J.Burke

Angie Contini’s ‘ballad of weather’

from fierCe

the sky does not cry

                   or feel blue

                          it is simply the sky

sometimes it rains

                 and the rivers rise  

                       but not in anger or with quiet defiance

                                                       they simply rise

and maybe the wind moves us to tears

          but not because it is singing a secret

                                   the wind moves


                                             that is all

a man

                  passing through the world

                                goes with less modesty

he forgets himself

                           says to the others

                                                           I am the weather

                                                                                        the stormy deep truth 

                                                                                                                                  I feel therefore I am

                                                                                                        I breathe through the trees

                                                                                and sweat from the skies

                                                            I beat down my body of sorrow
for all the dry eyes

                 I raise the rivers

                                   for lovers of tides

                                                and surge with

                                  the mood of the moon

               this life of rights

is a tender trap

             it aches with the

aura of the passions

             and all the while

                         the lull

             between life forces and letters

                          decomposes

                things will either be known

          or remain unknowable

                   and that is all

Yannis Rentzos ‘THE HEAD OF ARTHUR RIMBAUD’

from Divertente and other poems

The head of Arthur Rimbaud
prefaced by a knife

In the neck, the cheeks
the sweaty knees

uncontrollable, in brackets

Rising vowels in stutters
usurps your exophthalmia

Suddenly you flick your hair and it kills

You declaim Molotov cocktails in the snow

Kevin Smith’s ‘NIGHT HERON UNDER A CRESCENT MOON’

from Another Day

Japanese wood-block print, Ohara Koson, 1877-1945

One could easily miss it. A small
gallery on a back street of this sprawling

city barely declares itself.
Inside, the lights dull to a fog

of yellow, the prints set back behind
plate glass, framed by dark timber.

A woman comes from another room,
draws my attention to a sign that tells

what I must pay in yen and takes
my money. When I turn she’s gone:

silence had erased her. And no one else
is here. My eyes adjust to the low

light and I realise now the lack
of noise, how cushioned the air behind

two sets of doors I’d passed through. Suddenly
I’m all there is of me. Drawn into

these prints, and out of my time, there’s only
birds now. A heron among the reeds

stands on one leg, her head settled
on a plump breast as if she feigned

sleep. She’s deep inside a world
that could not be without her. A shallow

stream pools around her, a crescent
moon rising through the reeds.

Ripples stilled around her leg
won’t tell the water’s secrets, but I

suspect she knows already. She’s alert
to a world that leads her into the mystery

of herself. Much has fallen away;
silence, a lucidity I can’t leave.

In light so dull, I see the edges
of myself dissolve, her stillness my own.

e less of her the more she is.
Outside, a moon over Tokyo.

D. G. Lloyd’s ‘Zhang Wei’

From Alive in Dubbo

The young man tore his stomach
along the barbed wire fence,
running fast through the canola crops,
fields of barley,
on the edge of town.
There are catheads in my eyes! he screamed.
His parents had been deported
back to Shanghai.
All the kids made fun of him
for shopping at Great Wall Supermarket.

Andrew Burke’s ‘Internal Cage’

from Historic Present

… just like a poet,
contemporary,
to grunt and grizzle.

What can you tell
about a person
from their unhappiness?

~

We all have a cage
inside the other cage,
open

or closed,
hanging in there. 

Mark Mahemof’s ‘Duct’

from Beautiful Flames

I’m directed to an anteroom
with grimy toys, old Women’s Weeklies
and an empty chipboard bookshelf.
There’s a three-seater couch
and a two-seater couch
identically upholstered
in shiny crimson vinyl.

There are two mismatched chairs
and two fluorescent tubes
emitting a bilious, stuttering light.

Outside this space
empty beds keep vigil in darkness.
Speckled, buffed linoleum
is the flooring of choice.

There’s a locked door
with the words AIR DUCT
in a large sans serif font
blaring from its surface.

