The Best Australian Poems 2011
Page 5
yawning from the bedroom, so I’ll leave the story
there, put the garbage out and the kettle on, and
go in to the love of my life. My witchetty’s at half-
mast already. Bon voyage-nuit!
Warning
Johanna Featherstone
In the bay-window’s corner,
a cobweb has come unstitched;
time dangles, is unturned at the
beginning of a cosmic fall;
after six months of mail we are
to meet. Face-to-face existence
promises miraculous guilt
for the experience. Proof
that what is natural is trouble.
Gli ultimi zombi
Liam Ferney
for Ezra
What it must be to be buried on an island
of the dead like a character
in some Uwe Boll zombie rave up.
The back alleys stuffed to the ceiling
with overpriced pepperoni pizzas
and the stench of fish soaking damp laundry.
On the Grand Canal the vaporetto lists
a city park drunk stumbling
at every oversubscribed port of call.
Like cattle at the famous Roma sales
the befuddled subjects adoringly
compliant servants to the tyranny of the viewfinder.
Fluff
Toby Fitch
Milling about the city’s nightlife,
she threads through the quilted crowd
who rug themselves up, flattering
each other’s leathers and wispy flair.
She stands on the fringe like a lost
strand of hair, listening to the needles,
the knit-knot words, the pinning-up of
phrases – cottoning on to their lingo.
She’s ready to be brushed aside
when some guy’s quip poufs her up
like a pillow, though she responds by
chewing a ball of fluff because, for
some fuzzy reason, she wants his hide,
sewing what’s left of her heart to
her sleeve – a threadbare cliché that
his quiff-like puns pierce like
a pin-cushion. With conversation
wearing thin, his hand reaching for
her velvet, she remembers the lint
piling up in the corners of her
apartment; the frayed curtains she’s
never closed on her view of the city.
She can see it now from her bedroom
window: the silhouetted skyline, a
tattered hem; the stars, little white
cross-stitches forming a sky of blind
eyes; and rolling over the buildings,
the moon, a silver ball of wool,
unravelling.
Long Weekend, 2
William Fox
The elephant is the comparative immaculateness
of the empty rooms at my parents’ holiday house.
Arriving at any such place in breezy, bayside night
will present an identical scene; dull, dormant light
flickering alive the photo frames, fanned-out old magazines,
specially made beds with directions to extra linen,
remote controls with channel guides handwritten
in tentatively proud script, a fridge filled by bare essentials
& the fresh stuff you know yr mum snuck in the day before.
There is a poignancy in such presentation I can barely endure.
Ostensibly I just chuckle or say the minuteness makes me grin.
Within, what recurs inexplicably is the thing Thomas Jefferson
said about the art of life being the avoidance of pain. I know
my mum got catharsis from cleaning every corner of my grandfather’s
joint when he passed away. I don’t presage a speck
worth shifting when my parents move on. What will be left
down here except a stasis of lovingly arranged invitation?
Sometimes I envisage it being best if I were to never shed light
on such cordiality again, but just to let it decay behind
thick blinds matted with dust only airborne to opportunistic
burglars on the most sun-filled & silent weekdays.
The Suns Fall at Zero
Andrew Galan
The zebra measured shimmering lines to a yellow slippery dip, pacing service station skeleton awning –
I considered a sideboard where it lay in the street,
counted five long dashes as a girl reflected cool against gushed drainage,
pink fibre folds hid under happy green wrapping lying about her closed eyes.
Someone had abandoned a white, black-wheeled tractor; its blue bucket matched her bikini top.
‘Should we really be where these tents are in our blue and white swimwear?’
I read and ignored a drip from boned eave.
She lay out on the tarmac, a bikini sphinx, her swimmers eaten by movement over
the waiting slippery dip, against a purple galaxy, with the shadow of Ned Kelly’s horse hiding out.
At her waist things had gone awry,
it was at this point you could note, if not distracted by riveted cement rampart,
blackened buildings which stood dilapidated; ink splatter encroaching to slick surfaces.
