by Lisa Gorton
but it must have been much like this
ever since you swaggered out of your wicker cradle
and set about ruling the world; you had the measure
of left and right, art, money, sexual deviation
and all the main current of thought –
yes, I’ll have another splash of the red, why not.
Your garden flourishes outside in fruitful technicolour,
skilfully maintained, of course, by those expert hands
while you see through the cloudy glass of each political party
as well as the seamiest anti-semites and mining thugs,
because you smell the due stink in everything,
the dirt that rots every pocket. Yes, you are bloody well like
those puritans you affect to hate so much, thin churchy rats.
Every phony, you force us to understand, has been fattened up
on taxpayers’ money. No scholar is not a fake,
bar those few honest sods you happen to endorse
or at least agree with, today: those commonly known
as your disciples, docile ephebes and victims,
who wouldn’t answer back in a month of Sundays.
We admire your dense green gardening, drink on,
nary a soul half-daring to answer back or argue – after all
who wants his or her noggin blasted off with a phrase
like fart-warmed thunder? Certainly not yours truly.
We’ll go on laughing then into the deep lull of evening.
After all, tomorrow we’re driving back to the city.
Valleys
Toby Fitch
(After Rimbaud)
Warning
Ainslee Meredith
You slip the latch
and come to me across the ice.
A mouth is a circle lit
up, tapped out, departed.
Electrical haloes, we are
clairvoyant as soft gods,
sliding in boots, red stars on our soles.
We beckon dampness
into our woollens, swoop
an inner corona to the sheet-iron.
The memorial clock has no carillon.
There’s a thread of you
on my collar when the nightwatchman
appears on the edge of the ice
to shout: off, off,
it won’t hold you.
Watching How A Rain Front Stops
Martin Harrison
1
as it starts to do background
having been vertical drop down shutter-noise
leaf-quivering up to your neck in it soaking green
rainy earth-smoke and scarves upon boughs melting into air
melding into background of lost ridges beyond the paddocks
the air-wall of something not seen because you can’t see it
last month’s mirroring creek buried under mist with its blind flow between ponds,
re-growth bush on the far side and old, fenced land this side –
an overarching, moist clearness starting to saturate with blue-grey
2
within pale immensity which has permeated
the way the last ten minutes’ change has occurred –
even the way each molecule of time was like a
snappy, wet branch swept across shoulder, through hair,
as I stepped back onto the verandah –
transformation happening as if marble turns to flesh
new breath on wet skin
while the threatening cloud-weight, bulging
across the range, starts to give way
3
to glinting bicycle spokes of once again look-alike daybreak light
through flecks of leaves, a
sudden spaciousness in the seeming quietness
(brooding quietness) (unstifled breathing calm)
the house two fruiting quince trees the shining spaniel
the loam’s glint, drenched brilliant grass
and hardly to be noticed, the insects’ rasp and saw
re-charging across edges and slopes
in the corners, low down, yet everywhere in
4
inertia and stillness, stilledness, everything happening
it blues the blueness growing,
so cleanly back of the mind we see things we don’t see,
yet they’re seen – a huge, untraceable lightness
remembered as an opening upwards away over there
burnt paper climbing in a chimney’s updraught
granulated sky with the suddenly sun-drenched grey heron picked out in the dam
– poster-paint grey wings, his neck “morning-after-a-snowstorm-
in-Kosciuszko” whiteness –
flapping up in three, four, five alarmed strokes
Western landscapes with retreating horizons
Paul Mitchell
The flurry of fingers on keyboards
spell silence, poets write
too late what time is and professors
dribble down murderous bibs:
There’s no time to wonder
where time’s gone
But the crowd shouts,
Wait a minute!
turns sixty perfect circles
*
Shop bell rings, a knock on the door
Please shut down your power supply
we now own the sun. We bend over backwards
to comply, then bend over some more.
Cash registers ring Hey, listen to this!
police on radios, many countries mentioned
in one breath; one long breath drawn in
but never let out. We want to scream
what we know and release all the mice
from their treadmills. Ordinary indexes
swing through the trees and we hear the creaking
forest floor. Speeches die down to a low hum,
steal flight from everything feathered
and we pick wax stains from our wings.
*
The distant waves
do what they do
and we set alight
photographed catastrophes
When we rebuild, we won’t govern
nor allow others the honour.
We’ll live regretfully, we’ll hoo ha
and dance a pirouette. No one
will notice. We’ll explode in capital
letters all over the footpath,
croon old tunes to young audiences,
then forget how to bow. Once the jeering
dies down, we’ll smile and show
each other scars. The crowd will cry
for more, then search us for knives.
