April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
rob walker has three published poetry collections: sparrow in an airport (Friendly Street New Poets Ten), micromacro and phobiaphobia (and is currently looking for a publisher for his fourth.) He lives in the Adelaide Hills, South Australia, dividing his time between writing and teaching. He is also a member of the unique jazz/funk/impro poets collective which is Max-Mo..
Tropeland. Surreal estate.
In the Land of Trope
boxes of matches spontane combustiously,
self-ignite like passion.
Vampire bats appear as garbags snagged on barbed-wire fences
Butterflies float skyward like liberation
In the Land of Trope street lights go through the phases of the moon
while the real moon waits for the traffic lights to change.
Deep serene ponds resemble your eyes and babies’ cheeks are gardenias
In the Land of Trope ears roar like the ocean
when you hold them up to your shell.
Cellos are the waists and childbearing hips of
country girls.
Cotton wool confined
to bathroom cabinets knows it’s a cloud
forming over the ranges.
The day sky tries to be as blue as the child’s pencil
while the night
leaves itself deliberately empty
for the distant sound of a lone
dog
In the Land of Trope sweat from armpits impersonates
cinnamon bark and vanilla pods
Similes assimilate later as comparative as a comparison
In the Land of Trope dark sky splits white lightning apart
and all poetry is black except for
the pink bits
Silver coins are rain-filled sheep hoofprints.
Clocks at 2 a.m tut-tut that you’re not asleep.
Mountain scenes are almost as realistic as paintings.
Surreal estate.
Every autumn leaves fall
in love.
Drums beat like a
heart.
In the Land of Trope dogs feel as sick as a man
wheels are as silly as eccentric children
and tacks never feel flat.
In the Land of Trope rainbows come blank
so you can colour them in yourself
from ultra-yellow to infra-green
In the Land of Trope pins are as neat as houses,
rabbits breed like the poor. A whip
is as smart as a sadomasochist
In the Land of Trope
money is mute and
humility talks.
In Tropeland
It’s better for you
And metaphor me
Sluggish returns
The dew dragged that giant slug from
the retaining wall again last night
Perhaps he was indecisive
on the up/ down question
Perhaps he has a one-second memory
and constructs his journeys randomly
Perhaps he was lost
Perhaps he just wanted to leave me
a silvered graph of yesterday’s
All Ordinaries Index
Poetry of the New Millenium
it’s all entropy
and things bleeding
into something else.
i’m tired of hearing
about your lover
and shards of things.
your journey holds
no interest.
your maw
is just a mouth.
shut it.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mal McKimmie’s first volume of poetry, Poetileptic, was published by Five Islands Press in 2005. Poems from this collection were developed into a feature program by ABC Radio National in 2006. The Brokenness Sonnets 2 was published in Take Five 08 (Shoestring Press, Nottingham, UK, 2009); other poems have appeared in Australian anthologies and journals. The following poems are from The Brokenness Sonnets & Other Poems, to be published by Five Islands Press in 2011. Mal lives and writes in Melbourne, Australia.
His and Hers Homunculi
When I knocked on your door & you opened it smiling
the beam in your eye
knocked me & my mote flying.
Assured you were a placebo & I was in the control group
I took part in this experiment.
It was all a lie — I have the symptoms to prove it.
In the morning I will tell her how a fat, buzzing, blowfly-yellow moon
flew into the car & beat its wings against the windscreen while
I drove through the night to her door.
This morning I opened my door to the conclusions of Loss:
bouquets of poems, a tideline of foam-white flowers.
I wonder when I will meet the lover who sends them to me from the future.
Be forever dead in Eurydice, Rilke advised.
Berryman thought Rilke needed to ‘get down into the arena and kick around’.
(Henry said Rilke was a jerk.)
Would I love you if Neruda did not write:
Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos
(I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees)?
Orgasm, a scopolamine moment—
briefly, as in a police line-up:
all the usual suspects.
‘You are not alone’ the Goddess sang, dancing around my grave.
And finally I heard the legend of Eurydice’s head.
In the dream, the fact that I was dead
enabled me to write the poem
that I gave to the beautiful woman.
In the language of the deaf the sign for beautiful is beautiful,
the sign for calm is calming,
& love & happy each require both a hand & a heart to be invoked.
Shy man, 45, GSOH, NS, SD, Tourette’s syndrome,
seeks beautiful woman 18-25, GSOH, NS, SD, Echolalia.
Her: Poetry is like sex, it goes round & round; that’s why I’ll hang on with you.
