Live Encounters is a not-for-profit free online magazine that was founded in 2009 in Bali, Indonesia. It showcases some of the best writing from around the world. Poets, writers, academics, civil & human/animal rights activists, academics, environmentalists, social workers, photographers and more have contributed their time and knowledge for the benefit of the readers of:
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Contributors
Mark Tredinnick – guest editorial
Alex Skovron
Alicia Viguer-Espert
Angela Costi
Anne Elvey
Beatriz Copello
David Ades
Dirk van Nouhuys
Dominique Hecq
Gillian Swain
Irina Frolova
Jennifer Compton
John W Sexton
Jonathan Cant
Justin Lowe
Kate McNamara
Les Wicks
Linda Adair
Lisa C Taylor
Volume Two November-December 2024
Marie Studer
Mark Roberts
Mary E. Ringland
Michael J. Leach
Natasha Remoundou-Howley
Patricia Sykes
Percy Aaron
Peter A Witt
Richard Clarke
Scott Thomas Outlar
Sven Kretzschmar
Valentina Teclici
Mark Tredinnick. Photo credit: Kathy Luu.
Mark Tredinnick, the author of twenty-five celebrated works of poetry and prose, is the author, most recently, of House of Thieves, One Hundred Poems. His books on the writing craft have touched the lives and works of many. He runs What the Light Tells, an online poetry masterclass, and teaches at the University of Sydney. His edited collection of essays for Robert Gray, Bright Crockery Days, is just out from 5 Islands Press, whose managing editor he is. Mark lives and works southwest of Sydney on Gundungurra Country.
Mark Tredinnick The Exquisite Spell A manifesto in
sixty parts
What did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices.” —Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”
1
Poetry is a solitary observance. An austere estate. A devotion. It is a clutch of flannel flowers rising up under ruined sheoaks in a fireground, after.
2
You make it like compline, a night prayer, and for the same reasons. It is a way of speaking the language in which the world speaks, coming true. It seems to remind the world how to go about its mysteries, and include us in them.
3
When a thing is entire and adequate and glamorous with its own integrity (when it makes you want to weep and laugh at once and live a life more worthy of that instance of the world)—a phrase of song, a smile, a sentence, a foal, a scarp, a creek, a vessel, a birdsong, a child, a look in an eye, a frost, a room—we call it a poem. It is a poem, that adumbration of the actual, and it is what “poetry” means; it is an instance of what we try to shape into a humane form, a small habitat, in a poem, and in such poems we affirm the poetry of all existence and contribute to it. We may even, in such poems (writing and reading them), participate in it, that other world (that republic of interconnected things, that ecology of signs and significance, that we neglect in the secondhand prose, the emaciated tropes, in the transactions that constitute most of our daily lives.
4.
Poetry is the language in which the world enacts its being, in which it speaks its mind and keeps its silence and inhabits itself, and knows itself and all of us good, or good enough for now.
5.
“With used furniture … makes a tree”: the poet’s magic trick, as Anne Sexton put it. This dark and moonly art. A trick takes some doing. It takes some craft. Some luck. But it happens. And if it didn’t, what would become of us, all our forests felled, all our furniture left out in the weather?
One takes old news, one’s life, one’s times, these leavings, and makes it a small new world. One takes language, in which one fills out forms and teaches class and scolds children and writes emails, and makes of it this humblest, noblest art: the art made of speech: the poem. From a whole life, you make a minute or two. Sometimes they stay. And sometimes house a reader’s life. A chaos made coherent and habitable.
6.
An old Egyptian belief: if you want an afterlife, if your death is to be survived, your life not lost, your name must continue to be uttered by the living. In Dante’s cosmology, too, all those in Purgatory not thoroughly condemned through all eternity (by their fatuousness, their self-aggrandizement, their meanness and hypocrisy and cruelty during life) were sustained in their hope of redemption, by prayers of intercession offered who by those remembered them among those still drawing breath on earth.
We say the names of those we’ve lost. So that they, if not their lives, continue. This is poetry’s work.
7.
In a poem, no matter what else it intends or speaks or who speaks it, a reader may hear her name said, as if now her life mattered and always had and will.
8.
That which is human within us, some would say divine, is remembered and acknowledged and invited back into its dignity in a poem.
9.
Poetry not only wakes the dead. More urgently, it wakes the living. But you have to give yourself to it, its forms and measures, which are not yours, but belong to poetry itself and to all the communities who have sung poetry and fashioned it and used it and depended on it for their social and private sanity from the dawning of human speech.
10.
Poetry, Robert Bringhurst said, frees language from writing. First there is speech, and then there are the discourses that grow up around governance and commerce and church and state and science and theory and all the rest of it. Which, in their various shortcomings, their addictions to control specificity and sometimes clarity, diminish speech and deprive us of its sexiness and holiness and lyricism. So we need poetry, and we always did, to transfigure writing into language again, restored to its wildness, its organic self, and us to ours in its presence.
11.
Poetry is a deep kind of speaking.
12.
Let’s never go forgetting the innate humanity of syntax. The glory of speech. Sense making. Voicing. Sure, let a poem be opaque like a gesture, oracular like a prayer, complex like a flavour. But let it not just think or exclaim or smash some icons. Let it speak. Let it be. And unless you also know how to dance, unless you know some jokes and how not to take yourself too seriously, neither lecture nor rail nor proclaim. (And always fly a bird into it.)
13.
Poetry is a radical clarity, like the operations and devices of the world.
14.
The other day I heard Stanley Kunitz say (given back to us by Instagram) that from the beginning it has fallen to poetry to tell the story of the soul’s adventures—its leavings and strayings, its draggings of feet and clickings of heels, its trials and delights and terrors— travelling through this earth. Had it not been for the poetry that humans began to write (long before they got sold on commercial fiction), we would not have known how living felt, how it went, what it meant. We may not have worked out how to do it well and feel it all the way down and learn to risk it and give thanks for the gift of it.
15.
To make a poem is to garden by night. The furrow, the harrow, the fallow, the compost, the humility of it. In darkness, you dig and plant and pull and prune. Mostly you turn soil and turn it again. Only sometimes is there moonlight. Always there is weeding. In which there are many lessons: what goes, what stays, what brings you out in welts.
16.
I had been weeding for hours. By day, but it might as well have been night, so thick were the words-out-of-place, so random the commas, so rarely had I looked from the screen or recalled the actual earth. Editing: holy work, but hard. Especially taxing when it’s someone else’s work you’re tending—into a greater likeness of itself. So, when I heard an email land, I stopped weeding and looked.
A note to thank me for some teaching, and to say that the poet had fallen in love with one of the forms we’d studied, and by exploring it, was fathoming new aspects of their voice. At that, I looked up, glad, and saw how an early October afternoon was ending outside. A swill of grandeur, a high tide of amber light. A luxuriance of being. A moment in which all the meaning there is seems to show up, notwithstanding all that’s ill. The old world that had grown weary was in love again, and its whole life ahead of it. But also sad with every life lost and every hope still born.
17.
Just after six, see how the light gives itself up to the trees— Chinese tallows, greening toward the end of the year. See how It ambers my neighbour’s high gable. And there, like sorrow, ends.
18.
I had the sijo in a few minutes, a rare event; I sent it as an email to my student. Poetry is both intimate and ultimate. From one’s self, but not merely about oneself. A choir, not a solo.
19.
“Life is a spell so exquisite,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “that everything conspires to break it.”
20.
In a moment of correspondence such as mine last Sunday afternoon (the email, the gratitude, the form, the light, the poem, which came in its three sets of fifteen syllables, and whatnot, almost as a given thing), life’s spell, dangerous and gorgeous and eternal, was made manifest, you might say. Eternity surfaced. A moment later, of course, the spell broke, the moment crashed. My father, 93, sat in the lounge room near my study and turned on the TV to watch, for perhaps the twenty-seventh time, an episode of Death in Paradise, an experience only to be had, of course, at full volume.
Many things conspire thus, sometimes fatally, against the poetry of living: the cost of living, marking, business activity statements, passwords, the whining of a dog, commercial radio, commercial fiction, spreadsheets, AI, the latest news from Lebanon.
21.
Poetry recasts the exquisite spell. (Emily doesn’t say it, but means it.) It has that power: to wake the world to us again a while, or us to the world. To exhume the river, to pool the frequencies of the whole and actual world, into ponds of encounter and articulation, and set at least one life to rights.
22.
“Every good poem begins in language awake to its connections,” Jane Hirshfield writes.
23.
Our work is to make ourselves instruments, divining rods, say, apt to receive such language, itself awake to worlds our minds are most often too crowded with concepts and complaints, to apprehend. You have to dismiss a lot of common-place, flat and accidental language to make space for the kind of wide-awake words capable of bearing witness to life and spelling it again for others.
24.
“In significant ways, meaning is prior to language, and extends beyond it—but if language is to bear its trace, the choice of words must be exact.” (Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy, 190)
25.
That exactness is not just a lack of ambiguity—the fit, if you like, between the word and the meaning. The fit we’re talking about in poetry is that the shape and feel of the gesture enacted in the language continues and participates in the felt sense of whatever it is that the poetic phrase alludes to. The poem is always a “gesture” (Jan Zwicky favours gesture—as in sketch or dance or movement—for poetry’s relationship with its subject matter) toward the lifeworld of the episode the poem relates to. An apt and humble enactment in which the essence of the moment itself is implied or adumbrated in the form and sound of the poem.
26.
The adequacy of poetic language, its achievement, has a lot to do with how its music makes a rhyme with the thing itself. Bears traces of that moment or person or thing or thought. Makes an impression of it, like a translation, of how it went and felt.
27.
The way the frequencies of forms and events and thoughts that comprise a moment, an instance of world vibrated—so the language in the poem vibrates. And then the reader.
28.
“Language rooted in music is the linguistic medium in which the images of lyric thought are at home.” (Jan Zwicky, 216)
29.
“Lyric meaning is not a form of labelling. Nor does it ‘capture’ the world. No speech holds the world within it. To think of language as though it did would be like mistaking a window for a mirror; or, better, for Alice’s looking glass.” (Jan Zwicky, 221)
30.
Think of a poem as a window, then, because of which, alone, some presence in the world, the felt sense of one moment of being, is able (almost) to reach you.
31.
“For the most part, language obscures the world. In a profound image, language is transparent to the presence of (some part of) the world.” (Jan Zwicky, 221)
32.
A poem overhears the music of the intelligence of things. Of moments of the world.
There is a realm, an order, of being—open, calm, electric, wide, old, limpid—one sometimes enters. In contemplation, is sport, in love, in the wild, in reading, in writing. Some speak of flow state. I think of it as the poetry of things. Writing poetry depends upon your finding your way, through the trowel-work of the mind and fingers gardening in the dark, back into it, the poetry place, down into the lyric frequencies of the real.
With luck, a poem, a lyric piece, will bring that state on for a reader: “a fast forgiveness of weather,” as I put it in “Late Winter Light, One Sunday,” “in which every name is said, and all time begun again.” It may be what Hopkins meant by “the dearest sweetness deep down things.” Some speak of ecstasy, from ex stasis, a standing beyond oneself. But it feels to me more like a sudden (but eternal) a dwelling much deeper in.
33.
This may be where Emily Dickinson was going with her “spell so exquisite.”
34.
Perhaps what we call the real is comprised of infinitely complex sets of frequencies, vibrations of matter and consciousness. And some of the frequencies at which life plays are lyric. They play all the time, but generally deeper than awareness the way most of a river runs well underneath the river, under its bed. Music recollects these frequencies. Love, at its lonely offices, bundles them and gives them form. So, too, poetry. More humbly, more vitally, since its art is speech and we are the mammals who live in language.
35.
“The virtue of precision is not just that it allows greater accuracy, but that it requires self-discipline. True self-discipline is a form of homage to what is not self.” Jan Zwicky (213)
36.
In piece in the New Yorker some years back, a reflection on the history of psychiatry and the uses of the talking cure, Jerome Groopman, who holds a chair in medicine at Harvard and writes on neuroscience for general readers, wrote this: “Words can alter, for better or worse, the chemical transmitters and circuits of our brain, just as drugs or electroconvulsive therapy can.”
37.
So, it matters how we speak and write. And what matters is not what we choose to write about, so much as how. To write lyrically is to be concerned, in one’s turns of phrase, one’s images and rhythms and tone, to do justice to the lived experience one records and to work an alteration on the circuits of one’s reader’s brains that is more likely to heal than to harm. More likely to do justice than to do violence. Harm happens when we use language that is inhumane, mechanical, ugly, abstracted, colonising. The poet who would make a difference might best consider the kind of change they would like to work on those chemical transmitters, on the molecules of self, in any given reader’s body. The frequencies of complaint and outrage are unlikely to work the lasting change, the deepening or awareness, the enlargement of self, poetry is for.
38.
The change poetry makes is not social or political. It is more important than that, and prior to that and beyond it. The change it works it works on our molecules, on how it is we feel ourselves alive. All social change is likely to depend on the change that happens to who we are, how we know ourselves and what we feel connected with. Social revolutions begin with molecular change. Lyric poetry is an agent of such change. Poetry that waves banners is likely to be an inadequate form of protest and is doomed to contribute nothing much more than a rush to the remaking of anyone who ever reads it.
39.
“Life’s infinite variations are essential to our life:” Wittgenstein. Poetry is a way, not ever to hope to capture some of “life’s infinite variations,” of form and way and character and cadence, but to gesture toward them, to attend to them, and so enrich and revivify human life—one’s own, the lives of all who ever read you, the lives of the infinite variations of life toward which your poem leans and bows. To attend lyrically to any life is to enliven all life, in life’s infinite range of autonomies of being, each implicated in each other.
40.