*
Trumpets announce a recurring dream
of snow-capped mountains towering
over a wilderness of ideas.
You’re from the past! a voice
down there cries, but we can’t tell
if it’s for us or the mountains.
This is the kind of confusion
sky must endure all the time.
The weight of the impossible
draped around a bird’s neck
its clouded face dissolving
Once all the leaves are gathered
the mist will clear. We’ll know
our real names and the sun
will be the busiest it’s been
is the myth of circumstantial evidence
&nb
sp; given the gift of happenstance:
There are no further hiding places
now the earth beneath our feet
is ploughed, and the planet’s
axis is the balance beam on which
we take our final bow.
Whale Heart
Josephine Rowe
An album of photocopies of photographs of
the ancestors. A woman whose face is always
scratched out. The interior of the once-beautiful
church. Young men on the deck of a whaling boat
cutting the tail and fins from a captive humpback;
a crude blade attached to a long wooden pole. The
whale still alive while this happens, though weak
enough to be lashed to the side of the boat. The
boys pose shirtless, triumphant around the immense
carcass, their lean arms around each other’s shoulders.
We try to make out which organ lies at their feet.
How big is the heart of a whale? But not one of us knows.
What Frances Farmer Ate
Ivy Alvarez
Nobody knows I’m here. Abscond of old,
this gold hair celluloid loves to capture
silenced by a dowdy scarf.
Into the brown-skinned night-market crowd
I go, buy an egg from someone crying balut!
Crack it open. Inside, the embryo
duckling feathered in soupy broth,
unseeing eye a full stop.
Have you ever had a broken heart?
I drink its liquid with a pinch of salt
and remembered when I wrote ‘God Dies’ one broken night.
Those ballerinas in Russia can’t dance me out of this
idea: I blame nobody for my fall.
I open my mouth,
swallow the contents whole.
When God Dies
Liam Ferney
So let’s get this straight:
We don’t do state funerals –
but what we do do,
is tabloid extravaganzas starring Valmae Beck?
– & hasn’t prison aged the old duck terribly!
Isn’t it enough that we have already
diminished ourselves?
We are fallen with no path to redemption,
why bother with the hairshirt?
The film I will never sees stars George Eastman
hair grown long & saltwater thick
after a summer lazy in the Balearics.
Lensed by Polanski, an Alan Smithee stand in
for Joe D’Amato
& Anna Karina fresh from Godard
goes under the axe blade in this
sub B-Grade faux-Bergman B&W shocker.
& I stick to my guns
because the newspapers in this town
only report reliably
on gossip, slander & opinion.
When You Showed Me the Stars
Gemma White
The moon hung from the sky like a dead thing
You tried to show me the stars again
But this time I was not listening
Your face already turned towards somewhere else
The horizon surrendering one bare tree
Scared white in the moonlight
So we sat in the silent blue
“It’s okay, I half-expected this”
And I wasn’t lying but it still came as a shock
The next morning when you were gone
The tired wire-screen door closed so violently behind me
Red dirt blew in and suddenly it hurt.
Who Took the Bee’s Greed For a Sign
Eugene Dubnov (translated from the Russian by Peter Porter with the author)
Who took the bee’s greed for a sign,
who through a point drew a straight line,
who opened the eyes to malicious things,
who taught rapier to the strings?
Who flattens childhood’s eager grass,
who hopes the dream will quickly pass,
who recollects the border train,
who warns of death and life again?
Window onto the Bay (after Kafka)
Christopher Konrad
Whoever could sit in solitude by a window looking out over the sullen bay and yet people it with sea weary sailors, gulls screeching overhead, terns darting swiftly, deftly; solemnly protecting their cliff-side nests and where swallows dot a dreary skyline like coursing black stars in the daytime; the solitary watcher will never be lonely nor will she ever fail to craft a poem that will hook the reader of fine words with a relentless tackle to be reeled in breathless on a pebbly shore nor will she fail to pierce the mirror of that reader’s illusions with sharp intonations, striated synaesthesia perhaps on a drunken boat, perhaps the corpse of a cross bowed albatross and the dart of her desire (whatever it is; fame, strength, to walk straight on a crooked dune path) will arch over that sheltered rocky cliff: it may drop sharp into the dark green-kelped depth or it may land softly on a ledge swept by the kestrel so vigilant over its crag nest. I am thinking of Kafka in Prague: of his window onto the street.
Women in Classical Chinese Love Poems
Debbie Lim
are always waiting
under moonlight
with cloud-damp hair.
Moth eyebrows signify
their great beauty.
Nothing occupies them more
than crickets and longing –
time passed in cicada-hours,
cups of undrunk tea.
