Elegy, with Sorghum Amplum

I keep remembering
that you are dead.

I remember
the sorghum fields, the fissures
in the earth running through them, running
to catch ourselves on the wire fences.
If you wrap your hands
around the barbs slow enough,
you don’t break the skin

I remember you, lying on your back in
the dead grass, the blades of it
sticking, brown and flyweight, to your shirt;
a girl pouring milk into your eyes
because you’d burned them
staring too long at the sun. Milk,
filling the hollows of your orbits,
and drying on your cheeks; milk
rolling down over your temples
and into your hair like tears.

I wonder if they found my clothes in the harvest.

I wonder if your eyes look like that now,
white and glazed.


Madeleine Dale (Queensland)

The Floating Bars of Ohio

The summers were always nice and warm
We used to go to lakeside bars on Saturdays
and have Bloody Mary and Corona alternately
till we got buzzed. The old couples used to bring their private
boats and get wasted at around noon.
Once I met an old lady who claimed
to have babysat Patrick Carney from Black Keys.
Her 20-years-younger boyfriend
kept looking at us as if we were from Mars
and one nice Saturday afternoon
a girl came and started asking about my whereabouts
and said she was from down South. Her cousin came
all red-eyed and said ‘Why are you talking with this terrorist?’
I had long hair and a beard at the time
and I also had a very long laugh to follow.
I was not offended. I dug his context
but I hated his teeth,
which kept reminding me of Global Warming and Nickelback.


Sudeep Adhikari (Nepal)

The Cuckoo Clock Shop

There is a small gate invitingly open
To a path narrow and stony through a cottage garden
To a door with the sign above
The Cuckoo Clock Shop
Unreal world we enter
Into a rain of tik-tak-tik-taking seconds
A little old lady smiling
Winds up all the carved dark wood masterpieces
She makes them play their tunes and all their dwellers appear
To drink their beer and crash their glasses
In toast to friendship
The wood-cutters bend to and fro over their long saws
And the men and women in their fancy outfits
Dance on the balconies round and around
And the old little lady smiles proudly

What if they started
Arguing loudly about
Politics history wars religion immigrants dishonesty in sport
And money when it comes to the core of it all
And some husband would bash his unfaithful Helga
On the minute terrace
Above the big hand of the clock too fast
Missing the noon for just about a minute

But then the shopkeeper lets the music stop
And she looks at me with questioning eyes
Teary with nostalgia
In this gingerbread house from a fairytale
On my trip across the Australian outback
I can afford nothing
But she is happy to let me
Buy nothing else but a myth
Of her happy village in Schwarzwald


Anna Habryn (Western Australia)

Gecko

Small translucent oracle
please tell me,
          is it time?

Your echo call on blast
of sour night air
          brings me hope.

Are your toes
          drumming       against skirting board,
          tinkling          against stale bottles,
a code tapped out in your scuttle language
          that says,        pack your bags?

Are your throaty brays
          chk chk chk   laughs of disbelief
that I've stayed this long?
Or are they
          a warning call:
                                  leave! right! now!

Tell me soon
for my ears are tensed
to your cries and to his keys scratching
stumbling to find the keyhole of the door


Rae White (Queensland)

Ten Pound Alan

Fastest runner in the school — I watched him
ease ahead of me on sports days, his chest
pressed against the finishing tape, first every time.
A good fighter, brilliant at rounders, climbing trees,
he once ate dog biscuits in my back garden,
sitting in a deck chair, Fritz’s paws on his knees.

I wasn’t sure what emigrating meant.
How far was that? I was afraid to ask.
I knew where he was going though.
That country in the corner of the map on the wall,
spread out like orange peel.
Ages and ages on holiday.

We went to his house before they left.
I sat on the floor by the fire pulling threads
from the carpet, a varnished boomerang
above me on the wall. His mother, poised
in front of net curtains, a silhouette inside silver
cigarette smoke, talked about the wages out there.

It was June, we stood in assembly
holding blue hymn books,
too much sun in the hall. The teacher,
her long dress yellow with flowers,
asks us all to wave to Alan. He hands me his book,
runs along the row, down the corridor,
looking back at no one.


Michael Crowley (UK)
From Michael's book First Fleet

Editor's note: Ten-pound Poms

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)

Lost

My communion coat got left on the bus
It is lost
My communion coat got left on the bus
And Dad is sorry
But it is lost
Someone else is wearing it now, I suppose
My new red coat

My communion coat cost seven pounds
(Granny Griffin paid)
Seven pounds!
‘And what am I to tell her now?’ shouts Mum
And she cries
And slaps my face, hard
‘You should never have taken it off!’

I remember the day my communion coat got left on the bus
Dad pawned it in the shop on Talbot Street
While I waited outside
And we never did get a bus
We walked home
And it was cold
With no coat


SG Capelli (Western Australia)

My Father’s Dying

My Father is dying.
Week by week the cancer swallows him up
so every week they have to move him
and every week the wards get smaller
and the walls close in around us

My Father is dying.
Today, he’s holding an orange, deep in thought
and no, he doesn’t want me to peel it for him
He just wants to hold it, he says,
‘I might smell it tomorrow. Maybe.’

It’s tomorrow, and my Father is dying,
and they need to move him to the hospice
but it’s proving difficult
because finally I comprehend that my Father is dying
and they need me to shut up wailing, now!
But I don’t know that I’m wailing

so I’m crying, pushing them away, shouting ‘fuck off nuns!’
as another version of me,
surprised, puzzled,
peers inside my soul,
asks,
‘What’s wrong with you? You don’t even know him’


SG Capelli (Western Australia)