My hand misses the glass the way a tongue does a tooth,
returning again and again to vacancy. It wants purpose

beyond tapping, the glamour of the louche, the toast,
the weighted pause. And there are days that I think

shot-worthy, events slipping from my grasp, very like
a glass, crashing. And the smarminess that seems to

emanate from my refusal, no matter how diffidently
I make it, little miss holier-than-thou sipping tea,

everyone needing to be that much louder to fill
the gap, to make it clear I’m not the boss of them.

And the slow slog of it all, the way a day is only a day,
and another to follow, and one to follow that,

in a tedium of accretion, and should I falter, having to
begin again at zero (my God!). And everyone so proud

of me, as if I’d discovered an element, extra-terrestrials,
a way to reel more than just myself back from extinction.

Devon Balwit

 

Devon Balwit teaches and writes in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of four chapbooks. Her individual poems can be found in places such as The Ekphrastic Review, Poets Reading the News, Autumn Sky Daily, Concis, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Front Porch and more.

© 2017

When there’s nothing left to say you eat
knock back the red wine you ordered
begin the cigars I hate.

My mouth is full with all that you said
and I’m too damned polite to do the napkin thing
spit out the one line I can’t swallow.

So I smile
no teeth
while inside I pack up and leave you.

J V Birch

 

J V Birch lives in Adelaide, South Australia. Her poems have appeared in anthologies, journals and magazines across Australia, the UK, Canada and the US. She has two collections – Smashed glass at midnight and What the water & moon gave me (both published by Ginninderra Press). She is working on her third.

© 2017

because he’d say
………don’t you know? don’t you know?
………child child how can you grow!
well I grew, grew taller than most
and my head wobbled, wobbled on its thin stem
and when my father pronounced the root source
of a German word, its Latin derivation
……….don’t you know? don’t you know?
I looked down at his feet
and saw the soil-clogged knots of roots
the gaping holes in the ground
and my gut began its life-long habit
of twinge and cringe that’s triggered by a certain
tone the masculine intones
……….don’t you know? don’t you know?
so when you and I enter new country
you stride ahead charting the vista, Mount This
Mount That, announce the names of plants
hardenbergia lomandra eucryphyia
names are good you say
……….don’t you know? don’t you know?
I hang back in the silence of the scrub
to watch a mysterious white-throated bird,
savour its tentative fossicking
names are good, yes yes I’m sure
but flowers still flower for me, can you believe it!
and birds appear.

Nicola Bowery

Nicola Bowery’s most recent poetry collection is married to this ground (Walleah Press 2014), and her two previous collections are Bloodwood (1996) and Goatfish (2007). She lives on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales.

© 2017

after Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

It took me two days to see the legs, I kept
looking and not finding them. This gave me a thrill –
the world getting on with life, no one
standing still to fete and grieve
a narcissist who wanted too much sun.
I had forgotten it was one of those myths
the big boys have well and truly picked over;
Jack Gilbert going for a glass half full
and forgetting the fall entirely.
When I remembered Auden and Williams
I didn’t want to write my poem anymore,
I put it away, though I now think
there’s still something to say. I see joy:
we all at the centre of our own lives,
a dignified lot for the ploughman, the shepherd,
the washerwoman. And I bet the big boys reached
between their shoulder blades to check
their wax was solid. They praise the lack
of limelight in the frame but I hear
in their words it unnerves them. For most,
life is a landscape we navigate;
it is rare to sit for a portrait.

Lisa Brockwell

 

Lisa Brockwell lives on a rural property near Byron Bay, New South Wales, with her husband and young son. She was runner-up in the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize in 2015. Her first collection, Earth Girls (Pitt Street Poetry 2016), was commended in the Anne Elder Award. www.lisabrockwell.com

 

© 2017

The bread knife is large and it’s heavy,
listening to a podcast mention Woody
Allen and Mia Farrow and another
open letter, I am attempting to cut
the cumbersome loaf of sourdough for toast
when I slip and slice my ring finger.
Look, I have almost cut it off. How would I
wear my wedding ring, then? Luckily,
it didn’t happen. Much blood, et cetera.

Lisa Brockwell

 

Lisa Brockwell lives on a rural property near Byron Bay, New South Wales, with her husband and young son. She was runner-up in the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize in 2015. Her first collection, Earth Girls (Pitt Street Poetry 2016), was commended in the Anne Elder Award.  www.lisabrockwell.com

© 2017

If I lived in the Oak Shadows
trailer park, I’d want to my trailer
to be the color of a 7Up bottle, I’d
want to be beautiful and young. I’d
want to be beloved by someone who
couldn’t live without me. I’d be
tragic, a little dead around the eyes.
I’d live in the space before everything
begins. I’d be no one you know,
a shadow on the concrete, a flash
of color you might see as you drove
by me on your way to somewhere else.

Michelle Brooks

 

Michelle Brooks has published a collection of poetry, Make Yourself Small (Backwaters Press), and a novella, Dead Girl, Live Boy (Storylandia Press). She has spent much of her adult life in Detroit, Michigan, USA, her favorite city.

© 2017

We framed you within the guidelines;
combustible, rigid container. No metal.

Your face now made up like pantomime,
wig hair and gaping mouth closed by lever.

Everything that came before has gone,
wetted itself into a dissolve, absent ashes.

My memory hangs like an idle picture book

echoing creaks of another life,
one where we had our conclusion.

Samantha-Jayne Burns

 

Samantha-Jayne Burns is a poet and lyricist currently residing in London, UK. She is currently studying her MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths University and has been published online in various poetry journals.

© 2017

He’s festering under the fig tree,
the editor who said
that because I used the pronoun ‘she’
the poem should be warmer,
as if ‘she’ can only mean ‘mum’
and then the nicer, cuddly sort,
festooned with beige crochet,
endlessly clutching tea.
I snuck up upon him,
with a shovel I named ‘She’.
And it’s true, you know!
After hitting him from behind
the shovel was quite warm
with my sweat and his thin blood.
And now he is composing no
offensive missives,
and composting rather well.
And the figs, the gentle figs,
well they taste fucking sweet.

PS Cottier

 

PS Cottier gets up. PS Cottier feeds the budgie. PS Cottier writes. PS Cottier blogs at pscottier.com. PS Cottier sleeps. Do all this, and you too can be Perfectly Serene Cottier.

 © 2017

in ten easy conversational gambits, with commentary from a Real Depressed Person in brackets

Come on, pull up your socks! (As if socks are well connected synapses)

We all feel down from time to time (But what if the time is ten years?)

You’ve got to see the glass as half full (Merlot, Methadone or Meths?)

There are those worse off than you (I know that. I’m depressed, not Donald Trump)

Buy yourself something nice! (They were out of nice brains at Brains ‘R Us)

Why don’t you take up a hobby? (Like patronising depressed people, perhaps?)