William James was a pioneer of psychology, back when it had not been colonised by neuroscience and was less to do with the brain and more to do with the mind (even the soul), and the (smarter, older) brother of Henry James. James proposes somewhere that we think too narrowly of the Self if we think of it atomically, in its solitude. We are not finished, Barry Lopez once wrote, at the skin. Think of one’s being as a constellation, James suggested, of all that one is attached to. Think of the Self as a network of connection, all the trees in the forest, all the lives at work somewhere and their pattern of inter-relationship, an ecology of affection (and trouble and desire and trauma and grief and hope).
41.
One is not a star; one is a constellation—the stars and the patterns of connection discernible among them. Write that. Write as that. For that. The more we discover about consciousness and identity, the less like the contents of the ego or the head Self appears to be. So, who we are is where we are, and how we love and whom, and whom we are touched by. And how we suffer when we fall into depression is radically out of contact with that small universe of things and thoughts and places and birds and books and cousins and friends and others and tunes that we always knew, and inhabited, as (the country of) our self.
42.
“I am what is around me,” wrote Wallace Stevens. “These are merely instances.”
43.
One Sunday late in autumn, I walk the quarry track in rain. I’m free, for the most part, and well past the middle of my years. Listen: each song in the wood sings the same bird. Each life, all lives.
44.
“To render precisely is to engage in a form of meditation.” (Jan Zwicky, 213)
45.
To pay close and tender attention is to sometimes divine—to join and promote—the lyric frequencies at which the actual world (or that part of it which is the country of oneself, or a moment of that world) plays, the regenerative frequencies of deep existence. And to join those frequencies in lyric poetry is to acknowledge and share and perpetuate them. And all of us. Who depend on them.
46.
We think too much in fences, and we think too little in fields. Across the river in turmeric light, horses graze summer Pasture. Where it ends, the Divide picks up. On the wind, two hawks
47.
All morning before I sat to write this, I was sad, for no reason I could name. Making notes, answering emails, making coffee, walking the dogs, apologising to others for their high spirits, which can look like ill-will and poor training, unless you know my dogs, and in my impatience at the checkout, my soul dragged my feet. The whole morning in its heavy robes was sad. Later at my desk, my friend texted with news that Barbara Blackman, whom we both had known and loved, had died overnight. Sometimes you grieve before you know why; we Are, in fact, more than we think we are; we are larger; we are plural; we are manifold. A good poem always seems to me to know that and to grieve like that—ahead of all parting, as Rilke put it, aware that all this passes, and that the passing makes room for the living on, the starting over, which a poem also sings. And that, though one part has passed, the rest remains. And the rest implies and perpetuates the part that is lost.
48.
Or something like that. Because no poem, no lyric gesture, should ever be too sure.
49.
What works best in poetic language is a clarity not too simple, and a simplicity not too clear. Just don’t ever forget this is speech you are attempting. If it is no longer organic, if it falls out with the syntax native to speech, and if it utters too much platitude and piety and pomp, too much plastic abstraction, it will fail to thrive, it will fall well short of the country it ought to hope to steward, the humanity it ought to hope to nourish.
50.
Life is short and holy; don’t waste it on revenge and cant. Conserve with your words the wildness and vivid particularity of life as it is embodied in each of us and any of us equally. As it shows up vividly grief and delight and loss and the rush of an escapee gelding along the lane, in flannel flowers in a vase, in a dirty pink supermoon, in the hummingbird hover of the black shouldered kite, its plunge.
51.
Even in retrospect, there is no arc. There is no storyline. Except in glaze of sentiment, life is not a narrative. Life runs scene-by-scene, and most of it falls between the frames. Poetry knows this, loves this, respects this, and refuses the fallacies and false pretenses of narrative. The very idea of arc.
52.
Most of the river flows underground. Nowhere is this more true than on this dry continent. The natural state of most Australian waterways at most times is a chain of ponds. So it is with a life. There is not love, I have heard it said; there are only acts of love. The rest is silence and imagination, memory and desire, hope and grief. What we call a life is an irregular succession of moments, ponds, and tracts of indeterminate space between. It is what the ponds imply.
53.
The lyric runs the way the rivers run, that true lives go: intermittent, episodic, discontinuous. Constellated. Mythic. It is not the years that last; it is the moments. Life is phrases, lines, spaces, lines, stanzas, cantos. Life does not run in plotlines. It is made of pieces. And poetry has for aeons been how we say them, and say that.
54.
And most of what’s important is small: a touch, a vase, a name, a syllable, a table, the whipbird’s call and the koel’s response, the scent of daylight’s first loaf, a phone call late, ice on glazing the bird bath at six.
55.
“All that’s important is the ordinary things,” says Robert Gray’s speaker in his great early poem “To the Master, Dogen Zenji.” “Things as they are are what is mystical,” he writes in a late poem “Testimony.” “Those who search deepest are returned to life.”
56.
“We are given the surface again, but with renewed awe.” Robert Gray again in “Testimony.” This may be the lyric work of poetry: to return us to self and earth, to know that it is, no matter how flawed, enough, and to ask us perhaps to perpetuate that which makes living good and returns others to the habitable, deep, and adequate surface of the things in themselves, our own selves among them.
57.
Robert Gray is on my mind because I have loved his work all my writing life, and his own life is ceasing to be very habitable these days. “We wear down,” writes Atul Gawande, “until we can’t wear down anymore.”
58.
So that Robert, worn down by Parkinson’s, might know that his life of letters has mattered (an instance of the essential work lyric poetry performs), we made a book for him: Bright Crockery Days: The Poetry of Robert Gray (5 Islands Press). We launched it in Sydney on 28 September, without him. But he knows what we’ve done, and that feels right. It is right that we remember our elders; it is right that we don’t trash the past, including the poetries of the past, but find in it, as Robert did, what is wiser than we may know and worth carrying on, and adapting, into the hard days ahead.
59.
Some words I wrote at the end of the book for Robert might do to land these thoughts, this loose lyric manifesto.
60.
“Poetry, which pays for so little, costs so much. But ah, how richly it yields, how much good work it does—for so long and so many. It deepens and sharpens the experience of being alive on the earth a while; it even seems to raise the earth back up from the dead. So, it is with the poetry of Robert Gray, which he has dedicated his life to and found delight in—but no guarantee of health or wealth of fame. His work has improved all our lives, asking us to ask more of them (our lives) and find more resonance in our days, and it leaves the world, itself, more learned, more in tune, somehow, with itself.”
Note:
I have drawn here, as I have long done in my teaching and thinking about poetry, on Jan Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy (1992). My quotations from her are from that work. I also carry into this lyric essay a lot of thinking I did in my book The Land’s Wild Music (Trinity, 2004), writing which I had no acquaintance with Zwicky’s work, which rose out of her deep experience in music-making, linguistics, and philosophy, and the practice of her poetry; mine rose from a fascination with nature writing and drew on music theory, ecology, and phenomenology. Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy, in its form (which I have emulated here) and in the wonder of its utterance, is the most important expression and exploration of the meaning of “the lyric” that I know. The book is also an instance of it. No one writing poetry should work without it.
Book available here: https://www.5islandspress.com/product-page/nine-carols-by-mark-tredinnick https://www.marktredinnick.com/books
Alex Skovron
Alex Skovron was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and emigrated to Australia as a boy. His family settled in Sydney, where he grew up and completed his studies. From the early 1970s he worked as an editor for book publishers in Sydney and (after 1980) Melbourne. His poetry has appeared widely in Australia and overseas, and he has received a number of major awards for his work. His most recent collection is Letters from the Periphery (2021); his previous book, Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems (2014), was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Skovron’s collection of short stories The Man who Took to his Bed (2017), and his novella The Poet (2005), have been published in Czech translations; The Attic, a selection of his poetry translated into French, was published in 2013, and a bilingual volume of Chinese translations, Water Music, in 2017. His work has also appeared in Dutch, Macedonian, Polish and Spanish. The numerous public readings he has given have included appearances in China, Serbia, India, Ireland and Portugal. In 2023 Alex Skovron was honoured with the Patrick White Literary Award for his contribution to Australian literature.
‘as if there were another voice under everything said’ — Kit Kelen, Pictures of Nothing at All
He locates an itch to scratch—nails it. Lets the Penguin riffle and spring itself closed like a paper slinky. Rises from the clutterless bureau to brush his thumb over the topmost shelf, the one with all those holy books. He eases out a stout King James, its print protected by a lockable steel clasp. Let us play, he says, opening at random. The pages cling together, hard-pressed to behave, but he notices that he’s hit upon Job— the story that always riled him as a boy; Milton made so much more sense. But committed now, he reads; and having read a verse or two, replaces the antique tome, asking himself why. He is tired, sleepy, can’t for the life of him decide what he is doing here, in this imposing scriptory laced with diplomas and degrees, and he— what? The itch comes back, the one he’s endured for years, that he can nail all right, but never really scratch.
Freewheel
For I was a boy then took off on the glide one foot to one pedal one leap astride
a boy who could catch in night-tones of May sparks in his pillow their starry array the lines and melodies whose namings hummed the calendar seasons wheels that stood or spun tall vaults and arches of cathedrals rendered sweet by their smoke that kindled the embers
of memory’s glow for sleepwalking fondly for crossing of doorsteps as foreign words woke me that quickly grew mine and a new tongue softened yet think how the pedals jerked or how often
the chain seized up each dismount or tumble turning to chessgame a private conundrum
till bed became mirror while pencil would stitch on the kitchen doorpost another inch
my graphite ladder propped against time retracted only to watch the rungs rhyme
The Goblet
Caesar decided, thumb came down, a deadly hush assailed the stands. Gladiator’s blade at the slave’s neck, thigh-muscles twitching, his chance.
Victim waited, gladiator glared into the sun where the Emperor sat. Colosseum drifted in a haze of doubt— what would such behaviour beget?
Caesar stood up, wine-mug askew, opened his arms, interrogative sign. Gladiator, scorning the eye of death, spat at the sawdust, sword cast aside.
Thumped his chest, a fisted salute, strode to the edge; multitudes gasped as he climbed the enclosure, leapt the façade—rash, presumptuous guest.
Caesar invented a fallacious grin, senators stared from adjacent rows. Gladiator seized the tottering wine, artfully drained it, athletically tossed
the goblet onto the gravel. Exclaimed: ‘Imperator, as your glory be great, I’m leaving—a gig in Mesopotamia. May the gods be with you. I’ll write.’
Alicia Viguer-Espert is a poet, and artist transplanted to Los Angeles, CA but born in Valencia, Spain. As member of a bilingual family, Castilian and Valenciano, the language spoken in the Old Kingdom of Valencia, she inherited an interest in languages; English she learned as an adult upon arriving in the United States. Raised at the shore of the Mediterranean, she considers its history, mythology, culinary diets, languages and soul as her own, and her poetry often reflects this deep love. Her work has been published nationally and internationally in journals, print media and anthologies. Winner of the San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival on 2017, she is also the author of three chapbooks. In addition, she’s included in “Top 39 LA poets,” “Ten Poets to Watch 2018” and “Bards of Southern California: Top 30 Poets,” by Spectrum. She’s a three times Pushcart nominee.
Power
Imagining the places it has seen I notice copper, bark brown, golden on the wings’ underside before it lands on the railing.
Too close for comfort. Those watchful eyes fixed on me, bent neck to better listen to my pounding heart.
Too awe producing to move. The majestic chest of a king imposing silence, death to small creatures,
I breathe slowly to befriend something, not a companion but a reminder of the power of effortless union with everything on the sky and the hawk’s s ability to achieve stillness.
How Will You Know When I’m Dead?
Will you feel the vibrations of my departing soul? Can you sense the pain of my fractured vertebrae when we have not seen each other in forty years?
My once long dark hair, now short and gray, my face, crisscrossed by freeway lanes going nowhere. You lost that golden-red mane I butchered before going to India, a mishap which saved you from looking too pretty.
I remember your eyes, a duplicate of the Blue Planet astronauts saw in the darkness of space, shining in Greece, as we tried to sleep inside a plastic tent, your American hunting knife under the mat to defend us from predators.
How your body glowed under the candle light at that hotel in Herat after our private sandstorm! How our moon-lit feet snaked around the Ganges, ears bent to discern noises from frogs, cobras, crickets and tigers, which like scissors cut the Himalayas’ night into 1000 pieces. How, like rich Indian tourists, we sipped coffee leaning on our cottage veranda in Ooty enjoying the mountain view until our first fight.
Before this, we dozed on top of Mount Saint Victoire, Cezanne on our minds, rain hitting the tent like bullets. We should have known, but didn’t.
Didn’t know walking the Taj Mahal hand in hand dreaming of the monument our love would leave behind, nor dancing at Srinagar’s Floating Gardens.
Because we didn’t know it wouldn’t last, in Pokhara you purchased two circles of braided copper, gold and silver we wore for the remainder of the trip, twin hoops binding us like a pair of identical sparrows, those tender birds with a very short life span, which explains a lot, though it does not answer the question, how will you know when I’m dead?
Angela Costi
Angela Costi is a poet and writer with a background in social justice and community arts. Since 1994, her creative gatherings, including plays, short fiction and essays, have been published, performed, broadcasted and translated. Her recent book is An Embroidery of Old Maps and New (Spinifex, 2021, winner of Poetry Prize in English, Greek Australian Cultural League 2022), and her recent chapbook is, Adversarial Practice, published in Cordite Poetry Review, May 2024. This year, her poetry has been longlisted in the international Fish Poetry Prize, the Grieve Project and the University of Canberra Health Poetry Prize, and published in a number of journals including Meanjin, The Ekphrastic Review, Ergon Journal, The Journal of Working-Class Studies, Meniscus, Australian Poetry Anthology, Australian Poetry Journal, The Suburban Review, Jacaranda, Rochford Street Review and Marrow. She lives on unceded Wurundjeri land, and is known as Αγγελικη Κωστη among the Cypriot diaspora, which is her heritage and ancestry.
