Australian
Poetry Collaboration
#39
YEARS OF GREATEST CHANGE
…OR MAYBE NOT
Editors: Jonathan Cant & Les Wicks
Archived in Pandora
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from Meuse Press –
https://meusepress.tripod.com/Meuse.htm
Banner design Angela Stretch
FEATURING: Adam Aitken, Ronald Atilano, Magdalena Ball, Koli Baral,
Bengt Berg, Maria Bonar, Henry Briffa, Margaret Bradstock, Kay Cairns,
Jonathan Cant, Cao Shui, Anne M
Carson, Anna Couani, Luciana Croci,
Michael Cunliffe, Lana Derkač, Joe Dolce, Ross Donlon, Tim Edwards,
Ingrid Fichtner, Lorraine Gibson, Stephanie Green, Hussein Habasch,
Philip Hammial, Dennis Haskell, Doug Jacquier, Anne Kellas, Kit Kelen,
S. K. Kelen, Jean Kent, Christopher Konrad, Likitha Kujala, Peter Lach-Newinsky,
Allan Lake, Chris Lake, Katrina Larsen, Earl Livings, Kate Lumley,
Teena McCarthy, Anita Nahal, Jan Napier, K A Nelson, Allan Padgett,
Maithri Panagoda, Sotirios Pastakas, Vaughan Rapatahana, Kate Rees,
Janet Reinhardt, Chris Ringrose, Gail Robinson, Frances Rouse,
Margaret Ruckert, Fahredin Shehu, Ellen Shelley, Kathy Shortland-Jones,
Sarah St Vincent Welch, Angela Stretch, Rita Tognini, Maggie Van Putten,
Roger Vickery, Louise Wakeling, Rodney Williams & Paul Williamson
Something in the Air 1968-1974
Sometime within this chillum of moment there was an explosion of possibilities, a grindstone of conflict
and dreams of liberation alongside explorations of self.
Birth of a new world? Collective delusion? Or maybe something in-between.
An individual experience. One moment of clarity or a drone’s eye view of the whole colourful mess.
¯
Power Lines
Power
lines run
from the sunlight down to earth
to those who once walked here passing by
Power
lines run
from the rivers up north
through the dark forests
down to the new districts in the south,
to great structures in a different language
Power
lines run
between people,
glowing copper wires that sing in the night,
dark and mute when everything has been said,
green and sprouting like thin roots
Power
lines run
between those who rule
and those who try to grab hold of their lives,
power lines between the way it once was
and the way it will one day become
¯
Kate Lumley
Sex and destiny, 1973
Everything she was taught, Gough’s supergirls
blew away. Those feminists flew as they raised
women’s agendas while she raised a sponge.
Was the political personal? she dared to wonder
as she thought about her G spot & covertly
took The Pill, 5 were enough, 6 if you counted him.
She yearned to flock with women’s libbers
who dotted their bras on the old King’s statue
in Parliament House but he called them a rabble
so she dutifully clacked out his thesis on a Remington,
changed nappies, covered The Female Eunuch
in brown paper, wrote secret submissions
to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships:
I just want to go to uni like my brothers and husband.
Years later she did, after the kids had left home,
despite his cunning and payback affairs.
How many times as the speedo clicked off the long
drive to campus did she picture flying the coop?
She wanted to fling her wedding ring out the car
window but she could never land a job because
of who he was in their small, pinched town.
He is 90 now, a silver fox content that she stayed
his steadfast wife while resentment pecks at her soul.
¯
Maggie Van Putten
Letter from New York City, April 22, 1970
People as far as I can see. 100,000 someone says.
Mostly freaks, long hair, young.
We heard through word of mouth
or blurred leaflets written in haste
reproduced on hand-cranked duplicators.
Earth Day, they’re calling it.
Traffic is banned on 5th Avenue
from Union Square to Central Park.
It’s like a party. Roller skaters skim by.
Beautiful girls hand out flowers.
There’s a sweet earthy smell
as a joint passes from hand to hand.
Now high school kids are streaming out
of the Penn Station commuter trains.
Classes ditched; they’re grooving on the energy
and the edge of danger as we walk
up the Avenue near lines of stoic police.
New York’s finest still wear their guns,
but left the clubs and helmets behind for this march.
At Bryant Park politicians on the library steps
shout their messages through PA system static.
It’s time to call attention to pollution!
No one mentions the U.S. is polluting
Southeast Asia with napalm.
Last week 25,000 of us marched against the war.
The day was chilly. The police bristled with hostility.
Today the sun is brilliant in a deep blue sky.
The air is clear and clean. Even the cops are enjoying it.
One tells me we need more marches like this, less traffic
But they’ll never close New York City He laughs, shaking his head.
¯
Jan Napier
Cheynes Beach Whaling Station
Wind, an anthem from pack ice, shivers waves to white,
snaps flags on the ‘chaser beached near a flensing deck.
No blubber slithers into boilers cleansed of red,
no pluming stench of rotting fat. No rifleman fires
at tigers and blacktips thrashing bloody shallows.
Wind, an anthem from pack ice, shivers waves to white.
In tanks that stored oil and grax, tourists click, click, click,
gasp at artwork on scrimshawed jaw, wince at harpoons
cleansed of red. No blubber slithers into boilers.
Footage of crews: we didn’t think it cruel. A job.
Histories of extinction shrink to monochrome.
Wind, an anthem from pack ice, shivers waves to white.
Beyond harbour, sea beasts cousined in breath and blood,
resume a long fluking through cobalt glooms and twilights,
wind, an anthem from pack ice, shivers waves to white.
No blubber slithers into boilers cleansed of red.
¯
Henry Briffa
Nispera(1)
1. l-art imwiegħda(2)
f'isem tal-missier, u tal iben, u tal ispirtu s-santu(3)
on this and every journey they’d pray
Nanna by the window above the wing
Nannu 82 and blind in one eye
In his own way he always loved the wild
Australia was his new frontier
she’d longed to live with her daughters
who’d care for her as she aged
when the plane landed at Essendon
they found his gun in the locker above
As a doctor, I can tell you he is not mad
as his son-in-law I know he’s a good man
Nannu was not intending harm
just keen to shoot a few more birds
before he died
2. West Sunshine
on page 14 of her Maltese prayer book
Nanna’s tattslotto numbers
cards dealt at Gin Rummy
convinced her she’d win
champagne each Christmas for 7 decades
breaking her flute for good luck
despite being given tablets with no effect
hope infected her placebos
when reserves became depleted
she swallowed pink capsules
people store their hope in odd places
she grew to possess a zest for the after-life
grounded in present day commodities
seeking returns within the futures market
during visits on final food refusal days
she imagined I’d find happiness in marriage
when illness left Pandora’s box
hope was all that remained
Coleridge bleakly claimed
without an object it cannot live
there are times
where it’s all I can offer
sometimes there’s Buckley’s and none
I pray I’m wise enough to know
was she as dogged as William
whose vision outgrew Sorrento?
3. West Hawthorn
as a child I had no books
in my native tongue
they called me the wog from the west
still more at home there despite my address
at the airport I’m always pulled aside
to take additional security tests
an economic refugee from a bombed
British colony whose word for God is Alla
striving to embrace that world my forebears
left behind
U l-Kotra qamet f'daqqa – u għajtet: "Jien Maltija! Miskin min ikasbarni – miskin min jidħak bija!" …
Ul-ombra ta' Vassalli – qamet minn qiegh
il-qabar,
U għajtet:
"Issa fl-aħħar – jiena se nsib is-sabar.” (4)
notes and translations:
1. I hope so
2. The promised land
3. In the name of the
father, the son and the holy spirit
4. from a Jum ir-reb? (Voice of Victory)Ru?ar Briffa 1945:
“The football crowd suddenly cried I’m
Maltese / who dares insult me? who dares laugh at me…/ and the soul of Vassalli
got up /from his tomb and cried / at last I can rest in peace.
(As a writer Vassalli was important for helping revive the Maltese
language)
¯
Maithri Panagoda
WHEN SILENCE YIELDED SOUND
Father spun war tales
in clipped Queen’s English
each word a brushstroke
on the village’s dusk-stained canvas
His voice rose like smoke,
curling in kerosene twilight
that lamp’s last breath
flickering on mud-brick walls
The wireless crooned
through a battery the size of hope
its tiny cry -All you need is love-
bouncing off the rafters
Mother stood, an iron in hand,
a small furnace of charcoal breath.
she pressed my bell-bottoms
with care and fire,
flattening time into creases
Brylcreem slicked my curls
into a helmet of dreams
each strand whispering
of cities and silver roads
I ran
past banyan shadows
and sweating fields
chasing fortune
beyond the village steam
Behind me
the silent ones faded
like old black and white photos
and the boomers
took their first loud breath
¯
Dennis Haskell
The livin is easy
When Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died
pop music ended, at least for me,
the microphones stopped waving,
the speakers sat silenced.
Full fathom five their fame would lie;
all those wonderful easy ideas
suddenly meant yesterday.
Cocaine Jimi wafted off
on a wave of woozy well being;
while Janis boozed and abused
that summertime voice
till death climbed up
into her raucous throat.
Those voodoo child, spoilt child
fertility figures could gloat
over every amplified movement. When youth
was undeniable, too strong for compromise,
they sized up an easy joke,
thumped out a flying, perilous grief.
Now try them under electric needles:
do fish start jumpin? does the cotton grow high?
¯
Anne M Carson
john and yoko meet for the first time
1966 her avant-garde art
show at a chic london gallery
an apple sells for two hundred
quid art which taunts
he reckons she’s a
wanker
high on the ceiling a canvas
he climbs the ladder to read
letters so small he has to use
the magnifying glass hanging
on a chain to read them
later he says that if she had
written fuck you he would have
walked out her philosophy
compressed into a single
affirmative
YES voiced
against the nihilism of the times
the fashion of smashing pianos
with hammers of destroying
in the name of art this tiny
three letter word strikes a spark
which kindles a revolution
kicks off a whole generation
First published Two green parrots, Ginninderra Press, 2019
¯
Anne Kellas
Radio poem
1977
Between the wars and Brands Hatch,
Tennis Egypt -
between the wars. and the martini,
England Eliot,
downwars
into the last war it drones.