You’ve got to learn to laugh at yourself! (That’s why I carved a smiley mouth on my wrist)

Just get out in the fresh air and enjoy yourself! (Yeah, I’ll put on my magic sport socks)

Why don’t you just have a good lie down? (You do make death seem strangely attractive)

Every cloud has a silver lining (Every cliché breaks an angel’s harp)

PS Cottier

 

PS Cottier gets up. PS Cottier feeds the budgie. PS Cottier writes. PS Cottier blogs at pscottier.com. PS Cottier sleeps. Do all this, and you too can be Perfectly Serene Cottier.

© 2017

It sounds like a children’s game
played with an energy of rope.
Stepping over, stepping around —
I saw someone playing it.
She was wearing a pink skirt
and played it at the station.
A man sprawled, pungent as durian,
at the top of the steepish steps.
Delicately, she stepped around;
a wily politician adept
at avoiding a sticky question.
Longer legs allowed the next commuter,
the one in in the suit, to step over the man.
For a moment he was an equation,
the cool guy in the suit,
and the collapsed man the vinculum
dividing the rear leg from the front.
No need for our dapper stepper
to interrupt his smartphone chatter.

And some of us step over and around
by using him for clever poems —
grounding them in a certain reality —
restrained muggers of another’s pain.

PS Cottier

PS Cottier gets up. PS Cottier feeds the budgie. PS Cottier writes. PS Cottier blogs at pscottier.com. PS Cottier sleeps. Do all this, and you too can be Perfectly Serene Cottier.

© 2017

with a feminist nod to ‘Fern Hill’

Oh I sang like the sea
When I was young and supple
And innocent with lust

Thus was my season
Spring, in its tulips, in its cups
All butter yellow atop the freshest green

Spring. The golden sap
Ran sugar-fine and pleasure tasted
Heady, pulsing where the skin
Touched air, spectacular desire

The way it was so long ago
When love was green and golden,
Easy in the windfall light

Here on the other side, Indian Summer
Deep red and bittersweet
Ripening to rot. Was that the all of it?

What now at sixty-five
As mercy edges further south
Every leaf and seedpod
……Rattling its bones

Star Coulbrooke

 

Star Coulbrooke, Poet Laureate of Logan City, Utah, is co-founder and coordinator of Helicon West, a bi-monthly open readings/featured readers series, and Poetry at Three, a long-standing local poetry writing group. Her poems are published widely in lit mags and anthologies. Her 2011 chapbook, Walking the Bear, is available online (through Digital Stacks in the University of Utah Marriott Library). Her newest poetry collection is Thin Spines of Memory. Star is director of the Utah State University Writing Center.

© 2017

her fast walk
military organization
and bossy manner …
leaves my drifting
dreamy self in tatters

*

through all
the comings and goings
of my siblings …
my mother and father
seated at the table

*

teachers
marshall the children
across the pedestrian crossing …
but the children keep
their own untidy thoughts

Anne Curran

 

Anne Curran lives in Hamilton New Zealand. She writes Japanese short form poetry when time and inspiration allows. She loves the idea of a writing space that provides for women’s creativity to prosper in print. Thank you to editors, fellow writers and mentors for their encouragement.

© 2017

 

After Bruce Goold’s Flying Fish, 1994, Manly Art Gallery

.

You choose the same meeting place
over and over and I wonder

what prompts you to become a regular.
Is it the view? It doesn’t take much
imagination to see the choppy waves

below as an alpine rendezvous
but you’ll have to show initiative

if you want our love to live.
Granted, you are a handsome brute
with beautiful bulging eyes

and a body, sleek as a torpedo.
Variety spices my life

but a cool palette, somewhat pallid
apart from dashes of red, is scary
considering thoughts of bloodshed.

We’re open to attack from below
and above. I don’t want to end up

on someone’s dinner plate, and no matter
how clever your aerial manoeuvres
one day you could leave me up in the air.

Jan Dean

 

Jan Dean’s writing credits include Meanjin, Southerly, Newcastle Poetry Prize anthologies and The Australian newspaper. Her pocketbook Paint Peels, Graffiti Sings (Flying Islands 2014) is in English and Mandarin, and With One Brush (IP 2007) was short-listed for the Mary Gilmore Award. Formerly she taught visual arts.

© 2017

I am a blushing bride
of transmutation, dewy-skinned
for a new reason

blanketed by the same layer
of lush, laden air
my lover fended me off from

when my palm relished
her intermittently luscious biosphere
I am a hothouse orchid

trembling on its stem
catch me ever
paying for a sauna again

Tricia Dearborn

From the sequence ‘The change: some notes from the field’.

Tricia Dearborn’s poetry has been widely published in literary journals and is represented in major anthologies including Contemporary Australian Poetry and Australian Poetry since 1788. She is on the editorial board of Plumwood Mountain, and was guest poetry editor for the February 2016 issue. Her most recent collection is The Ringing World.

© 2017

Some things – it’s as if we might have made them up.
Like the night we camped on a hill in Donegal, above
the sea and under a clear sky, watching the Perseids
smear sudden streaks of brilliance across our holiday

and it was like eternity or timelessness or time
or something; our two young daughters, awake
after midnight and watching with us. They both
remember too – I’ve asked. Even after twenty years,
light is still seared across their retinas; the night when …

Moyra Donaldson

 

Moyra Donaldson is a poet and creative writing facilitator living in Northern Ireland. She has published six collections of poetry, most recently Selected Poems (Liberties Press 2012) and The Goose Tree (Liberties Press 2014).

© 2017

I don’t remember her wearing it,
there’s not even a photograph.
I don’t know how she afforded it
on her teacher’s salary and my father
a booking office clerk for the railways
who brought his wages home
in a brown envelope on a Friday night.
It was a film star’s item of clothing,
with its mink collar —

at least that’s how I remember it,
hanging in the wardrobe,
smelling of mothballs, heavy as a quilt
when I’d secretly take it from its hanger
and slip my adolescent self into it,
feeling the silk lining against arms and legs,
folding it around my body, caressing
the tight unyielding curls,
black and shiny, almost alien, something
unnatural seeping through the glamour,
a darkness felt in the heart; a repellent attraction.
I wondered what sort of animal had a coat like that.

In the days after the funeral, my sister-in-law
threw it out with all the other stuff
or I’d have kept it.
It takes the pelts of thirty lambs
to make one Persian Lamb coat.
They must be under three days old,
ideally foetal,
so as to have that deep blackness,
those close curls that are the most desirable.

Moyra Donaldson

 

Moyra Donaldson is a poet and creative writing facilitator living in Northern Ireland. She has published six collections of poetry, most recently Selected Poems (Liberties Press 2012) and The Goose Tree (Liberties Press 2014).

