by John Tranter
Boofhead flummoxed, or
Boofhead stymied,
Starr crying or
having a thought …
looks back, looks back,
astonished at that innocence.
Volatile Condensate
Ken Bolton & John Jenkins
My dream once for the north wing of the building –
a vast mural of Fred and Wilma, done
‘after Poussin’ – is on hold. Unregretted.
What do you say to Jackson Pollock in a lift?
Obviously, the numbers climb higher and higher,
and expensive graffiti gets pulled out of the wall
at midnight, and carried away on a truck. You say
Que sera, sera and duck. Straightening up, slowly,
I explain my other dream to him: Géricault’s portrait
of the back of Delacroix’s head in old age.
Jackson laughs – ‘Like mine of Bill de Kooning
aged ninety!’ he says. Downstairs we throw the spray cans on the fire – watch them explode.
Others in the Town
Neil Boyack
for Newstead, Victoria: 3462
She is walking on frost at dawn
beside the highway that runs through the town
Over the bridge with a full river below
With black gloves on, she is planning for the town
Picking up a flattened beer can
Putting it in her pocket
then thinking of the four boyfriends she had
before she met Bill and settled down
Tucker Ross Bonici Smith
and then Bill Menangartowe
who gave her the horsewhip
that he plaited with the three king browns
the ones he killed especially
how many men have killed things … especially, she thought
the whip hangs on the wall of the long-drop
with the view of the mountain
where ghosts maintain fame
through legendary gambling debts
bestiality
leaning on the shovel at
shallow graves of native men
Bill Menangartowe is home
dreaming of new teeth
so he can eat Harcourt apples and his wife’s dry roast beef
that he complains of
there he is
waking
pushing himself from noisy bed springs
recognising his father’s thumbs
as he pushes shells into the gun
crows and lambs sewn together in the distance
are the crows complaining?
have the lambs had their eyes pecked out?
Bill walks barefoot across the floor and out the door
Into work boots striped by slivers of dawn
He hunts for rabbits
the old-time meal
a recipe that only the older women know
from years ago
when mothers were few around here
wondering
over cups of tea punctuated by sounds of a sparrow hunt
how tiger snakes got into linen cupboards
and how people were allowed to swim nude in the Loddon river
when the town has a policeman
When the moon is up her house is quiet
she can’t sleep though
there is too much to plan
for the others in the town
on their fourth new start at a life
And those still on their first, awake,
from the night before
gambling online
through cups of tea
that are made
when the internet connection drops out
She imagines the town as blue feathers
and all the children safe under wings
But a south-easterly pushes cloud into the moon
and her pillow goes dark
the wind pushes the colossal gum tree that saw the start of fences
saw white rapes
black births
heard the secret songs
and all the fights that followed
its trunk, full of wire, beer bottles, and horseshoes
an unknown baby skeleton
the wind pushes at the tree
and it falls in the dark
without a sound
Clarity of the word
Peter Boyle
to cut; to run; to stay in a burrow underground; to impersonate a tree in autumn; to approach the world with an open heart and an infinite capacity for disappointment; nm rapturous dismay; joyful ingratitude; nf a type of boxing match used for divination or to contact the dead; a woman who lives off the immoral earnings of more than three husbands; (S Am) a pitchfork with an angel’s heart; as in (Cu) the termites have crawled into the piano, or (DR) he who drinks the sea must nurse the oyster; (RPL, Chi) unworthy of entering a shopping mall even in a cyclone; (Per, Ec) gifted with fingers small enough to befriend dustmites; (Mex, Col, Ven) not to be trusted, not to be believed, also patron saint of fish; (as a colour) yellow, orange, red or brown; (ornith.) a seabird with golden wings and hard onyx beak or a small bird afraid of swamps seen only during ill-omened festivities; from Arabic, a tree that befriends doomed travellers; also see medieval Latin, a table for unwritten books; (colloq.) to succeed, to fail, to cough, to lose one’s way etc.
The Sublime
Kevin Brophy
at eighty-six and ninety-one they are still together
more or less
and greet me at the door
as if I am the punchline to a joke
they were just recalling
my mother staggers sideways in the drive
my father reaches for a wall, a rail, an arm
with the urgency telephones demand
they know what it is now
and do their best to hide this knowledge from us
agreeing to be forgetful and ever more frail
they can’t help grinning at the picture they must make
they expect to be driven to appointments
they say are medical or therapeutic
my mother toys with the idea of a new knee
my father trembles to the tiny drum machine
beneath his ribs
and their eyes go cloudy, ears a solid silent blue,
their mouths half open to let out the unspoken
because they know what it is
and now they want it more than this old world
the small days come, flowers in the garden,
drugs delivered to the door, postcards in the box outside
she has a sturdy stick to hold down against this earth
tapping as if to wake someone down there
a warning they are coming
In my phone
Pam Brown
for Gig
you said we didn’t but we did
have telephones
in seventies share houses,
bulky bakelite telephones
ringing as often
as Frank O’Hara’s
and Brigid Berlin’s did, a decade earlier
we had honour systems –
add phone calls
to a running total
in a column under your name,
like a boardgame score,
pay up
when the household bill arrives
*
I could ring to say
so
metimes I imagine you
in a Max Ernst collage
(Une semaine de bonté)
there’s a woman reflected
in an ornately gilded mirror
behind an open door,
you’re the other woman
guiding a feathered bird-man
into a high Edwardian
drawing room –
he carries a tooled leather bag,
he seems to be a doctor,
‘mind how you go doctor’ you say
‘just step over
the apopleptic monkey, doctor’
doctor feathered bird-man
brings sleeping elixir,
an anodyne
*
in sleep
I’m filled with thought,
my dream constructed
not by surrealism
but by Slabs R Us,
solid, solemn, grey
half asleep, half dreaming,
a phone is ringing,
I hold the earpiece close –
friends pollute the swoony hours
with caring
in a poetry world
everything is providential,
or not,
and, sometimes,
just life on hold, call waiting,
like Tennyson’s poetic
reading now, quiet,
a newer title –
I always skip
redacted poems,
the crossings-out seem obvious
and attention seeking –
you would agree?