Waiting for the Verdict
by Abraham Solomon,1857, oil on canvas, Getty Museum
This morning
As soon as you are led to the room you are painted darker your hand tries to hold up your head while the other slumps there is a window but its light is judicious your family of women and babies dare not look at you though their faces show they have no life without you your dog is there submerged in your almost black attire staring up at you waiting waiting waiting you may never unshield your eyes never but your dog hopes
This afternoon
A tail of a beast is said to be the origin of ‘queue’ your throbbing head cannot be protected there is a tiny spot of red on a tile in that waiting room it could be a poppy it could be a drop of blood yours or the others before you cast out of the court room with its higher steps and partly opened grand door inside cloudy swirls of white wigged men digesting what you had done or not done or should have done this room is painted higher than yours it has a guard to one side of the door permitting it to be partly opened for the barrister about to enter who is wigged and gowned holding your brief showing you his back
Artwork Waiting for the Verdict 1857 by Abraham Solomon, accessed at Tate Images https:// www.tate-images.com/t03614-Waiting-for-the-Verdict.html
A Ship in Distress by J.M.W. Turner c. 1805
study (a)
I wish it was a ship I saw instead of my mana on her side with her massive naked thigh afloat
the rest of her in trouble gurgling up the storm of a day filleting then frying then serving fish she rolled the bucket brimming and splashing slapped the mop onto the laminate’s grit
the floor was greasy from deep-fried oil slipped her into the swell of grime
worked her arms like a captain’s command when the mast breaks and the sails tear
study (b)
when she fell it was slow
as if pulled down by a long sweeping line across a page she lay there
willing herself to rest with clenched teeth
knowing her daughter’s scream would save her from drowning
study (c)
scratches and stretchmarks on vinyl deck the vessel continues to carry a childhood
my young mouth opens to receive her fear inner waves lurch from stomach to galley
falling fills my ears, makes my eyes water Mana built her body to survive this wreck
study (d)
after all the years of seeing her clean the horrors of your ship you freeze as she falls
distance yourself as if she is made to continue broken
oh well, you chuckle, refusing to see her older than eighteen the day you married her
Artwork no. 37 folio 20 of Shipwreck (1) Sketchbook c.1803-10 by J.M.W. Turner, accessed https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-williamturner-a-ship-in-distress-r1139189 mana is phonetic for Greek: μάνα meaning mother
Refuge
after the detailed drawing of botanist Erwin Lichtenegger above, the sap is a tentative blossom, a singular study below, the cartography is a sprawling interconnected metropolis of main arterials with byways and lanes found in every country inhabited by a needy populace
each root is a route for planned and spontaneous cities creating industries of carbon, nourishing seas of soil, feasting fungi viruses bacteria, hidden without fear of getting caught in tunnels, they marry, they party
it appears the botanist has poured into the ink an artist’s wish for a better behaved world, each and every line curled, enough for a seed to dream, leaving the skyscrapers to scrape at clouds
Drawing of Alyssum montanum 1992 by Erwin Lichtenegger, accessed https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/479/rec/64
Anne Elvey is a poet, editor and researcher, living on unceded Bunurong Country in bayside Naarm/Melbourne. Her most recent poetry collections are Leaf (Liquid Amber Press, 2022), shortlisted in the 2023 ASLE-UKI Book Prize for the best work of creative writing with an ecological theme, and Obligations of voice (Recent Work Press, 2021). A new collection ‘Intents’ is forthcoming from Liquid Amber Press in April 2025.
Solder
Intent to be other to the flow but lured, molten into connectivity, the spill of psyche to circuit lies hot against the binary that privileges the one over the multiplicity. Honed to lift of branch and soil’s pulse, the sun’s bidding in green cell, nothing is zeroed in on souls that hammer and haunt like early light. Or is it speech? The tempest-telling sprites, acolytes of climate, keep their fossiled tracts extant in bones and breath, distillations of seeped stone.
These noughts with units on a grid, do they discount the long mugging of the land? Bled quarries – sunset captures them. Whose lives are extracted for works that take natures from selves, from our embedding in the commons? Is fluid alloy’s response to flame a recompense?
Sophia
She came to me in a clearing the quiet sun sifting through trees’ canopy, the day soft as moonlit night surrounding heart’s dusk or dawn – might I not tell? She was a breath of knowing, tender against my oldest scars though I could not fathom what brought her into my waking dream or why when I look inside she remains a subtle presence – discreet & unassuming, as if a healing should proceed, shy of the everyday like a bat. Her body’s leathered wings fold into limb & leaf. Wind rustles in the shelter of her foliate tilt towards grace
To the will maker of branching breath
Leave me the hospitality of words how a good sentence can
salve, like an instrument’s compassion, strummed tremor of line, fingers’
pulse on wood, or mallet to timpani –how they ground an orchestra
with surprising character, warm and low – a capacity to let be when
expanded. How then I’ll forget hurt, forgive what’s unintended, give to quiet the wholeness we’re gravitating towards, as day
lets go and wind plays through night’s yard, unsettled, soothing
Dr Beatriz Copello
Dr Beatriz Copello is a well-known reviewer, writer and poet, she is also known for her sense humour. Beatriz Copello is one of Australia’s foremost poets, her poems are sensuous, evocative and imaginative wrote Julia Hancock, Ex-Editor of Allan an Unwin and Freelance editor and journalist. Copello’s poetry books are Women Souls and Shadows, Meditations at the Edge of a Dream, Flowering Roots, Under the Gums Long Shade, Lo Irrevocable del Halcon (In Spanish), Witches Women and Words and Rambles published by Ginninderra Publishing. Her poetry has been published in literary journals such as Southerly and Australian Women’s Book Review and in many other print and Electronic Publications. Fiction books by author are: A Call to the Stars, Forbidden Steps Under the Wisteria and Beyond the Moons of August (Her Doctoral Thesis).
Searching for answers
the truth wrapped in silver foil words silenced like those of a prisoner nothing said no excuses gated utterances unable to escape forces that drive denialism paradigm asserting the natural accumulation of critical anomalies relationship of shifting parameters broad sweep of measured reality deplorable mundane alternatives tired of the usual narratives of power and triumphalism dispassionate cold myopic ingrained desire to make sense of the “messages in a bottle”
Chrysalis/Domestic Violence
he tied her legs with bunches of roses her hands he imprisoned with love letters the heart that palpitated in the tortured body with jealousy he pierced and with his fist he stamped possession while he claims “it’s your fault” he can abuse and punish her but one day her eyes opened to reality the prison of make-believe love filled with valour she escapes confidence regained she marches head high a new woman who no one owns
What is out there?
flood of matter and radiation atoms molecules stars galaxies that populate the vastness of space space that envelops us constants of nature that allow the emergence of life quantum outcomes that become a reality a wave function that collapses into a single entity multiple states of existence parallel universes multiverses phantasmagorical arrangements in which instant by instant our perceived universe branches into infinite alternatives uncountable versions of life
David Adès
David Adès is the author of Mapping the World, Afloat in Light and the chapbook Only the Questions Are Eternal. His next collection, The Heart’s Lush Gardens, is forthcoming from Flying Island Books. David won the Wirra Wirra Vineyards Short Story Prize 2005 and the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize 2014. Mapping the World was commended for the FAW Anne Elder Award 2008. David’s poems have been read on the Australian radio poetry program Poetica and have also featured on the U.S. radio poetry program Prosody. His poetry has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. His poems have been Highly Commended in the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, a finalist in the Dora and Alexander Raynes Poetry Prize (U.S.) and commended for the Reuben Rose International Poetry Prize (Israel). David is the host of the monthly poetry podcast series “Poets’ Corner” which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb8bHCZBRMB jlWlPDeaSanZ3qAZcuVW7N. He lives in Sydney with his wife and three children.
I Threw a Stone
I was not the first and will not be the last to throw a stone.
I hefted the weight of it in my hand before the explosion of violence through my shoulder and arm. I did not throw the stone in anger.
It did not split a forehead or exact a tithe of blood.
I took from the stone, its inertia, and gave it flight.
I relieved it momentarily of weight and gave it lightness.
In turn, it gave me a skim across waves, one, two, three, four, five times before it sank. This was our transaction
like so many others before it, my moment in the secret life of a stone.
To All My Forgotten Selves
For Michele Ramshur
Of course I don’t remember you, scattered as you are all over the world where I left you, across more years than I care to remember, held in the recollections of others, in hundreds of letters and photo albums — yet the knowledge of your existence, the disappearing contrails of your passage, luminous, fragmented, partial, delights me even so, and when some small fragment of you emerges, unexpectedly, a gift released from the past, as when an old friend, (first met in Istanbul in 1984, and seen again only a few times in the ensuing years in locations between Athens and New York) messages me to say that she has found, written in a little book given to her
in her twenties by a friend, a note that read
Complaineth not of what thou chooseth: Davidicus Adictus (Roman anti-whingemongerer)
(as seen through the eyes of DAVID ADES) that made her giggle, I too
laugh at this unremembered self, at its humour and nature, grateful at its re-emergence, at the joy it carries, that we share.
I Should Have Said
Lately, as things draw towards a close, I feel as if I should have said something, something that remains unsaid amongst the vast flock of words that have flapped and flown from my mouth, envoys to hearts and minds and many lost to the unhearing air. There are so many truths
I have not found, so many questions without answers. But it is not that.
I haven’t lived my life to lose it taking a stand.
It is not that either. Courage either arrives or doesn’t when it is needed. So I imagine: I wouldn’t know.
Perhaps that’s it: perhaps I cannot speak what I don’t know.
Still, I feel I should have said something, that it might have lit a fuse, been a blessing, healed something broken, that it might have made a difference.
Dirk van Nouhuys is an American writer, computer scientist, and translator known for his work in fiction and non-fiction. His literary works span various genres, including novels, short stories, poems, and essays. He is currently working on a novel centered on the history of San Jose, Ca. from 1932 to the present, of which this story is an excerpt. He has contributed something over 100 items to literary magazines and journals. Van Nouhuys’ writing often explores complex characters and intricate narratives, reflecting his keen interest in the human condition and societal issues. You can learn more about him at his web site, www.wandd.com.
Owens Valley, 1973
Anne Fujiwara signaled a pause at Lone Pine to look at Mount Whitney. Dennis Forbes parked in front of a green placard, colored and lettered like a highway sign but weathered and ramshackle. The big, top lettering read MOUNT WHITNEY PACK TRIALS, and below were details about buying equipment and hiring guides. Beyond the sign were brown sheds, almost shanties, beyond that low, kakhi hills. They lifted their eyes to the wall of peaks, The Sierras, at once distant and hovering to the west. Whitney was the highest among many peaks. Dennis knew “sierra” meant saw and asked Anne if she did.
“If they were a saw,” she said, “Whitney would stick out and be broken first.”
They stood silently gazing. They were not cold, but Anne shivered with her shoulders, and said, “Can you imagine what it is like on those ridges swept by the winds?
“Have you ever done that kind of hiking?” Dennis asked.
“No.”
“Me either.”
He toed gravel with his left foot. Without speaking they turned away to their car.
The road continued in the middle of a dry, glacial valley, khaki earth with more sage brush and creosote and fewer Joshua trees. Occasionally irrigated fields planted with alfalfa interrupted the view like lost chess squares. On both sides beyond the desert bluffs rose and beyond them peaks made the space seem vaster.
“I’m confused,” Denis said after a while, “which way is west?”
“The Sierra is on our left, that’s west, the mountains to our right, that’s, east, are called the White Mountains.”
“This space makes me feel free,” he said.
“Free of what?”
“Good question.”
Anne asked if he knew about the water wars.
Denis admitted ignorance. She recounted how at the beginning of the century this valley had been lush agricultural land watered by many streams from the snowy mountains, but the city of Los Angeles had viciously bought up farms and sucked the water away. “”Manzanar’ means Apple orchard. We grew apples there and lots of vegetables.”
In the open country they could see the entrance a good way off. Two thick poles made from slender tree trunks held a wooden placard hanging in chains. The chained placard bore in cleanly painted lettering the words, Manzanar War Relocation Center. A wide dirt road passed between the sign and a small building, hardly more than a room with thick, stone walls. Its roof came to a peak that suggested a pagoda. The dirt road reached for the mountains. A hundred or so yards to their left stood a guard tower, no more than a waist-high wall and a roof supported by about twenty feet of rough-cut, weathered, brown wood. Anne turned left onto the track. One large building hunched alone to one side maybe 50 yards away. Otherwise the 100 acres or so before them was without trees or shrubs, or buildings, only clumps of dry grass and concrete blocks that had once been foundations.
“I told you. There is almost nothing left. The barracks were torn down for lumber. Some of us bought it cheap at auction and hauled it away for construction.”
“I understand.”
Anne nodded toward the building in the distance. “It’s closed.”
She drove a ways into the open area, then turned right and wound hesitantly over rough ground. Finally she stopped, got out, told Dennis she wanted to look around, took the short shovel and bucket out of the car and began searching, moving ever more slowly from one deserted foundation to another.
Although an intermittent breeze carried a smell of juniper, it was hot. Dennis stood by the open door of his car wondering what her thoughts and emotions were. Finally she knelt, put her arms around her face, and began to cry. Dennis knelt beside her.
“I can’t find it. It’s gone,” she said among her tears. Dennis put his arm around her shoulders.
She loosed her arms from around her face and gathered her legs under her to rise. Dennis withdrew his arm. She stood while Dennis remained kneeling looking at the ground wondering what she had been searching for. She remained quiet and he rose looking at her questioningly.
