generational stillness

it’s one of those centre-strip
wishing wells
surrounded by lawns in increments of neat,
neater, neatest
with nice old trees too, their bark gnarled
as if waiting for the pencil
of a still-life student

but when I lean over
it’s just typical small-town grimness
with cigarette butts
half a foot deep
locked in that generational stillness,
grey water
strangling every dream

and it’s all the way across town
but I swear
that the graveyard
has sent its hoar-frost here to roost,
I can almost taste the down-payment it’s made
on every kid I used to teach

how far the stars seem now
from the grill of a fast-food sweat shop
or the single-hinge backdoor
after daddy-o
puts in another nomination for shitbag of the year
and I’m supposed to impress upon them
the everlasting importance
of proper essay structure?

on the way home I slaughter a thousand bugs
with my windscreen
and somehow it feels hopelessly right.


Ashley Capes (Victoria)

Gentle Lives

Your letter came, Irene
It rose up through the thorning patch
And flowered Robert's grave
I — know you spoke proud
I saw the name of your son
I ache when careful words
come, Irene

Your husband's here, Irene
When wardens cleared his tulips off
You drove a bramble deep
You sing to him still
You — held for twenty-five years
You found the strength to wait
here, Irene

Your colour left, Irene
I crawled beneath the airing shelf
And wishing to be found
I whispered your name
I hide    behind a Daniel
I — crush when gentle lives
leave, Irene


Daniel Hutley (Victoria)

the kiss

You find me in the secret place, that corner of
Rodin’s woods where his statues begin to thin,

forlorn in a sparseness of tourists who never
stray from the path or their first language,

where I’ve begun to wonder if I’m visitor
or visited, the wax heartbeat of a hot day.

You drag me to the shade where we hide from
the curator, wait for her to chain the gates,

lock us up in some out-of-hours limbic limbo,
insisting I’m a real boy: that an original rhythm

still thumps in me. — there’s room for two more here,
is what you said — already our skin peeling,

unfurling around ankles, discovering each
other’s earth.

The last light meets an unfettered moment, burns out
on our Balzac bodies, verdigris busy on new bronze.


Miguel Jacq (Victoria)

Ceyx azureus

There,
on a bough of wattle
jutting over water,
a little azure kingfisher,
Ceyx azureus,
sits.

Blue as a summer sky,
bronze-breasted,
stump-tailed,
squat,
with long beak disproportionate,
it waits.

I know that if its
keen eye spots a fish
it will dart down
and splash
and instantly be back there
with its catch.

The summer day being long,
I take a spell from busyness
to sit
in stillness
like this little bird
whose business is stillness.

I watch the kingfisher
watching for fish.


Yvonne Deering (Victoria)

Holiday Town

We watch them come, from Cup Day on,
The caravans and tents.
They’ll all be here on Boxing Day.
The foreshore will be dense.

They’re here — street signs are mangled now,
To confuse our whereabouts.
We shrug and sigh, and say aloud,
‘It’s all those holiday louts.’

Picket fences, letterboxes,
Local structures all abused.
We pay the damage someone does
Just to be amused.

The shops are full of trolleys.
They jam up all the aisles,
And queues to all the things we want
Go back for miles and miles.

But wait! We see kids paddling
And playing on the sand,
The bike track’s used by families,
They’re all in Happy Land.

The holidays end, it’s ‘Back to School’,
They’ve packed up in a flash.
So come again you happy lot,
And don’t forget your cash!


Shirley Burgess (Victoria)
First published in Positive Words

Hibernation

He gives the clothes back
to them. They are not really his. He walks back
into the snow — the avalanches — they have broken him
many times. He knows he has to find a way
to pile the snow, to lie across it —
to become the river.
And now he returns to the cave.
He will walk deep enough to paint the sun
on the wall. Where the cave eats,
he will pile the rocks, the fragments
of his wood. After the sun has bled
a thousand days he will be able to open his eyes,
to breathe — to make his fire.


Annie Blake (Victoria)

Oblivion

morning has to come
at some point.

you are the sole pedestrian
measuring the length of the body
trailing your shadow
under the street lights.

it all belongs to you.
the night sky and vacant streets.
the passing cars that do not stop for you.
and the voices whispering
into the distance, especially.

and when it begins to rain
you will not seek cover
or turn back towards the room
where you are living.

you know that no one can help you.
at this distance everyone is gone
and the rain is telling you something.