your number’s in my phone,
I could call to ask.
tick
Joanne Burns
last drinks at the
friendship bar evanescence
is my pashmina no apology
for the lack of a biography
anyone could see it
coming runes in the fettuccini
is one way of looking at it i
suppose all the decades of
romping in the hay production
figures never disputed now it’s
time to leave the wagon to
serenade its own wheels how
black the glossy stars this enchanted
evening mario stranger than anything you
could call terrestrial bow ties
How the Dusk Portions Time
Michelle Cahill
Then one evening, after the gallery, hung with invisible
abstracts, you take me apart to flesh the miniatures:
a fleck of craquelure, speckles of mascara from my
shadow eyes, already panda-streaked.
I fail to notice how you slip the pieces in your coat pocket.
Distracted as I am by wolf hands, the hairs in your cleft
neck. You’re not, but you might be, up yourself, I think,
skating across the vestibule floor.
How the light divides the dream, menacing, promising
shyness or indifference, I cannot tell, though it amounts
to the same verdict. Is that what you mean about pleading
guilty as the fig trees stir, balmy in winter?
Some evenings are this fragile. Rainbow lorikeets court
the soft crumbs, a magpie takes off with a crust, clouds
skim over the Finger Wharf, footsteps trip in the Domain
where the pine scent lingers as lips:
ours for a flower moment, the botanist’s pinnate rose
is a name calling to its mute echo. Bats skip and loop
the legible sky in their quiet frenzy like involuntary
kites between metallic and neon spires.
So dusk emulsifies desire, or maybe it’s the reverse
– we are tenants of this periphrastic end. Office cubicles
half-lit, ladder the sky, turning their discretionary gaze
to what’s sketched by the carbon ink.
the lights are on
Grant Caldwell
the irony of green rain
is not lost on you
the rank apocalypse
stalks the landscape
spreadable butter for your convenience
where would we be without
your depressive head
mocks you from its alcove
cars whizz both ways
the question remains
like a daytime tv show
where someone you’re sure
is yourself in disguise
makes predictable jokes
laughed at by machines
on empty
John Carey
On a hot day the North-West Plain is so flat it isn’t.
The horizon curves and stirs like a wisp of moustache.
Animals burrow that aren’t meant to burrow.
Prey walk past their predators under a white flag.
The eyes of roadkill are left to boil in their sockets.
The can of beer is dry when you open it.
A cigarette is rolling another swagman.
The motor smokes nervously before you start it.
The mobile phone sweats, whimpers and croaks.
The devil is on holiday in Tasmania.
The paddock on the left is Texas.
The seat of government is the only tree.
We’ll take a rest-stop at the next mirage.
Is it far? It has been. Are we there yet? No.
Magma
Bonny Cassidy
At almost noon.
He sees only figures no game.
They clap. Céline has the ball.
He raises his palms, then lowers them.
Just go, just go. Clap, laugh, go.
Their shadows curl
under them: falling leaves.
The ball hovers above the beach, eclipsing the sun a few inches.
He eases back
he becomes sand.
ms marbig No. 26 16
Julie Chevalier
another team needs restructuring
her boss seeks rejuvenation
he likes a shiny new worker
in glossy black accessorised with chrome
she’s the facilitator who holds the coalface together.
strong jaw teeth without stains
she click-clacks his documents
past your use-by date, he
exposes her in public
whips her back into an angry V.
her rusty assistants jam
printers, shredders, fax machines
We begin building that which cannot collapse because it will have to have been built as if it had already fallen
Justin Clemens
Gary was being extremely annoying with the glue-gun, as a parody
buffoon gets stuck to the routine and then can only separate
by ripping off his own souls while his kaleidoscopic pantaloons
spiral outta control like a flotilla of combi-vans
driven by acid-hippies through the violet hill-deserts of ma mind…
do you too smell the blood of a nationalised energy foundation?
You have to keep the abecedaria flying, or, if not flying, at least floppily erect!
(uh-oh, here comes that dynamic psychotherapy again, Gwyneth,
you’re for it now! It’ll make you springen, springen wiff ’appenis fer sure,
as the flashers go off with epilepsy-inducing arrhythmia.)
Please don’t bother me with your body any longer, I’ve enough
of orgasms and orgies to last me ten thousand lifetimes,
and it’s a better bet to go pale over a flaccid biopic of a pallid poet,
because my wound-dark nerve-endings are just sooooo sensitive they quiver
at the merest trilling of those much speculated-upon boronic microparticles –
Fargh! your vulgar disinhibiting fanfare can be only dreadful noise to me!
Picasso
Sue Clennell
Wrapped in bulls and balls,
squiggle me macho.
Seek out my women,
how I make their
bums, breasts and bellies
fold up into furniture,
gore them into dripping tears.
I am potted, baked dry,
moulded by España’s rough hands.
If you are woman don’t catch the
attention of my one red eye.
Four Lines by Ezra Pound
Jennifer Compton
The New Zealand poet settled to his coffee at the Astoria in Lambton Quay
kindly hunched against the bitter wind at an outside table because although
he hated us when smokers ruled the world he pities us these days of leprosy.
He spoke of our late mutual friend from Lecce who, whilst living in Venice,
paid his respects to Ezra Pound on occasion – as one would – the poet sunk
below the waterline into the clarity of incommunicado and monkish accidie.