April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Aidan Coleman teaches English at Cedar College in Adelaide. He is currently completing his second book of poems with the assistance of an Australia Council New Work Grant.
Astrocytoma
like the worst thing you ever did at school
the news comes steep and ashen
brisk mind to hurt mind
face to broken face
the pea
uncancelled by forty mattresses
clicks the past into place
leaves the future (whatever that was)…
Void
It was one of those restaurants where fish with heads like buses
were bumping against the glass.
I found myself stalled on annihilation;
of things going on despite me, of you alone.
Amongst the talk and laughter of others,
I stared and stared, and couldn’t blink.
Post-op
The head I wake in is airy and painful.
There’s still work going on in there.
Last night, a circle of numbers
and hammers,
forever
slanting away.
I clutched my bowl and sat it out;
thought about another year.
This morning: birds and fair-weather light;
a calm I can’t meet
with my eye.
Meat, sick, disinfectant on/off through the air.
In the next room people are talking about me.
They’re talking inside of my head.
Steroids Psalm
I am fearfully and wonderfully made
The delicate thread of each breath become rope
At night I glow with a Holy insomnia
In the ripe air I taste your promise
So many plots and schemes
So many plots and schemes
Now back from the dead
I have to tell you these things
I have to tell you all of these things
The walls of my room are effervescent
Shakespeare heads and butterflies
I walk through doors and mirrors and walls
Because so much is tied to earth
So much is tied to the earth
I am Henry V on the eve of battle
The guy who is in on the prison break-out
I’m Francis, Churchill, Robin Williams
People stare unconvinced
and I tell them…
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Tricia Dearborn is an award-winning Sydney poet and short-story writer whose work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies in Australia, India, the UK, the US and online. Her first collection was Frankenstein’s Bathtub (2001). She was joint winner of the 2008 Poets Union Poetry Prize.
Fig
I’m stunned by your dimensions
and your presence—
no less impressive than if a brachiosaurus
stood in the park before me.
As I walk around you, gazing up,
your branches weave patterns
that dissolve and form before my eyes.
There are wrinkles at the bends
of your giant limbs, the tip of you
sixty feet above the ground, your lowest
branches curving gently down
to my chest height.
I breathe on a leaf and wipe the city grime from it
with my palm, startled to discover
its faint scent of milk.
Mapping the Cactus
I used to worry when you wilted,
dipping your spiky head
to the edge of the bowl
until (the laboratory years
stirring within me)
I charted your movements
over months, and saw you
in time-lapse
rise and swing and fall
like tides. Whether you followed
sun or moon
or shifting magnetic pole
I still don’t know
unable to decipher
your slow-motion semaphore.
But clearly you didn’t droop
with thirst—bowed
to a power greater than
my small green watering can.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jennifer Compton lives in Melbourne and is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. Her book of poetry – Barefoot – was published by Picaro Press in 2010 and her unpublished ms – This City – won the Kathleen Grattan Award and will be published by Otago University Press in July. Her stage play – The Third Age – has been short listed for the Adam New Zealand Play Award and she is hopeful that it will eventually be produced.
How to Cast Off
I poised the needles to do the final thing
you can do for a shawl (before the fringe)
and forgot, forgot how to cast off.
My hands blanked out how to do it and
I have done it a hundred hundred times
I got a fright.
I walked around the house for a bit
but it didn’t come back. I sat.
Learning how not to know something.
I still knew what a selvedge looks like.
And I still knew wool.
I put two and two together.
And worked it out.
Yes, it was late. I was tired. But
casting off had slipped away from me.
Lost Property
Somewhere in the city
I lost the knitting
the sentimental wool
I had unpicked to reknit.
The colour scheme was alarming
but that was what my mother chose
when she was still capable of crochet
so I held my peace and flew her colours.
I had been warned of an imminent loss
the knowledge of loss had thrummed by
so I kept checking I had everything
one hand delving in my shoulderbag.
And more than the knitting is the pillowcase
made by my husband’s mother, now deceased,
she had run it up from a summery cotton frock
with two ties at the top to keep the knitting safe.
My hands know the scarf in progress intimately
I was working away at the royal blue stripe
plain and plain and plain and plain again and turn
the yarn between my fingers running like smoke.
As I rose to leave my train at Upwey Station
a thud of portent hit me – something missing –
my soft bundle pierced by two sharp needles.