Him: So I’m a good poet, but a bad lover?
Curse the prosaic who reduce the aim
from loving to living, from O! to I. (Diminishing even punctuation.)
The fourth magus was a woman.
She turned from the Bethlehem star & gave
her gift for the child to her own children.
Only if I move this glass paperweight
will the snowflakes inside it fall soft as syllables
on her skin, her upturned face, her hair.
In the hospital-fever nightmare, her father was the attending doctor
handing her not the child but the placenta
& ordering that it be raised to adulthood.
The lonely man with his ear to a drinking glass against the apartment wall;
not to hear his neighbour’s words, just to know she’s there.
Her: Aieeeearrrgh!! %$#*&^@*&^%$#@!!
Him: We’re having a baby! We’re having a baby!
The world continues because women were once children.
The world is imperilled because men were once children.
You were a 5′ 6″ upturned hourglass; we were in the kitchen;
& all the women I had ever loved passed before me one by one
while I cooked a perfect egg.
from The Church of Doubt
(whoever has ears to hear should hear)
V.
I am telling you that you do not know Love.
You throw the word at this person, that:
—I Love him, I Love her—
You throw it even at the whole world, & at God.
But it is a ball that bounces back to you, the same
Colour, the same size:
Nothing has changed.
So you throw it again, & then again.
Do you think that when I say the word Love
It returns to me?
It travels through the hands of all because none can grasp it,
Travels through wood, metal, earth, through infinite spaces.
At the very end of a universe that has no end
There is a child who has been orphaned by religion:
Its only desire is to play,
Though play cannot be said to be a desire.
When I utter the word Love it travels
Over weeping distances to that child,
Becomes a ball in its hands
& there it remains.
VI.
If you ask me if I believe in God,
I shall say No.
If you ask me if I disbelieve,
I shall say No.
I have one foot on soil, on earth,
That is to say: in the tomb.
I have one foot in water, in ocean,
That it to say: in the womb.
Why should I want to live but not to die?
Why should I want to die but not to live?
Before birth, I was or I was not.
After death, I will be or I will not.
Between birth & death I AM.
The brain is of the body
& shall die with the body: There is no Mind.
What is not of the body or the brain—is Soul.
The brain is of the body
& shall die with the body: There is no Soul.
What is not of the body or the brain—is Mind.
Soul & Mind—One & The Same.
& One & The Same is also something else
Which is neither Soul nor Mind.
A word in a bowl; Bowl another word:
Soul fills Mind, Mind empties from Soul.
The Christian empties his Chalice; the Buddhist
Empties his begging bowl.
Arm in arm, Thirsty and Hungry go into the tavern
To eat meat, drink wine, & sing.
VIII.
For members of The Church of Doubt
The way forward at every crossroads
Shall be revealed by where, dizzy from turning, they fall.
& each time they fall they shall fall
At the feet, the jumbled bones
Of a corpse
& two bones shall point them in a new direction:
Wish Bone & Funny Bone.
& for a short time thereafter they shall know the way
& knowing it shall dance as a corpse dances
Just before it becomes a corpse:
As if dying of joy.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ali Jane Smith’s first poetry collection, Gala was published in 2006 as part of the Five Islands Press New Poets Program. Her work has appeared in journals such as Southerly, Cordite, and Famous Reporter. She has recorded readings for audio Cd and performed in schools, universities, pubs, cafes, shopping malls and festivals. She is the Director of the South Coast Writers Centre.
Poems as Dolly Parton: A real live Dolly
Up close you can see
the texture of my skin.
The smile that was always mine
the eyes full of thoughts
of you and the other people
I care for. Of the world
and what can be done.
If you take my hand it will be
the hand that you know.
The touch that you have grown
used to and never grown used to.
The voice most of all
shows the things that change
and never change
like a long, long love affair.
It’s easy to hear what’s been lost:
the range, the clarity, but
in my voice now you’ll hear
all the joyous moments
inspired thoughts, desolate
hours, true griefs, and loving gestures
you have known.
Poems as Dolly Parton: Only Dolly Parton album you’ll ever need
I know you love
the dirt-poor dreaming girl
who lets you forget
the hours and pains in
writing, singing, playing, looking pretty.
The show that lets you forget the business.
I know you like the stories.
You like my heartbroken women.
My happy singing women. My ruined
but still hopeful
lost and longing never despairing
picked up and dusted off
women who know the cold truth and carry it
alongside warm hopefulness.