She lay, legs an easy knee calf-high cross – out, owning the rigid grip of gutter
below she mirrored still,
under fallen arm white dashed tar trembled the plastic curl of the slippery dip,
flames boiled from where the people had been,
I saw charcoal smear constellations; one green pylon blurred aqua where it met the rip,
written armed line, hip under string, cappuccino skin,
bellicose consumption, between bitumen and shoulder and neck, a small echo of the coming storm.
Her swimsuit cup matched the tractor’s bucket: it was an unusual coincidence.
‘Should we really be where these tents are in our blue and white swimwear?’
The words slowly dissolved as stars jammed from the other side of the wall,
only where the cleaner worked had anything come through.
The far right corner saw the slim frames of the city bombed out of the wilderness.
Plants still lived in the drain,
heavy lines of crossing fled from her hand into froth where she threw up the familiar pool.
Forefront steel points loomed away gold flares sank,
I wondered why someone left the dining room cabinet in the middle of it all, let it be graffitied,
and I realised that the building was just bones, I could see the storm.
A few more suns fell ‘Why was she the only one running?’ A few rusty bloody, hung on.
The Sum and its Parts
Angela Gardner
Not a rerun of Star Trek:
The Next Generation or a reload of I
Love Lucy but the day in my head replayed
and the nervous system closed up
– when I got to the burial ground
summer had already come looking in
to the light-filled hole
the child on his rocking horse, distinct
in his world, horn and ears alert.
Did I say this was a love story?
The pressure of new sap faced with love
embodied: vapour-clouded, breathless.
When Actaeon went into th
e forest
it was full summer, all that tells of the season
said differently through sunshine.
So late in the year. We step through this
curtain, to crouch, where last night’s windfall
lies bruised upon the grass
the upturned forest in sad decline, the pity of it,
so meekly arriving, dog-helmeted as you
and I console ourselves.
The problem is not flesh and bone but viscera,
the shining consciousness it maintains
as beauty, hard above the poisoned blood.
Absurdity Rules
Carolyn Gerrish
sometimes being cheerful isn’t easy
that ability to smile at someone else’s child
throwing a public tantrum & having the discipline
not to abuse the bus driver when he’s
forty minutes late & trying not to flinch
when someone says of a recently deceased relative
– I wonder what wonderful adventures she’s having –
no your default position is a sweet dour pessimism
where the soundtrack of your days is a Brahms
string sextet but you can bring out the hilarity
in bleakness like the Hanged Man turn everything
on its head so even the worst calamity can be
laughed at
my way of laughing
is to tell the truth
so the only real catastrophe occurs when your pen
runs out while trying to record a Chaser Moment
& those belle epoque Rupert Bunny women clutching
fans & roses & staring existentially into the night
could they be waiting for a take-away pizza? then
while the lights are off an auteur projects a
fictional film of your life-in-progress but
the plot is vertiginous the colour palette
confusing (even rainbows have doppelgangers) the
protagonist is unlikeable & it’s no joke when
she misplaces her sanity then discovers her soulmate
is a pedophile serial killer
comedy is a tragedy
with a happy ending
Leftovers from a pirate party
Jane Gibian
OFFER: very small
dog coat Lewisham
4 used netballs
Old goth/punk clothes,
size 12–14
WANTED: Heat mat
(for hermit crab aquarium)
Inflatable Santa – giveaway or loan
OFFER: Three-arm chandelier
with frosted glass –
needs rewiring
LEFTOVERS FROM
A PIRATE PARTY
Jade plant from Mascot
gone already!
RE-OFFER: Disposable diapers
for small cat/dog
3 vacuum cleaners,
no wands
WANTED: 7 fence palings
LARGE CONTAINERS
FOR HOME BREW
To the Lady who I gave
Sony Trinitron TV to in Feb!