She gestured at the block of concrete before them and said “I don’t know which one was ours. There were gardens everywhere.”
Dennis shook his head slowly, then asked, “Did you find it when you came here before?”
“The first time I came, in 69, I was with a group. We did everything together. I didn’t look for mine. When I came with Jack we found it. He was confident. Jack was always confident. But things look different now.”
“I can wait while you look.”
“Let’s go to the graveyard.”
They walked back to the car and she found a faint road. As they drove she explained that people had died. Dennis had not thought of that.
“Mostly children and old men.”
“And they are buried here?”
“Some were cremated and their ashes stayed in the apartments until their families went back; some were buried here and then when their families…what is the word?”
“Disinterred,” Dennis said. “Yes, disinterred and reburied them somewhere else. A few are still here.”
They reached a white pillar with a pointed top, it’s back to the mountains. Two bunches of wilting flowers graced its plinth. The air was more clear than clear. The pillar had three Japanese characters in bold black.
Dennis asked what they meant.
“’The answer that consols the soul.’” She turned her back to the mountains and walked to an otherwise untended area where few gravestones were scatted irregularly. Dennis wanted to ask her some questions, but her silence dissolved them. After she had stepped past each gravestone — there were nine — not reading them but gazing at the half tended emptiness where the barracks, where the community, had stood, she returned to the monument. Dennis followed her unspeaking; their footsteps crunching together.
“So, while you were growing up on the two farms, going to school, we were here, and when we came home it was gone.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Going to high school, college, choosing to be a lawyer — Did you ever think of being anything else?”
“Yes,” Dennis answered, but didn’t elaborate.
“…living places, did you move around much?” She did not wait for an answer…”having friends, lovers, maybe enemies —Do you have enemies?”
’
“Yes, you can’t prosecute people without earning enemies.”
“You said ‘’earn’ —is animosity a wage?”
“Not everyone who has received justice believes it is just.”
“And we struggled to find a place. Did your father and mother sell the farm?”
“No, my mother sold it after he died. Like, my sister and I did the selling.”
“Was there any kind of title search?”
“Yes. It showed that your father had sold us the farm. It was, like, clean from the title search perspective.”
“How much?”
“Six thousand dollars — That’s 1942 dollars.”
“I am not your enemy,” she said.
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”
She made a little gesture with her hand as if she were tossing something light away or catching it.
“Let’s go on,” she said. We can go to the hot springs in Bishop.”
They drove about 45 minutes north through higher dry country with sporadic watered fields. Kakhi bluffs sloped up from the valley floor and snowy peaks rose beyond them. The valley seemed as if it might go on forever, but after about three quarters of an hour a sign loomed beside the road. Two white poles supported turquoise boards with ‘Visit Historic Keough Hot Springs ‘in white. The poles and sign were weathered, but the letters were newly painted in some font with curly turns.
“Turn in there,:” Anne said. They continued about half a mile toward the hills on a dirt road and came upon a random collection of buildings, most small, one large, set on grassy area among low trees.
“Park by the building,” Anne said. It was two stories about 150 feet long. It looked something like a warehouse. The lower floor was a whitewashed wall with one door, the second story was wallboard. It’s planking was freshly white washed, but here and there it looked awry. No windows.
“The pools are inside, “Anne told him.
With crunching tires he parked near the door in a space where gravel meshed in crab grass. They unlatched the trunk of his BWM, opened their suitcases, and fished out swimming suits and flipflops. He took his wallet and she took a book, her redframed glasses, and a pair of sunglasses with heavy black frames. The door opened into a space cluttered with pool gear which in turn opened out to a pool that looked like a public swimming pool in a park except that a powerful jet of water emerged from the second floor and rained on half its length. Dennis paid for admission at a grilled cashier widow. A plump, brown-haired woman in glasses behind the grill told him without rising that womens changing rooms were on this side, men’s across the pool. When he stepped to the side of the pool, he saw three people swimming laps and on the right, shadowed under a roof, a shallow, half-sized pool where several people drifted or clung to supports that extended from the edge. “That’s the hot pool,” he heard her speak behind him. The opposite side of the pool had space enough for recumbent deck chairs.
“See you in a few minutes.”
He walked to the other side on a narrow walkway. To his right was the shallow, halfsized pool; he put his finger in the water. It was hot. On his left arched the hefty jet into the full-length, open pool. He noticed smelling nothing, no chlorine, none of the acrid sulphury smell he associated with mineral springs. He stept down into the changing area.
There were two lines of booths, unpainted wood with swinging, louvered doors. He entered one. The was no place to lock up his clothes, so he left them on a shelf and emerged in loose, black swimming trunks. He stepped out through the swinging doors and looked around for Anne. A towel and a book lay on a lounge chair in the sun but he found her floating with her eyes closed in the hot pool. He paused, and she opened her eyes. “I’m going to do a few laps,” he said loud enough for her to hear over the sound of the jet. She smiled and nodded.
He was a good swimmer and often swam laps at a college pool near his office. He dove into the lap pool. The water was warm but not cloying. The rain of drops where the big jet were warmer than the pool water and pleasant. He thought of places he had swum before. He had been on his highschool swimming team. He settled into it, and his thoughts drifted to a girl who had been on the girls team in his highschool who he had always wanted to date but had never dared to, then to prospects at work that required his attention. He did not come to conclusions but passed his attention over them like petting a dog. He swam 20 laps and felt at first released from the unacknowledged tension of Anne’s challenge, and then tired.
He heave himself out of the pool. Anne was the only one using one of half a dozen lounges. She wore a muted red, single-piece bathing suit and was reading a book. He thought she looked lonely. He took a chair next to her and asked her what the book was.
“It’s called Escape form Freedom.”
Normally he read only legal books, but he had read this work a few years before wondering if it illuminated either people’s experience of incarceration or the public’s intention in employing it. It had disappointed him. He was eager to learn her thoughts.
Dominique Hecq
Dominique Hecq is a widely anthologised and award-winning poet, fiction writer, essayist and translator. She lives and works on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land (Naarm/Melbourne). Hecq writes in English and French. Her creative works comprise a novel, six collections of short stories and seventeen books of poetry. Together with Volte Face and Otopos her bilingual sequence, Pistes de rêve appeared in 2024.
Stroke
Yours was a sun brimmed and nature blasted childhood of scratches and rashes, leeches and ticks that unspooled in free-draining soil, with its smells and textures caught under fingernails, matted in hair and rubbed into the soles of your feet.You are a Cyclops now, swimming in the Eurotram. Your head’s in a vice. Face drops. Sprain your jaw. The Eurotram’s a black crater now. You freedive. Fail to touch the bottom. You are the Virgin Mary. Ascend to Paradise Lost. You’re unsure whether you’re Galadriel or Sauron now. Say you’re Lady Macbeth. The sky is filled with waxflowers. You crush their fine foliage with your artificial hands, release their spicy aroma. Bees, beetles and butterflies swarm. Pollinate their nectar-gorged blooms. You pluck an armful of lambent Tiny Dancers you’ll bring to your own funeral.
Amnesia
The first word to go is a hot air balloon caught in a plane tree. It shifts in the breeze. Threatens to pull loose. Tears. Free in all its facets falls around your neck: able, allowed, emancipated, liberated, released, unbounded, unburdened, welcome, all set free. Next to go is want with all doing thingies. Very soon after that you know what I mean. No? Well, all the disappeared will leave a memo, jointly composed, signed and stamped, saying they are duty-bound to remove the inevitable. Err… Live.
Monosonnet
the path is lost in its stained-glass window of words traits inter lines memory hoops
Gillian Swain
Gillian Swain lives and writes on Wonnarua and Awabakal country in Australia. Gillian’s first full poetry collection is My Skin its own Sky (Flying Islands Press 2019) which followed her chapbook Sang Up (Picaro Press 2011). She is published in various anthologies and journals. Gillian has facilitated poetry workshops in many settings working with children and adults of all ages. She has appeared as a panellist and feature poet at writers festivals and events and was the poetry curator and co-director for the If Maitland Writers Festival through 2020-2022. Gillian currently is the convenor of Culture Club Poets Society in Maitland and one of the programmers at Newcastle Poetry at the Pub. Gillian’s most favourite things are her four children, her husband and Mum, their two dogs, poetry and coffee, not necessarily in that order.
Almanac
as if the boulders of this year hadn’t fallen you still feel the way you did the hum in your ears hasn’t stopped
as though the heart could beat another shock away as though skin will numb
a day is a planet this whole year a churned universe the bones of you still hold up the sky
Late night delivery, shared prayer
The small hours have big arms. Maybe we retreat into the partitions of insomnia to find that clasp.
After midnight solitude waits. Conversations quiet metaphors for early peace.
Trite they may well be but honest too, restorative
in the spaces of silence, like the last hours before daylight.
Grief
will wait behind every act of distraction every spring clean every rug rolled back and beaten.
It is loyal robust has a long bow.
Do what you will to get on with now to be off with the past claw back the present.
Construct delays with intricacy use your best bricks and mortar around your middle.
You will not hear it regain its footing return its grasp.
And be ready you’ll find yourself look up one day to learn what deluge really looks like a downpour for every day you shut out pain a sound so solid your throat remembers swallowing it down over and over and over.
Be ready the size of time is immense and heavy. Grief inhabits the moments left untended, is patient.
All it wants is welcome.
Irina Frolova
Irina Frolova is a Russian-Australian writer who lives on Awabakal Country. Irina’s creative highlights include her poetry collection Far and Wild (Flying Islands, 2021), the second prize in the 2021 Deborah Cass Prize for writing, and a longlisting in the 2023 University of Canberra VC International Poetry Prize. You can find her @irinafrolovapoet.
The Flautists of Green Point
the Awabakal land the black-and-white charm of Gymnorhina tibicen ambushes me the rush of wings and then they burst into a short run and I do my best not to burst into laughter a flash of wild mischief heads cocked to the side they welcome me into the tribe the conventicle in the fields of Green Point we swap seeds for song and feast on the music
Note: Gymnorhina tibicen is a Latin term for the species of Australian magpie, ‘tibicen’ can be translated as ‘flautist’.
1.
I lie low in my living room re-learn the art of vulnerability tell myself I am tidal lunar-like my energy levels
rise and retreat into the uncontainable salt of self-reproof I let it dissolve on my tongue
raise my blood pressure up to ‘normal’ amid stillness and lack of productivity
a crescent of light claws its way through the thick nothingness
2.
I wonder about time and focus my attention maybe it’s not something I am short on the black-and-white convictions of a to-do list fade today
a rose outside my window turns her young face towards the briny coastal sky
her swirling contours fill up with colour and sweetness surging time-blind and sure
3.
November noon I walk through the bush breathless humidity condenses between my temples
migraine is brewing the storm cloud’s mouth looms over the shore swallows the sun
I shelter in the mangroves this saline woodland a marvel of adaptation where
neither solely on land nor at sea we make a life of it
Jennifer Compton
Jennifer Compton lives in Melbourne. Recent Work in Canberra published her 11th book of poetry, the moment, taken, in 2021. She is an avid performer, bringing page to the stage, and won the Melbourne Poets Union Open Mic Prize in 2017 and was highly commended for the Melbourne Spoken Word Prize in 2017 and 2018. She has recently been a guest at the Newcastle Writers Festival, the Queensland Poetry Festival, the Red Dirt Poetry Festival, and the Maitland Writers Festival. She also writes reviews, most recently for Cordite Literary Review and Mascara Literary Review.
A Spider
A redback spider slipped through my hands and onto the ground as I took off the lid to the compost bin — how beautiful they were!
The glossy glossy black, the vermilion, carmine, scarlet, crimson of the marking on their back. The word ‘red’ comes nowhere near. I say ‘were’ because I crushed them quickly as I could under my heel. Was I wrong?
Saving Seed
Next year you will be hungry, I can guarantee.
Eye off the climbing bean pod, dangling, yellowing, the one that got away from this year’s picking.
Inside — count them with your fingers — five chances.
Wait a bit. Wait a bit. Soon they will be wrapped in a twist of brown paper.
Now! Put the five unquickened pulses into a dry, dark drawer.
Next year you will be glad of them. Believe me.
Grown From Seed I Saved Last Year
My runner beans are seeking structure. One upstart tendril has found the downpipe and is circling it.
I tormented another hopeful this afternoon as it was groping with one soft finger out into mid-air.
I held my hand up next to it loudly promising that I would stand there for two days.
No I won’t.
Tomorrow it will be too hot to grip the metal pipe so the tender feeler will think again and back off.
John W Sexton
John W. Sexton’s poetry is widely published and he has been a regular contributor to Live Encounters. A collection of experimentalist poetry, The Nothingness Kit, is now out from Beir Bua. In 2007 he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry.
The First Seraph
That angel drove a chain into the moon, and swung it as a thurible. Moonlight thus entered into daylight: time was stilled. Sleeping and wakefulness collided, and all was dream. And in that dream we held alert, all minds on earth in focus. The last apricot hung from the tree of souls, but its golden flesh was puckered. Azure finches came upon it, and their troubling broke it free. Into an ageless darkness it fell, but a descent of no ending. In this endless fall the finches pecked it clean.
Its stone hung inviolate, geology of stretchmarks: a metaphor of past births and births to come. All on earth stood aghast at this thing done, undone.
The Second Seraph
That angel was the daughter of Betrayal, thus named Betrayed. She pared her fingernails on the grinding-wheel of the sun. The pearl-lustre dust of her claws descended upon us. We choked in our breathing, and each hacking cough was the name of a child ignored, the countless dead in the many nations of our indifference. Upon the rings of Saturn she shaved her hair, and her blades of grey came down upon us. No one was spared from this impalement. Her hair was the desolation of Palestine, the detritus of her nails the dust of Lebanon. But our pleas were for none but our own kin, and our pity only for the tearing of our skin.