You look at me as I
smile out at you from your tv
a photograph or the stage
when I sing and laugh and let you see
a glistening tear that doesn’t spill.
You want me to mend
your hurts and forgive.
To see the good in you, but
the pain and cruelty as well.
To know
and still love you.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Marlene Marburg is a PhD candidate at the Melbourne College of Divinity. Her research is focussed on the relationship of poetry and the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. Marlene is a poet, spiritual director and formator. She is married with adult children, and lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Moving Images
Wurrunjeri earth,
skin and muscle bulldozed
to raw and slippery flesh.
Deep rivers turned shallow
slush upside down
Water like wind
finds the empty places
It wants to whirl
The earth-shapers are stopping erosion;
moving piles of dirt from here to majestic there.
Progress demands intervention, they say.
They erect a good will sign,
Rehabilitation Project,
but many of us are old enough to know
the banks of the local creek
are little changed in thirty years.
By October, the stench settles.
Crystals on the banks twitch in the light.
Dust fog begins to rise.
Walkers inhale the disturbance,
coughing debris out and in
Oneness with the earth is closer
than we think
I don’t believe in an interventionist God
Nick Cave sings, and the wind is alive
to his song, and the water
knows to seek its own level
Whorls
The ammonite in my hands, gazes
from a mysterious, soul-breathing centre,
recognising we are kin in the cosmos, Jurassic heritage,
forming and transforming fossil and flesh, hardened
and polished like marble and slate, cool
spiral labyrinth, narrowing path to the holy of holies,
birthplace outgrown, time and again, the dark place
edging forward into the light. It is as if she struggles;
albino lashes languishing in her burial rock.
Wine stained strands float from her like mermaids’ hair.
Cavities are filled with coral crystals,
pearls from a stowaway rape.
The ammonite is clothed in delicate embroidery,
golden imprint of once green clusters flourishing on a sea bed;
We animate them in the theatre of imagining, mirror
the infinite mind giving shape to desire.
Returning the gaze, I bridge the vast gap of time,
explore her colour and shape as a once-lost sibling.
Ammonite sister and Abraham’s lost son
see the whorls in my fingers and the mirror of self.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Michele Leggott is a Professor of English at the University of Auckland and was the Inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate 2008-09. She has published seven books of poetry, including Milk & Honey (2005, 2006), Journey to Portugal (2007) and Mirabile Dictu (2009). She edited Robin Hyde’s long poem The Book of Nadath (1999) and Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde (2003). A major project since 2001 has been the development of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) at the University of Auckland. Michele was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) in the 2009 New Year Honours for services to poetry. See also www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/leggott/index.asp
te torea / the oystercatcher
trebling stage left
and how would you ever
pick them out on the rocks
until they move and orange sticks
poke and shrill at the kids who want
food and probably flying lessons
same old same old torea not in
Native Animals of New Zealand
but certainly one of the cards torn
from the jelly crystal packets each week
always three and often duplicates
what were we learning and why is it stuck
in the active grid this morning
looking at Motukorea their island and Motuihe
where a goose jumped out of a boat
on new year’s day and danced
for lettuce from a bucket oh he’s
too little to leave on the farm they said
and rowed back out to the yachts
bobbing off Von Luckner’s bay
dogs rode in the bows of kayaks
landing we supposed on other parts of
the island famous for its permeable approach
to security Pearl chasing down the Moa
out there in the sparkling waters of the gulf
and they got all the way to the Kermadecs
with their charts sextant and radio
and their pantomime imperial flag another story
outside the cordon of plastic ribbons
on the landward beach and a sign
DO NOT DISTURB THIS BIRD gazing
absently out to sea just above
the highwater mark a jelly card swap
an indigene without sound and this book
that comes into the house today
trebling calling catching itself
on the black terraces above the tide
Maungauika and the winter stars rising
over my northeastern shoulder
the answers
it looks impossible but really
it happened is happening the table top
bright red and the little chairs
each with a decal on its creamy enamel
the continuous tea party
that seems to be taking place whenever
we look whenever we ask
what was that where are those baths
that merry go round she rides
with one of us the plank and sawhorse
seesaw in the driveway the baby
stomping along in the sunhat
with her mother and the mountain behind
is that her on the path with presents