© 2017

Last year, in memory of something
or in anticipation of something

(both being loss), I planted
one hundred daffodil bulbs,

buried them one at a time
in the newly turned earth.

Now they are February’s yellow
budding of absurd, enduring hope.

Moyra Donaldson

 

Moyra Donaldson is a poet and creative writing facilitator living in Northern Ireland. She has published six collections of poetry, most recently Selected Poems (Liberties Press 2012) and The Goose Tree (Liberties Press 2014).

© 2017

There’s a pram by the river.
…  .A white-haired man in a navy parka
steps from the crouching wattle,
…  .tosses in a line. Moorhens scuff
their feet along the meniscus,
…  .a coterie of rowboats nudge
against each other. The river blinds
…  .like a shattered bottle,
the old man leans into the pram.
…  .Moorhens paddle their reflections,
a bell rubs the edge of his line.
…  .It’s a very quiet baby.

Susan Fealy

 

Susan Fealy is a Melbourne-based poet, reviewer and clinical psychologist. Her poetry has been published widely in Australian journals and anthologies and some have also appeared in the United States, India and Sweden. Her first collection, Flute of Milk (UWAP), won the 2017 Wesley Michel Wright Prize.

© 2017

there was never
any doubt of love
in my childhood
dahlias grown by dad
vibrant in mum’s vases

~

Empire Day:
my father in the garden
lighting fireworks
while I watched, enthralled
behind the kitchen window

~

bias binding
one of those dread items
clever mother
wielded when teaching
her dull daughter to sew

~

Grandma
crocheted most beautifully
round the edges
of our linen hankies …
all gone now, every one

~

too late to know
it was always you
from the start …
still, I can cherish
those Elvis recollections

Amelia Fielden

 

Amelia Fielden is an Australian poet and translator of Japanese Literature. She has published seven collections of original tanka poetry in English and fifteen books of translated Japanese tanka.

© 2017

Let their words pass through –
They don’t define you.
Your strength lies in
The strands of courage,
Hope and compassion
You forged to pull
Yourself together
And make you who you are.
You are amazingly strong.
Stand proud. Stand tall.

Maryanne Frederick

This poem was inspired by the sculpture Voyager by Linda Brunker, located in Laytown, County Meath, Ireland.

 

Writing mostly on her laptop from her home in Phoenix, Arizona, Maryanne Frederick would gladly trade it for a comfortable boulder near a forest mountain stream. Her publishing credits include The Human Touch Journal, Spillwords Press, Iowa Farmer Today, and The Gila River Review. www.maryannefrederick.com

© 2017

& we shall walk & talk in gardens all misty with rain
& never never grow so old again
Inscription, Wendy Whiteley’s Garden, Sydney

 

Narrow paths centre the terraces through
fig and flame and bangalow palm; leaves jostle

the storeys with shape and shade and tint
any leaf will take. A sanctuary with roots

in her childhood; Lavender Bay her own
rampant alchemy to wander in, like a painting.

And for us too, picnic tables, a bell hanging
in meditation, a birdbath from a cast-out sink.

With her hair wrapped in folds of iris-blue, Wendy
talks of how she replaced the debris among

the coral trees, cutting by cutting, plant
by plant and mulch, to revere them here:

her lover, their daughter. How all the willing
hours bloom unexpected grace from loss.

Kathryn Fry

 

Kathryn Fry has poems in various anthologies, including Australian Love Poems, A Slow Combusting Hymn, Watermark and the Newcastle Poetry Prize anthologies of 2014 and 2016.

© 2017

(If the baby is crying, feed the mother)

The garden was a witch’s kitchen
of wild blue borage, heartsease,
hyssop and sage, dotted with
chamomile and comfrey,
fennel for a colicky baby
raging at a dry breast
while grandma,
calm among
the chaos,
plucked milk thistle,
made it into tea,
succoured me.

Pia Goddard

 

Pia Goddard is a London-based poet, performing her work with two local poetry groups, the rye poets and Southwark Stanza. She trained as a sculptor and has worked as a fine art photographer and poet for the last twenty years. Find her online at www.southlondonwomenartists.co.uk

© 2017

a safe place
to be disgraceful
after swimming
busy seniors looking
a little more wrinkled

gold and silver
adorning ears and fingers
other metals
in some body parts
hidden out of sight

a blatant tatt
on one throbbing shoulder
helps her forget
the remedy needed
for a torn rotator cuff

light talk
of trips to the gyno
winks exchanged
from dimpled buttocks
of assorted sizes

noble breasts
worn from family service
faded scars
from battle grounds
badges of honour

ignored
by preening teenagers
elders sharing
confidence in knowing
they travel together

Hazel Hall

 

Hazel Hall is a Canberra Poet. She has published haiku, tanka and free verse in a number of Australian and overseas journals and anthologies. Her latest collection is Eggshell Sky (2017). Hazel was recently awarded the Skylark’s Nest Award and back cover space for her tanka in Skylark (5:1 2017).

© 2017

We are the grandmothers of poetry.
Looking at us you don’t see anything
but graying hair and work-worn hands.

You think we’re harmless. You don’t know
we hide machetes in our book bags;
our pens are whetted scythes.

We are the omas who carry memories sharp as razors
in our pockets. We never forget the past. Be careful
if you don’t want it carved on your forehead.

We are the obaachan who see through pretense.
Do not imagine our bifocals blind us to injustice.
We refuse to palliate with pretty phrases.

We are the abuelas who believe walls foolish,
fences small-minded. We snip chain links
into little pieces with our wire-cutting words.

We are the bibi who simmer and stew and stir.
Our love is fierce. Because we understand
souls need nourishment, we ladle out hope.

We are the bubbes who wield cell phones,
tablets, laptops, knowing our work is urgent.
We must bear witness to terror and beauty.

We are the elders who value every voice;
each one adds to the swell of ancient song.
Do not underestimate our power. We will not be quiet.

Patricia Hamilton

 

A native Californian, Patricia L Hamilton is a professor of English in Jackson, Tennessee. She won the Rash Award for Poetry in 2015. Her debut volume of poetry is The Distance to Nightfall (Main Street Rag Publishing).

© 2017

Well established Prince
….seeks energetic
Princess to run busy castle.
The qualified applicant must
be a multi-tasker proficient
….in financial management
animal husbandry
….as well as the more mundane
aspects of day-to-day
…….household management.

The successful candidate will have
child bearing abilities
….as well as maintaining
top-rank beauty
and ability to satisfy her Prince
….every night.
Knowledge of magic
….and diplomatic relations
with magical beings is a plus.
Please apply in person.

Position is expected to fill quickly.

