by Lisa Gorton
over a lake (‘water source’).
One bright spark solved it,
You want quiet? I’ll give you guys quiet, he said.
This is gunna be the quietest bug on the planet,
quieter than anything we’ve done before;
quieter than any soft-spoken woman at a well
shielding her eyes from the glare,
from dreams of water
in the insectless heat of high summer.
Sorrowful
Jennifer Compton
The house is up for tender and will be sold.
Houses always sell – in the end. Even if it is
for the land. Smoking out or treading down
the haunts takes three days, or even longer.
A child always has a father even if the child
must learn to forgive that father for almost
everything. A father is just a man, just one
more member of our clan, one of our skin.
And the mother, a roomy doorway, a pathway,
a vivid gash – making the baby up as she goes
along. If she holds the little one too close to her
it will have to kick hard to make her let it go.
The brother and the sister and the cousin keep
all the secrets of how you used to be. Oh a long
long time ago. In the meeting place impossible
to prevent the family smell from burgeoning.
The tea slops into the saucer, the wine is opened
and poured into that glass of memories, that gift
that was given to a dead woman, before she died.
Some of us drink tea, and some of us drink wine.
The house will be sold, the broken window was
repaired a long long time ago, some of us will
die soon – some of us will turn over in our beds
and do what is needful to call the new one home.
Spiritual
Ali Alizadeh
A place of crosses and bullet shells
sold by auction. Flattened cars
sold by negotiation. Muddy ribcage
to be inspected by appointment
with an undead agent. Vendors
stinking cadavers. Property
of decomposition. A house amazing
-ly decrepit. Did we enjoy prosperity
‘s graveyard? To report
conditions of infestations? No
place like home. It’s me and you
dusting this debris, kicking vultures
out of our craters. Floor boards
become of coffins, curtains
of bloody uniforms. Let’s haunt this house.
from Stages of Balthazar (with a Chorus of Elders)
L. K. Holt
1.
Uncertain grey of early morning,
a quick warm cataract
is the birth of donkey,
now stuck with grass and its mother’s gum, legs bunched
under like unlit kindling
The field totters and rights itself
as the foal stands planted fast,
lapidarian beside a sun that shakes
in its haze, an earth
shirking underfoot
—beautiful he
stirs up still things
Trailing afterbirth regally
the mother-mountain instead comes to him:
strikes him over the head with
a teat to set
his flesh on its parting way
—be ahead of all partings,
as long gone already
like winter in spring;
and be ever-dying in your chosen-poison;
the cut-glass cup that shatters itself
and resounds down the great diminishing;
be—yet know
of its antipode,
nothing-source of your trembling ontology:
Oh I am here! And as such
I assent!
Great love overshoots its end
and shifts back its conception:
Was it then a thin
girl hand reached down to touch his curly brow
commanding in a tiny-headed tremolo
Father let us have him.
—Only know:
this is the animal that never was.
Of course he wasn’t.
But as we gave him space
the poor pure beast persisted
and in this place so white unfenced
he barely needed to exist yet raised his head
Strange, unremarkably so
Anna Fern
They just want to keep talking when I read a normal poem,
but an experimental sound poem
brings a whole bar of drunks to silence.
Loading up the car, I admire the enhanced reflections of scudded clouds on the back window, the sun a bright disc.
Hey, you could watch a solar eclipse on this thing!
The bathroom mirror says I can leave the house looking pretty good,
but when I see my reflection in shop windows I want to go home.
Completing an unremarkable transaction on the phone, the customer says ‘love you’ and hangs up.
On the freeway, it’s best not to think about the possibility of dying.
Try to marvel at how cooperative we can be.
Peak hour, I notice a puff of white fluff from the car in front. Then another. Then a burst of white feathers. A perfect white dove falls plop! onto the road in front of my car, sits up, flies away. I think, the driver of that car is a magician, or maybe an escape artist.
Tonight, I was greeted by the neighbour’s cat on the back verandah.
Proof that when a cat dies, all the other cats redistribute themselves
to fill the empty space.
