January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ian Irvine (also writing as Ian Hobson) is an Australian-based poet, writer and academic. His work has featured in many publications, both in Australian and overseas, and his poetry has appeared in two national anthologies. He is the author of three books and currently coordinates the Writing and Editing program at BRIT, Bendigo. He has also taught social theory and history at La Trobe University (Bendigo) and in 1999 was awarded his PhD for work on chronic ennui in European literature, philosophy and psychology. He lives with his partner, Sue, and their children on a bush block not far from Bendigo. His poem “If You Eat a Pomegranate” is dedicated to our feature poet Thanh Thao.
Soft Breeze of a Temporal Implosion
After the bus trip:
light-green peaks, rice
plateaus and quiet water
buffalo.
As good a place as any
to reconstruct the countries
of the past.
And there is nothing generalist
about the H’mong children
dancing the narrow street below,
or
the German tourists, pleasantly
drunk on the hotel’s upper
floor.
We’re sandwiched,
as always,
between the present
and the impalpability of memory –
I muse:
Indonesia 1994:
3,300 rupee to the dollar.
Vietnam 2007:
16,000 dong to the dollar.
This impulse to quantify comforts
the illusion of time
as something solid.
Like the Dao coin I wear as
a necklace, the seller said ‘1820, Sir.’
Its shape is strange, like
a man without arms, ‘an ancient
unit of exchange’ before the
coming of the French.
The guide whispered:
‘A fake.’ But the shape
and the smooth-rust brown surface,
are all that matter to me
at four dollars US.
And the practicalities of spirit –
those women at the pagoda.
At the entrance –
dark rocks and lush
miniature trees.
Inside –
incense-drenched fruit,
a giant cauldron-urn, and
just above the entrance –
multicoloured lanterns.
They loaded us up with free fruit
and hugged our children.
Such calmness
like the men in the white-domed mosques of Java –
bowing, praying whilst
out on the street,
similar densities of
do-it-yourself technology.
I was thirty then, musical, reciprocating
love – and we’re still together
walking the town of Sapa,
negotiating maps, as always
will to will,
appreciating the flower-banked
lake, exchanging gifts, raving
about the view, caressing
and enjoying the local food.
A pleasant time-warp, like a lost map
to an old intensity of being
Making love in a grass hut in
central Sumatra – her soft
tanned skin, our
mutual freedom.
And then the day with icing:
as if outside time, and
abnegating the difficulties
of culture shock,
our daughter
her first poem.
Hospital Cave and the Superpower
The old man is 76 years old
still wears the khaki hat and shirt
of the North Vietnamese army.
He lives less than a kilometre
from the place that defined
his life. He’s
fit and stout and funny not at all
like the devil promised us by LBJ. Carries a
flashlight and knows
every inch of this
underground labyrinth.
During the war hundreds of people –
soldiers, surgeons and farmers –
took shelter in this cave. These days
it’s deserted, just damp concrete
floors and walls beneath
an eroded lime-rock ceiling.
When the Americans bombed and
bombed the island the locals
would crowd in here:
what
did it feel like
waiting for the superpower?
He shows us the ‘reception’
the doctors’ sleeping quarters
the medical rooms proper to the left and
right of a long corridor, until we arrive
at the ‘lunch-room’. Here
he drops his flashlight, introduces
himself again in Vietnamese
and asks (commands) us to sing
“Vietnam-Ho Chi Minh”
“Vietnam-Ho Chi Minh”
He lets me record the performance
and suddenly
all the war before me, cold chills.
Tonnes and tonnes of bombs
Agent Orange, vast networks of tunnels
in the South, the Tet Offensive, the
fall of Saigon.
I’ve met some Aussie Vets
seen them join the Anzac day throng
still tentative-as young boys
they met their reality match
in quiet Vietnamese determined to
end colonialism once and for all.
Here, just 70 miles from the Chinese border,
I begin to understand.
The digital video is blurry in the cave
(all sorts of shadows)
as the tourists sing and clap (nervously) the echoes
are immense, like 1969, like 200 people
singing, like injured farmers, like jets
prowling the paradise skies – and before us
this old soldier
like a phantom,
38 years among ghosts.
If You Eat a Pomegranate
For Thanh Thao
If, after eating a pomegranate underground,
you manage to return to the surface
it is said that you will have acquired
the ability to see ghosts.
Perhaps I’ve consumed such a fruit
by accident. Things have been strange
for over a month now – began with my
memories of that sunrise crossing
the DMZ:
The sun coming up
and all those people on the roads
in the rice paddies, or hanging around
the gravestones or houses.
I’m no longer certain who was alive
and who was dead. As though
another layer of memory-repressed
at the time – has invaded
the ‘realism’ of what I
thought I remembered.
