Port town

By day she sees them
framed against the sky,
gleaming steel and paint,
steady hull, stern and bow
and sun flashing on portholes.

She doesn’t mind the cold
or the seagulls that
crowd her at midday.
She likes being close
to a line of departure,
to structures brimming
with a promise of going,
the sloping beach where
she sits to watch the sun
sink somewhere
beyond her vision.

The town is a bustle of
tourists and day trippers,
locals soaking up cider and sun,
coffee-dry laughs
and the smell of fish,
narrow, art-peppered laneways
and the old man on the corner,
playing the concertina.

She doesn’t think of planes now
when she thinks of flight;
at night she dreams of
a picture frame
without the picture,
of steel and paint
and portholes gleaming
like pale eyes in the dark,
watchful, unwavering,
piercing her with
inanimate understanding.


Alexis Lateef (Western Australia)

Lungs

Your lungs were always
too small for your life.

You wanted to breathe in
more air than you could,
made yourself red faced sick
trying to hold it in,
to store it, like childhood optimism,
stubborn and defiant against
scientific fact.

Sometimes you coughed for days,
and when you were bent double,
those strange keh keh sounds
erupting from your chest,
it sounded like there was
an animal inside you,
trying to claw its way out.

You said
that there was.
You said
it was you.


Alexis Lateef (Western Australia)
First published in Creatrix

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)

No apology for Liz

Here lies Liz
she’s tired

Here lies Liz
she’s lazy

Here lies Liz
this is fiction

Here lies Liz
truth untenable

Here lies Liz
overworked

Here lies Liz
earning her keep

Here lies Liz
unable to get up

Here lies Liz
like roadkill

Here lies Liz
told to keep still

Here lies Liz
too scared to move

Here lies Liz
accommodating a man

Here lies Liz
in silence


Here lies Liz
a snack for wild dogs

Here lies Liz
cold and hog-tied

Here lies Liz
grisly find for joggers

Here lies Liz
aka jane doe


Here lies Liz
on an autopsy slab

Here lies Liz
not donor material

Here lies liz
In bits in bags
weighed, examined,
& here lies Liz
cut and sliced,
& here lies Liz
labelled, numbered


Here lies Liz
dead (assuming she once lived)

Here lies Liz
safer in a long box

Here lies Liz
burning again


Here lies Liz
in the
crematorium
niche

another
hole
in a
wall.


Kathryn Yuen (New South Wales)

the hush

it's just that, yeah, the hush, the trigonometry
of because, but, no, not always logic but yeah,
art hankers for its hit of white and, yeah,
course, just sluice away, do your forgetting
in private 'cos no, this is a wide road for
thin thinks and, yeah(!), should've done the leaving
of blues to greens to reds, the yoga breathing,

but no, there is no polite retreat here — the
traffic of fraud is in flow and yeah,
absolutely, s'all done with ramps and cuisinere
rods and rote learning and you, yes you with
your good ears and air traffic controlled angst,
no, you can't buy the hiss of liquid nitrogen on
skin, can't buy it, nah, can’t buy the hush


Kevin Gillam (Western Australia)

Last of her Lashes

I
The last of her lashes falls out,
curved in her palm —
a closed bracket.
When her daughter asks
Where have your eyelashes gone?
She replies They've flown south
for the winter.

II
Which wig to wear today?
The Angelina Jolie? The Marilyn Monroe?
She picks one with long, flowing tresses,
feels like Lady Godiva.
And as with that famous horsewoman
the crowd look away
the moment she passes by.

III
She's read the Navajo Indians
never cut their hair
believing their thoughts
preserved in the strands.
She touches her scalp;
like a freshly sown lawn —
a crop of new memories sprouts.


Marianne Musgrove (South Australia)