them; they knell

slow, only lettered stubs of permissibility but not clarity, not token, soft-shod monody

as lettered, like someone else and his parcelled ideas about someone-else-especial

as a lettered dõgen inhales carbon-copy scruples, never sound changes, or cedar oil

 

there are nothing but sutras everywhere in time and space; sometimes sacred letters

are used, sometimes profane letters; sometimes divine letters, sometimes human

letters; sometimes the letters of beasts, sometimes the letters of ashuras; sometimes

the letters of a hundred grasses; sometimes the letters of ten thousand trees*

 

yet lettered to curatorial people doubled over in tracts, their inscribed, stolid podiums

as pasty; nothing letters what it seems, like rifling-trifling words split into infinitives

and supernal letters; they vacillate themselves, planate-unrest, periphrasis ill-at-ease

as lettered as their flamboyance letting us hide, letting go; we seek iliadic-baneful signs

kernels anew as lettered this vanilla midnote; I am such rest, the painful rest of it too

such serial-story calligraphy finely lettered, like love-in-waiting drawing likes as red

morning of herons as lettered as it is watery, disavowing, surging alkahest in hallways

as lettered, me beyond my own instruction, content as contusion art, euphony combing

still lettered, can’t he see? I don’t instruct my art nor its lost parts and whisper plains

these belles-lettres scarcely ciphers; tidy dais yet ochre-known, conduits so recondite

these belles-lettres unearthed that bless today of our sudden star-turning, terrene days

its letters as wrapt, happy-as-filigree trappings, us in puji si, whetstone and greying

 

 

* This verse has been lifted from a citation of Dõgen by J. P. Williams in his book on apophasis. Of Dõgen’s ideas on the use of sutras, Williams writes: “Thus we see that the ineffability of reality is not a question of there being no words we might use to describe it, but rather that there are no words which would describe it completely.”

 

Michael Farrell

Michael Farrell’s most recent books are a raiders guide (Giramondo), and as coeditor (with Jill Jones) Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets(Puncher and Wattmann). ‘word seen from a bus’ and ‘country from a mans neck’ were written during an Asialink residency in Nagoya.

 

 

 

word seen from a bus

 

Maybe a word i know. But the mountains are covered-in,

different examples-of forest different water reflects. A bittern rises

from the page like a stick &s gone, it was a vision, white

word of childhood myth. Read unread.

 

Its context, framed Perfectly, the single word was there room or time for another?

 

a word in the river.

Or the sky: hawk

 

perhaps. Man woman or sugar

 

Could be anything.

Readers snooze,

Its like the midwest,

Or eden-monaro,

At home id-know,

 

Feels like glass,

A name,

Lifted by a crane,

Word post-card,

With without wings-amen,

 

 

country in a mans neck

 

Happiness in the night, last.

I know where im supposed to take you,

on stage, for a moment.

 

the tiny venue, the throbbing figures

 

nothing i can quote, but i approximate

by writing there were lots of toys,

& Nothing like a jimmy barnes oh.

 

Nothing i can quote, but i approximate,

 

these notions come from reading books by tanizaki,

 

The absent pearl earring draws my attention to his dark white neck.

 

Ive taken off my coat & my popover & remain inactive cool.

 

halfway home between one & another like an oyster…

 

a less observant guy than youd miss my thirsty shoe…

 

(not a better metonym than ass)

‘alluring aspect’ –

 

(unknown to the uncolonised as scrub)

‘or greenitude’ –

 

no sun Fell Hard

on my mental verandah

or the mushroom underneath.

The product of short days

 

 

Mark O’Flynn

Mark O’Flynn has had eight plays professionally produced with such companies as Q Theatre Co, La Mama, MRPG, The Mill Theatre Co and Riverina Theatre Co. His play Paterson’s Curse was published by Currency Press in 1988. He has also published a novel, Grass Dogs, which was one of the short listed manuscripts in the Harper Collins Varuna Awards program. He has also published two collections of poetry, reviews and short stories. His new collection of poetry, published by Interactive Press, was published at the end of 2007. Mark was awarded a residency at Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland by the Australia Council in 2007 to work on a new novel.
 

 

 

The Great Slime Kings

 

After much rain

the congress of frogs

summoning each other

sounds like frying bacon.

 

The creeks and puddles

shrinking to their usual drains

pulse and sizzle

with the electricity of frogs.

 

From the foetid mud they hatch,

on the prowl,

as grateful as I to snatch

a break in the weather.

 

 

Calligraphy of Moss

 

The wayward letters my son scrawled with his finger

in wet cement all those years ago have every day

reminded me of his name.