The problem: supposing all memory
collapses like this? What
will stop this tendency invading my
day time consciousness?
And the train,
as I recall it now, moving slowly,
far too slowly
along the tracks,
as though the dead
had engineered some kind of
deceleration – so I could see them,
so I could begin to hear them speak.
Though for the moment
the protection of glass
remains.
Who knows where this is headed.
It is said that a spell three times spoken –
especially if by the caster, the
recipient, and an unbiased intermediary –
is certain to work.
Leaning forward across the table
he asked me something in Vietnamese:
‘Why do you think I continue
to write poetry
at my age?’
Despite clear translation
I had no answer, said:
‘I don’t know your work
well enough to say.’
Eventually he replied in Vietnamese – and
after this was translated, I heard:
‘For those who are unable to speak’
But she wished for further clarity, said:
‘He says he writes for those
who have no voice … who are
no longer with us.’
Startled, I asked –
as though struggling to absorb the future –
‘For those who died – for the dead?’
She nodded, said:
‘Yes, for the dead.’
the table went
very quiet.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Greg McLaren is a Sydney poet and critic. His books are Everything falls in (Vagabond, 2000), Darkness disguised (Sidewalk, 2002) and The Kurri Kurri Book of the Dead (Puncher & Wattmann, 2007). Greg is presently co-editing a collection of essays on Australian poetry, and is poetry editor at Puncher & Wattmann.
Transit Lounge
On the last day
I leave work hours early
and bus in to meet you by the quay,
you nearly drunk
an hour before you reach the ferry
Past the terror-proof windows
everything is busy-ness,
flight preparations are tinted
a pale yellow that in some light
might seem orange
I wander through the fluorescent mall
of the airport, wait thirty minutes
for a train and dawdle
in the bookshop underground
until a friend rings my mobile
At cruising altitude
you’re sheeting across the south east
of the continent just short
of the speed of sound
My bus slopes back up Parramatta Road
Your mother the commercial artist
greets you past the gates
with something between coldness
and expectation, and with news
of her latest exploits on e-bay
Somewhere, I’m not sure,
I’ve kept the train ticket,
that emblem of love,
its coded magnetic strip past expiry,
peeling from the backing like a mirror
Retail Therapy
for R.B.
With a face like a Castlecrag property deed,
and the spruiker voice you got from your brother,
you interrogate clients and staff alike:
Do you like the new fit-out?, and What
do you think of the chandelier? As if you had
a North Shore mortgage on taste, judgement
or – get this – delicate tact. After the half-
a-mill reno: the cut-back in casuals’ hours.
After the million dollar fit-out in Melbourne:
the nervous house-sale, the knuckle-size mention
in the weekend rag, and, always, the lack even of an
ironic self-awareness. The mission statement is riddled
with typos, and reads like a hippy business plan.
You want to target “the high-end literary market,
or even just general readers”, and to hose them
with “Paris Café Jazz”, that iconic genre. You hire doctors
and pay them peanuts: we fart in your car.
The in-store music? A burnt CD you paid money for,
and could never sell: Roberta Flack, singing “The first time
ever I saw your face”, followed by James Reyne, “Fall of Rome”.
Wangi
Seen from the car, a blurred barcode
of trees against the background of the lake
The lake is a fuzz of smoke. The heavy clang
of cicadas engulfs us, crashing through
the bush and cramming the thin black road
with noise. The car’s metal body keeps out
nothing; heat and noise seep and drip like sweat
on cracked vinyl. Our parents are two heads
bobbing, neither wanting this exchange
of one place for another. They become
bored children again, visiting her mother.
The grey-green racket rolls, sea-sick
in waves as we slide up and down hills.
I think for a moment I ought to be in it.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Bonny Cassidy is completing a PhD thesis on the poetry of Jennifer Rankin and Jennifer Maiden at University of Sydney. Her poetry has been published in various journals and anthologies, and her first libretto will be performed as an opera in June. In 2008 Bonny will be undertaking a residency in Japan supported by AsiaLink and the Malcolm Robertson Foundation. Bonny co-edited The Salon Anthology: New Writing + Art (Sydney: non-generic, 2007) and works as Chief Researcher for The Red Room Company.
The mourner
His right foot drags an affected waltz
as if the way back lingers behind –
to a time of still
before he were wiser –
a time that comes after
death, after knowledge.
His legs snap shut. Only
the mules fill the cone of dust
before the next heave forward.
They bungle right through it on the double,
and he imagines animals alone
must own that frosting time,
always between one step and another.
Weight
For Mo Jingjing
A punching bag rises
in the breeze before rain. Above it,
waving, thumbs of mango buds.