and why are his fingers bandaged
it is the moving that matters
the two of us and her walking to camera
at Pukeiti the waterwheel beating
along the cool ravine or the Rinso box
and one of us running and jumping
under the clothesline rocking the pram
one taking out the other with the business end
of a hobby horse silent howling
swimming and getting stagily into the car
the circus the fire engine a donkey ride
at Ngamotu Fishers’ bach Dees’ bach
Onaero Urenui Mokau ordinary things
and behind them the extraordinary grief
of watching the toddler on the lawn
fall into her father’s arms
tonight on the cold Wellington streets
I see them walk by coats no longer over
their arms but the ring from Stewart Dawson’s
glinting on her hand there and on mine
and on mine here extraordinary grief
and the answers we make
from distance which is no distance at all
te oru / the stingray
hot blue stars at the edge of the world
some like horses some like music
and one has a saxophone
we’ve got chalk words and lots of food
we’ve got the saxophone
blowing us out to the edge of the world
where the poems are
orcas arrive in the harbour
hunting stingray the researchers
who named them have tracked the pod
from the Kaipara and say it is unique
in taking on the rays maybe maybe not
the whales frolic all morning
and when an escaping stingray
soars on camera ray skips lunch
with orca an old story flaps into view
stingray in the boat crew jumping about
trying to gaff it the whacking tail pain
my father’s bandaged fingers
held up to the whirring camera his salute
to the fish to us and to her
hot blue stars at the edge of the world
cool blue bird under the wharf
a new sun climbs into the sky
on this side of the harbour
the tug Wainui and her barge Moehau
are bringing in sand from Pakiri
for the beach at Torpedo Bay
a stingray cruises about the shins
of the kaumatua blessing the sand
the foreshore and the seabed
are not quiet places who can say
what belongs to this green mountain
rearing out of the morning mist
hot blue stars flash of wings
under the wharf kingfisher bird of omen
tell us how the sun lights the new moon
how kites with sting tails float over Orakei
how an old story encircles the gleaming bay
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sue Lockwood’s poems have appeared in Island, Heat, Antipodes and 14 magazine. In 2003 and 2011 she was a runner-up in The Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, and in 2007 received a Literature Board grant from the Australia Council. She teaches creative writing in Melbourne and is a member of the writers’ group, Io.
Relocation
for Jennie
I find the bag of bulbs you left
and recall your instructions
to plant them this autumn.
A moon calendar shows
in green wedges
optimum phases,
each of them two,
two and a half days
in earth and water signs.
I’m not sure if bulbs are annual
or perennial, if first or second
quarter is preferable.
My one concern is to get them
into the ground
while the moon is waxing.
When you come home to visit
this winter, some will bloom –
jonquil, hyacinth, daffodil.
Landing now so near to the equator,
I wonder how the moon affects
the sun of your arrival.
world view
We are mad with vantage points yet nothing isolates itself
not a parcel under plain wrap, not even meaning.
Take boats in the harbor, masts kissing in the wind,
making and unmaking the sign of the cross.
Single out the brightest boat and no matter how
you fix the scope, nothing you do can make you unsee
the image that rocks in the cove of your eye.
You wish your dreams were Mandelbrots
but all you get is a Multiplex, a squalid night in neon-land
that shunts you into dawn.
Sick of this you slap on boots and trek inland.
The desert has no vantage point, no point of view at all.
You swear you see The Horsehead with a naked eye,
but then the vast silences always were available
when we lay us down.
You meet a man who sets darkness alight
when darkness is all he craves.
Art should serve to remind us, he says.
What’s the after-life, after all, but consciousness lit up
and sent ahead. Gilled creatures live next to him
on the desert floor.
The original ocean is this close, an amniotic fluid holding
the world together.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Desh Balasubramaniam was born in Sri Lanka and raised in both the war-torn Northern & Eastern provinces. At the age of thirteen, he fled to New Zealand with his family on a humanitarian asylum. During and upon conclusion of his university education, he spent considerable lengths of time travelling on shoestring budgets through a number of countries, often travelling by hitchhiking and working various jobs. His continuous journeys have further evoked his passion in expressive art and embarked him on the endless quest in search of identity. He is the founding director of
Ondru–Rising Movement of Arts & Literature (
www.ondru.org). His poetical work has appeared (or are soon to appear) in
Overland, Going Down Swinging, the Lumière Reader,
Mascara Literary Review, Blackmail Press, QLRS, the Typewriter, Trout, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and various other publications around the world
.