 

Not that I would have forgotten.

Silly observation

Their presence is like the presence of air.

 

After the rain and the opportunistic streak

of living things; (the mosquitoes, the leeches),

the misshaped letters have filled with a calligraphy

 

of moss. The green is startling,

adapting to the concrete vagaries of the host.

Moss too has a toehold in our lives.

 

It is like the presence of air,

the presence of earth. The green

footprint of his name existing beyond the odds.

 

Groper

Wallowing like a dog in gravy

the great blue groper, king

of Clovelly Bay, rolls on his back

for his tummy to be rubbed.

Floating over sand like a dirigible

with fins he eyes the snorkellers above,

silhouettes against the bright sky.

One of them, he knows, will dive down

soon to scarify the sand, loosening worms,

or else dismember for him a tasty sea urchin.

All the vivid little fish dart in like hyenas

or frenzied gulls, but it’s the big blue

groper, neon as a burglar alarm

that we have come to see

to measure, in the breathless safety

of the bay, how far out of our

element we are.

 

 

Mani Rao

Mani Rao is the author of Bhagavad Gita – A Translation of the Poem (Autumn Hill Books, 2010), and eight books of poetry including Ghostmasters (Chameleon Press, 2010). She has essays and poems in journals including Cordite, Meanjin, Wasafiri, JAAM, Printout, Takahe, Iowa Review, Fulcrum, Zoland Poetry and anthologies by WW Norton, Penguin and Blood Axe. www.manirao.com has updates.

 

 

 

Ding Dong Bell

The jetty’s out
Who’s at bay
War-mongrels Hera Athena

Stout Menelaus
Slender Paris
Homer leads the charge

Imperfection haunts beauty
So imagination can rule
Helen haunts imagination

In the center of her forehead
Bloodthirsty star of the sea


Iliad Blues

I like battles out at sea
Hot spur
Cold water
Blood swimming both ways
Salty meetings
Sharks due 
At the end
Level blue

 

Peace Treaty

What if Helen died

Cuckold crows
Husband recalls
Body  face  rites

Once broad Trojan devils
Now cower in the shadows of walls
Fearing skywitnesses
Quaking at birdshit

Our boy came back
From overseas with a
Souvenir egg that ticked

A runaway wife’s a rotten prize
Unwanted alive
And dead

 

Anne Elvey

Anne Elvey’s poems have appeared in journals, including most recently Blue Dog, Cordite, Island and Westerly and in The Best Australian Poems 2009 (Black Inc.). Her first chapbook Stolen Heath was published by Melbourne Poets Union in 2009. Her research and writing is supported by the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, and Melbourne College of Divinity.

 

 

 

 

lacing and unlacing her song

 

The ear is a window where she transfers

a blue wren. Her song

is a cat’s tail curved

round the air when her fingers

bend to the strings. And her bow

is an oar, striding a river.

 

She ties up to a she-oak, shakes

its raindrop chandelier. The rest

becomes a body, composed

to chocolate and wine. Bread.

A magpie. Weeds trodden into

loam. A stump

 

where insects trace their graffiti.

The perfume of fennel. Wild.

Her touch says wood and gut.

 

***

 

At home the frame bends.

With use a string frays.

All night she will play

shadow puppets on a wall.

They disappear when the day awakens

beside her score.

 

And unlacing her song, she laces

her song with the remembered scale

of her years.

 

 

memento: the manuscript under may hand is/not written

 

The verse etched on a tree selects

a variety of media to represent itself.

 

On the smooth trunk where the bark has peeled—

such a robust street tree, thick

 

and rugged, not that I’d lean into it—

is the kind of word this land leaves

 

on things, neither exodus nor crucifixion,

but a slow tapping into soil, a writing outward

 

of time that was rock and clay and an everywhere

sky. With its dense foliage this is not a tree

 

for a clearing. Cars’ fumes create their own

mass and insects travel woody

 

roads eeking through age, so that I wonder

do they hear the tree as it makes itself?

 

 

Claire Potter

Claire Potter was a Poets Union Fellow in 2006. She is author of two chapbooks, In Front of a Comma (Poets Union, 2006) and N’ombre (Vagabond, 2007). Her first full-length collection, Swallow, will be published this October (Five Islands Press). She lives and works in London.

