by John Tranter
and carry charmd totes inside this bird of paradox,
informants gushing tedious and jocund, is, honey,
instrumental – the republic, enamelld & reductive,
its interiors’ consigned affiliations, slops of law
and capital’s bulbous, cordial seductions
grant lip service to this beguiling inheritance
(materialist, undetermin’d, in arrears) common sense
depositary and melamine; Wallpaper faces
unletterd & besmirchd by mismated possibility
drift across the onerous couch, a city wakes bedazzld
by the birth of a gildd, stirrupd fricatrice.
The reason for this mise en scène is, you know
’cause we live like worms) & think to like it.
Going to the City,
Karachi 2010
Les Murray
As the tractor-exhaust
vistas of desert sky
resume the south ahead
the farmer and his family
are moving to the city
in debt and crusted cloth
at the river’s speed
close but not together
going and reappearing
under the raft of noon
moving to the city
Reading Laurie Duggan in the Shanghai New Zhen Jiang Restaurant
David Musgrave
If only I spoke Mandarin
like a peasant, I’d say to the waiter
who compliments my crap Hanzi
copy of the restaurant name, ‘I could do better
if only I had prepared’
(great deathbed confessions: if only …).
I’d take my time,
learning how to speak like a child
and not pretend. Great translations
take gall and humility in equal measure.
I feel like putting up my hand
and asking for an extension
or another serving of the eggplant dish.
Meanwhile, Laurie is hacking into Les again;
downstairs, a banshee scream
of a little emperor thwarted.
‘It’s death,’ my aunt says, ‘and he’s
reading your poems.’
Frank Sinatra sings ‘unforgettable’
Thursday April 21. Canberra
Nguyen Tien Hoang
A raven, half a grove of poplars after wake
one receives news that one is gone
morse calls, toll calls and black
I stand on the ground of the displaced, scything the tufts
dawn bells – mathematical series of grey, and shades
after deaths.
Old People’s House washed over with chinawhite fineness
art deco lines and the never-never-mind
a fire, left overnight, burnt to ground, wisps
cataract sky hanging low with a few decoys
one that was my father’s ghost
on the mindsets of the villagers, his kin.
Of calligraphy, a word wrested
itself out of the mace of a young monk
wrote itself a wing and pressed hard a final dot
on the floor of the freshly dug grave, soft as flesh –
goodness returns to goodness – lush waves of wild grass rolling.
Under faded clouds, grains of my childhood
now I enter a Greek Orthodox house of worship in Kingston
swim in the rising tongues
of islands and archipelagos and the upturned seas
bathed in a hologram, sun washing over years and feet
held in caring hands, then
cut, roped, shifted, hanged up, nailed, in, out, under, over
dirt – warm, ever so, breathing
Values Meeting
Jal Nicholl
Down there by the fence is where everybody goes
to have sex. Back to first nothingness,
a soapbox shouting, its own goalkeep,
scores, falling into conception: to posit
the use of fire as a universal right … a different
coat of arms for each insect.
But how combine
individual responsibility with a sense
of community, as the tone, fine-tuned, combines
brightness and power? See, this
is just the discussion we’ve been needing
to have, like, do we believe in love? & if God is love,
• maybe we should be worshipping him?
• & if so, in what way precisely?
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Our Lady of Coogee
Mark O’Flynn
Turning it over
it’s no coincidence
that the famous Tom Roberts painting
Holiday sketch at Coogee, 1888
preserved here in postcard form
is also the same view of the very fence post
where Christ’s mother appeared to the people of Coogee
on those heated, sunstruck afternoons.
In the painting no one on the beach is nude.
People stroll the shore under parasols.
Cliffs in the distance, minus bathing baths.
Impressionism captures haze so well.
No shark has vomited up a tattooed arm in the aquarium.
No distant world wars. Not even a ravenous gull.
No cynical fence post, either, to deflect
the sunbright glare of Coogee’s vision splendid.
It is as if the figure that might be Our Lady (dressed
in black) is picnicking,
surveying distant figures across the hot sand.