She shows me how to pinch
egg wrappers into goldfish;
warm and yellow corners
of mushroom jostling, plashed with flour
to grow clear and tight in soup.
A small and dusty crowd gathers on the tabletop –
leaning one another in stretchy fatigue, pleated tails
skirting the fingerbowl.
The radio jabbers into the trees.
I wonder how many mangoes
will grip the end of winter;
and whether she’ll be here to slice them,
or back in the thick of Hunan, deaf
to that blushing drop of night fruit.
We’ve been hushed by our silent, signing work.
Dumplings bob through plain, hot water
as the storm clouds twist and slow.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Vivienne Glance’s poetry and short stories have appeared in journals (incl. indigo, Blue Dog), anthologies (incl. The Weighing of the Heart, Open Boat Barbed Wire Sky, Friday’s Page) and online (Poems Against War 2003) and other publications and she’s won prizes and a commendation in competitions (C J Dennis Literary Award, Split Ink, Southern Cross Literary Award). She is currently working on her first collection of poetry. She runs a performance workshop for writers and was a finalist in the 2007 National Poetry Slam. Her writing for theatre has been performed in Perth, Sydney, Seattle USA, London and Edinburgh UK, and she is a professional actor and theatre director.
Spectrum
There is no real difference between dark and light
though I measure memory and beauty by shades
and love by the umbra of what you said.
Your spectrum ranges far beyond my sight
and as the palette of this landscape fades
I am left with burning visions of infra red.
But still my breath stops suddenly when i see
a crow’s laborious ebony above my head
or water sparkling under broadleaves shade
the gash of black dissecting sterile white –
you asleep upon my bed.
first appeared in Indigo, August 2007
Indian Tea
On tea clinging mountains
my father lived with green
waves filling his vision
monsoon washing his skin
He saw colour-draped women clip verdant tips –
bitter scent seep into brown skin. He stood by fresh
green spread to ferment and succumb to slippery black
Furnace-breath-dried leaves stuffed
weighed, labeled in coarse sacks –
a pungent harvest stacked
awaiting English tables
My father inhabited this place between coast
and plain – its contours bowed like the backs of women
and colonised by tea. Born into this place but
serving another place –
foreign stock grafted on
native root belonging
to neither
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Papa Osmubal writes from Macau, South China. His works, visual and literary, have appeared in various publications, hardcopy and online. He is contributing writer to Chick Flicks, OOV (Our Own Voice), eK! (Electronic Kabalen), and others. He has work archived in University of Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry.
An Exchange With An American Animal Rights Advocate
In the Philippines, I told my friend,
we feed dogs with swill of fish bones
and rice swimming in plain water.
It is notoriously tasteless,
salt just does the job.
When they are big enough
we stew them with soy sauce and ginger.
Her face mysteriously turned red
and she suddenly rushed into the john
clutching her stomach.
(Her dogs are pampered
with delectable goodies manufactured
by underpaid, overworked Filipino workers
thriving on mere tiny fish and plain rice with salt.)
When she came back out
we were no longer friends:
she flushed our friendship down the gutters
along with her vomits.
In Giza
There is nothing here, absolutely nothing
only a handful of camels and pyramids and sea of dust.
Whoever created these was a real genius, he says.
I nod my head in measured manner.
I am looking at the pyramids.
He is looking at the camel humps.
Rainy Days
The floor is creaking.
It is mom again
emptying those buckets.
I cannot sleep.
Others count the perennial sheep,
I count raindrops dripping in buckets.
The Florist at Hong Kai Si (Red Market) Macau
The inviting smell of food from nearby restaurants
is not enough to suppress the smell of her flowers.
The clothes vendor looks at the flowers
then turns to look at the clothes he sells: what is in his mind?
The florist side-glimpses at a passersby,
crooning a song.
She momentarily interrupts her croon
to pick up the newspaper.
She folds the newspaper to the size of a book
and bashes the flies hovering around.
After putting the newspaper back down, she stares at a bee
that busily does what bees do to flowers.
Listening to the bee’s buzz, she covers her mouth with her palm,
then yawns.
Fragment
Sunday.
And everyone is wearing their haloes.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Arlene Ang lives in Spinea, Italy. She is the recipient of The 2006 Frogmore Poetry Prize (UK) and the author of The Desecration of Doves (iUniverse Inc. 2005) She serves as a poetry editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. Her chapbook, “Secret Love Poems” is available from Rubicon Press. More of her writing may be viewed at www.leafscape.org.
Self-Portrait with Umbrella
I am one-third umbrella.
The fakir in my left eye (detail) is a glass
of Bordeaux. Pins and needles
chatter the backwoods.
Maisie’s hands cut my hair.
I wear it like a fishnet. She changes
the appearance of everyone
she meets. Before we make love
I throw up in the bathroom. My necktie
glistens a lunch break.