 

 

 

Our Lady Of The Cave

From the ancient tale,
the miniature cries come to me
 
and I see what the monk saw
in the folds of the woman’s cape:
 
hundreds of young birds
in a maze of warm silence
 
and her arms stretching out
into the blue timbre of morning
 
The woman softly
 
ushered the birds away, said they were
no longer sleeping, promised the anxious monk
 
that the swallows would return and fill his hallowed
parish with the credence of vagrancy––
 
for what is unsettling in nymphs
is celebrated in tiny birds

 


Genet Lesson

Three metres apart   It’s snowing & tiny fronds of ice zigzag
between us    I reach across to you      but knock a mirror––   
realise you are on my other side        turn
right––   you are not there    left and you are blue,
 
from out of the
 
hand from the mirror takes mine & you reappear  
this time dressed in Chaplin   frill of dark mist edges you
nicely   & I’d like to take a picture   but have only an umbrella
 
decaying flowers, violets of which the bouquet, lest we forget, becomes
an umbrella, and vice-versa: the umbrellas are like bouquets,
and the bouquets are like umbrellas
 
Suddenly, loss of order   & receding    Is, is
as is whatever    really right?
 
Three metres apart    but never so well expressed
of open air
 
O my rose    you whisper
          tap-dancing to curtain fall         
 
encore

 

 

                                                                          The Tea Leaf Party 

My fretting friend & I
we’ll go slow tomorrow morning
not wasting any time––
 
We’ll trampoline trivial love
off the city pitches, spit
sugarplums and
heckle daisies with
ears pressed firmly to the ground
 
We’ll girdle all bleached
histories, skip
outside the radiation hoops
 
and below bad-mannered moustaches,
bray in raspy voices
to scare birds who open fire
from diamonds cut from sky
 
––Francis, come let me cradle
the qualms of your rocking suns
darn your memory pockets
with skeins of tightrope pulled
from a far-off star
 
and to the banksias who raise their
fiery brushes, the thurifers
will resurrect light
across our barren ground
 
to a clearing of the Sound
where ribaldry and tea
are taken not instinctively
but to catch leaves before they brown
 
 

 

Yvette Holt

Yvette Holt heralds from the Bidjara Nation of Queensland, born and raised in Brisbane, Yvette is a multi-award winning poet, academic and feminist. She has lectured on Aboriginal Women Studies and Australian History in an Indigenous Context at the University of Queensland and the Australian Catholic University respectively. Her research has been in Indigenous Australian literature with a particular focus on Aboriginal womens’ poetry, Yvette is also a passionate advocate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and their leadership on a state and national level.

Her prizes include the Scanlon Prize, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing for her collection, Anonymous Premonition, and the 2010 Kate Challis Award.

 

 

Always My Lover

  
my lover the colour of candescent brandy seducing an Indian summer/
 
my lover the reason I leave diamond kisses scattered across an auburn, morning waist/
 
my lover, skin sweeter then Belgian chocolate dusted with perfumed spices/
 
my lover amethyst fingers endlessly melting every breath behind my sigh/
 
my lover the reason I read poetry to our unsuspecting goldfish/
 
always my love, forever my lover/
 
 

 

Motherhood

(Dedicated to Cheyenne Holt)
 
 
I love my suburban backyard and sharing it with you
lying on the trampoline just mother and daughter
and making funny animal shapes out of the soft marshmallow clouds
 
then when night falls we begin to count the twinkling stars on our hands and feet laughing at the passing
red kangaroos flying high above our mango tree
I love watching you transplant a leaf from our garden as you impatiently wait for it to grow
 
sometimes I squint while trying on new clothes in front of her though because no matter what I buy or choose to wear I always seem to
end up looking like a six foot-tall full-figured Barbie doll or maybe even a Ken
 
I like playing big sissy with you and rolling around on my bed, begging you to stop tickling me until I fall hard
onto the floor then I get all too serious and fed up but you just laugh hysterically and say ‘C’mon mummy that was
fun let’s do it again’
 
I look forward to dancing with you every Sunday morning and singing ‘I am woman hear me roar’ karaoke style
with my tired and worn-out hair brush
I love calling you from interstate and telling you I’ll be home tomorrow
 
there are so many things I love about motherhood but we keep it real and have our fair share of difficult moments
too like homework time, always radioactive in our neck of the woods, or asking her to clean out her bedroom for
the umpteenth time because I’m unable to see the carpet
 
and yes I know I totally freaked out when you told your school friends that Mr. Bean was really your father
because at the next P & C meeting I felt like the black adder
 
but through it all if motherhood were a mountain then you’ve taken me to the highest peak and if daughters were
flowers growing in the garden
you would always be me one and only sweet                     
 

 