The sky beautiful as a bruise,
the waves petrified tulle frozen in paint.
Yet motion is what’s wanted
as Our Lady of Coogee finally stands up,
black as pitch,
brushes crumbs from her holy shroud
amidst the fish and chip wrappings,
the apparition’s vandalised fence post,
and opens her arms in wonder
at the miracle of real estate.
Four Thirteen
Ella O’Keefe
kicking in windows like old tvs
lasso some hose to scatter stray
hosts of morning tv, the kind
who’re evangelical about anything
the day began with the question
of how to fold the labour
– simultaneous declaration
of necessary breeze –
suburban magnolia puts on a show
‘on you frills lose their cuteness’
our street lacks verticality
thus becomes a drive by
optimistic housetags
e.g. call it
FLORIDA
& the cubist palm trees
will grow in Moonee Ponds
living close to the tracks
just to know things are going
(or that you can get going)
these things that are the same as
looking at your own handwriting
go upstairs to practice baton twirls,
a double-hander flag routine
& other choreographed delights
radio waves stirring the pond
where ducks collect surface dross
switching easily between
air & gel
atinous water
with an eye to the cinematic
a swan lands gracelessly
spraying mud, bits of weed
but making me think of a version of Zeus
as rendered by Rubens
(all white feathers pressed
indecently on creamy thighs)
poor Leda not yet
hip to the ruse
Reconfigured
Paul O’Loughlin
So when I went out of the bathroom I knew that no one was there.
So I went out naked, dripping wet, it didn’t matter.
So I was surprised when I was decapitated by the ceiling fan.
So I was upset when I was castrated by the bread knife.
So it was very hard to understand when I was disembowelled by the corkscrew.
When the television curled up inside my vacant abdomen,
it was not only extremely uncomfortable but it was also incredibly hard to watch the six o’clock news.
Only then did I realise my error in purchasing at a heavily discounted price the wide screen TV that was all the fashion.
The linoleum spinning, coiled round my feet, I tripped and fell.
Retarded, I threshed on the floor raising weeks of unswept dust
curling up in hurricanes, gouging emptiness into the walls.
Disturbed cockroaches fled in plagues to the safety of my only safe earlobe
with a flower pot hanging metallically by an ear-ringed mutilation.
The abdominal TV was vomited in my terror through a torn oesophagus
while its news presenter sprayed litres of insect spray on the forty-thousand cockroaches nestling cosy by my eardrum.
Only then did I notice that I could not notice what I noticed because the notice was pinned far away in the kitchen on the fridge.
The kitchen, my enemy, scalded me with its water, burnt me with its stove
and soaked me in the chatter and clatter of frying pans and saucepans.
Sugar stirred cunningly in every sweet delight in the pantry
in an unflattering eagerness to rush me into a diabetic extreme.
The power of the fatty food and the lure of the lounge
sent me spiralling into inaction, baldness and middle age,
severed from my reality by an unkind addiction to a comfortable life in a suburban brick and tile lawn-mowed masquerade,
in a piteously unwanted prosthetic of a globally embedded city, flamboyant in fashion’s leading skirts.
And the notice, it went coldly, refrigerated as it were in temperatures Antarctic.
It told me its ol’ story, flapping beneath a dreary plastic butterfly magnet:
buy some milk, put the cat out, duck when the ceiling fan spins,
sweep the floor, spray the cockroaches, mow the lawn,
avoid the knives and the corkscrew and don’t turn on the TV.
I replaced my head and my balls, and other bits and pieces wherever they fitted best.
I coerced the TV back to its allotted place, and pontificated to all household items to be reconfigured to suit the decor.
So I went back into the bathroom naked, dripping wet, it didn’t matter, I knew that no one was there.
