So the woman’s dream is, by their and our hands, hysterical. (And not entirely woman.) Voices of expression and tins of regret. It seems that, despite all tendencies, we have stairs instead. Or steps. Or plans of steps, stepmothers and stepladders. Stemming...
Data is extractable and its valence changes. Precarity in relationship > when we are situated in relationship to circumstance > when others situate us in relationship causally. White supremacy destabilises and shakes, only once in a while. Is white...
You can’t tell if your family gave up growing vegetables. Your Mum, gazing over, wishes for peaches. Our turmeric/sage/ parsley (the talking herb we call it in our family language) tastes like nothing. Night -time, in the garden, you observe minute LEDs...
If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it. Anne Carson You take photos of the auction, the world’s straightest Mardi Gras. They fill the street like the opposite of rubble. You have no skin here; you raise $100 000 and...
Inspired by the Tamil saying, “மாற்றம் ஒன்றே மாறாதது”(matrum ondrae maaraathathu) Translation: Change is the only unchangeable thing The bird sits alone, Waiting, and mulling boredom, Feeling like dust float. Change, ablaze unchanged,...
Blood orange sun burning and tar melts under peach haze while house sails obscure in custard winds coughing hacking strangling to breathe and soft fur faces are singed and bloodied birds falling are like dying while flying like drink driving and trees turn to less...
, at some lunch table not a desk at the University of Sydney , smoking on campus which is definitely illegal now , opening up my old student email account , to discover two weeks after the fact , my ‘creative’ PhD has been awarded an ‘academic’ prize , named after...
stood before an automated door that refused to acknowledge my existence I thought but I’m here & yes I do remember when time online was less anxious—not a threat to national security democracy of course an election is not a cake walk though strolling...
Panorama Blackness is a pleasure. I can imagine the long line of women who look like me & wonder where their bodies end & mine begins. Flesh of chocolate A face checked by the hand of God. My DNA is made of blood, sweat & tears.’ I was formed by the...
Our days of rest are passed in silent prayer Before the promise of our teenage courtship Convinces us to do away with care And sees us come together, lip to lip. Within his bed and veiled in whitest sheet, Our hidden love evades forbidding eye, As I anoint and humbly...
This is no time of crisis. Crisis is a tempest roving shore to shore Not gentle rain on subtle tour. A crisis forges sickles for every Soul. Scoops up the seconds, craves every hour, Reaches past the cupboard and eats the cobwebs. A crisis inks over everything, writes...
Draw me a picture of mountains, child. Sketch creatures, trees, flowers, butterflies and birds flying, swept high by winds in wild skies. Together, we will name these denizens of nature, make up words to pattern silent pages, (echoes of our almost empty world,...
antistudy these days suggest economy 10 to six five & a half days; read widely but with sycophant calculation in order ‘not to fail’ this, don’t sit too long on this bench construing politics from sunshine— now that language is the subject of your ambits it’s...
A shifting margin pivots on desire to assimilate under the purview of theorists who say the goodies are for the earning. Publishing is your real estate. Texts incise – a colleague says efface – bodies matter too I say though a text is a gulp drawn to signal this...
“ffffffffffffff.” Fricative relationship between us. “ffffffffffffff.” Like my grades then; fourteen’s a difficult age. “ffffffffffffff.” Filial defiance, common among boys. “ffffffffffffff.” My utterance became your fists, falling plosives, blow after blow, ...
Welcome to our university, where you will experience the best education the world can offer. Our focus on teaching excellence, and our endeavour to provide you learning tailored to your needs [1] will create an environment that will facilitate your journey to becoming...
Much clanking in the rhododendrons, knights in the garden Black knights, white knights, knights of the haiku table Goes at pashing and tableaux of Glenrowan, garden knights Much enjoyment of metal frustration, knights in garden Larkspur, machine parts: satiric...