Under the scissors, my smile
swells a tsunami. I am unemployed
again. I am with the woman
I love. When I grow up,
I tell her, I will be a firefighter.
A Warning about Attachments
You’d think, at first, it’s Ebola.
Or something white that comes through the mail.
A bridal shoe. A bridal cake. The bride—
blindfolded and schmucky (whole package),
or laced with small ransom letters (in parts).
By the time you’d have realized
something’s not quite right, it’s in.
A postal box can swell like your stubbed toe.
And then, you’d admit needing assistance.
The yellow pages are fully infected: Looking for
cheap thread? Come to Marley’s
for a good time. Your pipes are our business.
Turn tables at low, low prices.
You’d think, afterwards, it’s a glitch:
the anti-virus fouled up the way you fouled up
your first date with ketchup. And no, you’d think, no
way. It hasn’t got anything
to do with sex. Length issues, perhaps.
Mostly, spam. Slick girls and gonorrhea in a row.
Wu Jin Contemplates the Tattoo on a Soft Cheek
The medicine pedlar knows
her eyes are veined with red. It is almost
noon. The price on the ointment
for deep burns hangs crooked,
like bamboo in her stepfather’s hands.
She was exiled to Zhangchou
after stealing ten ounces of gold.
When her face was branded,
she didn’t cry. Eventually, she escaped.
The mark on her cheek allows her
favors from passersby. For weeks the wife
of a rich merchant dressed her in silks,
fed her spittle and fish lips from a bowl.
She learned to slip a dagger
from of her sleeve, aim at throats
without regret, share the intimacy
of death from other people’s eye.
Today he offers a salve for pains
that rot through the bone. He asks her
keep one for herself; she walks away.
Tomorrow she will be back, perhaps her fist
opening to take something for herself.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Diane Fahey lives in the Victorian coastal town of Barwon Heads, the setting of her recent poetry collection, Sea Wall and River Light. Her seven other collections variously engage with Greek myths, fairytales, visual art, nature writing, and autobiographical themes. Diane has published and read her poems internationally, and her poetry has appeared in over 60 anthologies. She has received a number of poetry awards such as the Mattara Poetry Prize, the Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Prize, the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Prize, and was co-winner of the 2007 Judith Wright Poetry Prize, for Sea Wall and River Light. She has been awarded writer’s fellowships and grants from Arts SA and Arts Victoria (most recently, a grant for 2008 to write on birds), and from the Australia Council, from which she also received support for writer’s residencies in Venice, at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland, and at the University of Adelaide. Other residencies have been at Hawthornden International Writers’ Centre, Scotland, and at Varuna, The Writers’ House, in the Blue Mountains. Diane holds the degrees of B.A. and M.A. in Literature, and a PhD in Creative Writing for her study ‘Places and Spaces of the Writing Life’.
An interview with Diane Fahey can be found in Thylazine No. 9: www.thylazine.org
The following dramatic monologues are selections from Fahey’s verse novel
The Mystery of Rosa Moreland, published by Clouds of Magellan, 2008. www.cloudsofmagellan.net (ISBN 978-0-9802983-3-8).
Dolores
The place where I began was a green dusk
with slanted spears igniting vines, toucans
with black-and-gold beaks, glasswing butterflies;
it was a borderless map over which
my flight scrolled an eccentric signature.
Mulch carpet, and chandeliers of leaves
hanging from hot blue – I played the distances
between them, my scarlet and yellow cries
filled the rainforest’s dripping voice-box.
I was kidnapped, taken to live inside
a closed collective mind – among porcelain
sylphs and swains, stuffed owls, aspidistras.
The eyes of peacock feathers gleamed by altars
of heaped rubies, and died with them: transposed,
like myself, to paraphernalia.
An exiled Amazon queen, I gazed through
gilt bars, the gift of speech my only joy.
I revolved sounds like seeds in my beak, gnawed at
phrases as if they were cuttlefish bones
to be scraped into chalky hollows.
Intoning words fraught with sardonic mirth,
an eerie dread, I breached the unspoken.
Thus I became a pirate of forbidden thoughts –
to be released in Rabelaisian spurts,
raucous chunks or mind-teasing fragments.
And there were days when no words would come,
when I repined – a third-rate music-hall star,
waiting in my wings. But not tonight!
Crowds part as I’m borne across this vast stage –
in a state of thrilled prescience, my cage-cloak
of royal blue drawn back as if a curtain.
Like a retired diva craving the smell
and hush and violence of the theatre,
I dream of new, astonishing flights
above limelit sawdust…
How fitting then
that I’ve been chosen to launch this tale:
instructive, diverting, or wicked? –
you, dear reader, must judge.