Intercontinental
red
armies
molotov
Africa. It mushrooms.
After the last war. Mandela,
it rains bullets now.
And after the 90 days
railways Rivonias
running backwars into the last war
it lasts.
Intercontinental travel
soup cocaine razors
I Ching Carter Rastafari
Inwars (this is a
sidewars
poem)
opium wars. Break it up
sings Patti Smith. It snows.
Paris 68 and it rains
Flowers leaving
no left turn unstoned down the road
stovepipes the Little Smoke
of Don Juan of Mexico.
It slides.
In the outback,
news
strikes the TV tower
and dies
with the lightning
(the tower
points upwars)
it thunders
missiles
oil
the CIA
Soweto
Robben Island off the Cape
like Chile
waiting
and armies
sitting tight
leaving Egypt
Birdlands
between the wars
intercontinental
towers
for the seventies
like Toronto's
CN tower.
News
my little one,
Windscale leaks.
Intercontinental
England
is forearmed
while the flames fall.
News, my little one,
Babylon
between the wars
skirls
atomic waste.
News
my little one
Rome
also had her problems.
¯
Peter Lach-Newinsky
The Way They Moved
In the whorehouses on the dead outskirts of the River Plate, hard men invented the tango blind with the boredom of waiting for their taciturn turns of consolation & grind
In Rio’s pulsing carnivals rolling out from the lower depths regional black rhythms fused
into pelvic ecstasies of sex & life that became the samba’s sinuous muse
In, yes, Perdido Street in1906 New Orleans five-year-old Satchmo watched, listless, from a window down onto poverty & nothing-new till one day from a corner Billy Bolden blew
his party- & funeral-raising horn at the sky encircled by clapping, singing, dance, &, shaking
with sound, almost fell from the window into his calling called jazz, soul quaking
with the bold cornet of a phantom called Billy soon sectioned in the Negro Section
where he died unknown, unrecorded, round the time the Street crashed all connection,
the unemployed queued, workers marched into red, black or brown, & jazz
became big band, respectable & white.
When the black & white students of the sixties went south to sit-in segregated cafes
& be fire-hosed or mauled by police dogs, a reporter held a mike to a local young black
& asked what had prompted her to join these blow-ins from the north:
it was the way they moved, she said,
the way they moved
In ‘68 it was somatic conviction that convinced our eye & gut
long before any clever word hit the expectant brain, an inward dance propelled
by black pulsations of hip & spine, the blues, rock-and-roll, the saxy free jazz
of struggle that infused the opening horizons of our blue-note night
it was the way they moved
the way they moved
Even in the most rarefied branching of the live & leaderless symphony of the human tree
poetry sings the melodic line above the sustained bass of sweat & struggle,
toil & tenderness, debate & dance, moving like wheat fields in the cross-winds
of history, memory, calm animations of dignity, upright refusal
to doff caps, tug forelocks, sit at the back of the bus
it was the way they moved
the way they moved
Even through filigreed Bach, Beethoven, Schönberg, through Whitman, Rilke, Neruda
the subtle ear may hear the thud of peasant feet, hammer & beat of working hands,
poetic cadence in the rise & fall of civilisations, spiral dance of humanity’s long dark
quest towards itself, driving propaganda of the lowly deed, feet stomping in struggle
rock & rolling with the planet exfoliating its potentials powered by the progress
of the cyclic sun revolving around nothing, no one, but itself
it was the way they moved
the way they moved
Even within the nine-second cage Mrs H. had to weld one
of the three thousand one hundred & forty daily tubes,
she had, over the dead vast of years, maintaining her piece-rate,
found the tiny seed of freedom’s breath: for a micro-second
her arm & shoulder briefly winged upwards
in one totally superfluous movement of her own
¯
Christopher Konrad
Dirt, Sea and Wind
If I say to you this place is cast in the frame of winds
that blast its Southern fringe all the way from Antarctica
will that give you some idea of its grandeur? And
if I say to you that its businessmen have been born in
its gold, nickel and ore and its pastoralists rested easily on its
wheat, wool, whey and wine, would that fill in the void of
your knowledge over it? But I then would have to explain its
isolation, its vast stretch over ocean in the West and mountains in
the East, coastlines to the North and desert stone and
seven seas all around, would you see then this Deus ex Machina of Asia
this rested anchor of the Indies and compass of great fish
white pointer and blue whale, but no, it is to its literature and poets
you must look, to its music, hear the sound of red dirt and carnelian dust
the mica of its Gneiss and timbre of its woods and bushland. The farmer will say
I care not for what you say as the next drought dusts his dreams
The local fisherman dances not as corporate markets plunder his seas
Mathematicians, scientists and inventors are neither needed nor
wanted as the elements take care of such great matters in one fell swoop
Moth and snake, mopoke and desert rat, these have all provided
the provenance of weighty concerns and the shack down the road enough shelter:
if I said to you it would not matter as the winds East and West cool this place and
dry it to bone, sweep its corridors, you would agree, as she, he and child
eke their not so quietly desperate lives and let politicians pretend they’re running
the country. You would agree that it is enough to look out over stretches
of rooves urban sprawl, sail boats on the Swan, prawn salad evenings
leaving but an involution of Aegean dramas, a spectacle of a southern race
forgotten as traders continue their markets, debts and jets. This South, you
will agree, is a forgotten tribe from whence it might send its emissaries to
be looked upon queerly across other-land board-room Teak and jet set chic
only for envoys to return with tales of greater wealths and other such pointless
knowledge, all to be had if only one could stretch the wretched back-water
briny, imaginations: but soon the gossamer of setting western sun would inebriate
such nonsense bearers so that they too would ask those who visit, “If I were to say
to you, this place is cast in the frames of the winds that blast, would that
give you an idea of its terror?” How chiselled its inhabitants are from such
sand and salt and tannins, from its rivers, granite, gargantuan trees
how its peoples in confounded statuesque to one another and how,
if they were to be asked who are you, they would look at you in fright and
say “ ... ask the dirt, sea and wind”
¯
Kay Cairns
The day Jim Ewart died
it was a 70s summer in Belfast:
Afghan coats, hipster strides, loons and flares,
self-conscious loping steps along the streets;
maxi skirts, cheesecloth tops, Turkish rings
and love beads, from the hippy shop in the city
where there was always incense burning,
scent soaking into racks of cotton, hemp and linen.
Saturday night party at someone’s flat, down The Mount.
Van on the record player, tripping out on tabs,
falling asleep on the floor.
Jim was found next morning
never having wakened from his Woodstock dream.
Long black hair, pale face, scoop neck tee and jeans,
barely seventeen.
¯
Lorraine Gibson
Wilfie from Glasgow
In the ‘60s, he earned his crust coiling pipes through hulls of titan ships on Caledonia’s River Clyde. Like many working-class folks he was grounded, rendered flightless by unseen shackles that locked the hoi-polloi in place ‘For their own good’. Reading blueprints was his bread and butter, but he knew better than to deviate from the plans set-down by others. Wilfie carried smells of his life and his city; coal fires and fog, Old Spice after-shave, welder’s flux, Capstan untipped, and a pint with a whisky chaser. Some folk found him too intense. ‘Who does he think he is?’ ‘He’s just a fucken’ plumber.’ His workmates wanted chit-chat that was light as gossamer, nothing heavier than the weather or the weekend score; not his high-falutin’ nonsense about the opera, astronomy, or ‘The silly face of the human race’. Wilfie was not a monied man but come payday he pushed the boat out, splurging on flavours of Assam, Ceylon, and Darjeeling at J & A Ferguson’s upmarket delicatessen. His trench-coat pockets held home-made corned-beef rolls and Mar’s bars for intermission at the Kings’ Opera House. At home in his element, he sipped exotic teas and eased the stylus onto his Von Karajan LP’s. Sometimes I’d find dad listening to music, shedding tears for Tristan and Isolde, for his thoughts which needed careful curation, lest shapes of a near-impossible life dared to take form.
¯
Paul Williamson
London Days
Touching down with wife expecting
our porcelain skinned baby
we lodge near quiet and pleasant neighbours
close to the deer park on Richmond Hill
with its gnarled and haunted pub
for drinking warm suds and real ale.
Months go without sun while I trudge
across from Waterloo Station on the bridge
in smog with the other match stick figures
to learn a profession and set a craft
in a lane near Fleet Street law courts
as class warfare slowly wanes.
published in To the Spice Islands; Belgrove Press
¯
Allan Lake
Briefly in 1968
A different kind of spring.
I was eighteen and suddenly the world
was made new so I stopped cutting my hair
and trying to fit into most of what I’d known.
An unlikely hurdy gurdy seemed to be calling me;
had to go out on the highway of my sleepy
Canadian prairie town and stick out a thumb.
Heard the clear call of the West Coast,
Pacific Ocean, Hendrix. Shades of grey
became rainbow even without psychedelics.
Everything was entirely new and pure
because the driven, riven old world had fallen
to earth like overripe peaches. Perhaps it was
a parallel world only a few saw but the few
were everywhere and recognised one another.
Drivers were kind, everyone everywhere
was kind because they too were under the spell
whether they knew it or not. Fear melted
like snow and any career plans I might
have once had. And then, The Rockies.
Hallelujah after so much prairie. Confirmation
that the world would never be as flat as it had
been for eighteen years or millennia.
Air was new, sky was new and I was new
and contentedly broke, on the highway
of a remade world, seeing Mother Nature
through new eyes, looking at but not for.
Was what it was and it was beautiful.
Some thought they were in Eden, thought
they might be the return of Christ,
thought things unthinkable before renewal.
