from Candy Tang Ting’s “Barefoot Running”
senryu
long summer afternoon children in a village house make music shouting into a fan
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Poems
from Greg McLaren’s “After Han Shan”
1.
This bedsit is home to a country boy. Buses or cabs rarely drop passengers off: the street-side trees so still that crows roost here, the gutter full of cigarette butts and used frangers.
I go chocolate shopping on my own, smoke joints in the park with my girlfriend. And in this little flat? Books piled high on my bedside table with the Chinese landscape print.
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from Iris Fan Xing’s “South of Words”
the sea calls me
on a day like this a cool glass of beer calls me to sit on the beach at sunset feeling the waves in my head rocking with the sea
a movement bringing me back to my mother’s womb when she walked up the hill her steps carrying both of us
all seems faraway nineteen fifty-seven and nineteen eighty-five
I see her only in winter now wake up in the middle of the night hearing her snore in the room next to mine
when we reached the dam after she marked down the water level I breathed then that contained river replied with a ripple from its dark
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from Tug Dumbly’s “Son Songs”
Three Degrees of Okay
Old farm sheds perfect parallelograms leaning aslant in a frozen dance with the wind.
Evening clouds a slow salmon as you breathe through the gills of the sky.
How easy it is for things to go right to let slip the weight of expectation duck the pendulum of pessimism let it swing into the shadows like a slow swooping bat.
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from Patricia Sykes’ “Among the Gone of It”
Ropes 2
upside down you’re a circus gypsy a wanderer on a rope who swings and sings to herself the way an upturned world makes the proper sense
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from Laurie Duggan’s “A Kite Hangs Above the Border”
Allotment 29
snowdrop, then daffodil, pink on a rose branch, green on a climber suddenly parsley then mint
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from Dominique Hecq and Béatrice Machet’s “Crypto”
Virtu L
ce qui ne se voit pas n’existe pas
objet toi Le plus visible
Le plus accessible
Le plus vite possible
hopLa!
tout entier dans son image
comme Narcisse
sans reste aucun
mirez-moi ca
transparence absolue
transparence tue
Virtu L
which is not seen doesn’t exist
object you the most visibLe
the most accessibLe
the most readily possibLe
HopLa! entirely whole in one’s image like Narcissus nothing left over behold id absolute transparency dead muted transparency
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from Clark Gormley’s “Not What You Think”
Coffee by the Sea
brown crust on white foam at the bogey-hole today hints of caramel
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from Gillian Swain’s “My Skin its own sky”
Renovator’s hints and tips
No crimes are hidden in the white bathroom of one who washes often and cleans rarely.
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from Iman Budhi Santosa’s “The Faces of Java”
Silversmiths from Kotagede
life was blown gently into the silver, gram by gram binding the emerald, enhancing the ruby eyes shining on each finger hammer and file danced at the stroke of midnight solder hissed in between and light taps to the belly, ‘antique accessories when weighed are worth more than the maker’s finger’
for years they have saved but not a single necklace to drape the scrawny chest the hair has turned silver in the making silent and forgotten by the children of time
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