Rachael Mead

December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Rachael Mead is a novelist and award-winning poet and short story writer, with her creative work appearing widely in Australia and internationally. She’s the author of the novel The Application of Pressure (Affirm Press 2020) and four collections of poetry including The Flaw in the Pattern (UWAP 2018). In 2019, she spent a month in the Taleggio Valley in Northern Italy on an eco-poetry residency awarded by Australian Poetry.

It takes a mountain to raise a cheese 
A golden shovel of Terrance Hayes’ ‘Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy’

You want answers, so immediately I’m in a panicked state.
What is a regenerative economy, anyway? I’m a writer. My time
is spent exploring on foot, trying to see things differently to others
like the way the piode is a jigsaw from below but from above is a roof.
That’s a bit simplistic. Trying to give you answers is making me careless,
the way I get back to the room, pull off my boots and sling my bra
not even looking to see where it falls. Some think nature is all about sex
but I’m leaning in another direction. I’m missing the moonlight.
All this walking has me in bed with the sun, weighing the valley’s life
and trying to piece it together with words. You want me to show my thinking
but resisting the seduction of witness and metaphor is not easy to overcome.
It’s as if you’ve offered the finest single malt whiskey but refused me the ice.
I’m trying to be critical and speculative but I’m just grinding out the syllables,
constructing poems from form, allusion and a well-thumbed catalogue of words.
I’m great at questions, seeing how problems connect, replicate themselves —
but critical speculation? I’m a dog yapping at unseen dangers. I can’t say
what should happen here, the possibilities clamouring so I can’t tell prank calls
from those with something important to say. The word on the street
is it’s better to ignore what you see. Go with what you perceive.
My bedroom window is black with possibility. This arrangement
feels impossible. What can I offer? I walk. I watch. I make poetry.
If only I was more original, walking around like a pregnant woman
confident in the form of her creation, her offspring welcome among us.
I’m not used to being so beyond my depth. As a wife
I can fake it, clean the house before guests arrive. (Don’t think about that.)
But here, all the surfaces are peeled away, lack of faith in myself
laid bare in these echoing lines. I scratch pen on pages to start fires.
The answers are needed, the world staring down its own destruction
and here I sit twiddling around with rhythm and the fall of a word.
Beyond my window, the darkness resolves into birdsong and branches.
Grass will grow. Cheese will be eaten. These futures are not empty yet.
But I’m not so deaf that I can’t hear this valley whimper.
It’s just that I’ve no particular claim to wisdom –
only the ability to watch, witness and fill with the pities
of someone gifted in seeing backwards. It’s a leash,
the tug of it jerking my head as I peer into the night’s
potential – ghostly, nebulous and keeping me from sleep.

OJO Taiye

December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Ojo Taiye is a young Nigerian poet who uses poetry as a handy tool to hide his frustration with society. He also makes use of collage and sample technique. He is the winner of many prestigious awards including the 2021 Hay Writer’s Circle Poetry Competition, 2021 Cathalbui Poetry Competition, Ireland.

All quiet on the fire front 

What is it that makes me see myself
more loving than the capitalist world?
Every time I watch the news my heart
goes out to the lonely orphan bear.

Look: there, as when a cone explodes
during a flare, another dog lay lifeless
on the charred ground, staring at a falling
pylon—the quieting chorus of ruin. Nothing

is blooming today & a man in my mother’s
village is breathing and asking— will the
water be gentle with me as it rises? I’m long
past hopeful and yes, beyond upset, I wish I

could say they’re just animals and my mother
is not sick. Still everything that is burning has
a name. Always something fragile and my father
looks up at me and sighs. We’ve lived in many

shelters. Even after the mud slide, a river slopes
along my heart to forget, for a second, the volume
of destruction. The thing about summer is: it doesn’t
come as joyful as it did once. If we are talking a-

bout a feverish planet, a thick pall of smoke still
hangs over my country’s green lungs. There is a
premonition before a ruin. Every herder I have
ever met said something about drought. More

drought. Or maybe to ruin the moment of camping,
a thousand heat-strokes & oh, there is famine too—

Monique Lyle

December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Monique Lyle is a DCA candidate with the writing centre at Western Sydney University. She is currently completing her first manuscript, The Park, which explores her experiences growing up in Sydney Housing Commission in the 90’s. Recently her work has appeared in Overland, Flash Cove, Otoliths, Plumwood Mountain and also Dance Research.

a shark

when
i
found am
out
in the garden half
dead
in the weeds
half
floating
in
a pond you
think
of pigeons
and flutter
bies in
over grown grass
field you
think of a
fly
landing on damp.