Some went mad. Lovers suddenly felt free
to be naked on beaches, make love on lawns.
A whole new beginning and fruit plentiful,
there for the taking. God and snake reconciled.
1968 lasted a couple years but by early 70’s
it was over. We could never get all the way
back home even if we wanted to and,
like little moons, had what was left
of our lifetimes to reflect.
¯
Kit Kelen
In my Incunabula
TV was eternity.
There was always the promise of snow.
Fingers ribbon black with fiddling,
type and leading shaky.
Some characters filled in,
keys stuck.
I never had a golfball
or anything selectric.
I was scribe of the old school,
still scribble to this day.
Kettle and fan for company.
No silent night—
my fridge was rocket ship in kitchen then.
Never quite took off.
A record would jump then
sometimes it wouldn’t stop.
Into the early hours like that.
Even then were things
you couldn’t quite switch off.
And on the screen for company
blue loungeroom bathing of the former age.
No true colour we could call.
Ceiling and floor shrunk.
We stared into the light
of alien transmission.
The vertical,
the horizontal—
our whole world all in thrall
to a simple dying star.
¯
Joe Dolce
Disappearance of Harold Holt
The PM had been advised to swim less,
that day at Cheviot Beach, in Portsea,
Harold had often swum there in the past.
He wanted relief from the hot day’s blast,
to work up an appetite before tea,
Harold had often swum there in the past.
The doctor medicated his distress:
morphine, for a childhood sports injury.
The PM had been advised to swim less.
In deeper water, the undertow’s press,
large swells and eddies dragged him out to sea.
Harold had often swum there in the past.
Three hundred and forty searchers were massed;
they failed to recover his lost body.
The PM had been advised to swim less,
Harold had often swum there in the past.
¯
Frances Rouse
STAIN
Purely simple,
almost Japanese,
though the results
not necessarily Art –
inserting into the pen-holder
the steel nib from Manchester, c.1910,
extending my fingers crane-like
in to the glass bottle’s
deep blue lake …
Though a Primary/Art School skill,
there, eighty years later,
still the letters refused to lie
biro-smoothe,
till the hang of angles
and dipping, and just the right
amount of ink;
then carefully reproducing
for a friend’s art project,
the recipe for Cactus Pear Jam.
Finally, blotting still-wet lines
with soft thick paper
already covered in reverse’d
half-extinguished words
craving Sherlock Holmes,
I ritually washed from my index finger,
the once-universal caste mark
of writers.
¯
Chris Ringrose
The World Elsewhere: Stamp Collection 1968
Triangles were the best:
serrated sails in cellophane packets.
The smaller the country,
the more splendid the stamps:
San Marino, Belize, Andorra.
Then the gold printed rectangles
from Melbourne Olympics ’56
that shone like a promise of sunshine
bright as Betty Cuthbert.
Messages from nations
that no longer existed,
flagging their semaphore --
some franked and smudged
others pristine.
And the lurkers on the dotted lines
plain monochromes with
their profiles of bearded kings
worth more than all the rest
according to Stanley Gibbons.
Came back from college to find
the glamour of the world gone away.
Mum had gifted the whole fat album —
transparent hinges, shapes, colours, notes
to the boy down the road.
¯
Margaret Bradstock
How like the past
(for my father)
1.
My father’s tread in the hallway marking his leave,
echoing towards landfall like a troopship cranking
onto the dim coast, his Captain’s hat in the photograph,
I recognise him now. How like the past
to remind us, how he was reserved for the home-front,
in training for the final invasion, that never came.
The uncles in uniform going and coming like heroes,
envied for overseas service, medals polished,
debonair as a night out on the town, their cigarettes
lighting up the sky, reflected in shop windows.
Wearing their dreams and nightmares like an award
gone wrong, they die of war-injuries further down the track.
One day they just don’t wake up. The years of darkness,
blacked-out Melbourne, shadow of rationing and deprivation,
the hard-to-get wartime toys (a grim khaki tricycle once owned
by a boy who died, I could never bring myself to ride it).
2.
We slip our moorings, shedding one coast for another
in my father’s wake, Brisbane, the sand-hills of Perth,
detritus of other lives. Children gather at the fence
in boarding-house backyards, like prisoners at rollcall.
I look through cracks between the palings, find a foothold
up and over, geese hissing around me, the watchdogs
of outer suburbia. Down at the lake
wind wrinkles the water, flattens the head-high grasses.
I stand on the edge, the way childhood bypasses the horizon,
can’t go back past the geese. Someone angry gathers me up.
¯
Earl Livings
Bluebird
‘The water’s dark green and I can’t see a bloody thing. Hallo the bow is up.
I’m going. I’m on my back. I’m gone.’
Donald Campbell, 4 January 1967, Coniston Water
Always the impress of speed
after chasing down prey
or avoiding the fate of prey,
and we crave this limit ourselves,
once our hands fashion power,
piston stroke, spinning turbine,
that fever gulp and blast of fuel-air,
the first, the best, the only, compulsion,
curiosity of man versus nature,
on land, on water, through air,
along dashed lines, around red flags,
records claimed, broken, those cheers
and that gashed silence
when seized wheel bearing,
disdain, or brake-chute failure
leaves behind gutted metal and another
closed record book, till the next seeker
straps in, gives the thumbs-up, flicks a switch…
I remember the ‘63 Melbourne Motor Show,
that grace imperative of tall tail fin, open snout,
thirty feet of wind-spearing metal,
those teardrop bulges over massive tyres
designed to carry four tons to the limit
of limits, all in cerulean shimmer-blue.
Remember too his assaults on Lake Eyre,
plagued by twelve-month cyclonic weather
that turned scorched, rock-hard salt
to black quicksand, till he four-inch rutted
the wet track, great chunks out of his tyres,
to break 400 for wheel-driven cars, snatching
the water record at Lake Dumbleyung,
his seventh in a decade, hours before close of ‘64,
the only man ever to gain both in one year.
Remember also the hasty newscast
in grainy black and white two years later,
the long, mirrored sheet-plume at 300 plus,
the hydroplane lift-floats tramping
over the brake-wash of his first run—
he’d turned without refuelling,
had the ‘bad luck’ draw at cards
the night before, Ace then
Queen of Spades, a new superstition
summoning him to chance faith
in lightened boat, mechanical frailties,
the jittery verge of fluid with air—
our disbelief as the craft lifts its nose
more than three and a half degrees,
stands on its tail, somersaults,
slams cockpit-first into granite water,
flips in a churning of spray and debris,
sinks with ripple-silence and a prayer
that this speed idol cheat death,
our perpetual prey and partner,
one more mythic time.
His lucky teddy bear, Mr Whoppit,
floats to the surface
of the five-mile, grief-slick lake,
and divers only find life jacket,
crash helmet, oxygen mask, shoes.
Thirty-four years on, salvage crews raise
still-blue boat, then blue-overalled headless body.
His testament: a corner of the local museum,
funeral in slosh-foul weather,
and his land speed record
for shaft-driven, gas-turbine cars
broken in this same year.
Such charisma of fate,
such coffee with dash of brandy
interrogation of limits,
‘Going ruddy fast at the time’.
¯
Vaughan Rapatahana
pill-popping competition, 1972
‘inter-penetrable’
was the call from below the ice
where
all the jam packed dead men with frosted beards
were supposed
to be
lurking,
shirking;
while Biggles, as just one
unfrozen exemplar,
was fluctuating/flocculating
in a gimpy tent
somewhere
on the sole remaining
anti-antarctic floe,
before the polar bears – you all know the ones –
could sense
a rip-off,
could gravitate more
ominously
up to where
the other 39 steppes
were just about
to cross into
turkey, unmolested.
and none of us were really on bad drugs, only the sad drugs
[we’d disambiguated from the urgent dispensary after macca’s latest stint
in kingseat – yunno, the loony bin - and the seismic ECT that entailed]
or any vestige of a hint
of a promise;
it’s just that
the human brain
can only take so much
gobbledygook
and anyway, we all envisioned (what a good word, save it for later)
someone from Lion Annual,1967
would soon appear
and drown all the scumbags
unilaterally.
at least that was before we slunk to stupor.
& later, somehow,
scrimmaged
into hori’s old blue vauxhall,
where we sellotaped on the seatbelts,
without any assistance whatsoever from Captain Scott
- who was AWOL somewhere with Amundsen I guess.
& we woke up -
sort of –
in another boreal bedroom,
surrounded by
frank zappa screaming
something about
peanut butter or
conspiracy or maybe it was
just those
damned yellow
pills, that looked like rugby balls,
the type you took
when you were about 19
and life
hadn’t yet
snow-blinded
itself -
the declension into
the algific blasts
of adulthood
yet another
penny dreadful
drift.
¯
Rodney Williams
one short book
one short book not
set for class I read fully in french
had a title with a sub-text that was lost in transition
reading it on the bus no knack for chord changes
for strumming in rhythm so instinctive to one kid
more lukewarm than cool with his guitar grin singing
serenades to barb-lipped girls shrill down the back
full of head-dread myself since schooled into silence
taking
itself too literally our class started a study
of folk alienated in a longer narrative for plague
bubonic on the mediterranean in a town french-algerian
oran where we began styling ourselves as absurdists
seeing pointlessness here & there haunted by pestilence
existentialists with a text we’d call la peste
too loudly
parlaying high school french my best friend & I
gladly
called heroic an aspiring scribe left uninspired
named by camus grand more mordant than ironic
showing an opening line to a novel never to be opened
constantly reworked one sentence on a horsewoman
handsome at a distance riding her fine mare a sorrel
but I
never told this mate
how my old man pissed off
in the summer after primary not bothering with goodbye
no phone calls birthday cards christmas gifts home visits
wanting to go myself too valium in my school shorts
at that friend’s place
not welcome indoors I soon gathered
learning nothing till later about his First Nations family
repeated in good faith my pal’s plea for acceptance
keeping our distance despite friendship in essence strangers
each in awe of that shorter book by our favourite
writer
its first line deadly in confusing a death day for maman:
both outsiders we preferred its title en français... l’étranger
Leongatha High School, 1968-1973
¯
Tim Edwards
Cider Circ. 1970s
Those illicit teenage ciders, cold and exciting,
Bought by the biggest kid with the first stubble.