And my hands, now, disconsolate as ghosts.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Margaret Bradstock has five published books of poetry. The most recent are The Pomelo Tree (which won the Wesley Michel Wright Prize), Coast (2005) and How Like the Past (2009). Other prizes include Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson awards. She was Honorary Visiting Fellow at UNSW from 2000-2010, Asialink writer-in-residence at Peking University in 2003 and co-editor of Five Bells for the Poets Union from 2001-2010. Margaret has edited 11 books of poetry and prose since 1983, including Antipodes, the first anthology of Aboriginal and white responses to “settlement” (forthcoming, Phoenix, 2011). Margaret reads with the performance groups Harbour City Poets and DiVerse, and will be reading at the 2011 Sydney Writers’ Festival.
The Malley tree
‘without Ern Malley there wouldn’t have been any Ned Kelly
– Sidney Nolan
Malley as bushranger, perhaps,
in quilted armour
hijacking poetry,
hoaxing a green landscape.
Verb like bird perches
in the heart of a tree,
the sole Arabian tree,
and lovers stroke the ecstasy
of words
trembling into metaphors
before the shadowed rocks.
Nouns like windmills
flagellate the dusk,
water-tanks are armoured
bushrangers storming the horizon,
Darth Vader breathers,
their blacked-out faces
poets, doomed dreamers, fabrications.
Poet without words
“It is incompleteness that haunts us.”
– Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire.
Lyric is not a category
but a dimension of pain,
a dog barking to the high notes.
Garbage trucks awake you
from pre-dawn nightmare,
long-ago music of garbage-tin lids
mutated through plastic. Three bins,
no music, choose your week carefully,
your cycle of fragmentation.
You dream tidal waves,
the seas control you
emptying one into another.
Working to balance the board, the words,
you end up arse-over.
Same wave, same water,
the wind a perfect north.
Poetry is out there,
news from another front
leaking across the divide,
weeping under doorways,
glaciers once grinding
their way into the valleys.
On the bald hillside,
stripped vertebrae of a Halifax bomber
like an ark or ribbed galleon,
the bodies interred further down
under a cairn of stones,
we trade our lives.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Nicholas YB Wong is the winner of Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition and a nominee for Best of the Net 2010 and Best of Web 2011 Anthology. His poetry is forthcoming in Assaracus: Journal of Gay Poetry, Prime Number Magazine, San Pedro River Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Third Wednesday and the Sentinel Champion Series. He is currently an MFA Candidate at the City University of Hong Kong. Visit him at http://nicholasybwong.weebly.com
Walk With Words
“I never use despair, since it isn’t really mine, only given to me for safekeeping.”
Wislawa Szymborska
Life at 3 A.M. is an elephant
urging me to make choices –
The night chill challenges my social life.
It asks why I commit myself to words
and turn away from humans,
who often talk too much.
Temperature has no speech – it never knows
the setbacks of language.
I have married words. Every night,
I bang on them, wearing my blood red matador’s cape,
working towards perfect orgasms.
Tonight, I am not writing. I walk
in the bituminous street, feeling bitter
after seeing my friends whose life
is made of unpronounceable stock codes.
My feet go numb; my existence, a walnut wafer,
brittle, belittled.
I search in the sky for the mercurial moon –
Not there.
I look back and ask the street how far I will walk
alone
Mark Twain as an Anti-Anti Smoker
Effective January 1, 2007, the vast majority of indoor areas of workplaces and public places, such as restaurants, offices, schools, hospitals, markets, karaokes and bars which are frequented by people of different ages are required to ban smoking.
Hong Kong Smoking (Public Health) Ordinance, cap. 371.
Mark Twain, a heavy smoker
(and literary
figure) himself,
is going to rule our city. And he,
with his humor and flare,
has decided to set free all
underground smokers.
In his inaugural ceremony, he strides
onto the stage,
his forefinger curling
his moustache
when he speaks:
“I won’t bow my head and
confess like a child. I give you all freedom
in an adult style.
To cease smoking is
the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know
because I’ve done it
a thousand times.”
You, who exterminated
that thing
in the city,
must be dismayed
to know the law
is dead.
That law, an infant, which cries no more,
barely knows how to toddle.