I’m left unconsoled
while his surgery takes place.

Anastasia Radievska’s ‘First Wall – Aleph 1’

From City of the Sun * Місто Сонця

building a prison beyond this prison,
with the help of many others, building,
with hands tied to the ultimate imagination of building a
prison beyond this prison, because many of us thought to do so
independently and agreed mutually beneficial, building a prison
beyond this prison maybe because productive ultimately, maybe
because engrossing, the passion of building
a prison beyond this prison while in this prison, and dark besides,
and very instructive, the character of building and of prison and
knowing more about ourselves each time
we catch ourselves building a prison
beyond this prison again even having heard now the stories of how
others had tried it and how flawed, together,
incoherent, deciding anyway we
should be building a prison beyond this prison
and reminding each other that when we are finished building a prison
beyond this prison we can rest then and dutifully, from time to time,
picking up the bodies of those who died
building a prison beyond this prison,
carrying them to the edge of that which we are building beyond
this prison and throwing them off it tenderly, tenderly saying we are
building a prison beyond this prison so that you may have something
to be thrown off and so that in building a prison beyond this prison
together it might mean we imagine there is something beyond this prison
we are building and say so to each other as we build.

(after Anne Boyer)

Iman Budhi Santosa’s “Aaaaahhhhhh”

(translated by Kit Kelen and Chrysogonous Siddha Malilang)

from The 100 – Celebrating Flying Islands’100th pocket poetry collection

yes, right after the foreplay
I have to shag you
in the tall grass, in the stable
or in front of our children’s eyes
or better, in front of the mirror
to make our play more honest
so we can be sure
I feel what I feel
you feel your feelings too

yes, nature lets us look for
this divine map, and in that very moment
we give back love
in love, in a long prayer
God himself will come
bringing everything: will
like a crackling thunder. Soft
yet shocking. Yet pleasing

lo and behold, who are they
suddenly here
laying bare
still

Brian Purcell’s ‘2001’

From Filmworks

1968
I

A small boy beneath a big screen
that begins to split, somersault, explode
at the beginning of an infinite journey.

I look up.
Where was this emptiness
and where was my god

whose worship I had abandoned
for these colours splitting my eyes
and raw space invading my head?

These disembodied voices
like claws of sound
scratch at the fabric of my world

while a horde of priests and priestesses
who fail to sing in key
are praising an entity I don’t know.

One human face
at the centre of the screen
is caught in a mesh of light.

The birth of stars
in plasmas of gold and white
configure our distress

drifting in the cold night
growing, imploding foetuses
broken eggs spreading

across liquid space
and shells beneath magnets
approximate prophets undone

bearing the caskets of angels
while slowly winnowing
the wheat of the stars.

Eclectic flavours escorted by
hexagons in close formation.
Passionate details of cementing cells

untying
salacious pink seas and green skies
watching

the eclipse becoming an oculus
into a room in an upturned palace
where the mirrors silently observe us.

Cocaine Versailles
a place where anyone can live
in a future we can’t know

and shouldn’t try to know
knowing what we know –
that no-one makes it

for when the glass breaks and we see
the vision of our death
why would we consent to be reborn?

II

All of this and more
I saw.
It was Sunday.

I should have been in Mass
to witness again the transmutation
of wine and bread into the body of Christ

but I’d seen something else
beyond understanding:
the birth of doubt

or the origin of poetry.

What was happening?
My mind was firing
expanding.

It was all meaningless
yet meant everything.

As the planets aligned
ahead of me
I looked down

at infinite space
and above.
What kept me

nailed to this place
now that everything was moving?
The glass was broken.

III

55 years ago
when I returned home
my father got a strap

and punished me
for missing Mass.
It was the last time.

Perhaps he sensed
I was lost in a space
he couldn’t and didn’t want to see.

Yet strangely as he hit me
I didn’t feel
any earthly pain.

My mind was still exploring
other dimensions
beyond the reach

of his Catechism.