if a
little
girl is
all alone left
there
will be no
eat there will be
no
sucksuck
there
won’t be any water melon. there
only
will be
tiny hand tiny
arm
tiny
cock roach crawling. by time the
mary
there get
it
will be late too—
eve taken will
have
already
apple cleaned
pinstripe
suit even gorgeous
lips.

when you are
in
an
over grown field with a
bee
on your
knee
and stinging nettle. when
a
purple flutter
bye
lands on a
yellow
dandelion
flower another
bug will
be
there with it
when a
root pushes
into
wet
brown mud, a
small green leaf
lives under
water.
when a small
green
ball
attaches itself
to
underwater, a blue
fish
lands on a
shark
flattening itself
out onto it when a red
critter
scurries through the ocean.
i
her
saw
jagged in the
garden an
out
distance coming one
zig
zag
arm another
zig
zag
leg another
coming
close
in
swimming
zone
i
a shark and
you here
no

Lisa Nan Joo

December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Lisa Nan Joo lives on Gadigal land and is an emerging writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Her work has previously appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Strange Horizons, Meniscus, Seizure Online and Spineless Wonders.

Plastic Nation

In the end, it feels inevitable. The floating island of plastic is declared a new nation, and becomes the world’s foremost thalassocracy. Ambassadors of PVC and polyethylene squabble over the borders, and stake claims for distinct nation-states among the sea-drift. New language emerges from the percussion of waste: the voice of the sea, but woven into a tapestry of six-pack rings and fishing nets. It sounds like a wave trapped in a torn plastic bag. The new nation sends out armies: swift, many-limbed proxies that surround and submerge their landed enemies, until the old borders mean nothing. The nation buries itself in the skin of the ocean, stretching until it’s fit to burst, and then it purges itself on the shores of the new world, and buries itself here, too, leaving no survivors, implanting itself into the canopy, the humus, the bedrock, the fossil record. Accelerating towards the erasure of organic materiality. The earth is an endling. The last of its species, abandoned to deep time.

Lawdenmarc Decamora

December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Lawdenmarc Decamora is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated writer with work published in 23 countries around the world. He is the author of three book-length poetry collections, Love, Air (Atmosphere Press, 2021), TUNNELS (Ukiyoto Publishing, 2021), and Handsome Hope which is forthcoming from Yorkshire Publishing in 2022. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in places like The Common, The Seattle Review, Columbia Review, North Dakota Quarterly, California Quarterly, Cordite Poetry Review, AAWW’s The Margins, and elsewhere. His poetry will be anthologized in The Best Asian Poetry 2021 and had recently appeared in the best-selling Meridian: The APWT Drunken Boat Anthology of New Writing. In the UK, Lawdenmarc’s poetry was long-listed for The Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2021 and shortlisted for Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2021 (Aesthetica Magazine). He was an August 2021 alumnus of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project of the US-based Tupelo Press, and is also a member of the Asia Pacific Writers & Translators (APWT). He lives in the Philippines where he teaches literature at the oldest existing Catholic university in Asia, the University of Santo Tomas (UST).

A Love Story

A kind of relationship developed between C and D.
The former was from a sacred temple, the latter
in an abandoned carnival park. One day a silvery
slope of tiny metal was found packed in an aluminum
foil paper. Glimmering in the glue of sunset
was curiosity. D thought it was chocolate;
C cherished it and both became friends. Soon,
lovers. There’s however a potential health risk
in chocolates, experts said. The two paid no attention
and their cadmium addiction soared 10, 000 feet
into the sky. They wrestled with toxicity, a sex
of pain and smoke parachuting. Earlier C saw D
hiding from tubes among books, hallucinating.
C’s worried face triply glowed. D handed the latter
a transcript underlining a note that read: “Cadmium
is thought to cause anxiety in monkeys.” Their eyes
paused, murmuring, But we are lovers made of chocolate.
Night entered. And for the last time, the two macaques
pleasured themselves in the chaos of ambulance
lights, right before the next laboratory experiment.

Jennifer Compton

December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Jennifer Compton lives in Melbourne and is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. Her 11th book of poetry, the moment, taken was published by Recent Work Press in 2021.

An Abandonment

I had done everything I could do within reason
­  ­   ­  ­   for the ragged rows of broad beans,
their juices were often thick on my fingers

­  ­   ­  ­   from their first unfurling in mid winter
to the pinching out of the growing tips,
­  ­   ­  ­   their binding to a stake in late spring.