That thing –
as you insist calling it –
has a white sinewy-lean body,
a mini-chimney,
paper-smooth, smell of ancient culture. That thing isn’t wood, but it sometimes crackles when lit
in absolute silence.
I’m warning you! That thing is returning
at full speed. And this time,
you’ll say no euphemism. You’ll speak
of its real name
as you do when you name
Jesus, Kwan Yin and the one
rolling over you naked.
During those bleak days, we felt like
fugitives
in the name of the hoary
addictive.
We hid in the darkest corner
in universities, diners,
at rooftops, anywhere so long as
they were invisible on maps,
puff
ing
and breath
ing
at the same time, degraded like dogs which ransacked for food in trash.
Soon we will hang a Mark Twain
flag outside our windows.
His face
soars in proud smoky air,
when we fondle with
that thing
legitimately inside. Soon we will smoke in buses, in churches, in malls, in the City Hall, in museums, in the Coliseum.
You then will die gradually
of second- and third-hand
smoke, and we,
devoted chain smokers,
will die faster. Don’t worry.
Don’t dissuade –
we are all prepared. Everything dies
on a predetermined date,
including the law
you once embraced.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ashley Capes teaches Media and English in Victoria. His first collection of poetry, pollen and storm, was published with the assistance of Small Change Press in 2008, and his second collection Stepping Over Seasons was released by Interactive Press in 2009. A haiku chapbook Orion Tips the Saucepan was released by Picaro Press in 2010. Recently his work has been awarded a commendation in the Rosemary Dobson Poetry Prize and in 2009 he won the Ipswich Open Poetry Award with the poem ‘shell.’
old green paint
beneath the bridge
where the busker and his flute
compete with
urine and the yarra,
a school girl drops a coin
into his case
and her friends giggle
down from the bridge
boats are lined up
like water-proofed hawkers,
no better at boasting than
old green paint
on the staircase,
or the predictable swish
of a waitress alfresco
and across the bridge
flinders street station
lies sun-bathing,
fake-tan yellow fading
and the rhythmic
click of the train
becomes the wrist-watch
of a patterned vein.
by the curve
a teacup sits on the sink
shoe-brown
inside, imagined marks
where you held it,
not by the handle
but by the curve, to fit a palm
aching from winter
and the rest of the kitchen
looks a little strained –
ant-killers nest against
the foggy window and
cutlery stands like a palisade
but somehow your teacup
shrugs off pain
with a sweeping shadow
cast low over the dish-rag,
to me it looks like you might
return at any minute.
broom-bristle-dance
beneath sunburnt roof tiles
I try to keep up appearances
broom bristles
dancing on concrete
and scattering leaves
like brown paper bags with legs
my neighbour is doing the same
only he’s hiding an alien family
in the caravan out back too,
I’m sure of it
that, and a wig beneath his fisherman’s
cap, hedge trimmers
and a polite face like a button
or a cuff-link
that night a strange glow
comes from next door, maybe he’s moving them
though it could be just the moon, blazing
away, looking over the shed
in a strangely possessive manner
as if the whole town
were his very own chessboard,
driveways and roads
‘L’ shapes for his knights.
April 20, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Andy Kissane lives in Sydney and writes poetry and fiction. He has published three collections of poetry. Out to Lunch (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009) is shortlisted in the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His first novel, Under the Same Sun (Sceptre, 2000) was shortlisted for the Vision Australia Audio Book of the Year. Poetry prizes include the Red Earth Poetry Award, the Sydney Writers’ Festival Poetry Olympics, the John Shaw Neilson Award, the inaugural Publisher’s Cup Cricket Poetry Award and the BTG-Blue Dog Poetry Reviewing prize. He has taught Creative Writing at four universities, most recently UNSW, (2007-2009). He is currently the recipient of a New Work grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council and is working on a book of short stories and a fourth collection of poetry.
Seeing you again
Driving to your place, I remember
how you said you wanted to carry my hands
around inside your bra. You won’t say that today.
You are married and it’s years since that
dinner dance, foxtrotting under the tablecloth,
my cock wet before I’d eaten the entree.
You said you adored men in dinner suits
and I was eager to strip, loosening
the onyx studs from my ruffle slowly
and carefully, as if they were amulets
with enough power to peel back
my shirt and open up my skin.
You meet me in the driveway, comfortable
in tracksuit and windcheater. Your hair
is not quite the way I remember it.