The Third Seraph
That angel was a fire of molten gold, the wealth of which evaporated all flesh; the fat of which rose upwards to heaven, from the condensed sum of which our emission of song. “Oh rendered suet of human folly, praise the powers that grant us second voice. In death we sing to the throne of creation, that catalyses the unworthy thus to glory.” And then that angel breathed a freezing, and our rendered flesh became pure soul, and all descended slowly, a scattered snowfall. Then the world at last shone white and silver, and the earth was held in that eternal slumber.
Jonathan Cant
Jonathan Cant is a Sydney-based writer, poet, and musician. He won the 2023 Banjo Paterson Writing Awards for Contemporary Poetry, was Longlisted for the 2023 Fish Poetry Prize, and the 2022 Flying Islands Poetry Manuscript Prize, Commended in the W. B. Yeats Poetry Prize, Highly Commended in the South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Awards, and twice selected for the Ros Spencer Anthology Brushstrokes. Jonathan’s poems have appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, Otoliths, and Booranga Writers’ Centre’s fourW thirty-four
Triolet for Murdered Trees
All those dead Red Gums at Castle Cove helps explain why we can’t have nice things. There was once a thriving native grove of Banksias—killed at Castle Cove for harbour views and the greed that brings. The homeless wildlife in Castle Cove! And this is why we can’t have nice things.
Unearthing
I wander through the coalfield’s lunar wasteland looking for signs of life, any colour or movement among the tailings, debris, and scattered scree. Something catches my eye halfway up a steep heap of coal. Cyan-coloured flames conjure dancing witches where a small fire has ignited. Drawn to it, I scale the mound, but hear no holy sound nor booming voice; only the whoosh and whisper of a south-westerly, winter’s wind bringing the hellish smell of sulphur. I descend along a dirt track as it snakes its way deeper into the valley. To my side, a shallow drainage ditch is littered with broken bottles and cans of spray paint discarded by tattooed teens who’ve left home to chrome solvents—huffing inhalants to take the edge off Life. Suddenly, I hear a chuffing nearby. There are no railway tracks in sight and yet—way out here— is the puffing of a steam engine. It seems to issue from a fissure in the shale embankment. A gaseous hiss with a rhythm that builds in tempo, then subsides into silence. I put my ear to the hole and listen as the thing pumps its way back into existence: an angry, breathing beast. I recoil from the spitting cavern as if it were the mouth of an idol carved from rock, now uttering a warning I don’t wish to hear. The Old Ones have news and it isn’t good. What should you expect from a place as forsaken as this?
ii.
Yet, even here, among the toxic vapours, pollution, and pillage, there’s beauty to be found if you know where to look— a natural museum underground. I pick up a large, flat piece of shale and cleave it open with a rock hammer, splitting it to reveal its history and mystery. A perfect fern! The smooth, thin layer of carbon meets grittier shale. The fossil’s dark silhouette contrasts with the lighter, surrounding stone; like an ancient woodblock print or a scholar’s slate awaiting translation. Geology’s lucky dip should be as much about art as it is money.
iii.
The shape and symmetry of each leaf mimics the larger branch from which it has stemmed—a miniature forest within a forest. Here’s the floral legacy of a life once lived. Now neutralised, compressed by pressure and time, asleep in its sedimentary bed. This plant’s stored energy becoming part of the carbon network like oil and gas to be spent—burnt under a car bonnet.
Justin Lowe
Self-Portrait with Cutlass
I.
I have been told I write with my fists. I have been told more than once, by people that I trust, that were I to parade myself in the street the way I parade myself on paper, they would probably lock me up behind that big iron door the old man argues with on my day bed.
II
I understand next to nothing, or perhaps what is worse, I woke one morning to the song of strange birds.
I play at wisdom like a kitten pawing at a loose thread.
I consider stubborness a virtue, cute as that kitten, except that kittens with a loose thread never age.
III
my heart gives me trouble since COVID, my mind wanders, my long legs carry me deep into the dark wood where COVID tried to bury me. three times it tried, and I’m not quite sure it failed entirely.
continued overleaf...
Justin Lowe lives in a house called “Doug” in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. His ninth collection, “San Luis”, is due out through Puncher & Wattmann in October 2024.
I am not puzzled by the face in the mirror anymore, but it seems puzzled by me.
when I turn off the light, and lock the door behind me, I sometimes wonder what it is thinking.
V.
trees build their cathedrals of shadow which the magpies fill with their polyphony of trill and clack,
and the cockatoos wander in, screeching at the choir like midnight drunks.
lightning flashes high and completes the vision, of a black bird and a white bird
arguing like cracks in a mirror.
IV.
VI.
each day I gaze into the puddle the last rains left. they were a month ago, but the puddle is as stubborn as the face staring back.
something is hatching in its eyes, sending out muddy ripples. the mouth grins all murky, like the mud around its edges.
the first dust of a long hot summer proffers the grinning face a wig, like a clown might wear, like a judge might whose empty bottle is his gavel.
VII.
one of those straight-talkers with the wisdom of a crooked nail. he of the baleful laugh, and a chastity box stuffed with monographed doilies.
chest-thumper condemned to the mascot shuffle, who spits on the oranges before the half-time whistle, whose moment of reverie is recalling an ancient grudge.
he of the tv eye, and the lisp of a shadow boxer, hostage like some weathervane to the public barometer and blind agency.
the shabby pedant always punctual but never prepared, who likes to pounce on my many contradictions, who refuses to pay on principle for the damage to my house.
Kate McNamara
Kate McNamara is a poet, playwright and critical theorist. She also works as an editor. Her plays have been performed internationally and she was invited to deliver the opening address to the 4th International Conference of Women Playwrights in Galway. She has recently returned to her first love: poetry. Her works have been published in a range of formats. A founding member of the Canberra Surrealist movement, Aktion Surreal, she lives in Ainslie with her sons, cats and a menagerie of wild birds.
Nijinsky
I am Nijinsky
I am the one who dies when he is not loved. I dance as the ice carves my bones out of light, Black hearted, I am implacable, My blood aches to dance.
I am only a shrine in which the Universe dances. I thought I was alive, they said I was insane. I am the dancer in the heart, I have no peace. Peace, will it ever come?
Ease, the flow of muscle, tissue bone, O and end, an end to love and mourning. Death dances me.
I have been mad and yet I understand the truth And in that I stand alone: pure, beautiful, incorruptible. I burn and yet I can still dance.
To me the earth is one single state: It is a God, the fire in the head, in the heart. My pulse is like an earthquake, I dance the stars
My body is the wind.
I know an infinite range of intricate torment I will not scream, I will not scream. I am Nijinsky. Tell me then if I am not mad?
Mankind makes merry And God mourns, he is in agony. I have nothing and I want nothing. They say I am a magician. I am not; I am a God in a body I cannot dance this pain, It is a song that will not sing I cannot give it voice, color, movement.
I am Nijinsky. I am the one who dies when he is not loved. I am love, I am mad, I dance, I am ice, once I was fire, I am not calm, I am a storm. I am an artist who loves all shapes, All are beauty. Beauty is harmony, the breath of a God. I like hunchbacks, I like freaks. I am one.
I can dance like a hunchback
Feel the twisted muscle
The throb of the hump. The beast clawing to regain me. I am a creature of hunted nights, A hawk in a cage. A creature in a forgotten zoo.
People stare at me and cry They do not know that even in these cages I am feeling beauty I cannot be silent. I will speak And when I speak They will deny me. They will put me in an asylum. Butterflies, I will speak with the insane, I will dance them They will know me.
I am Nijinsky. I am God’s problem, I am his fool.
Foot note - Vaslav Nijinsky was described as the greatest dancer of his age. He disrupted all the conventions of his art, changing The Ballet Russe forever. Not long before the suicide of my eldest son, Eamon, I was reading yet another biography of Nijinsky’s life: his demented journals, his concomitant genius and madness. He was an elemental force, almost a force outside of nature and as little subject to social control itself, his was an absolute insurrection against constraint. This performance piece I wrote became my funeral o ration for a son who never came to fruition, who was as breath takingly brilliant as he was difficult. Eamon and Nijinsky: spirit brothers.
Les Wicks
Les Wicks has been published across 38 countries in 17 languages. His 15th book of poetry is Time Taken – New & Selected (Puncher & Wattmann, 2022). He can be found at leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm
Back to the Hut
London once called. Or Perth. There was a promised car shiny namebadge & login code. We all left.
Had for years glammed up or down wore ties or lippy or rivers. We’d whatever-it-took within a fluid reason.
Perhaps we became hollowed, needed a new shadow or cause.
So much to give not too much of it ours.
Found things out forgot so much.
Sometimes we walked away a cardboard box brimmed with our awards & secret failings.
Other times we were monsters & monsters must be killed.
This time later are we the sum of our leaving or the returns?
Modified With Chopper Handles
Barry takes his mobility scooter up my street for coffee every morning at 9.00 & drinks at the club at 5.30.
Hope through habit has defeated fragility — he rides on the wrong side of the road. No worries mate. For every question & each ignored suggestion
Spark
if there are enough corners we will be a circle
those corners disappear our planet isnt flat the mistakes ive made need a teacher with the wisdom to pile all my lists & say this is now a bonfire
no promise of enduring warmth but any bright moment is precious
Linda Adair
Linda Adair is a poet as well as editor/publisher of Rochford Press magazine P76 No 9: Poetries of place/displacement, diaspora/ odyssey which recently launched in Melbourne for both the print and online special editions. Adair grew up on Darug country without knowing whose land she stood on. She now lives on Darug and Gundungarra country in the Blue Mountains, Australia. She pays her respect to the Traditional Custodians of Country which always was, and always will, be Aboriginal. Her debut book The Unintended Consequences of the Shattering was published in 2020. Her poems have appeared in several issues of Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, Bluepepper, The Blue Nib, P76 Nos 8 & 9 the Sonic Poetry Festival Issue, Ozburp, To End All Wars, Messages from The Embers, Poetry for the Planet, Pure Slush Volume 25 and Work! Lifespan Vol 5 as well as various journals. She is working on a verse memoir of her family’s complex ‘settler’ colonist history. She featured at La Mama Poetica, Cuplet, Poetry at the Pub, Back to Newnes Day, and BigCi Open Day. She read at Sonic Poetry Festival events. She has been interviewed for 3CR’s Spoken Word program, read her work on Eastside Community Radio and read at Knox Bar, Chippendale for World Poetry Day.
The orphaned truth
‘meeting’ Margaret from Roscommon
At the twilight of the last day before the clock outpaced the sun you drew me to you and those souls you claimed as yours
I stood in that unkempt cemetery facing the crumbling marble of denial the patina of neglect recalling a complex tribalism
a sweep of arum lillies carved in relief on the cold stone cross laid down upon the dark frost-burned lichen blanketing your family plot
I needed to tell you my great grandfather was your second son a quiet man who kept the property going but lost his family when his young wife died after yet another birth
that motherless infant my grandfather sent to live with aunts in the city saw his father only occasionally and rarely at the farm hiding the past or protecting the future.
I have pieced together your story a voyage as an orphan escaping the dreaded Roscommon Workhouse last resort of the destitute during the Great Hunger
rescued you sailed with the first boat-load of ‘Irish girls of good character’ shipped to a bigoted colonial town hungry for servants for free settlers wives and mothers for emancipist farmers
on the edge of the ‘settled’ nineteen counties you ‘married up’ to an older battle-hardened English Trooper turned Mounted Policeman then gold miner
who chased wealth from Tuena Creek to Lambing Flat* where he tried to drive Chinese miners away from their diggings.
beside streams of alluvial gold inside a miner’s slab hut another battle of life played out you birthed three children and only two lived to their first birthday
meanwhile your ‘Sergeant on Patrol’ rode the goldfields before returning home to you and his claim which eventually paid off.
I came to acknowledge you and to feel acknowledged even if only by the wind on unceded Wiradyuri Country
as I talked to you the setting sun cast a narrow ray across your grave sign enough that my voice had carried.
*The Lambing Flat Riots were a series of violent anti-Chinese demonstrations by that took place from 1860 to 1861 in the goldfields of NSW, Australia, in the Burrangong Region at various sites including Wombat, Tipperary Gully and Lambing Flat.
A shattering
Worlds within words beyond the storeroom door rows of dusty books beckoned neatly stacked sanctuaries from the jagged norms of domestic tempest
as a brooding thunderstorm galvanised the plains a crystal ashtray felled our Christmas tree glass baubles became projectiles then razors for small bare feet
with the first thunder crack his man-child’s rage also discharged Lear-like, shame came too late uncertainty’s arc flashed then carbonised in my young eyes before I sought refuge outside
on the verandah’s stolid concrete I breathed in the petrichor felt the lightning strikes’ power & scootered in soothing figure eights to try to process that world without words.
Lisa C. Taylor is the author of two collections of short fiction and three collections of poetry with Arlen House/Syracuse University Press. Her first novel, The Shape of What Remains will be published in late February 2025 by Between the Lines Publishing. Lisa lives in a small mountain town in Colorado where she mountain bikes awkwardly and hikes with a little more certainty. Lisa holds an MFA in Creative Writing and teaches online for writers.com. She is the co-director of the Mesa Verde Writers Conference which will be adding an all-day literary festival in 2025. www.lisactaylor.com
Terre Verte
Martha’s lying defined her like wacky hats identify the royals. Overrated, she said, or truth is for those who lack imagination. As a child, her lies were typical, telling Mom it was our brother, Harold, who left ink spots on the gold damask sofa. He was adding up numbers or something. Algebra homework. When a stump was all that was left of the blooming dogwood, she blamed it on Donnie Whitcomb. Boy’s turning into a regular juvie. Last week he toilet-papered the Johnson’s new BMW. It wasn’t until we got older that the lies became dangerous.
