Poems

Jill McKeowen’s ‘Umina Imprinted’

From Sunday Morning, Here

The sun and crowd have left the beach
to a wall of leaden sky
and low tide printing waves, set after set,
for a boy on a board
mucking about in the white edge.

It’s quiet on the dunes away
from new streets and subdivisions, the flash of houses,
colour-bond yards, queen palms
glossing over
old points of reference:
the unfilled scrub
of burrawangs, paperbark and banksia.

Glass-front mansions have snapped up views
along The Esplanade, a graded
back-track once
for holiday flats and lettings,
where all the year
sand and wind swept in between the weatherboards.

And down on West Street, too many cars
are inching
frame by frame
beside the spill of coffee tables,
past the ghosts
of girls in Levi 501s outside the shut shops
on winter Saturday afternoons,
smoking, watching, waiting for chance:
a slowing car
of surf-haired boys, that Golden Breed.

My sense of place slides
about
like the boy on his board negotiating
waves, each one
a moment of change becoming
a past that’s fixed
but can’t be held
in the ceaseless roll to shore.

Sophia Wilson’s ‘Cutting Teeth’

from Sea Skins

days grow              rare
as hen’s teeth       they are getting their teeth
into the mountain       the weather sets
our teeth                  on edge politicians
bare their teeth        the employee receives
a kick in the teeth       animals are fed
up to the back teeth       a witness crawls in
by the skin of his teeth       clouds are dropping
their teeth                         the professor gives her
eye tooth                     kitchens are armed
to the teeth       the protest is long
in the tooth       the temple is
of the Tooth       trees grit
their teeth           infants fly
in the teeth            of danger the astronomer
gnashes her teeth       collectively the crowns
are broken               the boy
sows dragon’s teeth       they are pulling
polar teeth                   the guided tour sells
hell’s teeth                    the buildings lie
through their teeth       the children are up
to their teeth                      in it the quake takes
the bit between its teeth       debt sinks
its teeth                              into

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