Woodstock, Mercury – in damp paper bags.
Dark bottles, balanced in the deep pockets
Of duffel coats or unbuttoned lumber jackets.
Flashbacks of those first freedoms –
Of slow walks across moon – raked parks,
Of laughter in the least lit streets,
Of a certainty somehow, that like Led Zeppelin
We found our stairway there.
¯
Ross Donlon
Boomers in the Top Paddock
For lazy journalists
To say we were like 'roos in the top floor of the commission flat
is a stretch, but we were at the birth of a neologism in a council flat.
Fresh from surviving or enjoying the war, some men did return
with love-light - to ease. But some returned to a commission flat.
Brains scrambled like eggs, they made boomer babies, helped
by the one left waiting, or met off the boat, making do in a flat.
It's always about class and time, folks. Money looks after its own,
fodder for generations too shallow to check lives lived out in flats.
Let's say couples escaped the usual post- war trauma, his drinking
paydays away with SP bookies, but money is tight in working flats.
Reminders of hire-purchase and lay-by flutter from calendars like moths
while mums chase re-payments or plot a way to leave life in a flat.
So don't blame negative gearing or the gap between rich and poor,
and other inequities, on all boomers; some die like old 'roos in flats.
Two Up, Two Down in town sounds like a fun game of chance. But money
and privilege stack the odds. Note: the rich live in apartments, not flats.
¯
boomer love
“Love immense and infinite, broad as the sky and deep as the ocean — this is the one great gain in life. Blessed is he who gets it.” Swami Vivekananda
love, love, love over the moon I go with an open heart in tow.
my young legs sprinting over hurdles, tripping and giggling.
after many rises, falls, the moon is still there on duty, aglow.
my aging legs still search, just mellowed and slowly walking.
i’m a single boomer mom alchemizing normalcy in my small world within a big, bad one of fake wolves. the real ones respectfully share space and reside in forests, where sham ones shamefully shoot for trophies, where mud is burnt, trees are hollow, with aimless screams in the air that no one hugs and soothes. i grew up on Mills and Boon, and all that romance canoodling a young woman’s spirit, like a broad-shouldered knight, a majestic horse, lilting music, the saber shining, and kisses under twinkling moonlight. Saturday Night Fever and many other Hollywood creations too had me in their grip long after my youthful years had learned many a lesson. and boomer era has come and gone, but my greying hairs don’t care. i agree; there are many a romantic fool in this crazed reality. after all, what else is going to save us from global insanity?
¯
Philip Hammial
Lune
On my cot in my corner I rejoice
in marrow & nightshade. The nurse of my needs
is a practitioner of the occult, its belts & levers
liquified, active in syringe. It’s thus
that potency is reduced to a varmint’s bowl, steel
table top polished, a mirror, a pool of water
in a veldt at which I slurp, companioned by
jackal & wildebeest. Nurse suspects
but sees not. Nor hears the cot-side laughter
of hyena. All carved in wood these creatures of lune,
a totem as host to a multitude. Yours truly among them
I adhere to what’s reckoned as abundantly normal,
forging a mask of insolence thereby, immune to faults of
questionable others thereby, sick unto death of Privilege
flouting its hue & cry. Prophet shouting my name.
I deny. I box up. I bloat. I embark upon a commitment
to seem small, to be invisible to bullies demanding
Bible adherence. Squelch & quick-foot. Chalk & cheese.
Shadow exhumed by priestly brilliance, acolytes
around the rim of a lily pond pretending profound
meditation, What they deserve & get is a slap
by Master Ska & a turn at scullery, snap & peel
me hearties! William Kidd’s instructions will
be followed to the letter. T in this case. T as in done to.
As in turn of the screw which pretty much sums up
what happens to me at the come-hither hands
of the good doctor Stretch: tongue jewellery for a start
followed by rough applications of python oil followed by
unauthorised sessions of TCE (a backyard version
of ECT) after which I’m carried to my cot in my corner
where I rejoice in marrow & nightshade.
¯
Roger Vickery
Wall Eye
In the Atlanta Hotel, Bangkok
the pool is a suspicious green.
An Aussie thrashing up and down
the 30 feet lane makes a tumble turn.
Some Scandinavians cool their feet.
They chat about trekking in Nepal
and how real it all was.
One of their kids bobs in the shallow
end cooing: I am the Arabian Sea
I am the Arabian Sea.
Two Germans boast about crossing
the Yangtze River for three marks.
The French don't talk. They're into shade.
Eitan Levy, a veteran of two wars,
is demonstrating the fire power
of the AK47 with a coke bottle
rammed against his hip
and shoot ‘em up sounds
Kuh-kuh-kuh-kuhhhhh
The travellers frown across
at this insult to peace.
But Eitan bluffs them
with his wall eye.
I know a thing or two
it says
About you and the real world.
¯
Jean Kent
The Red and Black Bookshop
The Red and Black Bookshop, in Brisbane, when I was
nineteen,
was the place to discover poets.
‘A corrupting place,’ our parents called it ―
dubious as Dracula lurking near blameless sellers of batik
and too many flavours of icecream.
In the dangerous spaces left there by banned Beardsley
prints,
young men who had recently fainted,
spit-polished and khaki-creased, cradling cadet rifles
on Anzac Day, were turning over Marx and Mao,
arguing for anarchy and intently
lengthening their hair.
In my aqua splash of mini-shift, I skulked behind the
shelves.
I wanted to be a Holub water sprite ―
but feared I was a slug, dazzled by the shimmer
from Akhmatova, Prevert, Ferlinghetti, Montale,
Herbert,
Buber, Woolf, Fromm . . .
How shall we live? Must there always be wars? .
. .
Megaphone cries and crowd bleats
ambushed the arcade. Reds under beds, black banners at marches,
bloodied Vietnamese in Semper and body-bagged Aussies
on the TV News . . .
On the silk screens of our eyelids while we slept,
red asterisks ripped. Into inky holes
the world was imploding.
In brief retreat from all that I slid in from the street
with the beat of policemen’s fists on my back ―
reached through the Red and Black
for these time bombs: white pages opening on my palms,
innocent as butterflies.
The poems lifted off
so lightly . . . but that shop was forever
flickery with shocks. I walked away electric,
not knowing how many others also slept
on pillows of Penguin paperbacks.
While cane toads squashed and mosquitoes fizzed,
into exercise books day and night
my own leaky lyrics spilled. In my separate conspiracy,
plotting snails’ trails away
from the mangroves and the malevolent
lines of law-and-order breeding blue armies like mudcrabs
I was nineteen, secreting round myself a chrysalis of
words ―
just beginning to be
an unknowing member of a secret tribe:
initiated by the Red and Black
into these mysteries
of holding, for a moment, poems’ unfolding wings ―
while I waited for my own metamorphic flights.
¯
S. K. Kelen
The Koala Motel Dream
It’s a dog all right the nurse told you
your wife has just given birth to a beautiful
bouncing afghan hound you must decide
either to hand out cigars and carry on
or tell them at the office fuck something
burn down your nice house
starting with the carport so you flew south
for the winter freer than a dream
& on the way picked up a hippy girl
hitching out of Albury if only the
boys at the office then she feeds
you blue hallucinogens on the way
to the Koala Motor Inn
at Wangaratta, Victoria.
¯
Allan Padgett
The 70s Have a Lot To Answer For
For her something birthday my gifts included
Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch
& Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
& a print because I couldn’t afford the original,
of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.
It all made sense at the time -
but the marriage ended a short while later.
Causation ain’t correlation, or what?
In Carlton’s well-lit nighttime streets,
down past Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar
& across Lygon Street from Readings
as I strolled in a post-midnight gloom
& listened not so far away
to the tigers roaring in Royal Park
& tried to not stare at the intoxicated,
stoned inebriated men
spilling from Johnny’s Green Room
& piddling in the alleyways
& punching if they felt like it,
any innocent passerby –
it all looked rather like a nightmare on ice.
Others were bent over & chundering in the gutter
after a big night out on beer & pizza.
Refer self.
Please, O lord of memories -
kill that one.
I began to wonder if that set of birthday offerings
might have germinated another way
of her seeing deeply into a life without me -
& more particularly,
the real life meanings
of the inner & outer versions of the me.
Better than living long enough
to become a widower, I suppose.
Better than being eaten
by a lion across the park.
Far better than being beaten up
by a gang of beagle boy thugs
outside La Mama’s.
Not so compelling as listening muted
to the stretching sounds of ghosts arising
around 1.00 am
for an early haunting
in Melbourne General Cemetery.
But better by far than being married.
¯
Maria Bonar
Memories
When we were young
five of us hitchhiked
to Loch Lomond, one
rainy weekend, 1970
three dressed fashionably
fringed skirts dripping
denim jackets soaked
they went home next day
you and I carried on in our
hooded anoraks and boots
tramping country lanes
found a tiny youth hostel
Inverbeg, on the hilltop
overlooking the loch
elderly caretaker couple
like grandparents
wood stove, kettle on the hob
long haired guitarist,
nightly singalong
answers blowing in the wind
a glorious time
until the money ran out
only an apple each and
wedge of cheese left
were lucky enough
that day, to hitch a ride
all the way home
in a chauffeured Rolls Royce
later, we crossed the world together
before taking separate paths
new brides, new cities
you in Malawi, me in Melbourne
fifty years have passed
fat airmail letters
emails, rare visits
over many miles and many moves
now you rise in the night
wander by the Loch, your
tired husband takes your hand
walks with you in the dark
you forget names, people, the past
remnant memories no longer
include your children
too many words lost in the mist.