The Zoo
[i]
Fate of war—shunned
to a strange land
‘Paradise’ said the coloured brochures
Refuge for the abandoned,
honeymoon pictures
Left at unversed doors,
new mother, a father—fern trees
Skeletal abode (a two-room home)
Six ‘curry-munches’ crammed (given
names)
[ii]
Solitary walk to school (a week late)
Shortened route through Saint Francis church
And in crucifixion
Christ smiled at the new boy
Across the painted gravel (black followed
white)
Arrival with the street flash of amber
next to ghosts of raised collars
Vultures in little clusters
Barely spoke theirs (English)
Blank across the muddy face
Stared by blondes and the blue-eyed—
day at zoo
Fame spread to the knotted fence (all in a day)
I wilted
kowhai at midday
[iii]
Dragged along the sports field
Dye of cut grass,
the habitual stain
Face below the bolus clouds,
chewed away
Midrib’s aches—courtesy of nameless stouts
The weathered knees—size eleven shoes
Spat on the frameless face; a freckled senior
Chased daily by the two-legged hound
Living on the same street
with a black dog—his absent father
Brochures of paradise
pealing on the bedroom walls
[iv]
Mother battled (once a believer)
Father struggled (still does)
a liberated prisoner imprisoned
Sisters fared (better)
reversing eastwards over rising mound
Little brother (a chameleon who crossed the sea)
Instead I,
lived / died / lived (barely)
Worse than war! (my morning anthem)
Harnessed a glare
Soiled words
A borrowed face
Self—
no longer mine
Even my shirt; gift of a kind woman
[v]
Days turned the pages of solitary memoirs
Hamilton’s winter fell
over the departed mind
Firewood burned steady
Anger pruned the neighbourhood trees
And painted the empty walls
Fog mourned over the distant mile
Blowing mist; permanent numb
First two years
couldn’t afford the school jacket
Recollection: Days of school 1992
My Country, my Lover
My country,
goddess of adulate flame
Craved by men and yesterday’s youth,
her countless lovers
Slumber of scented hills
Bathed dress-less
in thrust of Indian Ocean
Architecture of her European conquerors
caught in curls of frangipani edges
Mahogany breasts in your palms,
secret passages of jackfruit honey
Her long neck
curved guava leaves
Drunk on her southerly,
I weep
My country, my lover
misled by her lovers
An orphan child
sold and bought in abandoned alleys
Without defined tongue,
speaks in smothered hollow of hush
Her stitched lips
Forced by men of buried hands,
imagery impaired
Bruises—poisonous firm holds
Jaffna lagoon bleeds—weeps
from within to the nude shores
never held
My country, my lover
like my first love,
died
—in ledge of my chest
Crumpled rag and I,
the creased servant
Thrown off the berm of eroding clutches
by robed sages growing devotion of odium
Her face in a veil
divorced from podium of speech
World chose instead,
comfort of venetian blinds
At wake, my shuteye
below the lowered knees
in cobras’ glare
my country, my lover
my hands are chained
Smoke of Zebu
Grandfather turned the land
with a pair of humped bulls
Too young to lead the plough
I watched,
spotted coat and short horns
Dung of bull; blood of his ancient breath
A boy I watched,
fall of red stained sweat
Father turned the land
with a mechanical bull
Red tractor that ploughed the path
Too young to turn the wheel
I watched,
treads of the beast; ascend of tipper’s axel
Smoke of zebu; blood of his young breath
A boy an inch taller
I watched,
rise of red filled sweat
Years in exile,
grandfather’s ashes turned
to a palmyra palm
Father withdrawn
beneath beat of an aged heart
In an anonymous land
no longer a boy,
rather an unshaved man
Held to bones of his flesh
—I watch
men of immortal minds
masked in pureness of white
Turn the land
—a liberator’s salute
Plough the loyal breeze
Erasing the fallen history
I watch,
ploughing through pages of a pen
As they turn my blood
filled with corpses
who once had a name
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anna Ryan-Punch is a Melbourne poet and reviewer. Her poetry has been published in Westerly, The Age, Quadrant, Island, Overland, Verandah and Wet Ink.
Archaeology
With a fingernail
I carved a dry gourd.
Rattling my history
like a bag of tears,
I poured curling puddles
into dusty earth.
I poked their painful edges
broken crusts of memory.
With a toe, extended,
I scraped out a cactus.
Scoring my passions,
multiple as cabbage moths,
millipedes, crickets and
other unwanted plural creatures.
With a calloused thumb,
I decided they were not
objects of beauty or use.
I crushed their stink bodies,
left them to dry
into brittle filings, and
did not stay to see them
blow away in soft flight.