Michelle Hartman

 

Michelle Hartman’s latest book, The Lost Journal of My Second Trip to Purgatory, has just been released from Old Seventy Creek Press. The first poetic look at child abuse and its effects on adult life. The first book of its kind from a recognized publisher. Along with her poetry books, Irony and Irreverence and Disenchanted and Disgruntled (both published by Lamar University Press), Lost Journal is available on Amazon. She is the editor of Red River Review.

© 2017

wagon-bound pioneers …
who is the hero?
him toting a rifle
or her – two toddlers
and pregnant again?

Elizabeth Howard

 

Elizabeth Howard lives in Arlington, Tennessee. Her tanka have been published in Eucalypt, red lights, Mariposa, Ribbons, Gusts, Atlas Poetica, Skylark, Moonbathing, and other journals.

© 2017

Bring back wearing curb stomping boots.
Big old combat boots not mainstreamed into dainty things.
The ones with steels toes and metal ended laces.
Those heavy fuckers that bleed and callus and demand to be respected.
Those blood for blood boots; the ones your mother hates but appreciates.
The kind built for breaking noses at riot fest.
The kind that advertise an extra sense a security to your ‘barely there’.
The ones that advertise:
I am my father’s left over hatred.
I am my mother’s broken jaw.
I am my brother’s bloodied knuckles.
I am.
I am.
I am.
I told you so.

Gabriela Jimenez-Carrillo

 

Gabriela Jimenez-Carrillo is a twenty something multi genre author who lives on the outskirts of Chicago. She’s been published by Thrice and The Broke Bohemian.

© 2017

her blue jug
astride the breakfast table
loose lipped
handle on hips
all the things he said
she should never be

too round
for shadows to loiter
too blue
for clouds to drift through
too patterned and far far
too everything … yet

not slender
enough nor elegantly
resplendent
just plain and under-fired
where glaze doesn’t shine
the way he wants her to be

her blue jug
the one she reaches for
to pour cream
over snap-crackle-pop
or whatever however
wherever she is

enough to make her
poetically
sweetened
unrepentantly
playful
and oh! so deliciously real

Kathy Kituai

 

Kathy Kituai published a documentary for NBC, seven poetry collections, five anthologies, a children’s story, and received two Canberra Critic awards for her teaching in Scotland, South Australia, New South Wales, and the ACT since 1990. Her latest publication, Deep in the Valley of Tea Bowls, won the 2016 ACT Writing and Publisher Award.

 © 2017

I bow to you
you bow to me
performing a dance
strangers often do,
Lonchinver pavement too small
for your feet and mine

After you, I say
Oh no, after you, comes your reply
and we are bending
swaying and bowing again,
widening smiles
enlivening our pace

Achaye you say
before striding on by
It’s easy to see
We’ve both had husbands

Kathy Kituai

 

Kathy Kituai published a documentary for NBC, seven poetry collections, five anthologies, a children’s story, and received two Canberra Critic awards for her teaching in Scotland, South Australia, New South Wales, and the ACT since 1990. Her latest publication, Deep in the Valley of Tea Bowls, won the 2016 ACT Writing and Publisher Award.

© 2017

Aerial legs sprout splayed feet. Skin-linked to land-sun-sky
dancers slide under, over and through each other’s curves and caves.

It’s Jive Time in the fifties
and the Mother Fucker Country
wants space to quietly detonate a bomb.
The Cold War’s clouding an atmosphere
so yellow the stuff’s puffed up in the desert
where no-one lives so no harm’s done.

The smoke machine’s in overdrive. We inhale it from the aisles.
Hunch down, crouch low to escape the pressing shroud

…………but particles drift…….from the plan to the plain
shaken in a silent windstorm……..settling over water holes and
………….…all that………breathes.

broken weeping ulcerated seeping
branded with cicatrix and radiation burns.

No-one’s in the desert so no harm’s done.

* Bangarra Dance Theatre’s response to nuclear testing
on Maralinga Tjarutja traditional lands in Central Australia
in the 1950s.

 

Robyn Lance

Robyn Lance’s poetry has enlivened walls and Canberra’s buses. Publications include Best Australian Poems ‘08 and ‘05; The Canberra Times, Island, Quadrant, FourW, Poetrix, Five Bells, LiNQ, Meniscus and Narrator. Her awards include: 2014 ACT Writers Poetry, 2013 JC Drake Brockman Poetry (shortlisted), 2010 artsACT’s David Campbell Poetry (aeq), and 2009 Veolia Creative Arts

© 2017

 

You’ve done what Nature expected of you
and all you want to do now is carry on.
Find a nice place to lay the eggs,
protected from predators and weather.
A sheltered, aqueous spot.

After that, you can dart around ponds,
or bask in the sun
where your forewings and hindwings
become stained glass. A curiosity
that children point at and admire.

When the headache excuse doesn’t work
(because it doesn’t in dragonflies)
what is she to do?

The dragonfly has to think fast.
Stalked mid-flight,
she falls into the undergrowth
to lie perfectly rigid
to avoid encounters with frisky suitors.

Then, free of them, she resurrects.
Wings glide freely through air
for on a sun-filled day
everything seems possible,
even a good night’s sleep
in the secluded greenery.

* Female dragonflies feign death to avoid stalking males.

Rosanna Licari

 

Rosanna Licari is an Australian writer. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies such as Softblow 12th Anniversary anthology (Singapore), The Global Poetry anthology (Canada), Eratio (USA), Shearsman (UK), The Best Australian Poems, FourW: New Writing, Small Packages, Island, Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Love Poems, Tincture, and foam:e. In 2015, she won the inaugural Philip Bacon Ekphrasis Poetry Prize for her poem ‘The Wait’. She is the poetry editor of online journal StylusLit.

© 2017

He straightens up and looks
a bit less like a homeless person and when
he asks me how my Easter was I think how rough his voice is.
He has flecks in his eyes and I can’t quite tell
if they are two different colours because of the sun
shining sideways across them and turning them liquid.
His lips are dry and I can’t figure out if he has a lisp
so I don’t trust him but I trust him
more than I would trust a man with a Southern Cross tattoo
but he’s still a stranger on a train and Mum always told me not to go with strangers.

My mate Tony thinks he is a cowboy
and tells me all the time how good he is with horses but he
yells at his girlfriend who is
fifteen years younger than him and pregnant with twins.
Her teeth are gross and grey and her breasts are huge and her
dog is way too thin and I wonder
if she can’t take care of her dog how will she manage two babies
and where did she get that bruise?

The philosophy major is a feminist and pretty staunch about it
but he’s so earnest I
feel lost when we talk
I would like to love him because
his muscles are great and he has this smooth tanned skin but he doesn’t
smell like anything
which is spooky.

