by John Tranter
possessed me to announce I love these cocktails I could drink them
all night long, or who says cask red wine’s so rough let’s have another
this is fun, it’s Penny’s big night out, it’s Roger’s last day with us
let’s make sure we all remember while the café staff are laughing
looking on and counting money thinking ambulance or police
They’re waking up and cannot face the ugly thing that’s in the mirrors
that will catch them with its mug the simulacrum of a plastic drink cup
crushed, its two small pissholes in the snow glued somewhere
next to burst capillaries’ cadastral lines around what was a nose
and will those tom-toms never cease
they’re waking up if this can be called waking up instead of
resurrection from the dead and hearing noises coming out of furry caverns,
burred with algae, fungus, vacuum-cleaner sacks of dust and ashes
blurred with single malts and rotgut saying who’s a clever boy
and who’s a clever clogs and whimpering I know
I didn’t mean it while massed choirs shout You did
Across the bedrooms of the nation they are crying o my god and omigod
and omg and g almighty Christ on earth and on a bicycle what happened
where was I when that truck hit me and I thought among this blasphemy
my misery must end why are you with me if not helpmeet, friend
to guide me through the labyrinth of sin, disgrace and worse, insult
my colleagues and employer and I have to leave for work now
They are speaking when they finally untie the Windsor knot that was
their tongue and making words out of the alphabet that’s mixed up
saying Gertrude Steinways stone me, and the crows and all the raptors
Nevermore-wise as they hold their safety razors and attempt to shave
the hairs of dogs that stick out like whatever who remembers,
are those feet below me mine what face is this I have to look good
for the funeral somebody’s, mine today
They’re lying sweltering in their odour hell what perished here last night
what am I doing in this bed that keeps on moving who’s that body here
beside me, they are saying this is rough hold on I’m falling through the universe
again this bed is slipping into space what is that figure on the carpet,
that’s no painting that’s my husband that’s my wife I think I’m married
Who are you where am I now how did we meet o god not you
They’re making whoopee in the barrel that is going over Bridal Falls,
Niagara, Wollomombi, Apsley Cataract, a dog a snake a wildcat
getting friendly as they tumble into mateyness and once again with feeling
to the top, here’s Mister Sisyphus he’s going up again
the warrior scuttling up the heights to that lone pine
that’s every morning in the bedrooms of Australia
Trophy Getters
Craig Sherborne
Me and the young guys cough how women
flirt crude just like us.
We are the few who get them,
that’s our boasting.
We know they want to love us heartfully
but have hard bargains from which we shy.
We call one over like an interview –
her of us as much as us of her.
‘Far too homely,’ we smirk
into our laughing-gas drinks.
‘She’ll make someone a nice first wife.’
Wife’s not the point, we jibe:
tonight we’re trifling from behind our Marlboros.
She is a form of money. We four would divvy her
if we were kinked that way.
The most neon our eyes can be,
the most muscled our smiles,
must lever her into decision:
is she Brad’s tonight or mine?
Richo’s or Hobbsy’s?
The air blind and deaf with indoor night
and tom-tom bourbon.
My tactic, being older, is to offer her my seat,
bow too politely to be genuine,
and wish there were no laws to this,
that I could rip and lick right now
without remorse or evidence or bruise.
Humility
Alex Skovron
For months Mozart has been so crucial I haven’t played him.
The winds, filibustering the house, have heard
the chimney crackle and the paint strain
while the old obsessions went ignored. What was the point?
One evening I flipped the LP of the A major (K.488)
and the slow movement lacerated my defences
all over again. I squinted beyond the buddleia
on the fenceline and thought I could discern vast citadels
circling the horizon, and it was almost a joy
that swept its andante through the sad molecules
of my imaginings – but just then
a magpie alighted on the lawn, dragging a shadow
behind it as the sky turned a molten gold and a storm
broke from the west. The disc had ended
(I had no recollection of having heard the rondo finale)
and I sprang to the phone, jangling churlishly
to tell me you were gone. Music is like that:
it knows. It brought to mind what you had shown me
on the Baltic coast under the lighthouse:
twirling a miniature sailboat of souvenir amber
between thumb and forefinger, you pointed to the tower
and the encircling gulls and ‘Look at them,’ you said.
