November 13, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jena Woodhouse’s publications include two poetry collections and a novel, Farming Ghosts (Ginninderra 2009). A collection of short stories, Dreams of Flight, is about to be published by Ginninderra.
Muswell Hill Road, London N10
It was a summer of high hopes –
of what, we weren’t entirely clear;
it was enough to be in London:
theatre, bookshops, pied-a-terre –
a good address to house-sit, owners’
prized possessions stowed upstairs.
We respected privacy
and primacy of others’ chattels,
but our son, who didn’t
understand exclusiveness,
would steal up to the absent
children’s nursery, spend hours there,
a toy he’d found clutched in his hands,
delighting his small grip.
There was a sense of people we
should meet, but somehow never did;
Highgate Cemetery close by –
Karl Marx, angels, Lizzie Siddal,
lately joined by Alexander
Litvinenko’s lead-lined casket.
Opposite, the dim green dolour
known as Highgate Wood
wove its late-Victorian trance,
reeking of untimely ends:
oaks decked with garlands, messages
from friends lamenting early deaths
in this last remnant of the ancient
forest realm of Middlesex.
A melancholy bubble waits to rise,
to take me by surprise;
I think of time’s attrition as a thief
that skulks beneath my bed.
Oh to be in England!
pipes a small voice in my head.
At her third attempt to access
inner elbow, hand, then wrist,
the pathologist draws blood.
The vein resists, then gives its best.
Birds for Evie
Arid spaces in me crave
paint in captivating shades:
saturated saffron, cyclamen,
alizarin; cinnamon and pomegranate,
fresh as cries of morning birds
in ancient lands; Armenia,
Uzbekistan, Iran…
I give Evie a flock of larks,
tinged with bright naïveté,
simple as the day, and artless
as a child who paints for joy;
but they are only semblances
of tin that rattle in the wind,
trinkets looped upon a string
that neither fly nor sing.
November 10, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Maxine Beneba Clarke is a widely published Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent. Tim Minchin has called her work ‘amazing’. Overland literary journal says she’s ‘one of the most compelling voices in Australian poetry this decade’. Oz Conservative has lamented ‘…unappealing. Clarke’s views are the more dangerous ones’. It’s this last endorsement she wears afro-high. Maxine won the 2013 Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript for her debut short fiction collection Foreign Soil and the 2013 Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize for the poem nothing here needs fixing, the title poem to her forthcoming collection.
let alone
the one thing you never counted on
is how hard it is
to be a woman alone
let alone a black woman
alone with kids
let me alone
and get on with your business
how hard it is
to rent a house
in the neighbourhood of your child’s school
or get a job working
the hours you now need to
for five years you paid off joint plastic
and now that same bank manager
talks right through you
you have no ascertainable steady income
i am very sorry
we just can’t give a credit card to you
how hard it is
to get a break
or a loan
or a smile
or a hearing
or the real estate to repair
what so urgently needs mending
your child is the brightest boy in class
behaves besides
but now
they are always watching
waiting for him to slip
let my child alone
and get on with your business
a woman alone
let alone a black woman
alone with kids
the one thing you never counted on
was how hard
it is
November 9, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ann Ang’s poetry, fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Eclectica Magazine, the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS), Poskod, Kartika Review, The Common and elsewhere. Her first collection of short stories, titled Bang My Car (Math Paper Press, 2012), was launched at the Singapore Writers’ Festival 2012. An avid birdwatcher, she is an educator at the Academy of Singapore Teachers.
Sister
Jie, you complain you are sixty,
but I’ll never beat you at being old.
In Primary Four, you were in Sec Two—
Taller, your studious silences like Sumatran haze.
You did my homework because it was right
to prove that my centre parting and fondness for kueh,
were really yours. Mama caned you
for having Pontianak-red nails.
That was a better kind of love.
You got angry, grew up into being beautiful.
Now people call you by your name.
