Prerna Bakshi

Prerna Bakshi is a poet, writer and research scholar of Indian origin from Sydney, Australia. Her work has previously been published in over two dozen journals and magazines, most recently in Grey Sparrow Journal, Silver Birch Press, Wilderness House Literary Review, Kabul Press, Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature and South Asian Ensemble: A Canadian Quarterly of Literature, Arts and Culture. Her full-length poetry collection, Burnt Rotis, With Love, is forthcoming from Les Éditions du Zaporogue. She tweets at @bprerna.

 

The death train

You’re all grown up now.
Don’t jump around too much
out in the open.
A girl gets told
as she plays hop scotch.
You have grown breasts now.
They bounce up and down.
What if anyone sees?

I’ve been told rubbing
this oil helps.
It works like magic.
A girl gets told
as she gets used as a guinea pig
for virtually every ‘home remedy’
under the sun.
Don’t wear this dress.
It will attract the eyes to your weak spot.
You have such small breasts.
I worry who will marry you?

They are either too large
or too small.
Too saggy
or too perky.

They either bounce too much
or not at all.
Too this, too that — never right.
Never satisfactory enough.

Except on that day when it didn’t matter
how women’s breasts looked.
How big they were
or how small.
They were just right.
Just the right size.
The right shape.
The right shade.
The right kind of breasts
on the right kind of women.
The chosen women.

Women who were handpicked,
lined up,
one by one,
had their breasts chopped off;
blood gushing all over the jam-packed
train carrying refugees;
women bleeding
slowly to death.

Their breasts, finally,
finally — the right size
for being cut into pieces.

David McCooey

David McCooey is a prize-winning Australian poet and critic. His latest collection of poems, Outside (2011), was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards and was a finalist for the 2012 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award. His first collection, Blister Pack (2005) won the Mary Gilmore Award and was shortlisted for four major national literary awards. McCooey is the deputy general editor of the prize-winning Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009). His album of “poetry soundtracks”, Outside Broadcast, was released in 2013 as a digital download. He is a Professor of Literature and Writing at Deakin University in Geelong, Victoria, where he lives.

 

‘Whaling Station’ Redux

i)
What trash, that poem of mine about the whaling station
we visited in Albany in the primitive 1970s, those years
when an operational slaughterhouse could be a family
tourist attraction. My late father’s legacy of 35mm slides,
newly digitised, undoes my poem, with three shots—
miraculous and amoral—of butchered whales,
a shock defacement of poetry’s mouthy reckoning.

ii)
In the first capture, there are winches, wire, a stone wheel
(for sharpening things, I imagine), rust-coloured concrete,
a fibro building, and the figures of two blue-singleted men
in gumboots, one bending, both partly obscured by steam rising
from blocks of whale meat. The steam has a pink colouration.

iii)
The second capture suffers from camera shake,
that analogue of nausea, and shows two men with metal bars
prying into the whale’s remains. Above them are
the innocent clouds, a seabird with extended wings.

iv)
In the third capture, two boys are in the frame. They could be,
but are not, my brother and me. They are looking at a single carcass:
headless, flayed, and eviscerated, the mess of it
rendered into dreadful blacks, reds, and whites.
In the centre of the whale the JPEG clips to pure black.

v)
I was five years old when I was taken to witness this industry of men.
When I show my father’s photographs to my six-year-old son,
I skip past these three images, momentarily panicky.
My blonde son, intent on the screen, wants to know what
he’s just seen, but does not argue when I tell him it’s not for him.
We move on to a grainy shot of Uncle Mac—who was no blood relation,
but shared my father’s name—standing before the Arc de Triomphe.

 


Europe

The grey and the green
under the white of the sky,
and over the black of the earth.

The annual pogrom of Autumn.

Soldiers in the fog;
soldiers marching
in the guiltless dusk.

The storybook animals
living in bungalows.

The night birds singing
their repetitive songs.

David Ishaya Osu

David Ishaya Osu writes poetry and nonfiction. He is a board member of the Babishai Niwe Poetry Foundation based in Uganda. Among publications, his poetry appears in Chiron Review, The Lampeter Review, CutBank, Vinyl, Transition, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, The Nottingham Review. His works are also published in anthologies including: RædLeaf Poetry: The African Diaspora Folio, A Thousand Voices Rising: An Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry, Maintenant 10: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing & Art. David is a fellow of Ebedi International Writers Residency, and is currently the poetry editor at Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel.
 