It never sat well with me. I knew it was only a matter of time before the lies started getting personal. Mostly I tried to stay out of it, mixed burnt sienna and cadmium red light, jaune brilliant with a pencil line of raw umber. In the colors, I saw the break that happens when the sun focuses its single eye, and the ground swells with the beginning of light. Painting was my way out, all the stress soaring past me like a murder of crows.
Light can trick you, make you think that a winter bush is an old man or that the small dots of people who dropped from the towers were pigeons congregating in mid-air. The ones who were holding hands broke the spell. Ash settling all over the city afterwards. You couldn’t breathe, my friend, Bianca told me. She was nearby during 9/11 since she attended The Art Institute of New York City; Rhode Island School of Design for me.
“Do you want the canapés and Moet and Chandon or crudité and Medoc?
My opening at the Brownstone Museum was the result of decades of work. I’d finally arrived at the place most artists dream only of; I’d actually sold enough to make a living. Not famous or a household word by any means but trendy. Still, the Brownstone Museum was a pivotal moment, next to MOMA or Brooklyn Museum of Art, my victory last year. Okay, I haven’t had work at MOMA but I feel like I’m on that trajectory.
“I think canapés and champagne are more elegant. You?”
“Gracious Gourmet does a lovely job, silver trays, hunky wait staff. Trés, trés. Nicole, your ship is pulling up to the docks, unloading more than baubles this time.” My husband, Doug leaned in to kiss me. Twenty-seven years and still there’s electricity. Aged well. The lean types do, Bianca once told me over Cosmos at Bernardo’s Tavern. She was on husband #3, a commercial realtor from Queens. Her Megan was off to Brown, Simone at a boarding school in New England. Our two were in college on opposite coasts, Diane in L.A. and Christopher just outside of Boston. Bianca is the only one who remembers Martha.
“No one will believe you.” Martha had fixed me with that stare, planted her treetrunk legs firmly, crossed her arms.
“Put it back. I won’t tell anyone,” I had said.
“Can’t. I sold it at Henley’s Pawn Shop. Lot of money. Already spent, Nicole.”
Mom looked at her jewelry nearly every day. Useless stuff, I thought. Emeralds and diamonds, bracelets from the islands, earrings from European vacations where we were left with nannies with names like Maybelle; islanders who earned their living taking care of rich kids while their parents jetted off to Aruba or Switzerland. Twice a year, Mom and Barf-man would get away from “it all”, meaning us. Our real father lived in Poughkeepsie with Myrna and her teenage brat, Sheldon. We saw them maybe once a year.
“Martha, you’ve got to get it back. Mom loves that necklace. She’s going to be looking for it.”
“That’s where you come in, asshole. Why’d you take it? You buying drugs or alcohol? You’d better think of something fast because she’ll be home in a few hours.” Martha smiled at me with her porcelain veneers that cost Mom and Barf-man $4,000 because she’d convinced them that it was Dad’s bad genes that caused her tooth discoloration. The easiest way to get money from Mom was to blame it on Dad. I’d done it myself when I wanted to go to college.
“I got in! You know Dad won’t pay anything. This will show him that we don’t need his money. Please, Mom. I got a small scholarship.”
Barf-man was rolling in money. He never had kids of his own which is a good thing because they would certainly be ugly and mean. Mom told us, marry the first time for love, the second time for money. Sure as hell wasn’t for looks. Couldn’t hold a drink either. The first time she brought him home, they had wine and he lost it all over Mom’s upholstered chair, the one by the new flat-screen she’d bought with the divorce settlement. There’s still a faint odor though she had it professionally cleaned twice. He wanted to pay. No family of his own and he wanted us to like him. I never did though I thanked him at my graduation, sent him birthday and Christmas gifts each year. Small price. Turned out Barf-man got everyone back in the end. He’d put the bulk of his estate in an annuity for Mom that would be turned over to his church upon her death. Yeah, they built an entire parochial school with Barf-man’s money.
“What am I supposed to do now? I’m the one without a husband, remember?” Martha was counting on that inheritance to see her through. All the Botox in the world won’t do much for her in ten or fifteen years.
When I cashed out my savings account, sold the Tiffany watch Mom and Barf-man gave me for high school graduation (bought a knock-off in Times Square for $15.00 so they wouldn’t notice), I had just enough to retrieve that necklace from the pawn shop. I snuck it back into Mom’s jewelry box and moved out two weeks later. For good. Couldn’t be implicated if I wasn’t there. Told Mom I’d found a summer job in Providence. Eventually, I starting waitressing at Bertonelli’s Bistro, answered a Craigslist Ad for a roommate. Doug was my downstairs neighbor in an equally crappy apartment. I thought that was the end of dealing with Martha.
I painted my canvases with swirls of dioxzine purple, tinting white to tone it down, terre verte at the edges. Years after I finished art school and had a series of menial jobs at galleries, art critics began to take notice. Last week, the local paper ran an article about my upcoming show.
Nicole Bentley’s small-scale landscapes have grown up, graduated to ambitious canvases suffused with yearning and foreboding. The harsh yellows and burnt siennas of her early work explode with expressive distortion of murky blues and greens, and an emotional intensity that unsettles as much as it informs. Her solo show at the Brownstone promises to offer collectors a rare opportunity to witness the evolution of an artist in her prime.
I chose a Vera Wang sequined skirt paired with a black lace camisole Doug picked up at some boutique in Greece years ago. I had a matching clutch and pumps I’d bought on sale at Nordstrom’s. When the phone rang, I grabbed it, hoping there wasn’t a catering glitch or one of the many moving parts that can doom an art opening.
“Hey, sis. How’ya doin’?”
“Martha, no time to talk. My opening is in two hours.”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. How many times had Doug told me not to give Martha any information? He was right. I should have learned my lesson with the necklace and the times she begged money from Mom and Barf-man for her breast implants, and later to pay off credit card debt. She told me that she was being punished for not having kids because Mom and Barf-man took Diane and Christopher to Santorini four years ago.
“I mean, that trip had to cost a few thousand dollars. Why should I have less just because I didn’t want to bring brats into this fucked-up world?”
“It’s not like that, Martha. They were giving the grandchildren an experience. You chose not to have kids. They don’t owe us anything.”
She didn’t attend Barf-man’s funeral, was no help with Mom’s rapid decline. Harold and I auditioned the parade of aides, sold the house, paid off bills we never knew she had racked up.
Why do I bother trying to be rational with Martha? It was like trying to make cadmium red light into a bystander. A flash of cadmium on a canvas is a woman’s mouth, a bloody wound. I’m just the artist, the translator. The paints have an alchemy all their own. When they mix on my palette, they whisper about the underside of clouds, four shades of yellow in a daffodil, a shadow of a towering man standing outside my field of vision. I understand art and nuance. It’s Martha I don’t get. All brash and bluster, she tears up a scene like too much rust in a landscape.
“I’m ironing my dress now. You think I’d miss my little sister’s opening at the Brownstone?”
Well, yes. She missed the births of Diane and Christopher, my hysterectomy, Doug’s layoff, Diane’s cancer scare, and six other art openings.
“Really, it’s not necessary I won’t have time to talk.”
“That’s so like you, Nicole. I try to be nice but you turn it around. You’ve had it easy— husband to support you with your art, grown kids, house in the suburbs. I had to take out a loan when my Camry broke down. I borrowed the dress for tonight.”
“I appreciate it, Martha. I have to go though. As you can imagine, there’s a lot left to do.”
Martha could imagine. It was her one talent, imagining and claiming that imagination as reality. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the shimmering black dress that dipped down to nearly her naval, showcasing those expensive faux breasts, the stilettos, a new face that made her look thirty-five again, complete with swollen lips outlined in vermillion.
When I got the call about the two pen-and-inks gone missing, along with a silver tray and a sequined clutch purse, I knew there was no point in asking. Sometimes it’s best not to ask questions when you don’t want the answers. My response to the press was curt.
“No comment.”
It was Doug who found the note in the guest book.
Terre verte is a fancy way of saying green earth. Look outside, Nicole. Same fucking landscape there always was. You can paint it any way you like but you are still the girl who sold her watch to protect me. Can’t wait for your next opening.
It’s true that the past can come back and bite you in the ass. It’s also true that karma is a tough mother to beat. Martha left little pieces of her trail all over the museum. There were some things that money couldn’t buy though I had to admit her facelift and lip augmentation looked pretty good; good enough to convince the male judge to cut her some slack, buy her time to come up with another plan. There would always be a better fabrication.
Terre verte is a lot more than green earth. It’s the shading that matters. That’s how you know there’s a fox sleeping behind the maple tree, that the iris is about to fold, and that those wisps of clouds are on the verge of opening up and no one will be spared.
Marie Studer, Co. Limerick, Ireland recently published her debut poetry collection, Real Words (Revival Press). She is widely published in journals and anthologies. She is a past category winner of the Trócaire/Poetry Ireland competition and The Bangor Ekphrastic Challenge, and her poems have been placed in many competitions, most recently, The Denis O’Grady, International Poetry Competition.
First Day at School
I’m four years old clutching the seat of an ink-well desk, its wood as hard as the words stuck in my glottis.
Behind Mary Halpin and Ellen Noonan shuffle as my slipped-stream dyes buff-boards black. Mrs Somers roams between rows, stops by the shuffling pair. My tears trickle at the flow of her kind words, my fist unfurling in her soft palm.
Lost and Found
I dreamed my mother sitting on a garden chair, her salt and pepper hair brushing a roll collar of green suede, as she cooed to a chirping robin in the thicket. I called out and again, she disappeared.
I remained in the void, recalled her re-telling, how in a department store, she turned to find me not there, ran, ran, calling my name, watched in slow-motion as I was scooped from the tarmac of Dublin’s main thoroughfare, by a man in blue overalls.
He slipped through the hive of onlookers, and right to the end, she regretted not getting his name or hanseling a crown in his palm.
Next day, I dig and the robin feasts on turned tufts of earth.
Grief
Sometimes she drifts between the quiet house and the back garden gets down on her knees and with bare hands weeds and thins drills of carrots scattering tap roots and fronds in trenches of loss only lifting her head when earth surges her veins spilling tears to fill up empty again.
Mark Roberts
Mark Roberts is a writer, critic and publisher living on unceded Darug and Gundungurra land (NSW, Australia). He is co-editor, along with Linda Adair, of Rochford Street Review. His last poetry collection, Concrete Flamingos, was published by Island Press in 2016. His next collection, The Office of Literary Endeavours, will be published by 5 Islands Press in 2025.
Final Reel
After Breathless (1960) directed by Jean-Luc Godard
I know it is a trap but I’m in love and this is how she would want it to endthough when I saw the police car at the end of the street I ran.
There is only so much film left and if it doesn’t end in a kiss it will end in tears and they wont be mine.
I run hard for the street corner for the shelter of concrete. The first bullet whistles past me, I am filed with elation.
The second bullet hits my left shoulder spinning me around. I keep running I see garbage bins ahead as the music surges.
More bullets and I’m dancing staggering into embrace of rubbish. I hear a clarinet, feel your tears and sense the end credits
Consecration
forgotten gods we have rested here for centuries worshipped now by pigeons and shadows who slide between rotting boards at night to leave small sacrifices we wait disguise ourselves as mice and nibble at stale honey cakes
Taking Tea
After Cléo from 5 to 7 - directed by Agnès Varda (1962)
a man sits at a long table in a white room the table is shrouded in a white cloth behind him there is a large tv screen he is drinking tea from a fine china cup in front of him a teaspoon rests on a saucer there is a French movie on the tv the man has his back to it and the sound is turned down
we can read the subtlitles I always think everyone’s looking at me, but I only look at my soul Cléo does not look sick but she is waiting for her doctor the soldier must return to Algeria they both walk towards a possible death the man puts his cup down stands up places his chair carefully under the table and leaves the room I think my fear is gone I think I’m happy
Mary E. Ringland
Mary E. Ringland is a poet, prose writer, and therapeutic counsellor. She has travelled far and wide but now lives on the Antrim Coast, close to Larne. Her poems have been published in The Bangor Literary Journal, The Belfast Community Arts Partnership Anthologies (2022 & 2023), The Storms Journal (2023), New Isles Press - Issue 3 (2023), The Morecambe Poetry Festival Anthologies (2023 & 2024), and previously in Live Encounters Poetry & Writing. Mary has recently completed her MA in Creative writing at the Open University, and her debut collection is due for publication in 2025.
Full Circle
You look like the father of you, caught up in the furrow of your brow. A soul trapped in solitude, A soul lost to my history. Once my focus on a faraway shore. Revisited after an eternity. After a lifetime – nimble as a nanosecond. Collapsed. Caved in. We regroup. We rifle through the rubble of memories. In search of gold – nuggets of connection. Finding names in faces. Faces in memories. In photos, dogeared and dreary – reviving the lost ones, the lonely ones lost in the ether of everyday forgetfulness. You show me your scars. I keep mine hidden. They are not snow white. Not hot. Not healed. I am not as happy as you to travel through time, through years – forty in four seconds. To a far-distant past. To look through the recycled glass of this hospital prism. At the girl in the red dress. And back again full circle. To the near-distant future. To a woman who looks like the mother of me.
Trouble and Toil
i.m Teresa McAllister (grandmother)
She led me into a garden bound by bitter Celandine, through the mechanics of a clockwork morning.
I helped her Mansion Polish the work-worn step, put spit and shine on tarnished brass knobs.