Street Encounter
π.O.
Napier St., late morning
a blonde woman gets out of a Yellow Cab, pulls the rose
out of her hair, and throws it in the gutter
outside her house.
The old woman
with arthritis gets to the Hoddle St. bus (outside
the Flats); she still knows
how to laugh.
HUNGRY JACKS --- empty.
Small shot / Big Night: Ad for alcohol at the Bus stop
A Vietnamese woman gets out of the bus
: H â T
H2O is the name of a Hand Car Wash.
CALL THIS CUNT 0423451499
ENCORE --- will bring you pizza.
Ad: Red Meat: the Home of Quality
The Workers (on
the footpath) are excavating; pipe on shoulder =========
And piping the whole of the street.
A woman walking 2 dogs.
Cross over; – Which way? ––––– untangles the leash!
CALL O423451499 4 FREE HEADJOB
*! BangerS & Mash, peas $8.
A kid on the footpath (outside
the café) with red boots on, is jumping on all the puddles;
checking-out how
deep
they are.
A woman walking along
the footpath, is draped in the Australian Flag. (On her way
to the Sports ground, i guess). A red rose
in her hair.
An entrance (to a Brothel) called Ladies + Gentlemen’s.
A pretty woman outside.
.............................................
(Not
related).
Over the Hoddle St. Bridge (up
the hill) and everyone’s ))))))))))))))) on bicycles.
The YEAH MAAN RASTA
RAUNT looks very tired; Could do with a good paint job.
Draagon stops me (on
the corner). What you doing? he sez. I tell him
i’m going up the street here, to kill a man, shoot-Up,
run around the block, walk pass some Bouncers,
smile at a Copper, slap a PUNK about,
go back to Vincent’s, and pretend
nothin’ happened.
He sez, why don’t i come round later, and
have a choof.
from Succession
Brendan Ryan
(iii)
Maybe I should have held onto it longer.
I did my best thinking in the dairy.
All those years of dipping hands in hot water,
feeding calves, ploughing on Sundays, chasing pigs.
Now I’m chasing what’s left of this life –
these days I don’t even buy green bananas.
Wouldn’t it be great to do it all again?
Start off with nothing, go into debt, shift a bit
of country. Farmers have hung themselves for less.
I drive the ute over every inch of grass remembering
afternoons turning in the seat, face into dust, checking
the discs, rocks weighing them down, the back
out of joint, bone rubbing on bone. If I didn’t hand it over
he would have left. Some days I get silly notions in my head.
Summer
Nguyen Tien Hoang
Summer. The coach veers to a screeching halt. Divided into two groups, women and men.
I soon would wake up among the infirm.
Molded. A modicum of light.
What hits me then, a sudden
Your face
and ‘Never’, a curl of a sound
and all these years, my whole life end-to-end.
In the grand run-down house, they give me a small cabin
which looks like a single room once taken by Van Gogh
minus the writing desk
The caretaker says he’s Manichean, and will be kind
He hands me a Napoleonic washbowl
Indecipherable years scratched out at the base, saying
Use
For the snow.
The Bat Corridor
Louise Oxley
Or we could leave the house, the pressure
of its walls and light, its hard words
bumbling against the windows,
and go down to the gully where the creek-bank
collapses with the autumn rains, something
you could fall for and put your lips to.
Come on, bring the mattock for the thistles;
hold it between us if you wish.
We won’t know what makes them
unwrap the bandaged thumbs of their bodies
and bear away from the canopy
the moment the day’s balance tips towards night;
we won’t decipher their insect-seeking sonar,
or tally the number of beetles they catch
and the number they miss.
Yet these little crepuscular bats,
flying by hand, led by their petalled noses,
have us mesmerised in the spiky pea,
motionless, transported.
Scouts sent ahead of the night, detachments
from dark like escaped pocket linings,
one is suddenly there, a sharp dip and yaw
over the paddock, then gone; there
and gone, a relay of presence and absence.
They are mystery and guesswork;
their flickering fly-past in the half-light is enough
to make us question the worth of seeing clearly
and settle for partial blindness; enough,
when it’s time to go in, to make you
shift the mattock to the other hand.