Come evening, their beds grow
full of one-way love.
With no shoulder to cry upon,
instead the candles weep
until cold hours of dawn.
Dew is their abundance.
Sitting, standing, reclining:
these are the classic positions.
From girlhood they have known
grief must be sung, all hope
arrives on a west wind.
Persimmon-lipped, they live
by windows: flowering, fruiting,
composing slowly to stone.
Publication Details
Robert Adamson’s ‘Francis Webb at Ball’s Head’ appeared in the Australian Poetry Journal, vol. 2 (2), 2012.
Adam Aitken’s ‘Old Europe (2)’ appeared in Overland, vol. 208, Spring 2012.
Ali Alizadeh’s ‘Spiritual’ appeared in the Age, 8 September 2012.
Ivy Alvarez’s ‘What Frances Farmer Ate’ appeared in Three Chords and the Truth: Etchings 11, Ilura Press, 2012.
Chris Andrews’ ‘Mateship’ appeared in Contrappasso Magazine,
vol. 2, 2013.
Cassandra Atherton’s ‘P.R.B’ appeared in Australian Book Review, May 2013.
Peter Bakowski’s ‘City workers during morning rush hour, Collins Street, Melbourne, 2013’ appeared (in an earlier version) on the Eureka Street website, September 2012.
Judith Beveridge’s ‘A Dire Season’ appeared in The Warwick Review, vol. 6 (2), 2012.
Kim Cheng Boey’s ‘Chinatowns’, from which this excerpt was taken, appeared in his collection Clear Brightness (Puncher & Wattman, 2012; Epigram Books [Singapore], 2012).
Ken Bolton’s ‘“Hindley Street”: How to Be Perfect There’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, Issue 43.0: Masque, 2013.
Michael Brennan’s ‘Autoethnographic’ appeared in his collection Autoethnographic (Giramondo, 2012).
Lachlan Brown’s ‘Outstretched Arms’ appeared in his collection Limited Cities (Giramondo, 2
012).
Pam Brown’s ‘Closed on Mondays’ appeared in Otoliths, vol. 29, 2013. Acknowledgement: thanks to Iain Sinclair and Art Monthly magazine.
Melinda Bufton’s ‘Did you mean iteration?’ appeared in the Age,
12 January 2013.
Michelle Cahill’s ‘Renovations’ appeared in the Age, 2 February 2013.
Justin Clemens’ ‘Blind Spot’ appeared in Southerly, vol. 72 (2), 2012.
Jennifer Compton’s ‘Sorrowful’ appeared in Australian Book Review, March 2013.
Nathan Curnow’s ‘Prophecy’ appeared in Australian Book Review, March 2013.
Sarah Day’s ‘Dawn’ appeared in the Age, 27 April 2013, and in her collection Tempo (Puncher & Wattman, 2013).
Brett Dionysius’s ‘Black Throated Finch’ appeared in The Disappearing, an app published by The Red Room Company, 2012.
Dan Disney’s ‘A Quick Drink at the Bar’ appeared in the Australian Poetry Journal, vol. 2 (2), 2012. The poem responds to an interview with Robert Creeley, which appeared in Paris Review, no. 44, Fall 1968.
Laurie Duggan’s ‘An Ordinary Evening in Newtown’ appeared in Australian Book Review, April 2013.
Daniel East’s ‘The God of Bone and Antler’ appeared in Contrappasso Magazine, vol. 2, 2013.
Will Eaves’ ‘Dandelion’ appeared in the Age, 2 August 2013.
Ali Cobby Eckermann’s ‘Ochre’ appeared in her collection Ruby Moonlight (Magabala Books, 2012).
Anne Elvey’s ‘To Drag the Saints back from Heaven’ appeared in Meanjin, vol. 72 (2), 2013.
Russell Erwin’s ‘As Flames Were My Only Witness’ appeared in Meanjin, vol. 72 (1), 2013.
Diane Fahey’s ‘On Dreams’ appeared in the Age, 16 March 2013.
Michael Farrell’s ‘Not in Vain’ appeared in the Age, 13 April 2013.
Susan Fealy’s ‘Bringing You Home’ appeared in Rabbit, vol. 6, 2012.
Anna Fern’s ‘Strange, unremarkably so’ appeared in the Queensland Poetry Festival’s Spoken in One Strange Word: Anthology 2013.
Liam Ferney’s ‘When God Dies’ appeared in Rabbit, vol. 5, 2012.
Lionel G. Fogarty’s ‘Induct True Legendary Thrills Bravery’ appeared in Island, vol. 132, Autumn 2013.