Days pass the way we crack gingko nuts,
chalky cracked shell under bleeding nails:
you leaving the house keys, a new fridge.
My years were kernel and sap;
husband and children. Yours: a Mini Cooper,
a scarf and a tin of biscuits you returned,
dropping by for five minutes. “So much trouble,
give the kids eat. Singapore is so hot.”
“No one asked you, what,” you didn’t say.
So this is how we grow old together:
I’m wondering if you need spring cleaning,
more vitamins. Your left knee is gone;
you’ll die alone from leukaemia.
But I have grand-children.
The days filter through the rain trees,
hot humid light. You do nothing,
so time does not pass.
You say, “Don’t need, don’t bother,”
alone with the stories you believe about yourself.
November 9, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
David Wong Hsien Ming was born in Singapore, discovered poetry as a child at a Sunday lunch and pursued honors in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, reading poetry at Rutgers University New Brunswick along the way. His work has appeared in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Ceriph, Eye to the Telescope, Unshod Quills, Literary Orphans, and earned an Honorable Mention in Singapore’s Golden Point Award 2011.
To take care of your mother
Undo the woman before you—
go back beyond your youth
in fact go back into yourself,
pretend your unbirth
and her unpregnancy;
pretend the unbloom
of every bougain villea
in the family garden
and the unbloom of that first flower,
your father whom she found
half-grown and half-sated;
the first white workshirt
she scrubbed and poured softener over,
unwash that too;
unwash the lies and half-apologies
and the times you attempted
to use barbed words for reconciliation
until a thick stain spreads
to the utmost walls of the home
making it a blackbox
of broken dishes
and set-aside dreams,
of soft bolts of joy
and love so often tasting of pain;
make this blackbox of now, your life
—and meet her in her girlhood.
Chemo
It is night on your skin
where the needles swam.
Your body’s practiced betrayal
halves the venom’s speed today.
We have porridge for dinner again.
The swollen grain like flies’ eggs
hang together as we hang
together. I suppose in an older age
the eggs would have hatched and the maggots
would be weaning gratefully
on you, whom I kiss
with veils about my eyes.
The sheets that hold your sleep
ebb and flow and beg your case
to God who’s just about ready to—
look all I’m saying is
life does all the work
and we let death take all the credit.
November 9, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Maria Takolander is the author of a book of short stories, The Double (Text 2013), and two books of poems, Ghostly Subjects (Salt 2009) and The End of the World (Giramondo, forthcoming). She is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies and Creative Writing at Deakin University in Geelong, Victoria.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
ENTER a man with six fingers on each hand
and an electric lady,
her blood bright as the moon’s.
Their son: fretting in a closet,
turning the psychedelic noise
of his drunken parents upside down.
1 brother and 2 sisters were born damaged,
blind and silent, so it is only him
—and another brother somewhere—
spellbound in the clamour of this hotel room.
ENTER the Sunburst Fender Stratocaster,
made for his father, with his plentiful digits.
The boy is lost in its violence.
Watch him: night after night, licking his woman,
his teeth, like pieces of noise,
raining onto the stage.
Back at the hotel there is red wine
and pills, white as amnesia.
EXIT the boy, into billowing silence,
only the fluorescent lights still brash.
Casino Royale
The sky let loose—not a good omen—when the hare went to visit the polar bears. The bears greeted him, blocking the doorway, their fur bristling, black noses dry and porous like ice. They stank of dead fish and urine. They turned their colossal backs to him, and the hare followed them into the room, shaking his sturdy ears and skittering rain. There was paisley carpet: brown with green eddies. The electric heater was on: a jittery orange glow. As usual there was a game going. At the table, draped with a crocheted cloth, was a horse, her back slumped with the ages, her eyes yellowed. Next to her was a moose with a scrap of fur missing from his snout. His antlers were brittle but intact. The drinking was being done from rank mugs. The ale was poured liberally.