We don’t have much time alone.
Your husband’s making coffee
in the kitchen as words ripen
on the roof of my mouth like blackberries:
fat icicles ready to fall. My cup wobbles
on its saucer as I recall the last camping trip,
our lilos pushed together, your sleeping bag
zipped into mine, the guttural snores
of lion seals floating up from the beach.
I think of what might have been, waking
to a thousand, thousand dawns, children,
the closeness where you don’t need to speak.
Instead, there’s this afternoon tea, polite
conversation, the way I look at you and wish
I could live more than one life.
Wood becoming Rock
Walking down the steep path to the backyard,
I hold the stump splitter like a baby.
I’m an occasional woodchopper, intent
on clearing the logs left by the previous owners
—an eyesore, abandoned.
One huge tree, an angophora, fell down
of its own accord, unable to get enough purchase
in the rocky hillside, harming neither limb nor property.
I’ve already chopped and moved a mountain
of wood, gradually, like a hot-rodder
restoring a classic car.
But what’s left now is the hard stuff,
wood well on its way to petrification—
green-tinged, adamantine, too heavy
for one man to lift. I swing the axe
up towards the hidden sun and the other bright stars,
then bring it down onto the dumb block.
I make no impression on the weathered wood.
Relentlessly, I search for a fissure in the log,
a crack the width of a hair that I can wedge open.
The longer the search, the greater my enlightenment.
If only I could borrow the Marabunta,
those ferocious army ants from the film,
The Naked Jungle, let them feast on the wood,
then stop right there. But as I remember it,
they don’t stop, eating everything in their path.
I swing and swing until I am a riot of noise, a mob,
a serial woodchopper who won’t cease until he’s felled
the forest. I hack until my shirt sticks to my back.
My shoulders ache, my arms have emigrated,
and I am all axe,
as Gimli is axe to Legolas’s bow.
I can’t work, it seems, without making
some connection to popular culture,
though this is not work, this hefting
is not my bread and butter. Sparks flash
blue and yellow at the moment of impact
and I understand how my ancestors struggled
to make fire. I’m tired, wet, almost done
for the day, but over there,
against the fence lies another
and it will lie there until I come for it—
ageless, slowly rotting, obdurate and silent.
I wield my iron-age tool until the wood wails and shrieks
and when I finally cleave through the stump,
the sound of it splitting fills the cave
of my head with the last rays of sunlight.
April 20, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anis Shivani’s poems appear in Threepenny Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Harvard Review, Poetry Northwest, Fiddlehead, Meanjin, Washington Square, Verse, Stand, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. A debut book of criticism, Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies, will appear in July 2011, and a second collection of short fiction, The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, will appear later in 2011.
The Death of Li Po
Li Yang-ping, preserve my poems. The emperors,
on whose behalf I wandered, are jealous like wives.
To travel a thousand rivers upstream or down, in a
moon’s half cycle, is only to deliver one’s true debts.
In Ch’ang-an, the winehouses gave me a special name
I both abhorred and loved at the same time:
Banished Immortal, meaning he who imagines life
as a continuation of the mountain’s other side.
Long ago, in the gibbons’ shrieks I heard in K’uei-chou,
a passage of sorts was enacted. I lost my strangeness.
Now, on this river that beckons to the civilization
still remnant in the shrunken land, land of half-sight,
I embrace the moon, its diffuse wavy pattern, its
silken bodice, its talkative-silent recital – a poem
inherited among the thousands I most love,
to live through the tough interrogation ahead.
Li Yang-ping, preserve my poems. If I drown,
in the brown depths the poet’s only disguise flutters.
To Orhan Pamuk
You have the hüzün, the melancholy
of undying empires piled on each other,
the intrigue of the word-defying holy,
the torture-games of brother by brother.
You strand the Bosphorus on feet of clay,
an Istanbullu fifty years on the same street,
seeing the Golden Horn as on the first day,
nodding to the names behind the retreat.
We, loud exiles and immigrants, toss-offs
and runaways, our good parents’ heartbreak,
dig for first and last names in the old troughs,
defend to the death our identifying stake.
Your loneliness is spared the daily death.
We, the free, delineate each new breath.