I love
Ouyang Yu
I love work even on weekends particularly on weekends
I love work on holidays
I love work after making love after eating a good meal after drinking a good drink
I love work trying to let other things rake my brains
I love work even when I am with people who talk rubbish
I love work even in sleep even when I am in a dream even when the dream sweats me
I love work making people happy making people forget me
I love work right back to the seventies right back to the fifties right back
I love work in deepest pleasures my mind bent to its inner curve
I love work when night straightens its back and stands
I love work filling the gaps of fallen teeth
I love work seeding the future with an irretrievable me
The Red Gurnard
Louise Oxley
Silence is argument carried on by other means
—Che Guevara
Against an outgoing tide
he comes up sluggish and sideways
like a reluctant No,
breaks the surface
and spins under my arm,
his shocked skin flashing orange.
There is only unhinged mouthing
and raised hackles; his panic
is a slow internal bleed.
I know who he is:
shape-shifter from a life
with other rules for beauty,
for movement and sensation;
a wet and breathless life.
We’re spellbound:
I only have eyes for his eyes,
black from the grottos,
his faltering fins,
his undersea sail in tatters,
his sequined sides,
his crown of spines.
Kiss me now, he says,
his argument perfectly formed.
A Manual of Style
Geoff Page
for Bernie McGann
Gruff at times but not ill-mannered
A hint of old-time dancing but
the flattened fifths as well
Laconic, yes, but savage too
Angular, with no glass broken
Sad though far from sentimental
Aged but never out of date
Metallic but with friendly alloys
Unique but straight on down the strait
Legato, yes, for preference
but still there at the turns.
The low notes hoarse the high no less so
Harmony remembered and euphony forsworn
The late-night book of smoky clichés
always pushed away
Minor third without the third
as T. Monk used to say
‘This is the Only Place...’
Eddie Paterson
THIS IS THE ONLY PLACE I’VE EVER HEARD ANYONE PLAY THE SOUNDTRACK FROM GHOSTBUSTERS sadly my dad is not rapping in hebrew with his rainstick, it just sits there next to the pile of newspapers we have … i spent good money on that thing, do you want bubblegum for your cough? is cute & we have fought twice, which isn’t bad. (both times about her mobile.) my results were ok, but not perfect. there is a castle here. grandma is convinced a MUSLIM woman is cutting the heads off her gardenias. she is covered in a layer of what appears to be fine dust. or ash. perhaps i’m a marxist? this is not like coming out in one he was the bigfoot & he & neil diamond were selling an album they’ve made on garage band i went to see kevin johansen play for a second time. drunk a lot of mate. haven’t got a job. today i helped a man catch his runaway donkey. but i had better start from the start, everything else in tokyo seems to be just as good as
their toilets, it’s weird to be in a place with no bogans tomorrow we’re going to disneyland! my boss watched centrestage … she tell me to write this movie … i want a nice bed linen … i loved so much to stay the wife … i want that here in japan i am an old man. & you are a beautiful chicken. CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!! this marks one week without an infection. no pus for you! we are professional blueberry pickers. we are now professional apple pickers. sorry for my lacadazeical approach & spelling of lackadazecal i am the quote dirty dirty child who doesn’t succeed & hasn’t made the movie of the year. love, john-hair-implants-didnt-work-galliano o i think i can be famous … but i feel tired … please lets go shopping i miss you lik
e it is winter here.
Ripples under the Skin
Janette Pieloor
See the people crying in the streets.
The streets are rivers. They’re jumping in.
Who is there calling?
See the ripples under the skin,
the terrible truths, the people’s houses
tumble into the waves, their children
on the window sills, food still on the table.
The people aren’t ready. They’re still
in the uncurling, in a scene dark and
beautiful.
Cyclone Plotting
Felicity Plunkett
The danger is that we’ll drink this one quick drink too fast. The
danger is that one vodka beckons, flirting, to the next. The danger
is that, catching vodka’s white wave, I could spill, purple. The danger is
that I will become a nest of Matryoshka dolls, falling out of myself. The danger is that
your umbrella, stripping its black veils one by one, will spoke my eye. The
danger is that the rain, hard, will fill the streets with people, pushing. The danger
is that with the smallest shove I’ll miss my train. The danger is
that your every gesture, like a Cocteau film, must be deciphered. The danger is that
if I’m not lifted out of this hot storm everything will open, slippery and roof-shaking.
The danger is that I have invented you, and your hip bumping mine promisingly. The