Robbie Coburn (Victoria)

The Bride Who Became Frightened When She Saw Life Opened

After a painting by Frida Kahlo

She hasn’t read a book in seven years
he doesn’t like the light on
if she gets in before him     he says nothing
she could read all night
but the thing is     he’s in bed by nine
every night     every night she has
something to do     she folds their washing
in three piles on the kitchen bench and once
he’s passing through     and it’s on his way
so     she asks him to take one pile
the kids’ clothes     put them on the bed
that’s all she asks     he wouldn’t have to open
a cupboard or a drawer
but he refuses     another time
she’s peeling potatoes and stacking dishes
and showing Sonya how to tie a shoelace
in a double-knot     she asks him to take the rubbish
out     but he says no     why should he?
she’s closer to the door and she says
for the first time ever     about anybody
I hate you     to the window
as if she’s talking to herself     or talking
about the weather and she goes back
to peeling the potatoes.


Gayelene Carbis (Victoria)

Previously published in MUSE — Canberra Arts Magazine

Alaska

Every day,
memories place your name over morning.
The dust settles on the empty side of the bed.
My chest hollow as a pin-pricked egg.
Leaving is equal parts
laundry and gin, hot water and baking powder.
A car door that is too hot –
thick air on a summers day.
I wander broad-chested into the sky
and on the days that I want to die
I remember
there is sunlight in Alaska.


Kyra Gillespie (Victoria)

I keep having this dream where

there is a crack running the length of Main Street;
when it rains the crack fills and flows like a river.
Tonight it is raining
Oil slicks on the road reflect street lamps;
artificial Northern Lights.

He hadn’t paid his power bill, so
he leads me through his apartment by the light on his phone.
In his bedroom I see the mess even in the almost dark.
His bed is a mattress on the floor;
sheets barely cover it.
He lets go of my hand, pulls his shirt over his head.
The light flickers as the phone battery runs low;
he puts the phone away.
He undresses me.
In the dark I stand, naked, in front of him.

But then I reach for this zip along my side.
The zip begins under my arm and runs the length of my torso.
There is another along the length of either leg — hip to ankle.

I step out of my skin.

A river runs out of me like the one in the crack along the sidewalk.

I’m much smaller now
                                                  much more myself.


Tamasine Loves (Victoria)

weeds

supplicant green
tip to eager root/gloved hand

complete

like a slammed door/dead phone/totalled car

weeds spread quietly

while you sleep/stare at weave
in an office partition/wipe dust from a desk phone

on your way by goldfish sunrise
green under bike wheel

weeds stretch wide loop tight
knit into more

in the slide of a month
so many/so many

they begin to look
like they have design
logic
knowing


Alice Allan (Victoria)

My preferred funeral

Play Handel’s ‘Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’

or ‘Zadok the Priest’.

As you enter the building

take a scoop of my ashes

and throw me in the guts of the stale church air.

Jump up on the altar and conduct like madmen.

Every one of you.

Dance however you like.
Drink whatever you please.
Kiss whomever you desire.

Don’t mope around,

stunned,

faces hung

like wet socks.

Smile —

you miserable bastards

— or I’ll haunt you


Anna Bonetti (Victoria)

Infidelity

The little girl – except she’s not so little –
Says to the young man, Your Eyes
Are blue as the sun in winter.
He pretends not to believe her
As he holds her middle finger
In the palm of his ribs. Listen, he says,
To the thunder of my heart.

The young man – except he’s not so young –
Says to the great lady, Your Hands
Are ochre-yellow, bougainvillea.
She thinks of violets, roses, red azalea
As he lifts her up, down, higher
Flesh spilling through his hands. Listen, he says,
To the squirrel in my pulse.

The great lady – except she’s not so great –
Says to her husband, Your Feet
Are the crimson roots of green pea.
He tastes salt-water from the sea
As he pretends not to see
The bruises on her thighs. Listen, he says,
To my promises and lies.

The husband – except he has no love –
Sits in the shade of trellis vines. The sun
Comes in, invades him, bright and gold.
What have I done, he says, in a past life
To deserve my wife? She is a lady
And great, and so lovely it is easy
To ignore the young man within her.

The little girl comes home, the sheets
Are fresh. She says to the young man,
Your palms are too wide for your wrists.
He pretends not to hear her.
He holds her lips against his own
And listens for the sea. She is limp.
The music from her eyes is silence.


Karmun Khoo (Victoria)

You are the fold my scarf makes when it falls

You are the fold
my scarf makes
when it falls
across the chair
as I undress. My pulse

was a string your voice
picked. I bared
my throat. You exposed
a voice. I knitted
a shield. You are gone.

But crimson holds
a fold on a chair
as warm as the winter
thread that I wove.
Now a quaver

sustains the taut
thing of this voice when
soft on my throat
is the paw
of your leaving.


Anne Elvey (Victoria)

Funeral day

The register in the gullet is a fist. Held by the muscle
of unmourned things a duct aches, with the prayer's
shudder in a nook of the bone. In the gloved cup

the liquor is brine, and smooth as a smooth on the tongue.
The breath is as shallow as the loss is deep. Each
salt corner leaks, when the flower-seller says

thousands are going to that funeral. An eagle
spans the intersection of Swanston and Flinders. The fist
unclenches in its felt. Feathers are the clocks' hands.


