Category: Issue Eight Poetry
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Depart.
by Anne Walsh I. Your death is a soft, green wing. Velvet spun by sun. A parrot’s wing. Just one more thing, one more shade of impossible for grief to jump into like a souped up car. Electric lime. Vegas neon of a Lorikeet. Your death dresses old school big time. Ridiculous feather,…
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A Mind Like Lightning
by Hélène Cardona Stars scribble in our eyes the frosty sagas, the glowing cantos of unvanquished space. —Hart Crane Without gravity I fly into a thousand pieces, add sparkle to various reflections — fallen stars, colliding lights — transform particles, waves, and dark matter. I become ocean, mercury, silver shimmers, fairy tales, fascinated.…
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Wrecked on Rakia
By Ian C. Smith, I didn’t yet know what the obscure legacy of becoming a mature-age undergraduate would mean. For a first-year history assignment I chose to research immigrants’ difficulties with assimilation in Australia. Familiar with hard-slog picking in a drained swamp where magnificent vegetables grew in thick mud like black treacle known as…
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Swimming the Horse
by Anthony Lawrence, For Eleanor Hooker. It’s not just hoof prints on sand that leave proof of a visitation of mane, flare & muscled hide as the daytime moon apportions light to mushrooms taken & broken down by word of mouth to be eaten between sets of breakers & a tidal surge of…
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Women’s Rights
By Amirah Al Wassif, don’t try to introduce my skin to your skin cause such introduction doesn’t let the light to get in don’t try to prove me as your servant while starting to talk about equality between women and men! don’t try to teach me the art of life now and then cause my…
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Obi Wan
by Anne Walsh. I want to go like Obi Wan Kenobi with a smile that says I knew all of this would happen, I wanted it to. I wanted to lose you, my light, my sabre. I wanted the cut of you to deflate me, make me air and a pile of my old…
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Watershed Warning
By Drucilla Wall, Erect blue towers on my body. I lie low in sweet reflection, to all my creatures give provision, I layer the stone to mark the way. At my edges leave your boot print. Test my wetlands with your poisons where the absent salamanders follow with me to the river. …
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Poem thingo
By Nicki Bacon. Stare at me from a distance, A tale of boredom now known. Stare at me from a closeness, My life, a dullness sewn. This flash of light is but a journey, Some hundred-year sorrow. So far from a fairy tale, Oh, how I dread the morrow. Told of such…
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The Fossil Maker
By Debbie Lim, For Bob Slaughter, palaeontologist He understands the bones of little fish. The way each spine will set in stone beneath the weight of forests, sediment, the collapsed strata of years. How many times has he lifted those skulls with a minute brush, blown dust from the space their fins once…
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The Octopus
by Anthony Lawrence, Having knocked the lid from the cooler it was captive in, it slid along the jetty to confer with the knots in stained timber as to which direction lay water and which the dead heart of exposure. Despite knowing how survival and escape are one in the animal drive to return to what…
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Pukumani poles, Tiwi Islands.
by Peter Boyle.
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Widgie
By Sandra Renew, we segued from Elvis to the Beatles, louts and moral delinquents frequenting Kings Cross milk bars in our hundreds bodgies and widgies, didn’t know we were the new and frightening youth subculture newspapers said the world is turned upside down, boys with long hair and unusual clothes, girls with short…
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From the country of pain*
by Peter Boyle.
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Deer Woman at Fifty
By Drucilla Wall, One misty night on the road to Wentzville, a doe cut across the headlights and vanished kicking gravel chips from the edge of the woods, her provoking rump giving the last flash. I used to be that woman, luring men to their deaths, or so they liked to think, when…
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Cocoon
By K.S. Moore, The cancer has spread I want to cocoon myself with the living, hide from decayed wings, talk to people I don’t know, reassure myself we are human. This slow death will not slowly take everyone I love. There are people whose bodies do not turn against them. Let me transform with…
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This Old Heart of Mine
by Jill Jones. Don’t scrounge, my heart, leave the pickings for the birds, there’s always a magpie or honeyeater who can use it better than you. Just keep beating, flapping your valves you old scar, make it seem effortless like swallowing or taking or leaving the minutiae or the passions, you don’t need to smile…
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Woodwork
by Hélène Cardona If I could gather all the sadness of the world, all the sadness inside me into a gourd, I’d shake it once in a while and let it sing, let it remind me of who I used to be, bless it for what it taught me and stare at it lovingly…
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When
By Gale Acuff, In Sunday School Miss Hooker tells us that we’re all going to die one day, who knows when, exactly, except for Jesus and God and probably the Holy Ghost. Now I’m scared because I walk to church and back again, of course, and have to cross the road once coming and one…
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The Un-marvelling
by Jill Jones How strange last night, I beheld your face, electric with thought along with my unrest, alight and hollow when the night trees shivered and the block we walked seemed more cluttered than the road we used to walk, where every little plot and fence was tended, maybe we were too narrow maybe we…
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Muscle Memory
By Anne M. Carson, The dog’s legs twitch where she lies on the rug, remembering, we say, her run in the park, leaping and loping in the forever freedom of imagination’s paddock. In bed your flung arm drapes my hip, hand clenching and releasing in rapid succession. Pulses of energy fire into the night.…