Dear Paul Muldoon
Barricade the America behind the Princeton
oaks, behind the New Yorker’s gates, in a-technical
language of your aged-youth, steeped in the tragedy of
loaves and laughing sciences and lush O’Casey;
barricade it from the striptease of hidden views
familiar from publishing’s megacelebrities touring
the country in birdcages lined with squawk;
barricade America’s broken highways and silenced
cancer wars with ribbons of your faltering
precious dialogue with Heaney and his forefathers
and theirs, buried deep in the potato fields from
whence no man emigrates sans soul in a coffin box;
barricade America whose gift to herself is platitude,
toward blue Eden, soaked with irony,
a flatulent brig staggering onward to foggy coasts
borrowed from other continents, land masses
whose shape resembles fractured skulls.
April 20, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Judith Beveridge is the author of four award-winning books of poetry. Her most recent collection is Storm and Honey published in 2009 and it was awarded the Grace Levin Prize in 2010. She teaches poetry writing at the University of Sydney and is the poetry editor of Meanjin. In 2005 she was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature.
Vulture’s Peak
From Devadatta’s poems
Whenever I come here, I don’t pay much attention
to the lammergeier circling from the peaks overhead,
but I keep an eye out for falling tortoises, elephant’s ribs,
jackal’s jawbones. I stay on the level where the farm
women scythe and rick, scythe and rick, or pick
tithes of yellow samphire near the stones. I don’t
climb to the summit to take in the view of the valley
and the fertile plains; or as the Buddha suggests,
spend time alone in one of the small, damp caves
meditating on suffering and its root causes in desire.
I stay at the base near the talus and inhale the heady
perfume of the lavender and vetch. I watch the farm
women bend and sweat in the sinking madder sun
before they drink and rest near the ponds. I let desire
have its ground. I take my chances under falling bones.
Penance
from Devadatta’s poems
Some nights, when all I do is scheme
to give Siddhattha schism, infighting, dissonance,
when I think of what a pleasure it will be
to give him “dissentry” – then I plan some days
of penance: to lie among wood ticks, crickets,
the breaching heads of worms and leeches,
to let the gall borers gnaw my toes;
to offer the soft flanges around the tops
of my ears to the water fleas and wasps.
I’ll let mosquitos gather and fly off pot-bellied
with my blood. I wont apply saliva
or mud, use any unguents, no paste of cloves
and honey, and though the moon will mock me
like a pointed instrument, like a round
and cooling poultice, I wont give comfort
to any part of my body, but cover myself
with nettles, itch-weed, with crow and turkey feathers,
with hen-house refuse so that mites, too,
can leave me scaled and scabbed.
I wont climb away from my skin
even if worms burrow, or web-spinning flies
hang threads in my beard and make slime.
Though my fingernails will have grown so long,
I’ll not scratch a single bite, or strike any insect
down, but I’ll palp them like strange antennae.
Then I’ll lie on the forest floor among the burrows
of roaches and long-horned stag beetles,
and the sound closest to my ears will be the sound
of army ants devouring everything to pieces.
April 19, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
José Kozer, born in Havana, Cuba, 1940, has lived in the USA since 1960, taught Spanish literature at Queens College from 1965 to 1997, and is now living in Hallandale, Florida. Kozer is the author of 56 books of poetry and his work has been partially translated into several languages as well as published in many journals and anthologies.
DIVERTIMENTO (MA NON TROPPO)
La
madre
le
gritaba,
y
él, pato que era, metía la cabeza bajo un ala,
la oía cacarear, a grito
pelado desde lo alto
denostaba excoriando
excoriándolo chillaba
madre al fin que era
y con qué fin quién
lo sabrá, a voz en
cuello hendía y
hurgaba úvula
amígdalas cuerdas
vocales donde, pato
que era, el chico
supuraba, a final
de cuentas era su
madre, ¿no estaba
en su derecho? Él
se arrebujaba más
a fondo bajo el ala,
la madre le volaba
la cabeza, el chico
veía serafines,
húsares, calendas
griegas, oía vibrar
las trompas del
Señor, se santiguaba
a la manera de los
ortodoxos rusos, la
señal de la cruz a
la altura de los labios:
a qué le chillan, por
qué la madre
despotrica, esa
madre vulnerando
sus costumbres que
desde niño, ¿o no
se ha dado cuenta?