My Stepdad wears a bumbag and the same pants he wore in 1982 but
he stayed by my bed that time in hospital after I’d eaten a whole bottle
of aspirin and held my hand while they put a tube through my arm into my heart.
He gives hugs with the side of his body not the front and people often tell us how similar we look even though I don’t
have any of his blood in my body.
My blood comes from a distant man who lives over
many rivers and who I have nothing
but words for.

Anicca Maleedy-Main

 

Anicca Maleedy-Main is a Melbourne-based emerging writer, who has worked in universities for the past 10 years to support her addictions to books, horses and cheese. She has a masters in creative writing and has had work published in Islet, The Sleepers Almanac, Marathon Review and a range of equestrian magazines. Anicca spends her spare time with her daughter, dogs and horses, faffing around and being happily vague. She judges people who drink Sav Blanc, women who don’t moisturize before getting fake tans and men who have more than two aerials on their 4WDs. She’s not a fan of the word ‘problematic’ and often misspells ‘assessment’.

© 2017

What are little old ladies made of?
What are little old ladies made of?
Powder and pearls and frosted curls –
that’s what little old ladies are made of.

Old women – what are we made of?
Young eyes can’t pierce our camouflage,
their gaze slides away.
We remind them of things they would rather forget,
have knowledge of things they fear and regret.
Mothers and grandmothers.
Time, our sister. Death, who walks with her.
They carry our life sentences in their hands,
rob our enemies of vengeance.
Let’s change everything when no one is watching –
which is always.
Our bodies do less but our flesh knows more.
Use our powers of invisibility
for surveillance, stealth missions, covert operations.
When we are ready, we will cast off our disguise, reveal ourselves,
with triumphant cries, the hags and crones of childhood nightmare!
Gorgons, we will roll our rheumy eyes, flaunt our wrinkled skin
dangle empty sagging breasts and swollen bosoms that smother men.
Crumpled faces amplify our expressions to deafening volume,
the tendons in our necks will strain with the strength of our fibre,
our loose flesh will undulate like earthquakes.
Then, with the bones of our enemies and our foremothers
in our sparse white hair,
let’s run together screaming
to throw our remaining days
on to the fire
of the future.

Jacqui Malins

 

Jacqui Malins is a performance poet and artist based in Canberra. An Australian Poetry Slam finalist in 2015, and winning walk-up poet at the Woodford Folk Festival 2015. She is also the co-founder and organiser of Mother Tongue Multilingual Poetry events.

© 2017

I believed my choices would be marriage, possibly die in childbirth
by 16, or have a godly alliance with Christ as my earthly spouse.
Promise of a large dowry for my older sister assured she would wed
a lord. For me, my father presented a fair dowry of money and land
to the nearby convent two years ago on my 14th birthday. Though
I fancied a young man, my father ignored my pleas, my weeping.

Instead of a servant waking me, my eyes now open with a rooster’s
crow. I kneel down next to my slab cot, arms outstretched to form
a cross. Before morning bell for lauds, I flog my back and arms
to help cleanse my soul from desires, from thoughts of Christopher.
After breakfast my tasks include scrubbing our refectory table, buying
cloths and dishes, supervising table settings and meals. Once a week,
I collect soot in the oil lamps for the monastery monks who copy books.

Free from rearing children, we perform charitable acts for villagers,
distributing food and clothing from our convent doors. We are
instructed that women cannot perform Church rituals of hearing
confession or saying mass. We are lesser than men, made to feel
unimportant. I must confess my feelings of envy, yet to whom would I go?

Wouldn’t Christ think it odd that women could not speak as disciples
even though He has no separation of women and men in his teachings?
Dear Jesus, I must stop my grieving. Please, help me!

Cassandra McGovern

 

Cassandra McGovern’s poems have been published in several anthologies. In July 2015, Cassandra was one of four finalists for the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award through the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. Currently, she’s working on a series of poems about individual lives in 12th–15th century England and Scotland.

© 2017

When they ask her what advice she might
have for them, what she’s learned
on the battlefield of life,
she tells her daughters they need some time
alone
between the bellicose bookends of
childhood and alliance: time
to erase the submission of infancy,
to pen a prelude to their memoirs,
to discover self-sufficiency,
to compose a vocabulary of resolve,
to devise chapters in which they will forever
write their own lines. Time
to learn that loving themselves
might be the ultimate act of war.

Victoria McGrath

 

Victoria McGrath has been widely published in journals and anthologies in Australia and the US, including Best Australian Poems 2014 and 2015, and was shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2013. She lives in Yass, New South Wales, and is currently finalising her first manuscript.

© 2017

He came wanting attention; I lent him an ear
The customer’s right though my salary’s mine
He yearned for agreement – I gave it, I fear
Though he talked to my chest while I handed him wine

Thus he told me his tales of imagined offence
As I gave him a smile and then paid him no heed
For it’s hard to engage with a tale that’s pretence
Just another man wishing I’d plug up his need

Then his manner grew crass and I gave a small start
As his hand crossed the bench into room not his own
And he hissed snaking words he’d got down to an art
As he told what he’d do if I gave him a go

Yet I too have words I am willing to mention
If stuck at the bar with a man out of luck
For if I give one thing even less than attention
I fear it would have to be giving a f–––.

Rosalind Moran

 

Rosalind Moran is an author of both fiction and non-fiction who has written for various anthologies, websites, and online journals. She has spoken at the National Young Writers’ Festival and Noted, and enjoys making rhyming birthday cards for her friends.

© 2017

She is trapped in a fast-moving vehicle with the enemy.
She might be driving but the person next to her is in charge,

or thinks she is, delivering a speech. It is a rant on the faults
of the driver – a dangerous enterprise on a number of levels.

She is silent but full of scenarios: perhaps she could swerve
across the highway into oncoming traffic? She could stop

the vehicle and push the passenger out onto the shoulder
of the road or, better still, while the car is still moving.

She chooses none of the above. Silent, she continues
to drive safely, just above the speed limit. At Pheasant’s Nest

the enemy floats a question: If the plane crashes tomorrow, is this
the memory you want to have of our last hours together, Mum?

K A Nelson

 

K A Nelson is a prize-winning poet who has been published in Australian Poetry, Best Australian Poems 2015, Mascara Literary Review, Westerly (Crossings) 2017 and The Canberra Times. She is currently writing a memoir with poetry at the University of Canberra as part of a Masters by Research program.

© 2017

Are you lesbian or gay
or would you say, bi-sexual,
doubling your chance of partnering?
Perhaps you cross-dress, call yourself trans
sexual? Maybe you were born intersex?
Queer? My father used to say
all the world’s a little queer
except thee and me
and even thee is a little queer.
I’m a little queer,
heterosexual
and
that rarer bird:
celibate.