Florence Ellesmere
Applause: the fluttering of a million wings!
At my feet, coral and ivory blooms unfurled
from gold hearts as waterfalls of velvet
spilt crimsonly down, surged upwards.
Yet there were from the first, days, whole weeks
of fatigue when the pleasure of it left me.
I practised patience, gave all from nothing –
showering those rapt faces with gifts
from beggarhood. My Ariel-spirit
served while dreaming its freedom…
In full flight,
my voice of gold, ebony and lava
filled that darkened space like a great ear;
unseen eyes met each smouldering glance.
Even as a betrayed wife, letter
in hand, pacing the confines of a drawing room,
or a captive Queen, paraded in
the marketplace, I moved like a swan.
Then – arrived at the middle years,
the height of my powers – I must play
strumpet, murderess, bitter scold:
all the sordid trivia of men’s fears, desires.
So that I became a cliff buffeted
by hostile waves, eaten by the sea…
Enough! I have silenced that sea, left that
precipice curving towards emptiness.
Soon I’ll sit between burgundy drapes
in a house on Edinburgh’s quietest,
most hidden street. Calmly, I’ll set the stage
for glimpsing limelit shards of the future.
The cards will confirm what eyes, stance,
rhythm of breath and upturned hands tell me.
But I will take no dictation from the dead,
nor ever invoke them. Let them sleep,
or speak through dreams. My gift is to grasp
what’s just beyond reach – as if gazing from
half-closed eyes at a receding vision…
In the theatre I was adept at
waiting wordless while others declaimed,
ranted – with no hint of stage business
I kept all eyes upon me. So here,
I’ll be in charge of each performance:
Life’s bounty and Fate’s mercy must do the rest…
I’ll know what can be said and not said;
what will stall harm, turn from obsession,
dispel vain hopes. I’ll know. It’s like tasting
a line’s flavour before you say it.
I’ve spent my lifetime working on that.
Seamus L’Estrange
Spirit Photographer
Not for me the charades of revenants:
women with hypnotic eyes, robed in
lurid drapery – like nothing so much
as animated stone effigies;
nor a dead child, dressed in Sunday best,
grafted back onto parents fixed by grief’s
dissolving stare – an uncanny foetus
anchored near head or womb.
Once, though,
in a derelict house, as I photographed
a stairway leading nowhere, midwinter
noon bloomed from an unseen source, and –
the cloud of dust I’d stirred up, was it? –
a glimmering shroud hung in icy air;
I yearned to walk through those ghostly steps.
Thereafter I sought light-effects
that fused the unearthly with the human –
accidental poltergeists of brilliance:
a cypress avenue, corridored by summer,
to which a blown mist brought metamorphoses;
candlelit rooms of cigarette-fuelled talk;
a forgotten kettle boiling into
sunlight – all yielded chimerical
glimpses, my lens positioned itself;
the shutter guillotined illusion.
I saw, where rock sliced a waterfall,
figures dancing above white tumult;
an avalanche rolled ice into sea-foam
alive with the unborn, the unretrieved.
Stranded by storm, I watched moon-hazed drops
slide down windowed darkness – as if they would
make of absence, a continuous presence;
my gaze plumbed fathomless transparency.
At this moment, I sit staring at light
filtered by my sealed eyelids: jet and gold
mingling, glass shadows wreathed inside
a mandorla, a mural on a great dome
pulsing with my invisible blood.
Helen Westwood
Where do you go when you cannot return
to the place where you’ve belonged? The marks
he scored across my body – once only,
in that cold onslaught – made the marks
across my soul palpable, gave them
a form; the unsealed skin I bathed and bound
in linen, healed to a scarred memory.
With profligate malice he dealt me
a dead hand, as if all the cards were his.
Now I have gone. He’ll sit at a bare table.
Only the mirror will so intimately
read the burst veins and bulging eyes of his wrath:
his need to disestablish, over and over,
life’s simple truth.
I have plucked my daughter
from his intemperate love. Forever.
Her six-year-old eyelids cover pearl
and lapis lazuli fit to match
the sky-gleam of any river or sea on earth.
In this small room propelled by fire and steam
we’ll reach Edinburgh before dawn.
Journeying west, we will choose new names,
like talismans, for ourselves as fresh light strikes
crag and loch. At Stranraer, a steamship.
Blanched, shaking with fatigue, we’ll step out
onto Ireland. There, more untraceable
journeys between two lives, two centuries –
till we arrive at a place of refuge
and beginning: time’s virtue sifting
through all our days.
My keepsakes I’ve sold
to effect this stylish, disguised leaving.
Together we’ll fashion new memories,
find new keepsakes.