The hare took a seat, picked with his teeth at a knotted mat of fur on his hind leg, and then was dealt in. He sifted through the picture cards in his paws. Table talk was forbidden. In any case the hare was thoroughly preoccupied. He felt a familiar hunger for his own droppings—and something else, he only now began to realise, like a secret longing for his own death.
Flick-snap. He was struck by a jester wielding a witchdoctor’s stick. The hare looked at the polar bear and at the stack on the doilied table. The bear’s eyes were impossibly still and dark. The hare drank and wiped the froth from his mouth. He eyed the hunched paw of the bear as it turned the final card. Flick-snap. A black weapon shaped, it seemed to the hare, just like a scythe. He had lost everything.
The hare turned to the horse, who had closed her eyes. ‘So, how about it?’ he said to her, urgently, quietly. The mare opened her lashed lids and turned her eyes upon him. She looked at him, he thought, with wist. Just then the neighbourhood dogs came careening into the room, wet as the day, carrying on at the world as if something had to be done about it. The game, the hare knew, was over.
November 9, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jordie Albiston has published seven poetry collections. Two of her books have been adapted for music-theatre, both enjoying seasons at the Sydney Opera House. Jordie’s work has won many awards, including the 2010 NSW Premier’s Prize. She lives in Melbourne.
I went to the shooter’s house pled shoot me
shoot me open my chest like an unread
book blast my colophon break my spine let
all my pages fly out look recto vers-
o I am a box & aimed a finger
right here at my heart there are poems in
there you can hear their din each tiny word
weighs a ton I-am-out-of-everything
baby needs air but don’t mind me reload
your gun your bullets will taste just like love
it is cold she walks to the corner vers-
o recto left right left turns the corner
thinks about karma wonders exactly
which stars are extinct she steps stops forgets
remembers the whole world is dead as a
door-nail shot while it blinked someone said
a white car has had all its windows smashed
in it wasn’t there yesterday marry
me? is written high in the sky lucky
I went out the back for a bit before
the words passed away today is Thursday
it is seven past three a warm wind moves
through the trees someone is crying I am
pleased to report the results of such del-
icate signs the driver may be dead the
girl say no but I think yes! & alive
the day peeked in I wasn’t home flying
with fishes swimming with birds driving my
car upside down tomorrow is coming
it says on the news I may or may not
be in it time is gone still it’s tricky
to tell this day is made up of minutes
November 9, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Eileen Chong is a Sydney poet who was born in Singapore. In 2010 she won the Poets Union Youth Fellowship and was the Australian Poetry Fellow for 2011-2012. Her first collection of poems, Burning Rice, was published in the New Voices Series 2012 by Australian Poetry. The book was highly commended in the Anne Elder Award 2012 and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2013.
Noodles in Hong Kong
We’d walked downhill along Star Street
and emerged onto a version of Hong Kong
I finally remembered. Traffic, neon signs
and shopfronts like those from my childhood.
We squeezed into the single narrow aisle
of the tea room, locals staring at us outsized
outlanders. No one would share our table.
I had no Cantonese beside the usual ‘please’,
‘thank you’ and ‘I’m ok’. There were no pictures,
which meant we were in the right place.
Wonton mein, swallowing cloud noodles?
Brusque understanding. Two bowls slammed down,
steam rising from soup like early morning fog.
These were the best dumplings we’d had so far:
silken pastry encasing sweet prawns and crunchy
water chestnuts. Each mouthful of noodles
had just the right elasticity. The workmen had stopped
watching us; the news was on the TV in the corner.
We squinted and tried to make sense of the images:
a nuclear warhead, the Chinese flag, marching armies…
Three painters spilled through the door and sat
at our table. They looked hard at us and I smiled.
We finished our tea and paid for our meal. HKD110 –
a small price for perfect clouds with a hint of sesame.