K A Nelson

 

K A Nelson is a prize-winning poet who has been published in Australian Poetry, Best Australian Poems 2015, Mascara Literary Review, Westerly (Crossings) 2017 and The Canberra Times. She is currently writing a memoir with poetry at the University of Canberra as part of a Masters by Research program.

© 2017

Blue Beaumont dark reminds me I’ve flown
into unknown land, the thick, sweet heat
as foreign as the professional air
of this conference. Listening to discourse
on deconstructionist feminist criticism,

I worry over my poems, just my own words,
after all. What if someone shouts, Throw this woman
out; she doesn’t give a damn about deconstruction?
But that’s tomorrow. Tonight, someone pulls me

into a car and we head to Port Arthur
Mardi Gras. Swallowed up in Cajun street songs,
I swig longnecks, sway among sequins. A girl
in a neon pink cat suit struts by, better than nude;

every man’s head turns. I’m not even jealous, so perfect
is she poured into spandex second skin.
We follow her to the Fo’c’s’le Bar
where the beer-bellied barkeep, waxing drunken,
throws Mardi Gras beads. That girl and I jostle forward,

squealing, Give us beads! We’re whores
for beads! The owner tosses cheap purple plastic
to her, then eyes me hard, and swirling
turquoise blesses the air, falls on my fingers,
a strand of perfect praise.

I learn the music of the street this night
and at next morning’s meeting – my first
public reading – I lose my literary
virginity. Stripped bare, I give this crowd
what they want. Now, I am the hot pink girl

exposing more than sex. My words
undulate to the bump and grind
and I read for love: an amethyst strand
kissing my skin.

Janice Northerns

 

Janice Northerns grew up on a rural Texas farm with a large dose of fundamentalist religion, leaving her feeling like an outsider at times. She enjoys exploring this outsider status through her poetry.

Her poems have appeared in Conference of College Teachers of English Studies, Southwestern American Literature, The Cape Rock, College English, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Poem, Sweet Tree Review, Visual Arts Collective – poetry, and elsewhere.

She currently lives in Kansas, where she teaches English at a community college.

© 2017

This need for speed is out of hand,
the constant back-and-forth trek edging
me up to eighty, then over, just to throw a curve

in the ironed-out ribboning road,
just to feel the pounding scare
of a near roll on the turn, tongue-bite

steadying the wheel at eighty-nine,
every bump thrumming
under my feet. I slice dry highway

to the radio’s bass beat, and a fresh scent
comes off my skin, the aroma of owning
every mile. As I crest the hill,

childhood riddle swoops up:
What’s black and white, cherry
on top? I stop

only because I want to.
Stiff-creased, cocky in my mirror,
he strolls up, grinning wet
teeth. He thinks he’s got me.

But I charm a warning
and speed off – leave him holding
the ticket pad in his hands. My driveshaft

thrusts ahead, the hum and moan eating
the miles. I suck up the center stripe
and fuck that highway like a man.

Janice Northerns

 

Janice Northerns grew up on a rural Texas farm with a large dose of fundamentalist religion, leaving her feeling like an outsider at times. She enjoys exploring this outsider status through her poetry.

Her poems have appeared in Conference of College Teachers of English Studies, Southwestern American Literature, The Cape Rock, College English, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Poem, Sweet Tree Review, Visual Arts Collective – poetry, and elsewhere.

She currently lives in Kansas, where she teaches English at a community college.

 © 2017

Cynthia turns her work in on time
all semester, though in October,
her mother slips into a coma
for two and a half essays, then dies.
I clip the obituary

and slide it into her hands the same
morning that LaShondra brings her baby
to class. The rest of us, homogeneous
and white, stumble over the baby’s
name, Ejeeii. LaShondra repeats
it three times, like an incantation,

finally writes it on the board. The name
means “strong African warrior.” He wakes
and I dance him around the room
in his Baby Gap sleeper and tiny
red Nikes, calm his cries by reviewing
comma splices. “Oh look, you’ve bored

him back to sleep.” We all laugh, but inside
I fear it’s the one true comment
for the semester. Power-suited
in beige and black, once I was sure
I could make a difference, but as his mother
struggles over one more “C” paper,
one that will still lack

development and organization,
I wonder if I’ve cheated her
of early-morning lullabies
and given nothing she needs
in return. Or if Cynthia resents

hours spent on those first papers
while her mother’s death hovered,
unexpected as a pop quiz.
And what of the other twenty-four
who’ve shared this bare, tiled room

for thirteen weeks? They write and write
while I, with my back turned,
scribble revision tips on the board,
a chalky scrawl erased
with the slam of a classroom door.

Janice Northerns

 

Janice Northerns grew up on a rural Texas farm with a large dose of fundamentalist religion, leaving her feeling like an outsider at times. She enjoys exploring this outsider status through her poetry.

Her poems have appeared in Conference of College Teachers of English Studies, Southwestern American Literature, The Cape Rock, College English, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Poem, Sweet Tree Review, Visual Arts Collective – poetry, and elsewhere.

She currently lives in Kansas, where she teaches English at a community college.

© 2017

Eight March 2017

Home-time traffic blares its way
on Flinders as I wait at the
crossroads for the signal.
The pointy red debutante

switches; she steps forward
swinging her arms, her green
A-line skirt just to her knees –
unconscious bias laid bare.

Go! she says Now is the time.
Act! No more waiting. No more
waiting for the green man.
No more asking Daddy!

Inspired by Gloria Steinem, Washington, DC, 21 January 2017.

Rosa O’Kane

 

Rosa O’Kane grew up in Northern Ireland and now lives in Canberra. She has had poems published on a bus, in print and online. Her poem ‘Hydrography of The Heart’ was a commended poem for the Hippocrates Prize 2014. ‘Paperbark Daughter’ was published in The Canberra Times in 2017.

© 2017

duck your head, the door is low
the dark warmth gathers round

crackling twigs in the fireplace
a smoothed hollow in the earthen floor

sit on a thin mattress
turn frozen fingers toes to the glow

over the fire she makes sweet tea
a thick ghee layer floating

she married young, ran away –
smoke escapes through gaps in the ceiling

she is Thakur, landowner caste
her home a windowless cow barn without a lock

the door crashes open
her shepherd man blows in, warms bare feet

they speak of the early cold
the firelight in their eyes

Sue Peachey

 

Sue Peachey is a New Zealander currently living in Canberra. She is a landscape designer with a strong interest in permaculture, pottery and poetry. She has published previously in Eucalypt, Haibun Today and Kokako.