And then the harvest, soon the harvest done,
­  ­   ­  ­   and I had brushed through their ranks,
turned hands of leaves upside down,

­  ­   ­  ­   bent for a better view of their private quarters,
against the sun, the way it is when picking,
­  ­   ­  ­   nobody likes the low sun full in their eyes.

Their business at an end, I wrenched them from the earth,
­  ­   ­  ­   laid their lanky stems one upon another,
did not regret their wilting sigh, their quick dying breath.

­  ­   ­  ­   And clouds and clouds and clouds of ladybirds
crept out from the interstices, showed themselves, and flew.
­  ­   ­  ­   It was the very opposite of a plague,

because ladybirds do good work, no doubt about it,
­  ­   ­  ­   but it was very like that sort of thing.
And more and more and more, and then more, a wonder.

­  ­   ­  ­   They had kept themselves to themselves until
an acrid scent, or an orientation to the sun, or a sudden
­  ­   ­  ­   knowledge underfoot of sap not rising,

lifted them into an urgency of leaving.

Greg Page

December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Greg Page is a Koori Poet from the La Perouse community at Kamay (Botany Bay). He holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from UTS in Sydney and has been published in the Australian Poetry Journal and the Koori Mail. He lives on unceded Bidjigal land. Dox him at linktr.ee/boypage.

Barbed Wire

Earlier poems on barbed wire have proved unsatisfactory
Not that I know any, but if they were worthwhile I probably would
There’s no bigger symbol of the invasion
And the continent is still covered in the stuff

It might be offensive to talk about barbed wire
Perhaps not as plain rude as asking someone’s salary
A wealthy person’s salary that is
I’ll quite naturally admit my $16k annual jobseeker rate

Rust has a kind of beauty to it
Did they think through what happens to discarded industrial metal items?
‘We all have to go so we may as well go down the gurgler with microplastics’
Perhaps edible plastics might solve all our problems

There’s nothing hidden about the violence of barbed wire
That’s the thing I like most about it
It’s honest truth telling — a voice to Parliament
The ongoing mesh network communicating terror on the frontier

At the speed of light your sadnesses prove ineffective
Good intentions and Koalas are no match for intentional bulldozers
There’s a lot of uncertainty on the land these days
Good labour is so difficult to find even at $16k

Debbie Lim

December 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Debbie Lim lives in Sydney. Her work has appeared in anthologies including regularly in the Best Australian Poems series (Black Inc.) and Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann). Recent work appears in Westerly, Island, Rabbit, Overland and the Willowherb Review (UK). Her chapbook is Beastly Eye (Vagabond Press) and she is working on a full-length collection. She was a Mascara Don Bank Poet-in-Residence in 2020–2021.
 
 
 
 
Captive
Hapalochlaena lunulata

You are the one who cupped death in the hand.
Watched it writhe in sunlight, tender-faced,

flashing its blue halos, more precise and smaller
than expected. A slow thrall of limbs rippling

away from itself. Everything might have ended
there: a far sea throbbing in your ear as your

own heart slackened, then subsided. Instead,
this sudden act of mercy as you tipped a palm down—

saw a life jettisoned to the shallows.

Anisha Pillarisetty

December 12, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Anisha Pillarisetty is a radio producer and presenter at Radio Adelaide and a journalist at On the Record, living on unceded Kaurna Yerta. She is currently in her third year of university studying creative writing and journalism.

Remember to not talk gently when announcing the news, especially if you’re on radio

summers are long and the sky curdles                                                                   quick

a game:

splashes of cloud or congealing milk left in the bright                                          of the sink

skin circles back into itself
turning the colour of mud flaps on Dad’s old Maruti van                                     bogged after

                                         the                                         first                         shock of rain
radio says 2020 broke         records here

1. 1. the third warmest
2. 2. the fifth wettest
3. 3. the eighth sunniest
4. 4. the

radio also says there is                              a moon wobble

Zoom out to find the Indian Ocean on Google Maps and the searching

blue

is hurled against the window with the moon. The wind is torn between             remembering

the kind of rain that disturbs bird calls into                                                                 static
the kind of rain that is wanting

the Indian Ocean unspools
the tops of the gum trees like a tarp and it sounds like:

1. 1. dripping stripes on a gourd                                                   sold cheap by the roadside
2. 2. your fingers counting                                                                          the air
3. 3. ballooning curtains when my hands

were still                                                                                                         small
your freedom –                                                                                           is it mine?
bigger than the cling-clang
at your waist
your laughter is tomatoes in hessian                                                       sifted through
1. too soft
2. too green
3. the coins are hesitant to leave                                                                the cloth

summer                               circles

skin.