¯
Sotirios Pastakas
DEAD FROM HIV
I died two times, the first
as a man, the second as a woman.
Sunday staggering steps
in alleyways around Liosion street.
A body you sustain
with drugs before it becomes
irretrievably wasted, a body
soul of drugs, sex
and rembetika,
in which the wind blows in from everywhere
and is pulled and flies
a multicolored balloon,
a piece of candy of an unspent adolescence,
still,---gimme.
Gimme more drugs
so I can walk with the crowd.
So I can become a kid
together with your kids.
translated into English by Jack Hirschman and Agelos Sakis
¯
Luciana Croci
Grown up
I floated through uni
on the blissful mist of Germaine Greer
tipsy with freedom and philosophy,
avenging angel, I would set wrongs to right,
the female eunuch in one hand,
classics in the other.
Feisty and trouser wearing,
my pudeur too strong to discard my bra,
proclaimed my independence to the skies,
free for a while…
Where others took the plunge with sex
I was a coward,
more de Beauvoir than Greer
Alas, the clock ticked louder, faster,
assailed me with doubt and fears of FOMO,
half-hearted surrender, and I married.
Bondage was insidious, he was free, I wasn’t.
Sixty spans of grasshopper years,
a few on high, then a fall, face in the mud:
a thump, a splat and I clench my fists,
get up, clean my wings and hop.
¯
Margaret Ruckert
to newbies
ahead of us
in time
you are next gen
I am your parent
remember – I will pass
on cynical questions
explicit information
I’m not keen to pass on
a lifetime of little things
has stunted my stunts
I was a baby
boomer sigh
short shorter skirts
daisies in leather
hot apple products
psychedelic rhythm
I do not accept
screaming headlines
immediate media
grouped us groovy
hippy happy
I was often
not always
in love
my bedroom ecology
Beatles and Stones
no drugs no booze
believe me it’s true
but hey yeah
I may never get
out of context
alive
¯
Gail Robinson
Boomers
are dangerous with our addiction to toys we’ve vacuumed up resources, the Hunter and Barossa valleys, heated the oceans, wiped out species, exploded houses and menus and forests and our superannuation balances, and bang crash boom we’ve blown up our relationships with the prodigy of the millennium, thrust them into tofu and wars and poverty and forced them to smash their own avocado, then put the worst in charge with their invisible bank accounts so they can discover how to live forever and decide we are too old to share the secret with, preferring us to be confined to homes they run badly, an intentional rebuttal of our right to a pleasant old age sailing the waterways of Europe, because we can afford to and want to avoid stale crackers. But they’ll give us their youthful genes a while yet, pummel our saggy skin and train our flabby arms to lift weights so we can keep our bodies and accounts in balance until they inherit what we’ve left of the earth.
¯
Doug Jacquier
Remember the Revolution?
Remember causes
and marching in the rain against war zones
that are now tourist destinations?
Remember anger
and maintaining rage at symbolic loss
while secretly at home with the familiar futility?
Remember sexual honesty
and sleeping with whoever felt like you
and confining safe sex to heart condoms?
Remember dope
and discovering the 'real' you
and waking each time forgetful of the revelation?
Remember music
and believing decibels were antidotes to megatons
and lyrics could shield you from the newspapers?
Remember death
when it belonged to rock stars
and an endless list your mother claimed to have known?
Remember revolutions
and the bloody gutters of freedom
because fascism belonged to the right? Right?
Remember social action
and sitting in smoke-filled rooms with instant coffee activists
and housing project women with no teeth and less hope?
Remember parents
left on some private shelf
in case they portrayed you to anybody that mattered?
Remember party politics
and seeing neighbours become politicians
only to fall in clay-footed exhaustion at the barriers?
Remember health
when it was something other people ought to have and
you weren't smoke-free, mineral water in hand and smiling at God?
Remember money
and how it was never going to concern you
and then you learnt the golden rule and its defensible limits?
And do you remember when the penny dropped
that the personal was the political
and you found out you had to change?
And you decided to forget the revolution?
¯
Ingrid Fichtner
Yes,
those were the days––
and did I really think
they’d never end …?
those sunny afternoons
with summer wine
those endless nights
of sing and dance and...
whenever I felt lonely
I simply went downtown
so very sure I’d meet some
one who’d understand and
make me forget all my troubles
in movie shows that never closed
in cinemas that could be entered
anytime enjoying the end
without knowing the beginning
yes––the going was easy, yes
we were lucky we could breath
and we could finally laugh freely ...
the shadows of the war had
decreased only slowly had not
yet completely vanished but now
I am beyond my own sixties and
sometimes lonely I caress
my neighbour’s cat thinking how
privileged I am and how not to
despair about the state the world
is in right now and all the vigour
all the optimism I once had and
I can’t help! wishing dearly today’s
youth will have at least as much ...
¯
Anna Couani
the fold in the fabric: a song lyric
city almost city
those walls of glass
from the balcony
cat snoozing
in the sun
in the sun
so all of the old times
times weighing me down
so much to remember
soo much to forget
walking always walking
hold my hand now
hey you on the bike
come walking
come walking
in the sun
in the sun
so all of the old times
times weighing me down
so much to remember
so all of the old times
times weighing me down
so much to remember
so much to forget
the fold in the fabric
the crease on the page
the lines of your palm
the sight of your face
figure in the doorway
those faces
looking up the street
those faces in the wood
in the wood
so all of the old times
times weighing me down
so much to remember
so all of the old times
times weigh ing me down
so much to remember
so much we forgot
so much we forgot
¯
Adam Aitken
Contemporaries
My contemporaries, their children, frankly they annoy me, especially their subsidies, their 140 character fan base, their thumb-typed prophesies, their vodka-fuelled chanting, the way they embrace and kiss-kiss from a suitably fortified position, the way they lobby for extreme obscure sports, their selfish claims to unselfishness. But their parents are worse: Pop pilots a drone in the old brickworks park and Mum subscribes to Nostalgia Inc. Men-shed parties, and hoarding of chocolate or rare timber. The way they tell you how you could drive in manual, how to unfold, read old maps and re-fold them, how to use an SLR etc. I don’t want to hear how I can get a tan, how to smoke Sobranies, or what to do with telescopes. My parents knew each other very well I'm sure without all this. When I was born it was the Age of Leica, Sputnik, and Kennedy assassinations. My mother turned to mediation, but never meditation. In the rented house of life and death, in the Van Allen belt of their memory, they were travellers lost in a mixed suburb that never stopped asking them: when do you leave? Where will you arrive?
99 Luftballons 1989 to 1994
The Berlin Wall had just come down, the Cold War (officially) ended, and the First Gulf “War” was waged. Unemployment. Recession. Grunge prevailed; nightclubs and raves were the new churches of Ecstasy—aka “X”. This Generation even had a drug that bore its name.
¯
Teena McCarthy
‘Ich Liebe Berlin’
Sitting at the base
Of the huge gold angel
A place of desire
A place with wings
Bullet holes riddled
Techno clubs
It is god forbidden
A fallen Wall
Tis 1990 Berlin
A reunification of Germany
No longer 1871
It becomes capital once again
A celebration
A disaster
Wat do I care
All I can feel is Hitlers spirit
In the air
He still lives here
It looks Black
And white everywhere
Staying in Kreuzberg
Edge of the East
With remnants of the Wall
Tempted to take a piece
I left it to the faux ones
At Souvenir shops
Nightclubbing
Nightclubbing
Nite to day to nite
Took its toll
Crossing into the old east
A rubbish tip
Then sliding down a mudslide hole
Welcome to ‘Planet’
‘Tresore’ and all things excess
Techno it was
Hundreds of gay men
Hands in the air
A line up for Vodka at the bar
Not in Russian
Ya said it in German
Aline up for the loo
Nd my god it took you there
Piles of pure Cocaine
On dirty toilets
Did anyone care?
Sound full on
Like the sex
Hard and fast
Not many women here
Cept Irish Rita from Dublin
‘Ree Haa Ree Haa
Running the club
Rocking the bar
Sex clubs galore
Never seen so much leather
And studs
I suddenly donned it
Wanting more
Closely or from afar
After months of dancing
Inside Club X
I was put on a train
Straight to Bavaria
Now I’m in a movie
some kinda fairy-tale
Fields of yellow Daffodil’s
Opium red Poppies
L-E-D-E-R-H-O-S-E-N
Homemade Ale
Picking Raspberries
Redcurrants nd Blauberren
As my German step mother
Made Fruit Flan for breakfast
A Beef Pot Roast for lunch
And cheese
A lotta cheeses
A giant loaf of dark Rye
Enuf for a month
Going to the bakery
Daily for pastries, rolls and cakes
The farm under the houses
The smell of pig’s shit
We would bring home the bacon
Farms for bottles of milk
A bottle exchange
For bubbling water
Walking thru the Black Forest
With Acid Rain
Whilst eating Black Forest
Oh, the joy of this playground
To me Germany had everything
Fit to order-made to order
Especially for the farmers SS daughter
When all I really ached for was
Ich hatte gern eine Cola!
(I would like a Coke!)
¯
Lana Derkač
Fans
While we stand in the field, sparrows are in the bush.
Their broad, popular front peeking from the branches.
It almost would appear they are cheering. Following
the game of football. Later you think, the followers
of Marx and Engels. In fact they chirrup:
Sparrows of all countries,
unite, so together we can kick some football!
Later still, you've got the notion they read the Bible
you are able to discern the psalms in their
inchoate language, you hear them mention
Moses and the chosen team.
You draw attention away from the birds.
Someone, with a sharp blade of grass nicks the tip
of your finger making it red like a strawberry
pressing his cut finger
on your blood. You are happy. It means truly
he has come. A nascent brotherhood with Pan*.
*Pan is a significant figure in Greek mythology, a god of the wild, shepherds, flocks, rustic music, and impromptus.
Translated by Boris Gregorić
¯
Fahredin Shehu
The wall
When the World went South
I touched the Wall, and Gilmour played
solo in Berlin- we so admired Pink Floyd.