Musician
The god of musicians has been trying
to get my attention. Last month, a man
on a street corner in Chinatown stopped me
with his playing. When he finished the song
I uttered a name: Ah Bing. He asked me where
I was from. How does a girl from Singapore know this?
In the Utzon annex of the Opera House
the cellist Wang Jian played Bach solos.
When the audience wanted more he spoke
of a blind street musician and played The Moon
Reflected in the Second Spring. That was the first time
I heard it. In the tunnel at Central Station
it surfaced again. The old man bowed away
at his two-stringed erhu and China swelled
like a mirage: bridges, moon gates, willows.
I emerged into the light and put on my sunglasses
to hide my moist eyes. Immortal Han, I thought,
don’t you only watch over flautists? There is no
Chinese god of writers, so I think of the Kitchen God
when I work. Sticky New Year cake. Sweet words.
November 9, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mike Ladd lives and writes in Adelaide. He produces Poetica each week on ABC Radio National. Mike’s most recent book is Karrawirra Parri: Walking the Torrens from Source to Sea published by Wakefield Press in 2012.
Gasoline Flowers
Mohamed Bouazizi,
wanting living space
and a little justice,
became an orange-yellow orchid
Tich Quang Duc,
a wavering lotus of flame
Palden Choetso – a smoky iris,
deadly bright at its centre.
For his land of snow
and a spinning prayer,
Tsering Tashi was a gaping petro hibiscus.
November 9, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Elizabeth Allen is a Sydney poet and the events manager at Gleebooks. She is also the Associate Publisher at Vagabond Press. Her poetry has been published widely in Australian journals. She is the author of Forgetful Hands (Vagabond Press, 2005) and Body Language (Vagabond Press, 2012), which won the Anne Elder Award.
Winter Lilyfield
The mint and the rosemary
endure in the concrete backyard.
The star jasmine is taking over the
shed and the end of the clothesline
which is bare. A single sock lies
in the dead dried leaves and
a pair of lacy black underpants hang
off one of the succulent’s long spikes.
I can guess which flatmate they belong to.
The leaves are gathering in the corner
of our concrete backyard.
Lacy knickers
token of the summer dalliance
we wish we had.
Neighbourhood watch
Early one Saturday morning you watch
her as she shuts the door to her three
bedroom terrace & crosses the road,
highlighted for a moment in the sunshine.
She is wearing a red & white made590 skirt,
a black Witchery top with a blue plastic bird
brooch, Salt Water Sandals on her feet
& a hat made from a patchwork of recycled
vintage fabrics. She has a Monsterthreads
jumper over one arm & a tote bag with an owl
on it over the other & a KeepCup in her hand
(in your mind you can smell the coffee).
Some days she walks to the GoGet parked at the end
of the street. But today she appears to be walking
in the direction of the local organic produce markets
where she will no doubt buy carbon neutral food.
Sometimes you wonder what she is doing inside
her house: eating ash-coated goats cheese
on sourdough bread while listening to FBi radio,
or flicking through a magazine of new emerging
writers, or rewatching Mad Men? You think,
not for the first time, about how she would
be such a good character for a play: the wealthy
girl from the North Shore who makes her way
to the hipster wilds of the inner west & goes
no further, apart from occasional trips into
Marrickville for Pho or to Parramatta to visit
the one friend she has who lives out there;
how she would be so easy to write,
how it would be so easy to mock her
so much harder to take her seriously.
November 9, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments
Susan Hampton is a Canberra-based poet. With Kate Llewellyn, Hampton edited a major anthology, The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (1986), and followed this with two publications of her own work: a sonnet sequence, White Dog Sonnets: A Novel (1987), and a second collection of poetry and prose, Surly Girls (1989). She has published three further poetry collections, A Latin Primer (1998), The Kindly Ones (2005) – winner of the ACT Judith Wright award, and News of the Insect World: And Other Poems (2009).