Between 1952 and 1963, British forces dropped nine nuclear weapons and nine thermonuclear weapons between Woomera and the Western Australian border, within contamination distance of urban centers. The Menzies-led Australian government of that time was wholly complicit...
The nation turns its face towards the wall and does not see the dying child. But she is here. She lies amongst the flowers that spread their seas of blue across suburban gardens. Her shallow fevered breath inhales the distant scent of moss and earth. The colours on...
Image credit: Kon Kudo. Dear soft rubber, hard metal dress me: one part at a time interject with vanit y, shoulders nearby hold arm above head press face against windscreen stay MALLEABLE ...
Image by Farhad Bandesh. The following artworks, writing, poetry and music come from four asylum seekers—Mustafa, Abbas, Farhad, and Behrouz—who have been detained for the past five years by the Australian Government on Manus Island and Nauru. Hundreds of refugees...
What else have I dreamt of, waking in twisted sheets as the blue dawn walks the slope at the end of our beach? The hands have memory, the breath too. In the sky, a letter in cloud, a rune of ending, written without hands, without breathing. The hands have memory, the...
Goulburn Hospital The women of my family end up in hospital beds Surrounded by the people they spend their lives looking after It’s not meant to be ironic But it feels strange Our bodies owned by something else In the hospital beds I’ve visited the women I’m part of...
Walking the dog up the track through the gums and kangaroos, down through suburbs crawling into the morning. The dog (a dingo cross?) browses the roo poo, which people think gross but which provides a certain consolation: at least one of us knows how to transact with...
Well Then Introduce Myself to Me If you – happen to consider yourself female. And you are, alone at midnight (Tuesday morning) It can be good practice to strip down naked even though it is nearly ten degrees and you fucked your heater with red wine...
We’ve left the university I walked out wearing my red flag around my shoulders You left wearing a beret, chanting: ‘The workers, united, will never be defeated’ We left As the campus turned into the dollar sign that it is. A dollar sign Which provides delicious...
A few messages later and there’s Ten or twenty of us in a park near Braddon, armed with banners and badges, a megaphone, desperation and rage. We’ve tried everything else years in the making and it only gets worse. Garema Place doesn’t cut it any more. ...
“If I had planned it, I should never have made the sun at all… And if there were only the moon there would be no reading and writing.” A metaphor is a sign of weakness she says the language showing its limits going out to the edge and tipping over conceding I have no...
Most relationships are not without conflict or worry, and navigating these issues is entirely normal and healthy. That said, some factors may be beyond the control of those within the relationship, and as such can impose a burden within that space that makes them feel...
It’s a beautiful place a lot of Americans are eyeing like the Martians in War of the Worlds, to layer over with silos; end of the world condominiums where lighting is utmost to combat depression, where the prairies play on an endless loop in windowless rooms, where...
it took a cutting of my skin by a mouthful of teeth– from two places [it came] fixed margin by margin; hold cities under breast neither could swallow it like the daffodils; rising their heads in late winter bursts with colour when they grow tired...
Soul You have not earned the right to use this word, a white professor said to the Persian girl as he ran his eye over her poem. And filled with shame (at her own presumption) she scratched out four letters that she had not earned the right to use. The word...
The radio alarm this morning leaked a slow dark stain. Some deaths are quick and almost fine. These have caused the stars to reel in pain. Take my morning cup of Earl Grey tea, take the slow swell of quiet sun through the autumn glass. Take the polished surface of the...
BEACHED WHALE The black fender of a car; a thousand plastic bags that tried to become (new) lungs. SKYSCRAPER At night a thousand furious eyes. Blank in the day, revealing...
The darkness in the room is ripe and heavy, giving off the heady scent of bodies, breathing. In another language only breathing sounds the same. I shift an arm and she moves too, my double in the bed next door. Skin rubs against cheap sheets and rustles, soft – the...