I went North, uplifting self in tune with the unseen
…and there was hope and I hoped to see the World,
like a bird in the cage I lived for too long and
separated from the Men and from the rest
the unspoken reality
from the splendor of emerald green meadows
in a dreary dreamlike down the hill less trodden valleys
and below my strata through all those years,
I saw bruises fading, turning yellow.
The Time Merchant was merciless;
he took away almost everything
until I shrank to a tiny cocoon, and
harshly, out of trembling, I faced the Wall
and applied my self-floccinaucinihilipilification.
¯
Ellen Shelley
Identity theft
Fluttering began in the coop. A menagerie of feathers;
a turtle digging its way through the fence. My father’s
unconditional loves. His heart more animal than not, aligned
to those beasts out back. And I, invisible as the x in intersection,
a consolation rarely seen or heard. Growing was done for me.
Awakened before the years had stretched my skin.
That house with its scent of wet towels and old spice, licking the walls.
I got lost walking the halls. I got separated from myself.
That thin slip of a girl butted-up against the noise.
That person I have become now: too wild, too careful, too risky
because of what I saw? Time’s offhandedness.
Displacment. Those birds in the yard. A maze of caged
animals, caught and on the loose.
¯
Magdalena Ball
Kosmo Vinyl
In those days we didn’t need to spell it out.
There were already too many waiting
the queue stretching around the block
not enough tickets.
I wasn’t taking chances. I came prepared.
I wasn’t old enough to be out late
but I was old enough to lie, hiding
my hands in black leather gloves.
The coca cola clock said 1:11.
There was no other way to tell the time
other than by reading the graffiti on the subway.
I was a good reader even back then.
Even in rebellion, even when I had nothing
else to say, the lights flickering in the club
the music l-o-u-d. It was all about bodies
heat, sweat, strobe strobe.
It wasn’t the postcards. These came much later
and by then I was already steam rising
from manholes, tripping in 3D, high on
Dickens and cobblestones.
No one knew better, in those days. It was
a gas gas gas. I knew what I was chasing
Even if the lack of it was deafening
like rosebuds on the bridge of sighs.
¯
Kathy Shortland-Jones
X is the Colour of 1981
I am ‘Life. Be In It’ t-shirt,
dangling upside-down, knees gripping
the monkey bars, swinging 1..2..3..!
to land confident on size 3 feet
cradled by woodchips.
I am lipsticked by my rabid-red Freeza,
dropping chunks of garish ice
on my 1981 pattern of Norm.
I am beige ankle-boot rollerskates
gliding around the Karrinyup rink
snowballing my adolescence
into disco ball refractions
of permed neon
and self-consciousness.
I am yellow terry-towelling shorts
and violet parachute pants,
my hair highway-sideways part
curling freedom ‘round the automatic
waterski park, trailing fingers in the Spearwood
sidewind behind my goofy feet.
I am mulberry-picking free
in the backyard of my memory,
nostalgia painting my fingers and chin
purple, powerful with anonymity,
golden in the sand-blasted sunshine
of a long, vivid childhood, streamers
on my bike handles loose and joyful
across the Mt Pleasant bitumen.
¯
Kate Rees
Generator Party 94’
desert cooled air heat seeped sand welcome to sky valley night diving in rolled 2 barrels off pick-up truck smell kerosene caught by match familiar fuel wumpf cold crawling jeans girls to flame waif arms bare generator whirring up puddled ice esky fingers coldly fishing VB / MB / Sheaf Stout / Carlton Draught / Tooheys Old & New —Dogbolter—What you got?
Franklin’s magic squares headlights flooding in engine thrust sand skidding up Dr Martens 1460 goose-bump flesh overdrive in orange flannelette & jumpers hammering on dirt in nails joints passing forth dark night high embers riding flames forgetfulness divine.
Notes: Welcome to Sky Valley is the title of the third studio album from stoner rock band, Kyuss.
‘Forgetfulness divine’ is quoted from To Sleep, by John Keats.
¯
K A Nelson
On Yuin
Country, 1995
im Mervyn Penrith (1941-2014)
In age, we were separated by a decade. He called me Bub.
I called him Unc … he called
himself Little Black Duck.
We planned a trip to Gulaga—a
cultural tour for ATSIC staff
—Kooris, Asians and Gubbas like me, who had never been
to the sacred mountain or any sacred site on Yuin
Country.
It was a steep walk from the locked gate to the summit,
Yuin peoples’ sacred birthplace, Minga Gulaga, Mother
Mountain, where male and female rock formations—ancestors
—rested in a forest of eucalypts and Burrawang palms.
He sang to clapsticks heralding our arrival, daubed our faces
with clay, talked of totems, love, battles and the diplomacy
of old people. He shared ancient stories of rock, mountain,
ocean, island and the four winds. We looked towards the
island
but it was shrouded in mist. To hear how mountain and island
conversed, he said, we would have to take a dinghy.
Walking
back to the bus, everyone was quiet. Our daubed faces—black,
brown, white—were serene. At Umbarra Cultural Centre, we
shook hands. I handed him an envelope, said, Money well spent.
He smiled and nodded, Next time we’ll
go to Merriman in a dinghy,
but John Howard was elected; he cut the budget and we never did.
¯
Stephanie Green
Promises
Driving through Canberra that winter night
the heater broken in your battered VW Beatle.
you sang 'Heart of Glass' with Blondie
yelling out your window at the dark suburban houses
that seemed only to frown at our disgrace.
I tried to join in,
but those broken shards caught in my throat.
It had 'seemed like the real thing' to me, too,
but for you it was just the life of the party.
On the radio news Gorbachev heralded peace.
We celebrated the end of the empire
dancing in the old disco club until 3am,
its velvet banquettes bare and stained,
the champagne cocktails too sweet.
I wanted your best embrace that night,
your slim raised arms reflected a thousand times
in the moving mirror ball of my dreams,
but you were gone before the dance was over
with all the other promises.
¯
Katrina Larsen
Hipster
He gave a gift,
Handmade,
From the heart.
But it was really
A from the penis
Sort of gift.
One that speaks of
Books and jazz
And classic films
While unbuckling his belt.
One that broods in
Hipster shoes
And a worn leather
Shoulder bag
That waits by the door.
It grasps her face in his hands,
Traces her skin, feather light,
Sighs kisses, then plunges deep.
(All the while rejecting the cliche of feeling).
He observes her reactions
To write about later
At a vintage desk.
¯
Koli Baral
The Enigma
Back then, a single call could bring you
the warmth of buttermilk cheeks,
wavy hips, flamed lips.
Your playful tongue around the golden heights of lofty curves.
Delighted your moaning throughout the poetry notebook.
Jeweled letters of love stories in every page.
I envy that every letter, a lot,
Mines didn’t have the honor of dressing in your ink.
And what could sting more
than the ache of being untouched
for the convergent?
Yet, as the dot of bindi or the sweep of kohl,
I wear you every day-
wrapped in longing,
walking this secret path we never named
but always knew as ours.
Translated by Latiful Khabir Kallol
¯
oh to be
oh to be a girl in this generation.
to be all of my dads pride, my sister his love.
to be the side of every story that never got told.
to be looked up and down enough times that i began to wonder if it was “what i were wearing”
to look in the mirror everyday and want it all to change.
to hate everything i saw,
to cover it all w powders and creams i couldn’t name.
to be hugged by mother when i told her it was too much,
to be told its all just part of being a girl.
what part was she talking about?
for a boy to yell my name across the room with no shame,
for him to admit i filled up every corner of his mind.
to be given flowers dammit.
to be sent a message being called a
whore.
to have never been touched by a man.
to pluck out all my eyebrows,
to cut all my clothes to look like the other girls.
to being called crazy,
to walk into a club and make out with a stranger i wouldn’t remember in the morning.
to wanting to forget everything that had ever happened in my life and start all over again tomorrow.
to find the aura of another woman beautiful.
to becoming excessively obsessed with everything to do with her.
they’ve all sang it one after another..
to be happier,
to be prettier,
to be better.
to be a girl in this generation.
which generation you may wonder.
it’s all the fucking
same when you’re just a girl.
¯
Michael Cunliffe
When We Went To See The Bands Play
My cheeks endure the slap of colder winds now.
I dart down side streets and alleyways
from the café back to work. Autumn
will soon pass, then winter will settle in,
I’ll pull a coat over my neatly ironed business shirt.
Wind chill and iced latte numbs my fingers.
I long for something hot again.
Yesterday’s neighbourhood – a phantasm
thousands of kilometres away –
now lingers golden in my mind.
These streets once loomed eagerly above me,
now they have dulled, they have paled
into an awful cold grey.
No longer is there a fading ink stamp
on the back of my Monday morning hand,
no bitter Sunday hangover caught
in my hoarse, cigarette-stained throat.
My iPhone vibrates in my pocket –
I ghost the notifications, the demands –
everything is now, everything is hurry up.
I’m late. The café queue was long.
Sweating under the tie grasping my throat
I hasten for the boardroom – they will be waiting,
impatiently scrolling, scrolling Reels and TikToks.
Minutes are hours now, moments cannot be idle.
I pass by the shopfronts – boutique clothing and footwear,
bespoke suits, sushi takeaway, bubble tea bar.
I long for idle hours browsing rows of Alternative CD’s
in music stores and cafes. I don’t see them anymore.
I miss eager weeks awaiting a new album’s release.
Now everything’s instantly available to stream.
It’s constant. Even downloading is so yesteryear.
Another vibration in my pocket, ads and suggested posts,
my iPhone knows who I like, who I should follow, what I should buy.
All so automated. So intuitive. So boring –
subject to algorithm – nothing is discovered by chance.
Everything is instant yet half a breath from becoming past.
I long to loiter in moments, browsing shelves,
discovering second-hand CDs with hot flat white in hand. Fuck all this.