Anne Elvey (Victoria)

Tadpoles in a shallow pond

Who doesn't want to scoop up
A slickly flabby school of tadpoles?
To run their oily, knuckle-shaped heads
Like balloons squeezed too hard at one end
Between splayed fingers—
We have webbing in common,
You, taddeus, and I!

It is the same urge, by my reckoning
As the dare-I-leap sensation
That tackles me, nudging my knees when I am
Toeing the line of a precipice, hovering a hairdryer
Near an unschooled body of water
A beyond body-ness,
The double-think of observing
The end as it occurs.
(While hoping for a sequel.)

Yes, if you ever want to feel alive
While courting the Schroedingery
Goodness of the mystery box
Come and find me,
And we can scoop tadpoles in shallow water.

I have a net if you need it.


Stephanie Campisi (Victoria)
Twitter: @readinasitting

Life goals

Well, since you asked:
I would like to climb atop
a fine-and-dandelion
and with an exhalation and
a carefully positioned
makeshift sail made from
a crepish plastic bag—
the tiny ones used
to ball the heat around
a slick market dim sim,
a hot air balloon of pork
and chopped onion—
tobble off into a Gulliver
world of wrongsizedness
and vertiginise at the
smashed white skeletons of
clover flowers, those pluffy
failed parachutes lost in
a spinifex cemetery;
I might even lasso a flagondry
with a shoelace of my own
tying and flue it up
the musky chimney that my
lounge room should have
but doesn't, but all in all
I think that I am quite
on track.


Stephanie Campisi (Victoria)
Twitter: @readinasitting

A designer worth her salt

When a designer is laying out a newsletter, and her client gives her a bunch of amateur photographs to include for which there is little room, the designer knows she will be in for a hard time.

Because our world is largely made up of horizontal planes
the majority of extraneous material
will likely be scattered along the horizontal plane
either side of the central subject

When a designer is formatting photographs that must all conform to the same space constraints — eg: must fit the width of one of the newsletter’s columns exactly — any designer worth her salt knows that if you reduce the width of any photograph, it will take up more space

If a photograph that is twice the width of a square has a lot of extraneous material on either side of the central subject, it might be necessary to cut out that extraneous material in order to render the photograph publishable. It may, in fact, be necessary to make that photograph a square.

In a universe populated by squares
and various other geometric shapes
a horizon governed by space requires of the designer
much salt for its successful negotiation

Because all photos must fit the one width, to cut the width of a photograph in half is to double its height.

Not only do two half squares make a square but two squares make a half square. If you cut a half square in half, you will make a square that is equal to two half squares. Cut a horizontal half square in half, you will double its size.

The Great Designer makes tame the horizon
The Great Designer shores up her salt
and bends space to her will

The rule does not apply to vertical photographs though one is still faced with much extraneous material, ridiculously tapered legs and bulbous heads. To cut out the extraneous material may actually reduce the photograph’s size.

Any designer worth her salt would not accept photographs from an amateur photographer, particularly when space is at a premium,

for one must be the ruler of space
and not be ruled by it!


Eddy Burger (Victoria)

BBQ days and the salsa of friendship

I am new here
A stranger to the community
but the BBQ of friendship
is sizzling on my hot plate

I’m a foreigner
in a green and pink garden
but the salsa of new friendship
is stirring in my salad bowl

Someone smiled
offered me their number
now the coffee in my morning
is texting on my tea cup.

I am new here
You don’t know me
But the tango of a friendship
is Cha-cha-ing around my sugar bowl.


Danielle Bruce (Victoria)
As well as writing poetry, Danielle blogs at Eat My Street.

Last will and testament of you know who

When I die
I want everyone to fill jam jars
With their tears
So those who loved me most
Will be known.
There will be a PH test
To signify those who cheated.
Any cheaters will get
Nothing from my will.
When I die
I want a hundred soldiers
To shoot at me
And cut off my head
To make sure I’m dead
And not cremated alive.
When I die
I only want my head cremated,
Then, I want my mourners
To find a north wind
Face it and scatter
My ashes into it
So my head ashes coat them
And I’m more in their faces
Then they’ll ever let me be.
When I die
I want everyone
To go around
Kicking buckets continuously
For hours while they cry.
And if they don’t do this
They won’t get a skerrick
I tell you, you won’t
Get a brass razoo!
Place the body of my carcass
On a mountaintop
For vultures to peck at,
Cast my corpse and bones
So they can be printed
By a computer and
I can be reanimated
Into some headless
Advertising monstrosity
That will fund a thousand
Starving nations to billy-o.
Carry on my name
In slap-stick and pornography,
Bedroom my last moment
Into bustle and ballyhoo,
Or you won’t get a thing
From you know who.

Initially NO (Victoria)
From Initially NO's book Riotous favour (2013)