January
Gales increasing on hard rubbish night.
Brown Christmas trees
blow up the road, up the footpath
festive tumbleweeds.
Their evergreen didn’t last long this year
barely curled out 12 days
before they were dragged to the roadside.
Brittle needles crisp in smoky heat.
The television calls to resolution-makers:
dieters, quitters and exercisers.
New sneakers stink with good intentions
but newsreaders warn against exercising outdoors.
This is small news for homes in the suburbs
where all flames are out of sight.
Parched clay cracks around foundations
jagged gaps in the bathroom wall reopen.
Dead Christmas trees drift back downhill.
We can look at the sun without squinting
but hardly notice the smoke.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sridala Swami’s poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Drunken Boat, DesiLit, and Wasafiri; and in anthologies including The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (ed. Jeet Thayil, UK: Bloodaxe, 2008); Not A Muse Anthology (ed. Katie Rogers and Viki Holmes, Hong Kong: Haven Books, 2009) and in First Proof: 4 (India: Penguin Books, 2009). Swami’s first collection of poems, A Reluctant Survivor (India: Sahitya Akademi, 2007, rp 2008), was short-listed for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award in 2008. Swami’s second solo exhibition of photographs, Posting the Light: Dispatches from Hamburg, opened at Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad, in November 2009.
Chromatography
Solvent
Give sleep a chance and know while you do
that very little separates it from death. Rent
your language by the night. Pay your dues:
Filter
plant your dreams and watch them grow. Consent
to their eventual departure and separate view
of you from where they stand. Discard resentment:
Diffusions
wear your vocabulary like a badge. Few
dreams can survive their naming. Fragments
of your days dissolve and separate into
Separations
impossibilities. Try not to prevent
whatever happens. What happens is, you
will find, your days and nights are never congruent.
Of Clairvoyance
Squelch is not a word heard
under water. Elephants
sink and suck their legs out
of the mud their bellies arches
and beyond, a new world:
green-grey, tenebrous
weeds float like visions
behind the eyes of drowned
bodies or like harbingers of
lost sight.
The ground beneath their feet
not yours.
Breathe, breathe
beyond the last breath.
Tumble into the amphibious.
Clear and buoyant is the sky:
the elephants know this with one
half of their bodies.
With the other they see through mud
and see it for what it is.
All visions begin upturned and colloidal.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Jo Langdon lives in Geelong and is currently completing a PhD (creative thesis plus exegesis) in magical realism at Deakin University. She writes poetry and fiction, and was shortlisted for the 2010 Whitmore Press poetry prize.
Garlic
I’m reminded of a time my mother
chased garlic down my throat with
spoonfuls of jam & honey,
ousting a broken fever, her face
stitched tight with worry
over my penicillin allergy.
My Dorothy shoes kicked softly
against the polished doors
of the kitchen cupboard.
She’d sat my doll body on the bench
hours before, crimping my yellow hair
for the party we left early.
This morning, she relates the details of a dream
in which I fall pregnant with six babies,
my stomach filling out like the moon.
As a child I complained she never wore
her wedding dress or rings. It took uncounted
years to see how she wears her love.
I accepted it from the spoon, counting
cloves that glowed like white-eyed stars
as she wore worry on her wrists,
a bracelet of lines, tense as a watch.
Night story
The is day still with winter,
the water brown & duckless.
Before showing stars
the sky turns
blue as the pulse
hidden in your wrist.
You drive me home &
the lit vein of highway
streams with cars like columns
of iridescent ants.
The city fills the windscreen,
moves like an aquarium.
Lights like neon fish & somewhere
a little plastic castle.
I’ll think of how,
sometimes
you wear your heart on your face
like a child.
Tonight your reflection fills the windows,
holograms the swimming traffic.
We assign an easy currency
for thoughts.
You ask for mine &
the ones I’ll give you are,
stars curled around Earth
in a seashell spiral of galaxy;
a little red planet
floating in my eye,
& a pond I want to fill
with coat hanger swans.
Walking to the Cinema, the Weekend it Rained
I watch the rain curl
your hair as we spill into
the black river road.
Street lamps & taillights
reflect & shimmer like flares
or tropical fish.
In the foyer we
lose beads of water to the
salted star carpet.
A constellation
beneath our feet: popcorn &
yellow ticket stubs.
We communicate
wordlessly; sideways gestures
in the cinema.
Pictures on the screen
fall on our skin, colour us
as we crunch candy.