Fuck meetings. Let’s go to the pub after work.
The Bridge Mall Inn is now a sandwich bar,
the Black Swan Cafe is now a designer-brand bag outlet,
but there’s a pub on the corner, you know the one,
what’s its name again? Just down from the office.
Goddamn all this. Fuck going to the gym. Let’s go
straight after work. Today. I don’t care that it’s Wednesday.
Let’s drink beers like we did when I had hair down to my waist
and a bong on my bedside table,
like when we went to see the bands play –
before life swept our idle moments away.
¯
Sarah St Vincent Welch
1994-5
librarians knew they called I trembled craved longed paced turned up to lectures full wombed I quivered to work the web me a maker conservator watching patterns connections projected traced fresh maps learnt acronyms installed a modem read handouts instructions wondered over the engineers military student midwives decades of labour held my baby waited on the phone hours a tech guy talked laughed with me between feeds I swayed breasts full with milk I had to know played with games built Sim Cities invoked Godzilla to smash my progress wandered in Myst as atheist entranced in clues in images and myths sent messages and crafted emails the librarians watched books fly into voids into an opening a birth a closing down I swapped addictions for this web I am caught in this world wide I am prey and spider and at times it seems all else
¯
Janet Reinhardt
The Nineties
after an article by John McDonald
a dead cow painted electric blue
is dumped outside Sydney’s new
Museum of Contemporary Art
the tag on its ear carries the message
for anyone who has struggled for an answer
signed Brad
The avant-garde is a ferocious looking creature
writes the critic It tends to dissolve
at the first drop of humour satire or wit
Is this its corpse. this bloated body
four blue hoofs pointing nowhere
In New York London tries to shock
the unshockable New Yorkers
with a sectioned cow
a pickled calf
the local mayor complains
of elephant dung too close to the virgin
The avant-garde has become
the establishment writes the critic
Conformity is its ruling passion
Sydney’s lunchtime crowds
are not shocked by the dead blue cow
no-one struggles for an answer
¯
Louise Wakeling
Sailing to Moruroa, Rainbow Warrior, 1985
“We did not know what the hell we were doing.”
Theodore Taylor, nuclear physicist who had a change of heart
it was not timeless art that drove them, the young
and not-so-young of Greenpeace, not ordinary desire
or birds of beaten gold – the lure of transcendence –
but fragments of the earth exploding, bellying
unholy fire, atolls atomised. resistance,
a turning away from “unageing intellect”,
that prop and refuge of the aging poet,
the fallout of its terrible artifice
a permanent monument etched in bone:
human lab-rats breathing toxic clouds,
jelly-babies with a brain and beating heart
and nothing else.
debris and irradiated ash like snow
drifted onto children playing
under coconut-palms, row after row
of bone-white tombstones in the sand
Warrior would go on sailing sapphire seas,
careless of its own decay – the crew emblazoned
on deck, engrossed in maps, mosaics of atolls
and islands, bronzed arms welded to masts,
Moruroa in their sights – never imagining
their ship would one day lie on the sandy bottom
of Matauri Bay, a fleeting reef, a dive-site
bright with pink and blue anemones
they ferried the people of Rongelap
to Mejatto Island, a safer haven,
if anywhere was safe from the wisdom
of the sages, see-no-evil sorcerers
obsessed with a legacy, underwater
and surface detonations a thousand times
more powerful than Hiroshima
still with us, the dreams these warriors
wove around a re-birthed fishing trawler –
pennants and painted rainbow,
white dove soaring above the waterline,
a pod of dolphins arching and plunging
on the starboard side, spirit-companions
leaping in the foam of the ship’s passing
¯
Ronald Atilano
Tiananmen: A Reportage
There were many versions of the man
who stood before a column of tanks.
A student said he was a friend
of a friend of a friend— he woke up
hung-over in Cubao the next morning
and still managed to submit his thesis.
His wife swore he was home that night,
watching soap operas with San Miguel
and a plate of peanuts. Some saw him
being pulled away by bystanders;
he later ended up in a secret stockroom
in Camp Crame. Others professed
to have known his real name, a myth
passed around like Nardong Putik
in Zapote. In other accounts, he was dead—
witnesses saw him run over by a bus
along EDSA, his skull exploding
like a husked coconut. The official report
said he simply didn’t exist, and like Trotsky
disappearing in photos of the revolution,
the footage showed the dictator’s tanks
halting for no reason, trying to drive around
no one, perplexed like winter cranes.
¯
Rita Tognini
Saint Lei Feng
(or faith revisited)
I have known you
Lei Feng
have knelt
before your shrine
lips quivering
eyes aglow
with candlelight.
You are John Bosco
schooling orphan boys,
the blessed Damien
nursing lepers,
Martin de Porres
sharing a cloak with beggars,
Francis of Assisi
hymning the selfless life,
the children of Fatima
poor, illiterate,
sanctifying
ignorance and misery.
I have worshipped you
Lei Feng
followed your image,
your bones and blood
in sacred vials
carried high
in crowded streets.
I have seen you
ascend to heaven.
I have known you
Lei Feng
have seen you step out
on Chang’an Avenue
halt the tanks
speak to soldiers as brothers;
glimpsed you
on trucks that pause
at country crossroads
carrying women and men
to execution.
Lei Feng, a cadre in the Cultural Revolution, was renowned for his selfless deeds. After his accidental death, he was promoted as a role model for young and old. The cult of Lei Feng was revived after 4 June 1989 and again recently as part of Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive.
Prev published Almost Like Home. (2024). WA Poets Publishing
¯
Angela Stretch
An empire waist
It’s almost August.
I recall an artist
retell they no longer
want to make art
that looks like art.
Think of the slattered
bedframe, the advice
to avert the mould.
Futon piled at a window.
The lace dress dated
from the early 90s
had cap sleeves
now plucked from oblivion
about to be filled
with a warm body.
Hundreds of its kind
must have been
made intellectual black
to trust in the transformative
power of feminism.
Outspoken pineapple-syrup
polluted the light
with sparkly eyeshadow.
Pale mint shoes
with small heels
to carry me beyond
the limits of myself.
At the other end of the phone
late capitalism showed
brutal and plain facts in velvet.
The shimmer of disaster
was always close at hand.
¯
Cao Shui
Princess Relieving-Anxiety Beyond Generation Z
Walking on the streets of Istanbul
Pushing open the gate of an ancient castle
What you can't imagine is the password
1453，1453
I met the Princess Relieving-Anxiety of Generation Z
Colorful braids hanging from the head
There is a silver nose ring on the nose
Tattoos on the arms
On the left is a dragon, on the right is an eagle
On the belly button is a sphinx
On the belly button is a sphinx
Her nails are five colored
She has black boots on her feet
They all call her Princess Jieyou，Princess Relieving-Anxiety
She grumbled and started singing
Baby boomer was born during the World War II
Generation X people is lost in rock music
Generation Y people are addicted to the internet
Generation Z people were born into the virtual world
The five permanent members of the Security Council
The America, China, Russia, Britain, and France are all
People are all worried and anxious
Four generations are fighting each other
I am Princess Relieving-Anxiety who surpasses Generation Z
Resolve anything that can be spoken immediately
Keep everything that cannot be spoken of in your heart
I am Princess Relieving-Anxiety who transcends all generations
After speaking, she suddenly had a backflip
Disappeared in the castle in Istanbul
I turned around and became Prince Cao Who transcends generations
Walking out from the castle of 1453 to the world
¯
Jonathan Cant
The First Time I Met Molly
“She was my one temptation… I watched her walking away…
We must’ve been stone crazy… Now I’ve got those feelings again…”
No, not that “Molly”. He’s cool, too, but I’m talkin’ Moll-E!
“E” for Ecstasy. You see, there I was in this long-defunct
(and de-funked) nightclub, The Underground. Molly came on.
She starts in the stomach. A tingling. A buzzy hug. (“A big, good feeling,”
P.J. O’Rourke once wrote.) It’s a love drug, yes. A club drug, sure;
but, despite the pumping music and pretty people, I wanted more,
“something else, to get me through this”*. At least for that first time—
in early ’89—I didn’t wanna stay “Underground”. (Under, nor grounded.)
“High” was now redefined. So I headed out into the world. I wanted to walk…
forever. Out on Caxton Street, car headlights caught the shape of the odd
low-swooping flying fox (bat country? I thought). The late summer humidity
was eased by a welcome sprinkling of rain. I made my way through the leafy
backstreets past all those restored Queenslander homes. I became fixated with
every nuance of their design: wide verandahs with ornamental timber arches
and fretwork breezeways, balustrades, latticework, and leadlight panels warmly
backlit from within. What gorgeous architecture. What aesthetics. What art!
For me, E came close to the spiritual. Heightened senses begat revelation.
Zen satori? No, not so much a lightning flash, as a gently increasing rainfall
of feeling and effect. Or perhaps more apt, less Hokusai’s “Great Wave…”
and more a tsunami of micro waves of sensation (and zen-sation). Past and future
were drowned out. I became intensely aware—and appreciative—of each
happening moment, even the mundane reality that surrounded me: namely,
suburban Brisbane streets on a rainy Saturday night. I began to evaluate things
in their raw, honest state. Thing-ness. Is-ness. Those concepts now made sense.
“Miracles
will happen as we trip…
And what he goes there for, is to unlock the door…”
I couldn’t help but compare the experience to Aldous Huxley’s
The Doors of Perception where he wrote of his encounter with
mescaline and enthusiastically embraced its mind expanding effects.
I found that E fired an animal-like form of intuition. Peak perception.
A superpower, almost. Walking along, I could hear an unseen taxi
coming from the other end of the Western Freeway. Somehow
my ears picked up on the clickity clack tappet sound of a clapped-out
motor from several kilometres away. It had to be a cab. And it was.
Looking back on that night—apart from the crystalline clarity—
I felt elation (E-lation). This new feeling—with its sense of euphoria,
completeness, and peace—raised some questions at the time. Like: could this
be The Great Elusive Alcohol Substitute I (and others) have long sought?