The break
Caitlin Maling
To prevent tragedy the brush must be cut an angles,
no less than ten metres between squares.
Here my ancestors planted the buffalo grass
where it burns too hot for the native plants to seed
and we need these squares between land
to stop it sparking all the way to our homes.
After her third institutionalization they suggested
that perhaps my Aunt’s cingulated cortex be severed,
there was too much leaping between lobes.
Now I am the oldest member of my father’s family
not to have undergone inpatient treatment
for whatever fire caused my grandmother’s suicide
and the beating my grandfather gave which sparked it.
I try to hold my line. To be the space
large enough to let it all burn out.
But out of my native climate I arc and arc.
The Brooklyn International Motel
Ella Jeffery
Oily light in the corridors
and the smell of old suitcases
we borrowed from your parents.
You write our room number
on the back of your hand, spread
postcards on rough carpet.
Through the louvers
we watch emergency lights flash,
dragging cars out of fog.
Later, in the dark, you search for the bed.
Crookedness
meets your fingertips.
You grip my bent leg
like a branch
to climb up and sit on.
In other rooms,
people wait for hot water with a hand
in the shower.
From these windows
the world looks nothing like itself.
The ceiling has stolen some low stars.
Come closer.
The slow roll of cities
will turn us home soon.
Across the Pacific
the battered poinciana still stands
outside the house we live in.
The Conscience of Avimael Guzman
John Hawke
All Peruvians are liars – Mario Vargas Llosa
Peru is not a novel – Shining Path graffiti
In grey wind where snow turns to ice, leaving no shelter,
you are murdering the woman who made you feel guilty,
who called you a fascisti. Your fingers at her throat
you examine her pores and her pock-marks,
her teeth broken by a rifle butt
because her parents worshipped an icon of Stalin.
A high fog is breaking in the acquiescent village.
Faces carved from the hard material of nature
reveal no motives. Your hands close on nothing:
wood, weeds or water. Impossible to tell
if these people are servants to force alone
or to your foreign currency of words
translated from another language – the promise
of conquest, the repossession of forgotten land.
Your eyes fix on the face of the woman,
her ideas reduced to manageable flesh and bone.
What else could subdue them but your own
nervous retraction, making a virtue of fear.
Your tongue removing itself into black cavities,
y
our eyes concealed among Indians, watching
the woman’s body slowly digested by insects.
The strings of your nerves drawn shrill
by the need to maintain a single extreme moment,
but that was an error, a point of mathematics:
better to proceed by denial, eating your own words
compacted and swallowed in gutters.
The fabricated voice of the journals dissolves behind you,
Your carefully bound diaries left on a train
now somewhere in a distant country – maybe Russia,
the terminus, the last exit. The veins in your cheeks
crackle red, and you are outside time, awaiting
the moment of ignition. But these are autumn colours,
half-formed mountains at the edge of the world.
The Amazon running to rock. Vast crowds
milling together, resisting the pressure to meld or mesh.
At first there was anger, in the fluttering walls of the throat,
at the sight of those faces barely released from stone,
brown feet roasted over open fires.
Torturers winding back their watches
at the sign of the scar, at the hour of the sentry.
Americans with flaccid hands. The light like shroud-cloth
burning your skin. You made yourself dark,
withdrawing into the shadows of the century, accepting nothing.
You are speaking to yourself thanks to the magic
of an alien technology, which is your own,
or at least helps you belong to your time.
But how it really happens, how the same words recur
in this haphazard way outside of any system
remains a mystery. A voice speaking over the radio
mirrors your own, and you cannot break the habit
of these reflections, cannot even retrace your steps.
An insidious machine is reading your thoughts.
The woman raises her head grotesquely,
and even though you are immersed in shiny blood
there is nothing left to be offered or consumed.
The magic of cheap rhetoric is retained
like a forgotten taste, brushing your tongue.
All the things that you can touch refer to secrecy
or symbols, but is that magic any more than a good card-hand