The rails shriek over here Pass silver-eyed birch bordering lush cornfields, defining amber wheat. Hey Maria, in the northern forests, pines tall and trim, are well-kept like a fine beard. Young soldiers of time, Standing guard for the mill. I saw again,...
Bricks of antiquity flaking mortar and dust of Adam’s bones wherein words encrust modern day ballads, cheap songs echo in search of a god to enslave and here it stays as times new roman and pooling ink. (a forgotten murder) Who have built thus these iron bars? William...
Yes, Let’s! Lets A-politicise all that became somehow political. Until the politics is taken out of politics And the underground of revolution becomes a gathering of silent bodies. We don’t have a will to change the world, We want To control it, To strategise until...
this city does not care for me i am nothing to her cold indifference as if you never left as if i never learned but i have heard out there somewhere someone with a brain just like mine and a voice like English summer calling out my name in the...
Photograph by Johannes Dietschi This poem is from Hopscotch, a collection of poems concerned with notions of nostalgia, neighourhoods, family, and larger collections of people; ‘College, Collagen, Collision’ in particular examines how and why people come or are...
– Translated by Louis Klee & Milena Selivanov War and Poetry: A Journey Through My Russian Roots – by Milena Selivanov I am writing from St Petersburg, Russia, where I have returned after seven years in Australia. This is my father’s hometown and it’s not my...
Let’s go hiking man, I need to go hiking he said to me. I suddenly agreed thinking that everyone needs to get outta town, sometimes. So we sped down the road out out out to wilsons prom where we once as schoolchildren went, he directed: left, right, straight, stop!...
I am a feminist. I have a powerful body made of solidarity, Built on the strength of our call for justice, Found through the fists of time, Silenced by constant exploitation. I am a feminist. I have won that right at least. Won the right to be disadvantaged, Won the...
He is thirty-five centimetres taller than I am. I want to love and fly, I tell him, when we are naked for the first time. (He is the first boy to see me naked). Sunday afternoon plays like a reel of film in my mind; in every frame there is some part of my body – the...
I didn’t see the trucks pull up. An odd cargo was not unloaded overnight. There haven’t been any inexplicable disappearances. Those were not strangers in town. I received no unusual mail, had no calls. The fires were not deliberately lit. Everything is as I left it....
That child’s hand above your head; the hand of a little girl long dead. Kakadu. Djidpi Djidpi. Two blocks of ochre. One grinding hollow. A grinding stone. Five moments of pressure. Thirty reed brushes. Voices echo off the high sandstone ceiling: thirty young lilts and...
Manifesto Comrade, Comrade, Can you feel the revolutionary foment? The fog of ideology is lifting from our eyes – let us complete our historical mission! We listened on with equal parts admiration and revulsion, swayed before your certainty. You had the look,...
THREE There were trees outside when they arrived. One day, he sliced everything down. There’s only quiet, filling the room until she’s choking – she used to hide it better but it’s harder, now, and she can’t grasp the edges of it and he doesn’t try. He’s happy in the...
Held-square, something un-defined above sets short bare legs running. A grey metal shod cane keeps one man from fighting but not from war. Lone family sedan stopped at curb has eyes peering out windshield. Heavy coats insulate all to-some degree. There is an absence...
No evidence that cockroaches tell time by the large plain face of the clock we bought from Kmart to replace the clock that fell and smashed my cobalt teacups. At the same hour every night they make the long journey from the immovable dresser to the bookshelves. We say...
Ascending Loving your scrutiny, Agreeing with your Calculated appraisal, This conversation Is a staged renovation Of my crumbling insides. You aspire towards Beauty And frown at me, As I linger at the antiques. You’re busy nitpicking, Sorting into piles Of keep and...
I can’t deny how much I already feel this. But my focus refuses direction, won’t be blinked into moistened clarity. Muffled by a hum, just behind my ears. Whispering hushed tales of possibility. Yet I dare not speak it, that it be spooked beyond reach and out of...
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