después de todo él
es él, a quién molesta
o hace daño, pero por
Dios, que baje Dios y
lo vea, se lo diga a la
madre, si es todo un
muchachón de
nótese calidad
elevada, ved su
gran amor, en
efecto, por la
Humanidad: qué
más pedir, pedirle,
y la vieja dejar de
espetarle groserías,
denuestos, gritarle
tales verracadas,
lo enciende oírla
hurgar y hurgar ahí
do el pecado se
pone más de
manifiesto ah igual
que en el Romance
del Rey Rodrigo, lo
leyeron en clase,
con qué emoción
lo leyó de pie
ante la clase, lo
aplaudieron: algunos
rieron: las chicas casi
lloran: y el amigo de
su amigo le dio un
abrazo a oscuras
que por poco lo
hace mixto lo
apachurra se le iba
la vida cuánta emoción:
y mete la cabeza aún
más bajo el ala, no la
oye chillar sus burradas,
se besan se abrasan
son Uno (fundidos) en
santo y casto Amor
que todo lo vence,
coño, sal de ahí que
te conozco bijirita,
basta ya de tus, a
quién te crees que
engañas: tú, que
nunca podrás
concebir, anda,
ve y hazme abuela,
ve, ven ya palomo
de mamá, cosona
mía, curruca, alba de
alas, buche, cloaca, mi
aguilucho sin destino
conocido, gallina
tragona (por detrás)
cresta (mamá, no seas
vulgar) vaya mota que
gastas hijo mío, ve y
mírate en el espejo,
el ridículo que haces:
sal, ven, besa y
quiéreme, quiéreme
mucho, como si fuera
esta noche y bla bla
bla la última vez,
¿ves?
cómo
y
cuánto
la
vieja,
grita,
te
idolatra.
DIVERTIMENTO (MA NON TROPPO)
His
mother
screamed
at him,
and
he, silly goose, ducked his head under a wing,
listening to her cluck, screaming
from on high
reviling lashing
lashing out at him screeching
after all she was his mother
to what end who
will ever know, her voice
on high rented the air and
searched uvula
tonsils vocal
chords where, gay goose
that he was, the boy
oozed, after
all she was his
mother, wasn’t it
her right? He
wrapped himself more
thoroughly under his own wing,
his mother blew
his brain, the boy
saw seraphim,
hussars, a month of
Sundays passed by, he heard
the horns of the Lord
vibrate, crossed himself
as the
Russian Orthodox do, the
sign of the cross
at the height of the lips:
why all the screeching at him, why
does his mother
carry on, his own
mother violating
his habits of a
lifetime, or doesn’t
she realize?
after all he is
what he is, whom does he bother
or hurt, for heaven’s
sake, let God Himself come down
and witness it, tell his
mother, he’s a big
old boy of
obviously outstanding
quality, behold his
great love, truly,
for
Humanity: why
ask for anything else, ask him for more,
and his old lady to stop
spitting rude words at him,
insults, screaming
such nonsense,
it stirs him to hear her
digging and digging right there
whence the sin resides
most
apparent oh just
as in the Ballad
of King Roderick, it
was read in class,
with such feeling
he read it standing
before the class, they
applauded him: some
laughed: the girls almost
cried: and his friend’s
friend gave him such an embrace
in the dark
that almost
neutered him squashing his
life away with such
tremendous feeling:
he ducks his head even
more under his own wing, doesn’t
hear her asinine screeches,
they kiss and burn
they are One (fused together) in
holy and chaste Love
which overcometh all,
shit, stop pretending
my little bird,
stop your, who
do you think
you’re fooling: you who will
never be able
to conceive, go ahead,
go ahead and make me a grandma,
go ahead, come here mama’s
big dove, love of my
life, white-throated honey, feathered
wings, belly, cloaca, my
good-for-nothing
eaglet, greedy
hen (aft)
cock comb (mother please, don’t be
crass) what a great hairdo
sonny boy, go check yourself
out in the mirror,
how ridiculous:
come on, come here, kiss and
love me, love me a lot
as the song goes,
tonight and blah, blah,
blah for the last time,
do you see?
how
and
how much
your
old lady,
screaming,
worships
you.
Born in Cuba and educated there and in the U.S., after a long career in the teaching profession, Dr. Jorge Yviricu is now Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages at California State University, Bakersfield. He has published criticism on many Latin American novelists and poets as well as his own poetry and short stories. His previous translations include Spanish versions of poems by Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Hacker.