© 2017

into the cool dark forest
oils of Himalayan Cedars

the worn dirt path to the village
beside the muscle of the river

there were posters in town, photos of the latest traveller
missing, last seen, any information

did they travel with a Baba who secretly fed them Datura,
until they went mad?

who were the three unknown men?
shall I hide and wait for them to pass?

a log, fallen across the river
straddling it, bark catches my jeans

a branch sticks out
water swells beneath me

if I fall with this pack
the freezing water
……………..…….the rocks

Sue Peachey

 

Sue Peachey is a New Zealander currently living in Canberra. She is a landscape designer with a strong interest in permaculture, pottery and poetry. She has published previously in Eucalypt, Haibun Today and Kokako.

© 2017

with apologies to Gwendolyn Brooks

He not cool. He
damn fool. He

speak hate. He
bad date. He

tweet stink. He
not think. He

well-fed. We
drop dead.

Donna Pucciani

 

Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry on four continents. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Italian and German, and has appeared in such journals as The Pedestal, Acumen, and Poetry Salzburg. Her seventh and most recent book of poems is EDGES. donnapuccianipoet.wordpress.com

© 2017

Hard things have come up
and I have had to deliver them
from the middle of my mouth
into the cold air;
they kick and strain at a silent squall,
and suddenly they are noisy and no longer wholly mine
as they reach another’s ears.
But what is growing inside me now,
binary-inflexible,
cannot be reduced or compressed,
stretched or rearranged or parsed
in preparation for its approaching appointed time,
a time I will not be allowed to choose,
the moment I will gather myself behind it
and push with one last desperate push
and utter in a gush at the end of my breath
to an empty room
“Please stay with me now”

Claudia Shepard

 

Claudia Shepard is a retired psychiatrist from Winston-Salem, NC who enjoys regaling her friends with her brilliant ideas and unusual turns of phrase. She is a harpist, singer, and caretaker of two aged dogs.

© 2017

Two women with their backs to the camera, the silk of an umbrella taut and smooth. One pushes a pram over tussocky grass, her bustle a series of swales. Her companion wears black, skirt held clear of her feet with the same left hand that holds her reticule or dilly bag. In her gloved right hand, the umbrella handle. Many women captured in the street photography of Arthur K. Syer carry umbrellas against the sun. The expressive inclination of their covered heads suggests the two are talking as they walk through what Michael Sharkey called “the strange new world of post-invasion arrivals”. A possible fenceline, raw sapling posts. The wires can’t be seen in the photograph, or have not yet been strained. It must be near midday, their shadows are tucked neatly beneath the step they are about to take. On the horizon, a small dark shape. An uncleared tree? A woman without umbrella?

Ali Jane Smith

 

Ali Jane Smith is a poet. She lives in Wollongong.

 © 2017

Plenty of room for an ample bum in these injection-moulded chairs
we know from barbecues and marquees, draped in white

like tipsy debutantes. Dry and comfy, we watch our playful, dogged
or scared miserable kids chug up and down with kickboards.

When you love swimming, what is it you love? Water’s cling, its fascinating slop
the looming, alluring deep end, blue and grey feeling of early

your feet and knees, not how they look, what they can do, the funny sideways
competitive friendships, lollies, the warm car that takes you home?

Let’s pull my chair a little over the raggedy finish of the concrete
hardly even lifting my tired feet, a pleasure to sit after a morning

picking up pyjamas, buttering toast, brushing nightwild hair.
Resettle off-kilter and one leg of this ugly, useful, perfectly

replaceable chair drags like the battered hoof of a ruminant
content to flock among the mums and dads and grannies

their tired, enraptured faces watching unrepeatable children
outstretched arms, thrashing legs, learning to kick kick kick kick kick.

Ali Jane Smith

 

Ali Jane Smith is a poet. She lives in Wollongong.

© 2017

With persistence of fingers on keys,
we are having an argument

my hands holding the accordion
between the breath of birds pulsing

through bellows. Today you are a melody
out of tune. I want to shove a reed

against your mouth and pray
you’ll sing like a canary. But there’s no

valve that offers an apology while both
hands are playing solo. If I cried

at the sign of leaking air, would it be
enough? Will you ever know the difference

between a squeezebox and a beautiful
bandoneon? Sometimes I sit on the edge

of our bed and pray for a righthand manual
but you are a buttonboard kind of man

a musician whose notes hoover over rows
and rows of scales, oblivious to the arrangement

of melody, your perplexity a chromatic conundrum,
wings unfolded without flight, a disappointment

to any lover who might have hoped for song.

Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas

 

Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is an eight-time Pushcart nominee and four-time Best of the Net nominee. She has authored several chapbooks along with her latest full-length collection of poems, Hasty Notes in No Particular Order (Aldrich Press). She is the 2012 winner of the Red Ochre Press Chapbook competition with her manuscript Before I Go to Sleep and according to family lore she is a direct descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson. www.clgrellaspoetry.com

© 2017

thirteen men
fourteen women
in this room
a convolution
of sideways glances

he pours
another glass of wine
to break the ice
he can’t remember
but I met him last time

at each new handshake
the woman nearby
leaps into liveliness
after seven minutes
her mouth returns to a line

I stumble
through the smoke and mirrors
of banter
no signposts
on this rocky road

each seven minutes
longer than the last
faces merge
the only partner I crave
is solitude

Carmel Summers

 

Carmel Summers escaped from Sydney just under three years ago to live in Canberra. Carmel writes poetry, lots of tanka, and is working on a verse novel for young adults. Her book, the last day before snow, was published in 2016. It is a collection of collaborative tanka, written as responsive sequences with eight Australian tanka poets, including Kathy Kituai from Canberra. She is currently preparing a collection of poetry, free verse, prose poems, some of the Japanese forms and an adaptation of traditional forms such as villanelle, pantoums and sonnet.

 © 2017

A response to Occupied Lives, a pictorial essay by
Sophie McNeill, published 6 June 2017

A gravel trudge in early morning;
a walk to school on a day like any other
for five wide-eyed schoolgirls
in these southern Hebron hills.
Do they observe the perfect blue sky,
the hilly stretch of tussock grass,
the curve of the valley?

Or do they watch their own shadows,
or others, longer
that lurk behind occupied windows,
around occupied corners, down occupied alleys?
How many schoolgirls lose their will, their way
skirting threats and malice on their walk to school?

Now, these five stride along,
clutching satchels, escorted by their occupier,
an armed vehicle in front,
two rifled soldiers behind,
who guard against their own.
While five girls walk to school.

Carmel Summers

 

Carmel Summers escaped from Sydney just under three years ago to live in Canberra. Carmel writes poetry, lots of tanka, and is working on a verse novel for young adults. Her book, the last day before snow, was published in 2016. It is a collection of collaborative tanka, written as responsive sequences with eight Australian tanka poets, including Kathy Kituai from Canberra. She is currently preparing a collection of poetry, free verse, prose poems, some of the Japanese forms and an adaptation of traditional forms such as villanelle, pantoums and sonnet.