I watched her wring every last drop of energy from sheets, through a mangle – panting. I joined in her mop and bucket frenzy – dizzy on ammonia while she meditated at the ironing board of life’s creases.
I kept apace with her five-thousand-step expedition to the butcher for bacon and the baker for Barmbrack.
I mimicked her furrowed brow and flinched from the sting of hot fat spitting – forever from a pan full of working men’s fuel – waiting for the Angelus Bell to herald their return.
I listened for the hungry thud of hobnail boots ready to ravage our sacred space, ready to send me in search of sanctuary under the stairs – to suffocate under the soft-scented sighs of her crumpled dreams.
Found and Lost
I found you on a high, on a bar stool breaking all the rules – drinking – bitter.
The cowboy on the red pack – smoking – hot looking for a cowgirl to wrangle with,
eyes fixed on the Guardian speedy crossword, a sure sign you had a brain in there – somewhere.
I wrestled with clues, gave you the come on and we clicked over one across and two down,
snuck off to the fells for fun – falling fast into the heart of a town drenched in drizzle,
to amble – aimless, and drink pints of Wainwrights on smitten velvet seats – saturated in wrongs
and the whiff of stale pale ale. We listened to Neil Young’s Harvest Moon – full – steam ahead
dreaming our lives away – drowning in desire and false promises – pitted – with hope and hatred.
I lost you on a low, on a barstool drinking like a fool – acting bitter.
Michael Leach
Michael Leach is a poet and academic who lives in Bendigo, Australia on unceded Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Michael’s poetry is featured or forthcoming in journals such as Plumwood Mountain, anthologies such as The Best Australian Science Writing 2024 (NewSouth Publishing), and his four books: Chronicity (Melbourne Poets Union), Natural Philosophies (Recent Work Press), Rural Ecologies (In Case of Emergency Press), and Chords in the Soundscapes (Ginninderra Press). Michael’s poems have won or been otherwise recognised in the UniSA Mental Health and Wellbeing Poetry Competition, Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, Minds Shine Bright Confidence Writing Competition, Woollahra Digital Literary Award, Hush Foundation Kindness in Health Writing Prize, and Liquid Amber Press Poetry Prize: Poetry of Change.
Draw
I want to draw thylacines in forest scenes I want to draw plans for a modest home
I want to draw strength from organic fields
I want to draw the smallest crowd
I want to draw breath in your atmosphere I want to draw a bubble bath for you
I want to draw letters, not numbers
I want to draw strings on little bags of dice
I want to draw inspiration from birdsongs I want to draw a bow over one string
I want to draw careful conclusions
I want to draw no blood
Natasha Remoundou-Howley
Natasha Remoundou-Howley was born and raised in Athens, Greece. She is a bilingual writer, poet, translator, and literary scholar based in Ireland since 2003. Her work has been published by Dedalus Press, The Stinging Fly, Abridged, The Madrigal, Púca, Live Encounters, and ΑΣΣΟΔΥΟ and presented in festivals in Ireland and Greece. Her translations have been selected for programmes and cultural events held at Princeton University, Galway2020, University College Dublin, the Linenhall Arts Centre and published by Asymptote Journal, The Gallery Press, the Trinity College Journal of Literary Translation, Le Ortique, and Παράσιτο. She lectures in critical theory and English literature at University College Dublin and the American College of Greece.
Prey
Look, across the provincial abattoir a stray cat has paused, a solitary witness. Behind the glass she studies the spectacle of an anatomy lesson from a safe distance. Hanging from steel hooks, polished, severed, still dripping, pig heads, limbs, guts, and a goat’s heart repose their defeat on the marble counter. Fresh in order, carved with care, the price of flesh laid bare.
When the butcher raised his blade over the lifeless muscle, I saw the cat through the school bus window walking away with a live sparrow in her mouth.
white ink
after Hélène Cixous
The writer enters the forest to write again she-woman-escapee to write in secret in white ink. She writes for the things she only knows cartographer of forms, chaosmos-giver, about your childhood friends with the face veils. She writes the margin, the harem, and the abyss, Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale. She writes with you little girl from Oran for causing trouble unafraid of dripping blood on your dress. She writes unafraid of lacking, the second underage mother she’s ever had, you gave her ladder, labyrinth, breast,
a country to come into writing with a raucous laughter. She, too a phantasm in flight ever/overflowing, ever/over-failing with you, Hélène, Simone, Julia. Because in owing you her hair and her upbringing, listen how she murmurs an alien mother tongue etched under skin tissue with soil water and vowels.
Unsilenced, she’s left with two hands to carve your root prints in seabeds deep.
Patricia Sykes
Patricia Sykes is a poet and librettist. Her poems and collections have received various awards, including the Newcastle Poetry Prize, John Shaw Neilson award and the Tom Howard Poetry Prize. She has read her work widely and it has featured on ABC radio programs Poetica and The Spirit of Things. Her collaborations with composer Liza Lim have been performed in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Paris, Germany, Russia, New York and the UK. She was Asialink Writer in Residence, Malaysia, 2006. A selection of her poems was published in an English/Chinese edition by Flying Island Books in 2017. A song cycle composed by Andrew Aronowicz, based on her collection The Abbotsford Mysteries, premiered at The Abbotsford Convent Melbourne — now an arts precinct — in 2019. A podcast of this work is available on various platforms.
Flicker by Flicker
Flickers of light between leaves the flash of wings between us a window of ancient glass it’s faint grime redolent of seasons reflected and gone so many inhales, exhales, escaping its aperture to discover anonymity among petals, fallen from youth into age’s compost only the flickers renew, tireless as sunlight, moonlight, stars, wind, here, gone, feeding like butterflies until glinting off in glimmer breaths.
Percy Aaron
Percy Aaron is an ESL teacher at Vientiane College in the Lao PDR and a freelance editor for a number of international organisations. He has had published a number of short stories, edited three books and was editor of Champa Holidays, the Lao Airlines in-flight magazine and Oh! – a Southeast Asia-centric travel and culture publication. As lead writer for the Lao Business Forum, he was also on the World Bank’s panel of editors. Before unleashing his ignorance on his students, he was an entrepreneur, a director with Omega and Swatch in their India operations and an architectural draughtsman. He has answers to most of the world’s problems and is the epitome of the ‘Argumentative Indian’. He can be contacted at percy.aaron@gmail.com
All for Nothing
In a tiny village in northeastern Laos, poverty and misfortune make a tragic combination.
Mouk broke the hearts of all the young men in the village when she married Tham. Her beautiful face, twinkling black eyes and large dimples always made people feel special when she smiled at them.
Tham broke the hearts of all the young girls in the village when he married Mouk. He was goodlooking, muscular and hardworking. Unlike most of the other young men, he didn’t laze around playing cards, chewing tobacco or getting drunk. If he wasn’t in the field working alongside his father, he was helping his mother inside and outside their little hut. He was especially skilful at carving little figures from the pieces of wood that he saved from the kindling. Almost every child had a whistle, or a catapult made by him.
When little Pok was born all the village rejoiced. She was such a happy baby and like her mother, there was always a smile on her face. Everybody wanted to carry or play with her. By the age of four she was totally unafraid, hunting frogs and birds with her cousins.
One day, she wandered into the forest with the boys but lost them. A few hours passed before some of the children told Mouk. Dropping everything, she sent one of them to call Tham from the field and rushed off in the direction the children had last seen Pok. Soon Tham and a few villagers followed with sticks and knives. The forest while a source of food for the villagers, also had its dangers. There were plants that caused terrible allergies, poisonous snakes and occasionally wild animals. Some of the villagers even claimed that they had been chased by man-eating tigers. But the greatest danger of all were the bombies, little pellets designed to maim. American warplanes had sprinkled them indiscriminately during the war next door in Vietnam. These were uppermost in the panic-stricken minds of Pok’s parents.
Then they found her but their joy turned to horror. The little girl was standing at the edge of a large puddle laughing gleefully at the ripples she was causing each time she threw a stone into the water. The horrified villagers fled as a screaming Mouk grabbed Pok by the hair and slapped her several times.
By the time Pok and her parents had returned to their hut, word had spread about the child trespassing onto sacred land. Now nobody knew what revenge the enraged forest spirits would extract for their abode being defiled.
Over the next several days, Pok was locked inside their tiny room and various rituals were performed to propitiate the spirits. Tham and Mouk borrowed heavily to pay for the ceremonies.
Months later, little Pok fell sick. She started having seizures and losing consciousness. The whispers started as villagers remembered her throwing stones into the sacred pond. The village shaman prescribed various potions for the child and even more acts of atonement but nothing helped. Clearly the spirits were upset and she was being punished for desecrating sacred land.
When the shaman’s potions had no effect, the village chief told her parents to take her to the district hospital. The inexperienced and poorly trained doctor prescribed a course of antibiotics that left Pok very weak and even more disoriented. More visits to the hospital followed and Tham and Mouk went further into debt. There were evil spirits inside the girl’s head, the parents learned. Then a kindly nurse told them to take the girl to a hospital in Vientiane, the national capital. The treatment would be very expensive but there was no guarantee that their child would get better. They were devastated.
Back in the village, Tham, Mouk and his parents discussed what should be done. They pleaded with the villagers for help but the people were poor themselves. Besides, they were afraid to incur the wrath of the spirits.
Then the headman told them about factories in Thailand, where many people from other villages had gone to work, sending home more money every few months than they could ever earn from years of working their rice plots in Laos. Tilling the fields was more a man’s job and the factories preferred women whose work in garmentmaking was more delicate. * * * *
Mouk and several women from her village had already spent a year at a garment factory in northeastern Thailand. The work was backbreaking but the long hours kept her mind off her family back home. Every time a colleague went home for a holiday, she sent back whatever she had saved. Then she waited eagerly for their return and news of her family. Tham and Pok missed her terribly, she was told. Also, Tham’s father had passed away and now he worked the fields alone. She considered visiting him and Pok but thought of all the money she would lose if she took a few weeks off. Next year, she would, she kept telling herself.
One day, Mouk overheard some of the women talking about places in Bangkok where girls earned more than 25,000 baht a month. That was incredible! With that kind of money, she could return home in a few months to start Pok’s medical treatment. An older woman told her that since she was beautiful, she could earn even more. Mouk didn’t understand that remark and gave it no thought. She and some of her friends discussed the matter and agreed to move to the Thai capital.
At the end of the month Mouk and two other young women arrived in Bangkok. The brother of the woman who had told them about the job met them at Mo Chit bus station. He would take them to a place where they could easily earn more than 25,000 baht a month, he assured them. Twenty-five thousand baht a month! Their faces filled with disbelief and greed. On the way Mouk’s mouth opened in amazement. Each building they drove past had more lights than her entire village. She couldn’t believe that there were so many cars and so many people in the world.
The taxi stopped at a building and they were taken into an office. A man and an elegantly dressed woman sat at a table that was bigger than Mouk’s house back in Laos. A younger man, with bulging biceps stood at the door. The woman, who was clearly the boss, told them to take off their clothes. Mouk was shocked. Only her husband had seen her naked. She stood staring at the woman unsure she had heard correctly. There were always misunderstandings in Thailand even though Lao and Thai were almost similar. After all she did have problems even understanding Lao, which was quite different from her native Khmu.
The other women shyly removed their blouses but Mouk stood still. The woman nodded to the man at the door, who stepped forward and slapped her hard across the head. Then grabbing her shoulders, he ripped open her T-shirt and pulled off her bra. He was powerful and before she could resist further, he had already yanked off her jeans and panties. The three women stood stark naked while the woman looked up and down at their bodies.
She barked something at the man who gave them back their clothes and led them to an upper floor where they were shown a room with a couple of mattresses on the floor and some wooden lockers.
Mouk was surprised when the next morning she did not have to rise early for work. Instead, later in the morning, another woman came to the room and told them that they would start work each day at 4.00 pm and finish at 3.00 am. They were given some beautiful clothes to wear and shown how to make up. kind of work they would have to do and were told they would have to sit and talk to men, pour their drinks, and try to get them to consume as much alcohol as possible. If the men wanted anything more, they could take them to the rooms upstairs, charge more and keep half the money.
The first night the thug who had hit Mouk in the boss’s office, raped her. He told her that he wanted half of all the money she made if she took customers to the rooms. Over the next six months, Mouk lost count of the number of men she had sex with. Some were gentle and generous, but others brutalised her.
A few times she wanted to take her life, but what would happen to Pok and Tham? True, she was making a lot more money than she had ever seen and another woman showed her how to hide her money inside her body. This way, she didn’t have to share everything with the young minders who took not only half their earnings, but also expected sex for free.
A doctor would visit them regularly for checkups, stressing the importance of making the customers wear condoms. Yet, he seemed to forget to wear one, when he got his free sex. Mouk stopped heeding his advice. If the customers didn’t want to use condoms, then she charged them double. It was simple.
Slowly the people in the club became like family. One of the minders, now her regular lover, brought her little gifts. On Sunday mornings the women women visited the local markets where Mouk bought clothes, cheap trinkets and fluffy toys for Pok. She even opened a bank account secretly and had already saved over 20,000 baht. She no longer sent money home when she found out that more than half was being pocketed by the carriers.
It was almost three years since she had left her village in northeastern Laos but every time she thought of returning, she decided to wait a few months longer and take back more money.
One Sunday morning, the girls wanted to go to Chatuchak, the massive weekend market but Mouk didn’t feel like joining them. She was feeling very tired. Her last customer had been with her till almost 4.00 am. Two days later she didn’t feel better and the doctor diagnosed the flu.
When she didn’t improve after a week, two of the girls accompanied to the hospital. She had to stay for a few days so that some tests could be done. One week later, there was no improvement and a friend from the nightclub came to the hospital with a suitcase containing her things. The Peacock Bar didn’t want her back. She had some terrible disease and would have to look for work elsewhere. Mouk was too tired anyway and put off the idea of looking for another job.