Claire and I lie still:
effigies about to wake.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Born in 1988 in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong is currently an undergraduate English Major at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His poems have received an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Beatrice Dubin Rose Award, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as two Pushcart Prize nominations. His work appear in Word Riot, the Kartika Review, Lantern Review, SOFTBLOW, Asia Literary Review, and PANK among others. He enjoys practicing Zen Meditation and lives in Brooklyn with an 84 year old lady who he nurses in lieu of paying rent. Visit his blog at www.oceanvuong.blogspot.com
Arrival by Fire
Wooden teacups, steam swirled into the blue
then gray of morning. There was no one there to drink.
Before dawn blurred the edges of the sky,
when darkness made fools of limbs, we followed
the lantern’s golden eye, blinking from across the shore.
The river sliced our legs at the waist. Water
could not keep our secrets. When a croc’s eyes lit
like coals in the dark, my mother’s hand
clasped my mouth. The scent of sweat and garlic
would infuse my dreams for years. I had to touch
to believe my father was shaking. But there
is something different about reptiles.
Unlike humans, they do not eat when full.
But to disappear one must be swallowed
and so, we crawled into the bowels of a boat.
When we drifted to where sky and sea vanished
into a black wall, someone began to sing
a childhood song, and someone else begged him
to stop. The air began to tremble
as a hundred prayers hummed through my skin.
And where a fragment of moon fell through the hull,
a blue river of piss and vomit streamed
across the deck—washing away the fallen tears.
When there was too much silence, we would place
a hand on the closest chest, feel for drumbeats
then drift into dreams of chrysanthemums
flickering in the youth we’ve never known.
When we reached the new world, we dissipated
into shadows, apologized for our clumsy tongues,
our far and archaic gods. We changed our names
to John, Julie, Edward, or Susan. How many mirrors
have we tried to prove wrong? Who were we
when burning houses dimmed with distance,
and we watched our fathers hurl their hearts
into oceans where the salt sizzled in their wounds?
Now, on nights like this, when sleep sounds too much
like the sea, when the bed stretches into a ship
we cannot abandon, all we have are these stories, resurrected
like ghosts over steam of tea. Listen. Someone is trying
to croon that old song but the voice cracks over words
like Mother, Home. Nicolas, comrade, brother, whatever
your name, touch here—my hand, and remember: we were drifters,
we were orphans, but mostly, we were heat—steam
escaping
our bones.
If You Are a Refugee
There will be nights when you wake
to touch the photo, your fingers
fading the faces you cannot name.
They are phantoms of your own,
whose eyes have watched the precession
of waving hands
diminish into distance.
There will be moments, between
a lover’s kiss, when you remember
the taste of blood,
and the limits to the answers
one mouth can hold.
When you sweat, you will sweat the oil
that has stained the city
of which you only know
from what is lost.
You will return to that city,
beg the woman whose hair
has grayed to scalp to tell you
your true name. You will stare
into her turbid eyes and ask
of the crescent in your mother’s smile.
And when you dream, you will revisit
the body in the forest, say
it is not your brother’s. You will see again
the naked man crouched
by the charred house, licking ash
from his fingers to taste the bodies
he can no longer hold.
If you are a refugee, you will come to praise
the thickness of walls, the warmth
that clings to cotton
from embrace,
the cricket’s song
in a night virgin to death.
But before you leave
what is gone forever,
go back. Go back and gather that boy
you left behind. The boy who stood
at the edge of a field
where your father once prayed
with a pistol in his mouth.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ilumina, edited by Judith Beveridge and Roberta Lowing
REVIEWED BY MICHELLE CAHILL
Ilumina
Poetry UnLimited Press
ISBN 9780646476100
Sydney 2007
Ilumina is one of this year’s surprising packages. Published by the vanguard Poetry Unlimited Press under the loving patronage of Roberta Lowing, and edited by Judith Beveridge, it features work by commissioned guest poets of the monthly salon readings at Sappho Books Café, as well as the best of Sydney’s emerging talent. For the last two years post-graduate students from Sydney University, UTS and other non-affiliated aficionados have met in a grungy café behind the used bookshop in Glebe Point Rd to enjoy readings by guest poets and to read their own work in the open section. From personal experience these readings are of a high standard with an open, relaxed, and supportive atmosphere. A place where you can share a verse, a glass of wine, a few quiet words.
The PULP project is one of the few existing communal poetry projects, providing the opportunity to foster connection and nurture poets who are finding their voice in the factional and fractured Anglophone scene of Australian poetry. Ilumina provides us with new encounters; many of the contributing poets being of a non-Anglo-Celtic background, at a much higher proportion than you are guaranteed to find in any of your “Best” Australian anthologies, or for that matter in the majority of the mainstream journals.