Lesbo Riff
I think it was a beach show, maybe Gidget. It was when next door first got TV, and all the kids in the street were invited, maybe about fifteen of us. Anyway in the show these two girls are good friends and they go the the beach and put out their towels and get set up and have a lot of fun and then some boys turn up, complete dickheads I thought, kicking sand and showing off and next thing you know Gidget is kissing one of the boys. (pause) It seemed natural to me she’d kiss the girl – they’d been kind of flirting – so I said, Oh what? and all the kids turned around and looked at me and said, What?
Andrea Lemon had the best name of any lesbo I met. Lots of lesbians are called Lesley; Mase and Lesley Lynch to mention two.
She walked by me in the parade at Mardigras and my lesbometer erupted.
Maybe I want to look cheap.
I kept looking at the word lesion, it was so close. For a year we were Lebanese. No one likes the word lesbian. I’ve never met a single person female or male who likes the word.
It was the 1990s when we – that gay ‘we’ – pored over film history for evidence that we’d been there all along. There they were. Rock Hudson and Doris Day, whose real name was Doris Kappelhoff.
I knew a girl called Monique Blackadder whose sister was also gay and then her mother turned gay. The Blackadder women, I remember seeing them together on the street in Glebe one day.
This woman I knew put in to the Visual Arts Board for a grant to make a movie and have a scene set inside the vagina.
Could it speak?
No it was this beautiful cave with red velvet linings and ottomans and rugs and secret cupboards and an excellent bar.
And what was the scene?
The idea was there’s a host sitting in the room, or who appears in the room, a woman in her underwear, who invites members of the audience to come up and strip down to their underwear and talk to her. She asked them questions like, How do you feel about your vagina? and What was the best time your vagina ever had? Where were you? Were you alone? If your vagina wanted to speak what would it say? What objects have you put in your vagina? What would be a good idea for a vagina’s day out? Where would she go? Does your vagina have a mind?
Mum read somewhere ten percent of the population is gay. I don’t know how they work that out. Do they count family men who go to male sex workers, or go to beats and then go home to the wife and kids? There are plenty of men like that. They are basically family men and don’t identify as gay, yet they fuck men more than women. Or just as often.
Ten percent you say? All right, now this is a plane of four hundred people.
She half stood in her seat, turning around and said, All right where are the others?
The stewards, I said. Are all gay.
‘They think we are present by some sort of mistake or accident, and that thanks to their guidance and advice this mistake can be put right. . .’ Cocteau
Can you explain the circle kiss to Shannon?
All right. Shannon, we’re going out under the big tree at the back, there’ll be about fifteen of us when the others arrive, and sit in a circle and someone offers to start, and they kiss the girl next to them. They make the kiss as long or short as they want, but it must involve tongues. Girl B then turns to Girl C and kisses her, and so on, till the circle is complete.
Meanwhile the rest of the circle is watching?
Right, right. It can get interesting and very funny too. You should join us.
I don’t know any of these women.
That’s good. It’s actually harder if you know them, if they’re friends, I find.
But you do it anyway.
We sure do.
It was the winter of 1990 and they blew the lights out and sat around on rugs near the fire telling scar stories. Showing their scars in the firelight. Three of the stories involved hitch-hiking, and several happened in other countries. Most though were from childhood.
I don’t like to be competitive, Lara said, but – and pulled up her trouser leg. The mark of Ducati, she said.
To be born gay is to be born under the sign of chaos. There’s a significant problem of knowing who is telling you lies. All at once, through nobody’s fault in some cases, you are being lied to – in that people who love you assume you are something you’re not. It’s hard being raised by heterosexual parents.
She shoves the money in her boot, got money everywhere but in a wallet, it’s in her hat, her sunglasses case, under the car seat, falling from her pockets. It’s a permanent floating economy. The reason she likes men’s coats is because of the inside breast pocket. She folds notes into neat squares and puts them in there. She is also the kind of person who writes on money. Shopping lists and tips for the TAB. Arctic Angel in the fourth at Doncaster.