‘They love the lighthouse. It teaches them the humility of flight.’
Murder at the Poetry Conference
Melinda Smith
The old pesticide factory
casts a buzz-saw shadow
on the wall of the council chambers.
Inside, the poets sit like aldermen.
They talk of war and genocide,
harrowing themselves silly.
At night they retire to soft floral sheets, flocked wallpaper. They dream
infinite shelves of books with tilted spines –
M and N shapes staggering away;
leather the colour of blood.
Where’s my Rattan Overcoat?
Pete Spence
where’s my rattan overcoat? i have
things to say tonight at the basket
weaver’s AGM! how find anything
for that matter in this dish of haste!
i never thought my collection of toothpicks
could take up so much room! where’s
my snail shell rimmed spectacles
my echidna gloves! maybe i should
resume my search at high tide!
can i find my snakeskin snorkel!
here’s my sunglasses made of smoke
now that’s a find even though summer
is over & glaring at someone else
burning the edge of their rock pile
The Knowledge
Peter Steele
That he who distributes charcoal during a snowstorm
is a fine fellow, and that to be
like a tree which covers with blossom the hand that shakes it
warrants careful attention, and that
ice
will not lodge on a busy spinning wheel –
all this is common ground. Also,
to strike at the stars with a bamboo pole is the same
as to dress in brocade and stroll in the dark,
or to offer a twenty-one-gun salute when the general
has clapped spurs in his horse and departed.
And yes, pride is a flower from the devil’s garden,
and a well-groomed heart is a good match
for any well-groomed head. Repentance, they say,
is the loveliest virtue, at least for a while:
and is it not odd that marriage is an assembly
of strangers, and love an inscrutable monster?
My cousin has bought a farm and I have heartburn:
but still, with my couple of loaves, I remember
to sell one and buy a lily and, nibbling
a bamboo shoot, to bless its grower.
One hair on a pretty woman’s head is enough
to tether an elephant, but it’s the creatures
that swag the knowledge home, as that the sunstruck
ox pants at the sight of the moon,
that there’s one phoenix to every thousand chickens,
that a wren trying to walk like a stork
will break his crotch, that business is best done
slow and steady as the cow slobbers.
No end of wisdom: but what does a frog
in a well know of the waiting ocean?
Bondi rock pool. 1963.
Amanda Stewart
a line across a plane
a city marked in water and eucalyptus
an efficient takeover
a funnel web enters a sock
and at the edge of sea bondi’s child
all hands and tongue sand in mouth
gathers the movement
of starfish and snails anemone and cuttle
an observer, unable to utter, takes place
a voice, silently present, observes
this child etched in salt and breath,
the child thrown up onto the shore,
the nets thrashing with slow death and light.
Christmas Poem
Adrian Stirling
Last Christmas
Your father did his impression
Of a Chinese person
Your mother wore a see-through dress
And served up salad
Made of grated carrot and sultanas
Your brother gave us tickets
To the monster trucks
Then his allergic children
Who were high on cordial
Knocked a bottle of red wine
Into my lap
Everybody laughed and said:
‘What are you going to do, Adrian?’
‘Go and write a poem about it?’
The Ashes
Maria Takolander
The pig propped his hooves on the seat back and lifted the beer to his mouth. His toes, he saw over the translucent lip of the plastic cup, were perfectly clean if mottled in colour like the earth. The baying and howling intensified, and he turned his attention to the pitch. The raccoon dealt with the first ball, tossed hard in the lull following the crowd’s jeering. The ball rolled dead. A rat retrieved it, spat on the red skin and briskly rubbed it on the hairless skin of his groin. The next ball curved like the smell drifting from rot, and the racoon was out. Plastic cups flew up into the sky and down again like scuttled locusts. It had happened so quickly. As the pig watched the racoon remove his helmet and return to the pavilion, he was momentarily unsettled. How fragile things seemed. How would they fill out the afternoon? The game, though, soon became robust and quite ordinary. The pig might have dozed off, for time passed. When he woke there was a commotion beneath his grandstand. The pig looked down into the bay. An old emu lay on its back in a concrete aisle littered with plastic cups, cigarette butts, pie bags and piss stains. Two paramedics, grey wolves, knelt over him. One had its paws buried in the oily feathers on the emu’s upturned and distended chest. The bird’s legs hung from each side like snapped sticks. There was a small and miscellaneous crowd. Then from the other side of the arena, with a great wailing and roaring, came another wave of plastic cups, catching the sun, hovering and shimmering like angels. The partnership on the field had been broken. The pig found himself hurling his own empty cup into the teeming oval of the sky. When the pig finally looked down at the aisle below, one of the wolves, its fur hoary as the grubby cement, had fetched a stretcher. Only the pig saw the wolves carry the large dead bird away.