Trippin’Over Your Tongue


The littering of literature fills my living space
I break and enter like a thief in the night
Selling my words on the black market page
Pawning my thoughts for a night on the town
Then peeling the label from a bus shelter wall
Trading my soul for a leather bound classic
Collecting collectibles
Like a crazed butterfly
Embracing your tongue
Before you have spoken
Recycling your dreams
Triggering my pen
Before I commence
Exchanging your whisper
For a reloaded quill
Sifting through texture on
The black poet’s corner
Moulding your ideas
Into something more or less
Bringing to boil
A melting pot of languages
Simmering over time
Sprinkling through the ages
To be or not to be
Obesity of our words
Gathering up the pounds
Charring the midnight ink
 
 
 
“Motherhood” and “Tirppin’ Over Your Tongue” first appeared in Anonymous Premonition, (University of Queensland Press, 2008)

 

Deepika Arwind

Deepika Arwind, 23, is a poet, writer and journalist based out of Bangalore, India. Her poems have appeared in Indian poetry anthologies and poetry journals. She has also read poetry at festivals like the Poetry with Prakriti Festival in Chennai, and won several poetry prizes. She is currently working on short fiction.

 

 

The heart is a child

sings the man with the voice of

a sinking boat. Hear, how water

ruptures him.

On the lake-fringe, between us,I am bored –

even with my foot on your crotch and your

lips syncing lullabies of romance. 

Our hearts are expanses, not organs

like the Indian railways are an experience,

not a network of trains? you say.

But I’d rather eat up the city’s old charms – than your

clever metaphor –its barrage of baraats, the sound

of tomorrow’s kites in the wind. I’m so bored.

And you, between stomach and thigh are limp.

You begin: But to love is to be –

I listen (as if) unaware of the mild

 

backlash of our love.

 

 

(baraat: marriage procession)

 

The Studio (I)

 

Where the riot began

 

The man I will remember –

 

dull turban, pleated eyebrows,

black spectacle frames, the eyes that spit 

the Bhagat Singh variety of courage, that look – 

he ousted the topper of the class

the look that says: I will be alive at 69, because

I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, and I will only cry when 

Saira Banu dies. 

Scanty beard of pubescent modesty

with it – the fear of being reckless

the heart through the thin polyester shirt

and pocket-tucked ink pen

the heart through the polyester

shirt, narrow chest, its inevitable broadness

the heart through the shirt

the boyish arm, slim kada,

the heart that knows these are the 60s,

his belly burning with fireflies –

that taut heart ablaze in his eyes.

 

The man I will remember is agog in 

a clear day’s monochrome.   

 

But the man will remember the studio, 

much later a cycle garage.

 

(kada: a religious bangle worn by Sikhs, Saira Banu: a famous Hindi film actress of the 1960s, 70s, 80s.)

 

 

II) 

 

It may be Bilaspur. But we may never know.

 

She sits before a flattened tin of odd things –

safety pins and bottle lids –

in which chocolates were brought to her from Denmark.

(from a member of her feudal family, now dissolving into 

the modern-moneyed world.)

 

Behind her, the ornate wallpaper, 

from which she can dress a thousand dolls.

 

It must be early evening.

Before the jalebis are fried outside the studio.

Before she moves her darting eyes lined with kohl,

     she lights up the street for Amma, with the

     light of every mosque and sweet shop in this small town,

before she says to Amma,  I want to go, but you can’t see,

      she is told to run along

      she lifts her ferozy frock to avoid

      soiling its frayed crocheted piping,

Before Amma screams a murder of crows in high-pitched chorus:

“Firdaus, bhaaaag!”

 

Before the mob sweeps her in a swift moment

leaving behind a small round of ochre and the flies around it.

 

But we may never know.

 

 

(Amma: mother, Jalebis: An fried fried sweet, ferozy: turquoise, “bhaaag!: ruuun!”)

 

 

After the torso

 

comes longing. The odd rocket of desire

that picks up and loses orbit, but not at will.

Do you remember –

how aroused you were when you brought your feet

home, bleeding from hanging too long on bus footboards?

Then we pressed like jigsaw.

(After that we would never be pre-torso.)

 

is a gentle road. The universe of

the lower limb, the use in desperation to leave to run to come

back fill full circles stretch in love and sun to sweep with slippers

on filth to snake through sand and water.

 

There must always be afternoon after the torso and the creak

of a bone, sighing, like a novel at its end.

 

is a deluge of carnivals in the sea, swaying to the

sound of a slow fuck. A tireless hole of cum, its drip,

enunciated by your hips.

After the torso is defiance, a very brief

critique of authority.