What did she study?
She went to TAFE and learnt how to handle a chainsaw. Clean it, sharpen it, use it safely. When not to use it. Steelcap workboots. Kept the chainsaw under the bed. She had an allotment in the state forest and went in for firewood. Fifty bucks a ton. Mandy worked with her for a while, throwing the cut wood into the ute.
When I was at college I found this ten dollar note with a mobile number on it. I was walking along the street with two of my girlfriends and they said, Ring the number! Ring it! So I rang the number and a guy answered and we asked him his name and what he was doing – we took turns talking to him, he was OK for a while but then started wanting to know where we were and wanting us to send photos, so we hung up. What can you do. It killed off a beautiful anonymous friendship.
Who cares about whether they have their legs waxed?
She getting power-steering fitted to the Falcon.
I mean if she can’t even get it together as a friend, just because she fancies me, well too bad. She loses on the friendship.
So why did you become a lesbo, Chris?
On my birthday my father hit me over the head with a pair of ballet shoes.
We got to Burning Palms and at the café Sal raised her eyebrows at me twice quickly then turned to a table where two goodlooking local girls were sitting and said to them, May I sit with you?
Cath came in and gorged on a shank of lamb for lunch and when Janice said, ‘Nice hat’, Cath said, ‘Afghani national costume.’ She (Cath) is in love with four women. One lives with an orangutan, two live in Bendigo and are actually on together, so what hope has she got there, and one is a Fast Forward TV star, Magda. And, ditto.
Oh, Magda.
Then years later Magda came out as gay. Cath was onto it!
What does she drive?
Well she used to drive a Corona when she was with Cindy, but now it’s a 1978 HZ Statesman DeVille with mags and pump shocks. Airbrakes for towing.
She’s become a bogan?
She loves it.
I thought she was studying Italian.
She loves university too. She’s doing a thesis on body markings. She’d be interested if you have any tatts or scars.
I don’t have tattoes. Or scars.
Unusual
Thankyou.
Vixen on the Nile
The first image of Vixen. She is a small girl, in a white dress, wearing sunglasses. She’s walking along between her mother and a younger sister. They are holding her hands. There is another sister on the other side of the mother, pushing the stroller. The baby makes no noise. None of them make noise. They all walk along quietly. It’s hot, a hot day in the country town. The girl wearing the sunglasses seems to float between the others, her tread is not as purposeful as theirs. She seems slightly removed, it’s not just the sunglasses, it’s the way she walks.
The second image of Vixen. Now she’s twenty, already married, walks along beside her husband Tony. At this point in the story her name is still Vicky. She walks along in the same quiet way beside Tony. He doesn’t mean to harm her, but he doesn’t like women who fret about stuff and remain busy. This is why, all through his childhood, he had watched the girl in sunglasses holding her mother’s hand, even when she was quite big, watched her walking, and why he later married her. Close up though, she fretted – and he found it hard not to hit her.
Third image. Here’s a photo of Vixen now. She’s been vixen for ten years. Her hair’s bleached and short. The six ear rings in her right ear are the narrative of her life. She found her name in a footnote in Robert Graves’ ‘The White Goddess’, Vixen the Dog Goddess, Vixen Queen of Sparta. She’s a lesbian. She eats breakfast at the Angel before work every day, lives in Melbourne now. She’s working in a council gang – they’re building a playground. She’s the forewoman. They decide where to put the trees. At night she goes home to her caravan in Anna’s backyard. She’s not unhappy. In this photo you can see she still wears sunglasses.
There was a fourth photo in the packet with these but it’s lost. Vixen on the Nile, before she went to do her trade course. Hitch hiked around Egypt and Morocco. It helped that she looked like a boy, and sometimes she travelled with other boys, young men, westerners like herself. Then in the town wrapped herself up, became anonymous, went to the souk. She learnt some Arabic but never said any to us. Someone had taken a picture of her on the boat.