OFFER: Yabby family
of five in Glebe
Mixed Things From
My Pantry: Riverwood
Two shopping bags
full of stuffed bears etc
An Uncertain Future
Geoff Goodfellow
I was sitting in my car opposite
the Adelaide Magistrates Court
waiting on a change of lights
when i first saw her
she was in her early twenties
had on a black sleeveless top
& a denim mini skirt
her arms & legs were heavily
tanned & she wore strappy sandals
her hair was bottle blonde –
& as she crossed in front of me
blowing out a stream of blue
cigarette smoke
i noticed her black roots
complimented her chipped & broken
front teeth
she was at least seven months pregnant
the lights changed
i moved off slowly –
into my own uncertain future.
Dreams and Artefacts
Lisa Gorton
after the Titanic Artefact Exhibition
I.
Patiently, ticket by ticket, a soft-stepped crowd
advances into the mimic ship’s hull half-
sailed out of the foyer wall, as if advancing into
somebody else’s dream –
the interior, windowless, where perspex cases bear,
each to its single light, small relics –
a tortoiseshell comb, an ivory hand-mirror,
a necklace pricked with pin-sized costume pearls.
They might be mine – at least, things loosed
from a dream I had, off and on, for years.
They have suffered nothing, these things raised
from a place less like place than like memory itself –
II.
Where the sea is
worked back upon itself in soundless storm,
a staircase climbs.
Its scroll of iron foliage grows in subtler garlands now –
it is the sea’s small
machinery of hunger, feeding on iron, makes these
crookedly intricate festoons,
as if it were the future of remorse – Piece by piece,
the staircase returns
to the conditions of dream.
III.
In the next room, they have custom-built a staircase.
A replica, reinvented from a photograph,
it leads nowhere – or it leads to the house of images
where nothing is lost. A clock without a mechanism
adorns its first-floor landing, hands stopped at that minute
history pours through. We forgive things
only because we own them – This is a staircase
not for climbing, its first step strung with a soft-weave rope.
IV.
It is raining as I leave –
long rain breaking itself onto the footpath,
breaking easily into the surface of itself
like a dream without emblems, an in-drawn shine.
Overhead, clouds build and ruin imaginary cities,
slow-mo historical epics with the sound down,
playing to no one.
Flying Foxes
Robert Gray
In the night, the gorging begins
again, in the spring
night, in the branches
of the Moreton Bay figs,
that are fully-rigged
as windjammers, and make a flotilla
along the street.
And from the yard-arms
are strung clusters
of hanged sailors,
canvas-wrapped and tarred –
these are the bats, come
for the split fruit, and dangled,
overturned where they land.
It is the tobacco fibrils
in the fruit they seek,
and those berries, when gouged,
are spilt, through the squall
of the crowd, like
a patter of faeces
about the bitumen. This amidst
the cloudy shine
&nbs
p; of the saline
streetlamps. In the ripe nights
the bats fumble and waste
what they wrest –
there’s a damp paste
upon the road,
which dries to matted
sawdust, soon after the day’s
steam has reared; it is scraped
up by the shovel-load.
The bats are uncorked
like musty vapour, at dusk,
or there is loosed a fractured
skein of smoke, across
the embossed lights
of the city. The moon is lost,
to an underhanded
flicked long brush-load of paint.
You think of the uncouth ride
of the Khan and his horde,
their dragon-backed shape
grinding the moon
beneath its feet.
And then, of an American
anthem, the helicopters
that arrive with their whomp whomp
whomp. I’m woken
by the bats still carrying on
in the early hours,
by the outraged screech,
the chittering
and thrashing about
where they clamber heavily,
as beetles do, on each other’s backs.
They are Leonardo
contraptions. They extend
a prosthetic limb,
snarl, and knuckle-walk
like simians, step
each other under
and chest-beat, although
hampered with a cape. In sleep
I trample the bedsheet
off, and call out
‘Take that!’ (I am told),
punching the pillow in the heat.
I see the fanged shriek,
and the drip
of their syringes,
those faces with the scowl
of a walnut kernel.
It’s some other type of bat
I think of: these, in books,
where I looked them up,