Time in my bread

I will sandwich
time in my bread
and swallow it, then
beg to
return to
my mother’s mode
sorry, womb
where all
the eels and the
snakes and the gas
flames will take me
as their friend
fit to control
cocktails
and sunshine

 

Death debate

You cannot lock
air in a
casket, or not
expect people to see
the white you wear
or the black
in the eyes;
there is no hope
that the house will grow back, she said
but, there’s wine
in the glass
and the people
will have rains to make
ice of
their burnt bodies

Ben Hession

Ben Hession is a Wollongong-based writer. His poetry has appeared in Eureka Street, the International Chinese Language Forum, and Cordite, with work also to appear in the 25th anniversary anthology of Live Poets at the Don Bank Museum, Can I Tell You a Secret? In 2013, his poem “A Song of Numbers” was shortlisted for the Australian Poetry Science Poetry Prize. Ben is also a music journalist and is involved with community broadcasting.

 

 

Stuart Park Lagoon

After the storm, the stream breaches
the strand:
racing out skeletal branchlets;
racing out unconscious, plastic fragments
of suburbia.
Ostensibly still stands the lagoon,
the surface, tense with stillness,
a pelican breaks.
You can tell where to fish, watching a pelican —
an Aboriginal man had told me, once.
Where then, are the fishermen today, absent
from the overflowing water?

Andrew Stuckgold

Andrew Stuckgold is a writer and photographer living in Erskineville, NSW. He has been published in Meanjin, Cordite, and Spineless Wonder’s Writing to the Edge (the 2003 Joanne Burns Award). He is currently working toward completing an MA degree in Creative Writing at Sydney University.

 

Taken

These eyes that split
from the darkened water
surging upward.
A snapping lunge
armoured in nightmare,
a maw that reeks
like a bone garden, crammed
with punching teeth;
the spike hammer clamp
of shattering leaden jaw.
This green scaled grinder;
meat and sinew torn
from that still half living,
ripped ragged
to the feeding;
consumes its corpsed bride
in a salt red wash:
blood, bile, and faeces
the banquet’s
clawing perfume.

Stuart Barnes

Stuart Barnes UQP colour(1)Stuart Barnes was born in Hobart, Tasmania, and educated at Monash University. Since 2013 he has lived in Central Queensland and been poetry editor for Tincture Journal. His manuscript The Staysails won the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, resulting in the publication of his first book, Glasshouses (UQP, August 2016). His website is https://stuartabarnes.wordpress.com/; he tweets as @StuartABarnes.
 
 
 


The Moon and the Mason Jars

for Ruth Whebell

Purified in stainless stockpots
with black Italian cursives and gilt,
stuffed with smashed green cabbage, sea salt,
yoghurt’s

whey; three-quarter revolutions compel
the Latin blanks. From elliptic orbit a well
versed silver tongue assuages the dish rack’s
topsy-turvy characters.

Willo Drummond

Willo Drummond is a PhD candidate in creative writing at Macquarie University. Recently migrated from the wilds of the NSW Blue Mountains to the shores of Sydney’s Parramatta River, she has weathered previous lives as an actor, singer-songwriter and arts administrator. In 2012 she served on the assessment panel for the Varuna Publisher Fellowships and last year completed a Master of Research thesis examining the ethics of the lyric mode in Australian ecopoetics. Propagules for Drift and Dispersal formed part of this work. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in Cordite, Meniscus and The Quarry.

Cooing to R.A

Mr A, mangrove man
          Mallarmé of the mud flats
                    I’ve taken you in to the jelly
          of my brain,1 in a kind
of mud-dove dreaming

You’ll fly with me forever
          now, we’ve simply no choice
                    in the matter. Once mud gets in
          to mood and memory, life
becomes mangrove in a minor key

Swamp dweller, fisherman
          I see you in the eye
                    of a Bush Stone Curlew; hear you
                              singing for your love; feel you slip
                                                                                through the gap
                                                                                in a waterfall of words,
                                                                                                                  rooting out
                                                                                                                  a manhole of meaning

You, of the in-between
          place; you, of the feathered
                    imagination; you, who wrote
                              yourself into existence, one bird
                                        at a time; I row with you, now, gently, along
                              the mangrove mile
                                                                                I dream with you
                under moonlight
                                                                                Fish scales glint
        in the tangle of your hair, and
on the breeze, I detect a hint
          of ‘no referent’
                under moonlight
                                                                                It comes and goes with the tide

 

 


1 “I sing softly/ from the jelly of the stone curlew’s brain”: Robert Adamson, “The Stone Curlew”