After
Andrew Taylor
After the silent removal
after the silt in the drain
after all that you’d hoped for
deftly excised from your brain
after the cat’s been looked after
and the dog euthanised and the girl
who fed it on biscuits and munchies
quietly removed in a van
and after the garden is watered
and after the Rates are all paid
and after the roof is repaired
and the guy who’s been screwing the maid
and the maid make a suitable marriage
and their kids have all fled from the land
and after the land has been conquered
by carbon dioxide and drought
and the unions are running the government
beyond a shadow of doubt
and the price of energy’s rising
and the internet choking on smut
whose quality is as depressing
as the Stock Exchange in full rout
there will rise from the desert a something
we’d be probably better without
which will amble off into the cosmos
and turn the lights out
Cave d’Aristide
Tim Thorne
It is not the world which passes our long-legged, small table
outside the Cave d’Aristide where we have hoisted ourselves
to settle on the slightly too-high stools.
With my dark glasses and light air,
my T-shirt striped horizontally, the image I am striving for
is more faux Français than vrai Palavasien.
Irony! Somehow this village condones its ease.
No, it’s not ‘the world’, certainly not as literal
translation, but it’s more than fellow-tourists,
who are few despite the excellence
of the picpoul de pinet, the beach, the sunlight,
the exchange rate and the mussels.
This spot, right on the corner
of Rue Aristide Briand,
is perfect for remembering his victims:
Paul Boible, railway worker, before the court
in 1910 for carrying a prohibited weapon,
to wit a corkscrew, the thousands
who tore up their mobilisation orders
and mailed the scraps to Aristide, the Paris sparkies
done out of their jobs by soldiers.
Ah, Aristide, it was Emma Goldman
who countered your scream of ‘sabotage’ with,
‘Who but the most ordinary philistine will call that a crime?’
If there was a wine bar on some Rue Emma Goldman
somewhere, I’d be drinking there with the cheminots,
and Paul Boible would pull my cork.
But for now it’s Aristide, and the sun sets
as the shopkeepers’ kids play in the street
and I
turn to my Mas de Daumas Gassac ’06
and ask myself how ordinary a philistine I am.
Aristide, you were the prototype
for Chifley, Blair, all the Social Democrats
who (let’s be kind) spun themselves into
contradiction. Were you, were any of them
aware of this? Here, on my stool,
(no armchair Marxist!) I can contemplate
not just the passing ‘life’, not just the wine,
but how my hedonism and my history
have put me here, my feet just off the pavement,
glad of not having to strike for five francs a day
and with the luxury of pretending to pretension.
Ambulance thinking
Helen Thurloe
If the wail that whips around the valley
continues north, past the headland
the village mothers cross themselves
their broods safely south, they think.
Today a hopeful, hopeless rock fisherman
is washed into the greedy sea, or else
a holidaying tycoon has popped
an artery on the sodden golf-course –
their companions invoke
the snaking needle of sound, drawing in
the red flashing lights and the grim referees
already poised to call the game.
Adventure at Sadies
Ann Vickery
Down the rabbit hole, we find
a world of cottage cheese and over-inflated
princedoms. That joke was thirty years too late.
Sitting there on the piazza
between the banana trees and austere flamingos,
we conjecture convivially on the poet’s last fuck –
ing stand. He’s got beautiful cheeks,