Disregarding clichéd reverence, or the usual stylised conventions, many of these poets engage with disconcerting subjects like war, racism, dislocation and relocation. A good example is Tessa Lunney’s “You, My Brother”, a stark evocation of racial and sexual violence. There are chilling poems about war by Louise Wakeling, or this sparse stanza by Betty Johnson from the poem “Ali, Iraq”:
Your doctors promise
Miracles: new arms, new skin.
Burnt
We are shy. Ruins wait.
(160)
Onur Karaozbek’s “The One Who Might Be Any One” explores otherness by satirising social stereotypes:
I’m the Asian fella going to university knowing little English
or the kid from Albury studying Asian Cinema and Culture
I’m the one serving your grass juice,
the suit pushing you aside during the CBD rush-hour.
(162)
A new discovery for me was Micah Horton-Hallett’s spare, tense narratives that build around metaphors of space and language:
unaware that we
were writing the walls
tighter around us.
That we were writing
toward a full
stop.
Now–
As I write a new cage
for my memory of you–
The last echoes of alexia
have dispersed into
the open universe &
The drunk stars still sing:
(103) “The Pit”
Jill Gientzotis’ “Amsterdam” draws the peripatetic to an inner physical landscape, with images of fragility:
Where you are is not foreign.
Where you are is home.
(91)
Many of these poets seem to be at odds with the arbitrary closures and the propagandas of nationalism. Paul Giles’ “Australian Sonnets” interrogates the utopian ideals of Australia as a country of beauty and rich blessings. The poem is a harshly cynical contemporary rendering of AD Hope’s “Australia”, reworking the images and tones from a migrant, and more significantly a female perspective:
what does “pullulate”
mean anyway? what is history
but the sweep of shifting sands?
what place is left to dare?
it’s neither Cairns nor Perth.
if she hopes to survive,
she must find a home
for a battered mind,
a lonely, aching breast.
(97)
In Carol Jenkins’ “White Poems” a process of intelligent and sensual moulding of subject moves towards specificity and identity in the poems about potato, optics, or skin.
This is what gives the words
room to think. I beat in soft wads
of butter, warm milk and cream, pyramids of salt
and anticipation, all the cloud air puffs out at me
its warm potato breath, I am balancing, perfectly
all the white potato space in between
the scaffolds of real potato.
(156) “White Poem No 4: Ode to the Potato”
Her poems complement the lexical layers of “Knitcap Sutras”, a preceding sonnet sequence by Peter Minter. Minter’s highly inventive rural excursion is transformed at the outset by syncopated urban riffs, the enjambment leaving one sometimes breathless.
I drive in a dust pile, Tank Girl shambolic through early evening paddocks, steel wire coat hangers and polyester string looped & shuddering clots past the milkers, bright static radio & duco bent in panels where city chunks of 80s pop & supermarket fluorofoods bounce on the back seat along the gravel bolt beside the Gloucester river, all hot-headed
i (149)
Yet this allegro slows to more solemn movements where time is “ silently/ unfurling in the late sun’s gravity ”(153). There seems to be a desire to test and tease; to make of the landscape something more complex. Another youthful variant of the bucolic myth is found Ashley Burton’s poem “Swimming in the Murrumbidgee” with its unpretentious idiom.
Gospels of an entirely different nature are to be found in Peter Boyle’s “Apocrypha”, where crickets, shells, turtles and fish are personified with a surrealistic renouncement of the real; where the visual image surrenders wholly to the mind’s eye.
Above the sand
Spirit fish spin in the rivers of air.
A fish knows how to carry coolness deep inside its body,
How water glides
Even when it can’t be seen
The spirit fish are whispering the names of all the stars
(37)
Diversity and freshness aside, the hallmark of this anthology is a series of insightful essays by, and interviews with, guest poets. Judith Beveridge’s essay “How Poets Write” is a deeply personal account of her development towards greater receptiveness, towards a heightened attention to inner and outer worlds, and what she describes as “the ordering principles of the poem.”
Feeling the world give and give, one thing opening up to another, is what I enjoy most about writing. My poems don’t start from ideas, but are very definitely derived from sensory experience. (28)
This is interesting given Beveridge’s meditative observations of sense-impressions as a form of aesthetic and spiritual practice in her poems. Jill Jones in “I Want To Be Available To The Moment” acknowledges a similar phenomenological debt. She writes of her awareness of space, and of writing from the body; of breathlessness, vertigo and sound. Like Beveridge there is the need to be open and receptive.