A fellow patient invited Mouk to share her hovel alongside the railway tracks. Too weak to work, she lay on a plastic sheet in one corner all day long. When she could struggle out of bed Mouk started working the streets, servicing street vendors and junkies, often in darkened doorways or inside the shack, if the others were at work.
As her conditioned deteriorated she didn’t have the energy to even get out of bed, soiling the rags she slept in. Soon she was too sick to even use the bedpan next to her. As the stench of shit got too much to bear, her hovel-mates threw her out. Back in the hospital, the staff didn’t seem to care.
A nurse suggested she go back to Laos; at least she would have family to take care of her. Back to Laos, she wondered? She hadn’t even thought of her husband and daughter in months. It had been more than a year since she had even received word from them.
A week later her lifeless body was heaped upon another in the police morgue.
In Mouk’s village in Laos, Tham wondered why there was no word from her. It was almost a year since he had heard from her and even longer since she had sent any money home. How he missed her! Even four years after she had left, he had still not got used to her absence. Fortunately, he had Pok, the spitting image of her mother, to keep him company. But some nights when the young girl cried for her mother, it was difficult, very difficult, not to shed tears too.
Each evening the other men in the village would meet for a drink and endless gossip. Tham could have joined them to ease the loneliness but he preferred to play with Pok and chat with his mother.
One day when the thought of another night without Mouk got too much, Tham decided to walk to the village where one of the girls who had left with Mouk lived. Maybe, they had some news. The village was about ten kilometres away and if he cut through the forest he could still be back by midnight.
The bombie that Tham stepped on, gave him no chance.. When he didn’t return by the next morning, his mother went to the village chief for help. By the time they found him, he had bled to death.
After the death of her son Tham’s mother tried to get in touch with Mouk. Word came back that she had left the garment factory more than two years earlier to work in Bangkok. They knew nothing of her current whereabouts.
After her father’s death Pok became even more introverted. The villagers shunned her as she was bad luck. Sometimes, they urged her grandmother to abandon her in the forest.
One day a team of researchers from the Institut de la Francophonie pour la médecine tropicale visited the village to gather data. Pok’s grandmother heard that some foreign doctors were among them. The old woman went to the camp they had set up and spoke to one of the volunteers accompanying the team. The young woman turned to the tall, white man and spoke to him in a language she didn’t understand. The foreigners talked to each other and asked to see the little girl.
The old woman took them to her hut and and watched as one of the doctors stuck a strange tube into his ears and then hold the other end against Pok’s stomach then chest. He pressed her stomach again and again and asked to see her tongue. The two white men and the young Lao woman continued speaking in their strange language. After a while, the young woman told Pok’s grandmother that they wanted her to bring Pok to Vientiane for some tests. She would not have to pay for anything, they assured her.
In Vientiane other doctors performed more tests on Pok. After a series of tests, a woman in a white coat, who spoke Khmu, mentioned words like epilepsy and phenobarbital, which meant nothing to the old woman. They gave her tiny white stones and told her that Pok must swallow one every day, for the rest of her life. And that soon Pok would be a healthy young girl.
Peter A. Witt
Peter A. Witt is a Texas Poet and a retired university professor. He also writes family history with a book about his aunt published by the Texas A&M Press. Peter’s poetry deals with personal experiences, both real and imagined. He has twice been nominated for Best of the Net. His poetry has been published on various sites including The Wise Owl, Oregaug Mountain Poetry, Verse Virtual, Beatnik Cowboy, and The Blue Bird Word.
Pipe Stories
He sat in his wicker caned chair, one leg placed over the knee of his other leg, tamping down tabaco into a well-worn pipe he said he’d had since college.
Grandpa told stories while he tamped, sometimes pausing his tamping as the pipe gently descended onto his knee and his other hand began to wave halfway between his knee and chin as his mouth formed memories, like a sculptor shaping clay, of his army days in France during WWI, being careful to leave out the gore of men dying in the trenches so we young ones could sleep at night, dreaming of the sweetness of pipe smoke not the stench of bodies decaying on the battlefield.
I don’t remember much about the war stories, except that telling them made him seem sad, but I do remember hoping that after dinner grandpa would sit in his wicker chair, reach for his pipe, take a large pinch of tabaco from a bag, put it in the pipe bowl, and begin gently tamping, sometimes lighting the pipe, but often just resting it on his knee, while his other hand conjured memories like a magician pulling silk from his sleeve as the smell of the tobacco echoed in the room like a memory that refused to fade.
An Itch for Nature
This morning, hot and humid, I walked along a mosquito infested path, my exposed neck, hands, and face slathered with repellent, ignored by the biting menace of swamp mosquitoes.
And yet the walk was a treasure worth the welts that rose in anger from my skin, for the trees were a fluttering tapestry of migrating birdswilson’s warblers, baltimore orioles, and yellow breasted chats -
happy for a mosquito feast before starting their journey over the gulf, hoping they’d stored enough energy for the overnight, and then some, flight.
Back in the safety of my hotel room, a smoothing salve applied to my itching skin, I scanned the images captured on my camera, some like weeds in a garden, were easily discarded, others a reminder that to see nature at its resplendent best sometimes requires the sacrifice of an overnight itch.
The Demise of Sunflowers
(prompted by Van Gogh’s Sunflowers)
Plucked in their prime while pointing to the sun, sunflowers begin their slow march to death as they stand, for now, like sentinels in a yellow vase, on a yellow table, displaying their beauty like a peacock flaunts its plumage as the artist van Gogh paints his masterpiece that someday will fetch a remarkable sum at a 1987 auction.
Yet there’s something sad about the painting, one flower already bending over, beyond its prime, succumbing to having been clipped and planted in a water-filled vase. By morning others will follow, their dark brown centers tilting downward forecasting the inevitability of their demise, the compost pile awaiting like a dark fertile abyss, where they’ll eventually provide the mulch to nurture another generation of sunflowers, unaware that they too will be snipped and vased, in a cycle that repeats itself until someone says ‘enough,’ and vows to paint the sun-seeking flowers au plein air or moves on to painting squirrels hording secrets in their cheeks or burying them in a pile of pine needles.
Richard Clarke
Richard Clarke was a poetry teacher for forty years but has spent only four years as a poet. His poems have been published in Australia and the USA, since retirement rekindled his muse.
Spellbound
As a pale, puny boy, while my freckled friends boasted they would be firemen, soldiers, pop stars I dreamed of becoming a magician.
I sent away for the cape, the magic cards, the wand and top hat then made my debut at my grandparents’ golden anniversary.
“This Master of Illusion has performed in front of the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Kent and several other dubious public bars,’
announced my smirking uncle Kevin, introducing me to the expectant aunts and cousins who applauded each trick dutifully.
Later that year an actual conjurer, bearded and grey, stood outside redbrick Berala Public School, handing out leaflets promoting his solo show.
I grabbed a handful to pass around in class. Not one of my mates was keen but I was first in line the next afternoon
straight after school at the church hall. The magician, Merlin the Mysterious, (working to a tight budget?) stood genially taking tickets at the door but
blanched when I said in my piercing, newly broken voice how much I’d enjoyed his show the year before.
I soon knew why. Every trick was the same. As was the patter. No one else seemed to know or care but now I’m old and grey I know Merlin must have mastered true magic because after fifty years his performance remains unforgettable.
Scott Thomas Outlar originally hails from Atlanta, Georgia. He now resides and writes in Frederick, Maryland. His work has been nominated multiple times for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He guest-edited the Hope Anthology of Poetry from CultureCult Press as well as the 2019-2023 Western Voices editions of Setu Mag. Selections of his poetry have been translated and published in 15 languages. He has been a weekly contributor at Dissident Voice for the past 10 years. More about Outlar’s work can be found at 17Numa.com.
Burn, Baby, Burn
Lay me down in the luminal fire use the same thorn twice in both palms
Lick the salt from cavern walls and eat the echo humming in my heart
Revelations are born in moments of great understanding though first gestated and bathed in the flames of sorrow
Not by wit alone nor beauty nor arcane knowledge nor street smart common sense but by collage and amalgamation
The thin whisp of imagination back in the air like calm before an inferno
Original Jesters
The rupture of sound breathed over a cosmos
Whispered vowels and sigils given form
It came from the high realms and swallowed us whole
Between dusk and dawn one blink resets the system’s signal
Big beast known as Moby gut bigger than Galactus
While pondering about equitable shares the giants stomp a healthy portion
Skin and bones are given old rags and cake crumb morsels
Lamentations of Job in the bloodbath took a cut in the nosedive
It’s all zeroes on the silver screen snakes of six eyes, seven glands stroked
The passing of fear in silence changing guard after running gauntlet
Into abyss with pearls of sorrow left to the waves with their infinite wisdom
Hush now, humans, don’t dare fret the mockingbird smirks at all you’ve wept
Not in vain nor with vanity dance the peacock garb back to fashion
Sven Kretzschmar
Sven Kretzschmar hails from Germany. His poetry has been published widely in Europe and overseas, among other outlets in Writing Home. The ‘New Irish’ Poets (Dedalus Press, 2019), Hold Open the Door (UCD Press, 2020), Voices 2021 (Cold River Press, 2021) The Irish Times, and Das Gedicht. He was awarded 2nd place at the Francis Ledwidge International Poetry Award 2022.
In a minor key
(for Helen Fares and Josi Miller)
Their time seems almost up when they are singing lullabies in hiding beneath the rubble on the side of the road where tomorrow tanks will roll. Shrapnels break families into splinters under the ink dark moon –ghosts that cry in the silence of air alerts and the wails of a hundred thousand screams. They would rather not have their hearts torn but wild with forest glades or streams –and against leaf-veins would measure their lives. Meanwhile missiles in the night sky displace constellations. Still, the music continues. In a minor key.
Foldline
Mist held in soft curves of dirt tracks hedged with the almost-nakedness of wintering bushes. Frugal sun waits to be claimed by the morning. A quiet day, a good day, maybe, in the countryside. A rare one. Dreich temperatures have unpacked sky and acres –I revisit their furrows at every foldline of years. Someone has carried quarrystones to the edge of Rosselwood, heaped them on top of a buildingsand mound: An easy way to discard them. Through their cracks wail the East wind and voices choking under bombardment rubble of otherwhere.
Ghosts of winter
Crow dusk shadowed against a January sky –transmission lines and nascent driving snow turn them into ghosts of winter. Monday markets are crammed with tractors and pickets. At night, a solemn vigil mourning bomb fog and shattered body parts around the debris of Gaza.
Valentina Teclici
Valentina Teclici, Romanian born, immigrated to New Zealand in 2002. In 1999, she completed a PhD in sociology at the University of Bucharest, with a thesis about street children. Her debut book, De la noi din gradiniţă (From our Kindergarden), Ion Creangă Publishing House,1986, was awarded a national prize. Poems and excerpts from her books for children are included in the bibliography and textbooks for primary and secondary education in Romania. She has published several books of sociology, poetry and stories for children in both Romanian and English. Her work has been translated into French, Te Reo and Spanish, and published in many magazines and anthologies in New Zealand and overseas. In 2016 and 2018, Valentina edited and translated the bilingual collection “Poetical Bridges – Poduri lirice” (Vol I & II), Scripta manent Publishing House, Ltd., Napier, that includes the work of 24 Romanian poets and 24 poets from New Zealand. Valentina has been a member of Writers’ Union of Romania since 1993, of the New Zealand Poetry Society since 2013 and of The Theosophical Society since 2022.Valentina enjoys playing the piano, painting, reading and traveling. She lives in Napier with her husband Robert and their cat Shadow.
A Lesson of Harmony
Osaka, Shintennoji Temple, Japan’s oldest, guarding the world for centuries. We climbed the steps, steps you are not allowed to seat on. We bowed, then got in. Small and big statues, fresh cut flowers, scented sticks, half lit.
Sitting on the bench, facing the altar, a Buddhist monk reading quietly from a handful of wooden strips. Sutra?
Hitting a metal bell with a spoon on his left, after that, a wooden fish head on his right. Two different loud sounds, perfectly timed, drummed on the soft tapestry of monotony.
His prayer had no meaning to me, no matter how hard I tried. So, I quietened my mind and listen to it with the spark that shines in each of us. My soul was at peace, like a timeless river. Even the Buddha’ statues seemed to be holy prisms reflecting the harmony of that moment’s eternity.
My Cats Don’t Belong to Me
My cats don’t belong to me. They might belong to Ra and other Gods. Their ancestors lived in Ancient Egypt, being treated like goddesses and queens. My cats’ names are not Mafdet and Basted, but Lucky* and Shadow, beautiful, magical creatures, bringing me good luck every day. My ginger tom-cat Lucky - the adventurer, the thrill seeker, curious and fearless… the hights, the falls. Lucky does not belong to me, his forever growing confidence and grit. Every day I am grateful that he chose me.
Shadow, my grey-orange patched girl cat follows me everywhere, like my shadow. So playful, running crazy and hiding like a shadow in funny places, inviting me to play hide-and-seek with her. Shadow does not belong to me, her grace, her playfulness. Every day I am grateful for her loyalty, and I am grateful she chose me. My cats are inquisitive and very loving. They transformed my life with their company. I cannot feel lonely, depressed or bored.
I cannot imagine how I’ll cope with grief after they pass. Or how they are going to cope if I’ll go first. I have no idea how we’ll celebrate each other’s life. Am I going to shave my eyebrows? A custom used back in history for grieving your cat. Am I going to write a book in their memory? My cats don’t belong to me, I’m sure, but I belong to them.
(April 2020)
*Lucky passed away in November 2020 at the age of 13, after falling down from a tree.