© 2017

I watch the insurgent crowd,
whirling around where I wait
…….beneath the ‘big clock’.

I think I am not this type or that
maybe once I was
…….or never have been.

I used to wish
to be other than I am
…….but no longer.

I am content in my red woollen coat
leaning against the wall
…….waiting for you.

Dorothy Swoope

 

Dorothy Swoope is an award winning poet whose works have been published in print and online in newspapers, anthologies and literary magazines in Australia, USA and Canada. Her memoir, Wait ‘til Your Father Gets Home!, was released in 2016. She resides on the South Coast of New South Wales.

 © 2017

I have no desire
for looking back.
No thirst for salt.
Not one pine
for the old ways.
Nor a crave
for familiar tastes.

Those friends, this husband, children that I’ve loved
all fall away. I drop
my cloak of obligations.
Brush off embers
of memory –
the dying glow
a bundled heap
for someone else
to sweep away.

Now, bare-shouldered
in the cold night air
my neck remains still
reluctant to turn.
I force myself
to own
that loyal dogs
will burn.
Wide green gardens
scorch.
My pegs will melt
to cinders on the line.

But I have not cared
for eons. I do not
wish for there again.
I have no home
to be sick for.
I have been
many years now, sick.
Sick of
home. Sick of home.

Helen Thurloe

 

Helen Thurloe is a Sydney-based writer and poet. Her debut novel, Promising Azra, was published in 2016, and was shortlisted for the 2017 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Helen’s poetry has won national awards, including the 2014 ACU Prize for Literature, and has been published in anthologies, journals and online. www.helenthurloe.com.au

© 2017

on river shore mum smoothes the rug and plants
the drinks and sandwiches; we girls splosh in
and bob round Auntie Barb, her floral bathers
with one cup soft to cooling stream

age ten my forehead creases, seeing she
swooshes backwards, shifts hips and lifts a kick
with toes that frill the surface; setting hands
to sternum, she breaststrokes water into
circular ripples, spreading lines of smiles

Mira Walker

 

Mira Walker is a Canberra poet.

© 2017

They have moved us to a new room, and the changing quality of air plays merry hell with the workings. Still, says the keeper, a bit of oil, a bit of a rub, you’ll be back to normal. To what counts as normal. You creaking yourself upright and bowing at the waist; me inclining my head and my eyes, extending an elegant arm. Your timber meets my steel, and element calls to element. I have loved you since 1823. In the last analysis, you say, but the wheels stutter and stop, and I will never know what happens next.

Jen Webb

 

Jen Webb is a poet who works at the University of Canberra, and has been published by journals and anthologies in Australia, Canada, the USA, UK and China. She is the author of several poetry chapbooks and, with Paul Hetherington, of Watching the World: Impressions of Canberra (Blemish Books 2015).

© 2017

I

It is two a.m. and I am walking to and fro, talking to local cats, kicking litter to the kerb. I have been keeping the dog-watch, learning the texture of the night. I have been studying the madder parts of the holy book, and drawing its charts. I am ready to make it come true.

II

You hunt where you can, you with your terrorist chic, your poster of Andreas Baader, your hipster cap. You walk me round the town, gesturing: There, you say, that’s the station, that’s the bridge. You walk me past a postcard-pretty lake, where swans steer past boys in boats for hire; or through the market, gesturing: here and here. You are dreaming of death, among the dog walkers and the begging birds. You see blood on innocent stones, imagine your story rendered perfect on the screen.

III

They are gone into exile. Days in the jungle, nights by the sea. She spends the night hours breathing prayers: words with weight enough to slice the wind. Her son, and her son’s son, are gone. Her house, and her dresser, and her little dog. The wind worries past, the great sky turns slowly, the chiaroscuro of the unwired world keeps her there, watching, chin on her fist, fist on her knee.

IV

Ashes in the wind, sand between our fingers. Even the memories of memory are fading. It has been decades since this all began. All your threats have been fulfilled. The children have gone to dust, the front doors on the houses bang dully when the weather turns, and the town has been handed over to stray cats. It is time to shelve the history books, shred the archives, draw down the mourning shades. Time to agree that no one has won.

Jen Webb

 

Jen Webb is a poet who works at the University of Canberra, and has been published by journals and anthologies in Australia, Canada, the USA, UK and China. She is the author of several poetry chapbooks and, with Paul Hetherington, of Watching the World: Impressions of Canberra (Blemish Books 2015).

© 2017

you have devoured nearly all of it  –

…………………………this cake

hugely robbed
sharply less
undone……………………..is diminished

its few blueberries
not enough
though hotly purple………….iits minimal matrix
its last few raisins
beneath the brown crust
not tempting….so……   …….undesirable

listen mister….you didn’t ask
left the whole thing wounded
lost….impossible to restore…    ..…the sum of it

and….of the rest
too little remains
to nourish my soul…………….…once generous –

I will make more of these
creamed and iced
a delight to the tongue………….a festive mix

macadamia
cinnamon….cashew
over red mulled wine…………….….I could offer you

a whole cake….or even two
perhaps another for the road
and we could still be friends…..  ….but then

I guess…..and sadly fear….you

my dream of you

may not be here tomorrow

unless ………..

Irene Wilkie

 

Irene Wilkie has published two books of poems with Ginninderra Press: Love and Galactic Spiders (2005) and Extravagance (2013). The latter collection won a Highly Commended Award in the ACT Writing and Publishing Awards 2014. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Australian Poetry Journal, Award Winning Australian Writing.

© 2017

for Natalia Mali

Last Sunday in the wild, walled garden –
gaunt, skeletal after winter –
birds arrived to celebrate the radiance,
the warming balm that promised to replace
the chill, the overbearing bitter grey, with white
froth on the prunier, with more expansive days.

Hyacinths and snowdrops, daffodils
had magically appeared. Girls lazed
on a rug like gypsies, basking beside
trays of tea, cardigans discarded
in an invitation to the sun, as trees
prepared their silken, new embroideries.

Today, the cold has taken back
its fiefdom under leaden threat;
the gypsy troupe has fled to Paris,
leaving a Mihalkov film set:
empty garden, no Natalia,
no ballads from Lermontov;

the house party – unfinished fiction;
servants gone to humble hearths,
no nurse to tend the samovar,
the chanteuse and the mirth dispersed
with all the motley cast of guests,
in thin and melancholy air.

Marnay-sur-Seine, March 2015

Jena Woodhouse

 

In 2015, Jena Woodhouse was awarded Creative Residencies at Camac Centre d’Art, Marnay-sur-Seine, France, and at the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens, Greece. In May 2016 she was writer-in-residence at Booranga Writers’ Centre, Wagga, NSW. She is the author/compiler/translator of seven books in various genres.

© 2017