I see what I do as exploratory, responsive to the pressures of language and my own intuition and memories as they converge in the moment, in going places, in observing and being part of experience. (145)
Both Jones and joanne burns, in her essay “Click” describe an interest in the physicality of writing. Jones, with her collage narratives confesses to her reliance on accretions, associations, taking notes in cafés, buses, even meetings, and of her stationery fetish. “It can get a bit pervy,” she writes, “but a lot of art practise is like that, I suspect.” (142) joanne burns speaks of the “technologies of writing”, and of their potential to create random correspondences. Writing as a practice, she admits, can be ritualistic, playful and surprising.
Lowing is to be credited for her skillful interviewing of the guest poets, particularly Stephen Edgar and Peter Boyle, whom I suspect would otherwise be taciturn about their writing habits. What results is an inquiry into the ‘how’ of writing, an arguably more interesting question than the ‘why’. Equally impressive is Stuart Rees’ inquiry “Can Poets Change The World?”. Rees dismantles the manifestos of one-dimensional institutions, or the use of power ‘which tolerates no critics and values only compliance.’ (224) Citing poets like Octavio Paz, Oodgeroo Noonuncal, and William Stafford, Rees asserts that poets can indeed confront the basic humanitarian struggle for home, dignity and identity:
If poets breathe life into the premise that the personal is the political, they will inevitably confront these issues of identity, which are at the hub of destructive conflicts. (219)
Nicolete Stasko reminds us of this in “Ashes”, one of the book’s closing poems:
All over the world
poets are going up in flames
leaving
little piles of ashes
in the shape of mountains
it seems we do no notice
their going
so much else is ablaze
but the darkness
is growing and
it is not our eyes
(244)
Ilumina strives to resist this ‘darkness.’ It’s a book to read on trains and buses, or while ever you are waiting for glimpses and sparks. The poems and poetics in Ilumina make the issues of space, time and perspective more complex and inclusive. It’s a collection that mostly sidesteps the ‘sludge’, to quote Rees, in the hope of making a difference.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Reid Mitchell lives in New Orleans. Following Hurricane Katrina, he refugeed one crucial year in Hong Kong. There he and a Hong Kong poet began work on a series of dialogues, some of which have been published in Admit2, Barrow Street, Caffeine Destiny. Poetry Monthly Magazine, and Poetry Superhighway. [http://www.sighming.com/dialogue] Mitchell has published some short stories as well as the novel A Man Under Authority. He has also published several books on nonfiction.
1. Sanctuary
Two and two-thirds red columns, roofless
House left unfinished?
Mansion in ruins?
2. Singapore River
(An answer to Mingh)
A word misconstrued
does not necessarily lose
all value
a path obscured
by leaves and words
may lead somewhere in the end
two people lost
in dark woods
may wander in circles
two lifetimes.
3. When I Imagine Us
When I imagine us
I see you, golden in Italy,
your small face peeking through Umbrian green, Tuscan dust, Sienna sienna, as
in an excited way, excitable you run ahead, one finger pointing.
Didn’t we walk, hot and dry, between blood orange and olive?
Didn’t we look down on the sea blind Homer promised would be wine-dark,
and the beach that slaughtered Athens,
and where we nonetheless smiled and kissed?
You watched me eat artichokes with garlic.
We strolled from ghetto to Pantheon,
past the Mandarin restaurant
and you announced you would kiss no more foul foreign mouths?
No, sad no.
The South China Sea does not lap Sicily
and those fish will not swim to Hong Kong to be sold in Causeway Bay.
And you? You were fighting with your sisters, washing your hair on the street,
finding out that words, even more than boys, could be playthings.
I was by myself, with passport, poetry I forget, and faint, unquenchable hope.
But when I imagine you,
I see us in Italy, between orange and olive,
your head glistening, your feet dusty.
You run with index finger pointing toward a miracle I cannot yet see
just ahead.
4. Ghost Bodies
Seducing a woman twelve time zones ahead
is like bringing a ghost to bed:
a nice thing to write about
I do not want your body without your mind
nor your mind without your body.
But seeing I may have the attention of one
I would like to swap briefly for one night,
seven years,
or most likely one long sunny afternoon
spent in Singapore or other southern port
“Physical intimacy?” you say.
I don’t want an abstraction.
That patch of dry skin,
the crooked toe,
the ears that don’t quite match,
your breath gone sour, hair hot with sweat.
I want to touch you all the places you hope that men don’t notice
in Saigon, Singapore or some other southern port
one long muggy afternoon when sweat refuses to dry.
I want your body,
perfect in its imperfection.
5. In Praise Of Youth
Show her no mercy,
younger children.
She showed no mercy to us
calling this love dry
and another fat.
Pointing out teeth that have yellowed
worse than old photographs.
Let her be humbled before she turns thirty
by teenage girls gawking on the escalators at Kowloon.
Let them say, “What does she mean by wearing that?”
as she passes down with bare midriff and blue velvet cap.
Let young girls’ eyes be her only mirrors.