And why is this “Big, Good, Feeling” not readily available over the counter
like confectionery? Imagine all the violence and conflict, both public
and private, that could be avoided. After all, Ecstasy was used
in couples therapy before it was criminalised in the mid-1980s.
In the end, though, youthful optimism (and its older self,
nostalgia) can be misleading. It was only a few years after that
wonderful epiphany (yes, E- piphany) that I discovered I was just
as capable of doing dumb, regrettable things under the influence
of Ecstasy as I was on any other substance. Every generation finds
its drug. And every generation thinks its drug is better than those
of all the generations that came before it; but, as with most things,
balance and moderation are what matters. So, cheers, peers!
Note: Italicised refrains are lyrics from “I’ve Been Thinking About You”
by Londonbeat; then “Crazy” by Seal. Both tracks were played on high
rotation in the Ecstasy club scene of the early 1990s.
*This line is a lyric from the Third Eye Blind song, “Semi-Charmed Life”,
which references methamphetamine—a primary ingredient in Ecstasy.
¯
Chris Lake
Recovery
Dawn breaks while I'm not looking.
A morning squall sends greasy paper
Tumbling down the empty streets.
Its hissing is a whispered desolation.
I see the sign. It’s high, like me.
A cardboard slip shoved carelessly
Through dirty slats. ‘RECOVERY’, it says
In quiet tones my kind alone can hear.
I trudge up greasy painted steps
While beats and shrieks and thudding feet
Come pulsing through the night black door,
Subsume me with their siren call.
A door bitch, grim lines early etched,
Cut deep into her thin young face.
She stamps my wrist, her eyes lock mine
As a wife regards the man who beats her.
Beyond, a gruesome fairy bower
Of winking lights in ragged holes.
They burn like garbage sprites that
Flare round corpses dumped in swamps.
A twisted cage of wire and struts,
And in it, one lone dancing girl.
She climbs the bars and flicks her
Pointy tongue in my direction.
I stand and watch her for a time,
Her bored and careless undulations.
I ponder on the end of history.
She flips me off. I head into the club.
¯
Hussein Habasch
Tomorrow, You Will Be an Old Man
(For me, in a quarter of a century, more or less)
Tomorrow, you will be an old man
The cane, always with you
You will walk alone
You will mutter to yourself like all old geezers do
You will become obstinate, hard of hearing, and slow
You will ask for help when you need it
But no one will respond
You will dream of the past
And the good old days
While your grandson will think of the future
And days to come
You will curse this vapid generation
Repeating itself like a broken record
How wonderful our generation was!
You will be the butt of jokes in the family
They will laugh at you and your positions
Which you think are right on
Your lips will let out a sarcastic smile
Whenever they mention words like “stubbornness”,
“Vigor”, and “faith in the future”
You might even laugh
Your bones will soften
Illnesses will roam freely in your body
Without permission
All your desires will be extinguished,
Except the desire to die
There will be no friend or a companion
Loneliness will be your support and comrade
You will always be ready to depart
The threshold of the grave will entice you
And keep you company
All the angels will betray you and leave
Only Azrael will approach you as a last friend
Perhaps you will say just as you are about to go:
If I die burry me here in the strangers’ cemetery
Perhaps these words
Will be you your final wish.
Translated by Sinan Anton
¯
Adam Aitken is a Sydney poet who has published eight books, many of which have been nominated for prizes. His latest is Revenants (Giramondo Publishing). He won the Patrick White Award in 2022.
Ronald Araña Atilano is a Filipino-born poet who lives in Awabakal land in Lake Macquarie, NSW. His works have been featured in the Rabbit Poetry Journal, Westerly Magazine, Island Magazine Online, amongst others. ‘New Ordinance for the Dead’, his bilingual book of poetry in English and Filipino, will soon be published by Flying Islands.
Magdalena Ball is a novelist, poet, reviewer, interviewer, VP of Flying Island, and managing editor of Compulsive Reader. She is the author of several novels and poetry books, most recently, Bobish, a verse-memoir published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2023. Find out more at her website: www.magdalenaball.com
Born in Bangladesh. Koli Baral is an indigenous Bengali writer dexterous in Poetry and Storytelling. The number of her published books is five. Raikamal's flute (2024)" bilingual poetry collection in Bengali and English. Jalnili (2023)- a poetry collection, Novel Cheetah (2024), Script (2025) a collection of short stories Aroshi's Jonai friend (2025)- a story collection for children.
Bengt Berg, lives and works in Värmland, western Sweden. He has published more than 50 books, mostly poetry and often in collaboration with various artists or with his own photographic images. Since the poet lives in the forest and lake landscape, nature and landscape also play an important role in his poetry. Bengt Berg's poems have been translated into many languages and he has participated in many poetry festivals around the world. Bengt Berg is active on Facebook
.
Maria Bonar writes poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction, which has been published in Award Winning Australian Writing, Creatrix, Catchment: Poetry of Place, Brushstrokes, Poetry d’Amour, Rochford Street Review, Bronze Quill Winners Anthology, Green Ink Poetry, Verge 2025, Stringybark Stories, BootsnAll, anthologies and online publications in Australia, UK and USA.
Margaret Bradstock has nine published collections of poetry, including The Pomelo Tree (winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize) and Barnacle Rock (winner of the Woollahra Festival Award, 2014). Editor of Antipodes (2011) and Caring for Country (2017), Margaret’s latest collection is Alchemy of the Sun (Puncher & Wattmann, 2024).
Henry Briffa was shortlisted for the 2022 ACU poetry prize, Walking Home, his chapbook, was published by the Melbourne Poets Union in 2019. Over 50 of his poems have appeared in local & overseas journals including Rabbit Poetry, Australian Poetry Anthology, Live Encounters & Mediterranean Poetry.
Kay Cairns, an Irish Australian poet, won the Tom Collins Poetry Prize in 2024 and her work has been published in several Australian anthologies. Her debut collection Between Two Skies was published by Walleah Press in 2024 and her current collection was shortlisted by Five Islands and Flying Islands Press.
Jonathan Cant is a writer, poet, and musician. His work has been shortlisted in the 2025 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize; won the 2023 Banjo Paterson Writing Awards for Contemporary Poetry; and was longlisted in the 2023 Fish Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Cordite, Island, Verandah, and Live Encounters.
Cao Shui is a Chinese poet, novelist, screenwriter and translator. He is a representative figure of Chinese Contemporary Literature. He leads the Great Poetry Movement. So far forty books of Cao Shui have been published, including 10 poem collections, 5 essay collections, 10 novels, 4 translations, 18 fairy tales. He has won more than 50 literary awards worldwide. His works have been translated into 30 languages. He is also chief editor of Great Poetry, Asian coordinator of World Poetry Movement, executive president of the Silk Road International Poetry Festival, Chairman of Beijing International Poetry Film Festival.
Anne M Carson is an independent researcher, creative writing teacher, poet, and essayist living on the unceded Bunurong Country. Her fifth poetry collection, George Sand (and Me): a poetic biography will be published by Rabbit (2026). Her PhD (2023, RMIT) received an Outstanding Dissertation Prize (AERA 2024).
Anna Couani is a Sydney writer and visual artist who runs The Shop Gallery in Glebe. Her recent publications of poetry (of 7 books) are Thinking Process and Small Wonders. Songs: annacouani1.bandcamp.com/ Visual art: sesquitria.blogspot.com
Old writing: annacouani.com
Luciana Croci is a Newcastle-based poet and retired writer who occasionally publishes poems with Meuse Press and Hunter Writers’ Centre. She has won local competitions run by the latter. She has been published in and won a section of Grieve 2024.
Michael Cunliffe sprouted from an alien seed pod scattered in the Scottish Highlands by the sons of the notorious Ragnar Lothbrok a thousand years ago. At an unknown point in time he found himself transported by some little-known form of alien technology to Far North Queensland, where he writes poetry.
Lana Derkač (1969) is a renowned Croatian poet and writer. She has published around seventeen collections of poetry, prose, drama, essays, and one novel. Her work has been translated into 23 languages. Her recognitions include national and international literary awards.
Joe Dolce Winner 2017 UC Health Poetry Prize. Highly Commended 2020 ACU Poetry Prize. Shortlist 2023 Newcastle Poetry Prize. Best Australian Poems 2015 & 2014. Winner 25th Launceston Poetry Cup. Recent publications - Poetry: At the Noisy Café (2023), Cookbook: Joe Dolce Cooks (2023), Music: Green-eyed Boy of the Rain (2024), Essays: Crooked Timber (2025).
Born in Sydney, Ross Donlon now lives in Castlemaine, Victoria where he is convener of Poetry from Agitation Hill. He has published seven books of poetry, the most recent being, The Naming of Clouds – 50 ghazals (Recent Work Press).
Winner of two international poetry competitions, he has read at festivals in Australia, the U.K.
Tim Edwards is a Perth poet who has had work published in a variety of literary journals including Westerly, Island, Quadrant and The Weekend Australian.
Ingrid Fichtner, born in Austria, living in Switzerland, with numerous publications in anthologies and eight books of poetry (in German) once in while writes a poem in English, cherishing the sound and rhythm of the English language.
Lorraine Gibson is Scottish Australian. Her work was shortlisted for The Bournemouth Writing Prize 2024, Flying Islands Poetry Manuscript Prize 2024, and Calanthe Collective Poetry Prize 2023. Her poetry appears/is forthcoming in Meniscus, Antipodes, Prole, Quadrant, London Grip, Galway Review, Live Encounters, and others. She is a retired cultural anthropologist.
Stephanie Green is widely published in Australian and international journals such as Meniscus, StylusLit, Axon, TEXT, and Live Encounters, and anthologies, including Pratik: Fire and Rain (APWT/Nirala, 2023) and The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (MUP 2020). Her most recent collection is Seams of Repair (Calanthe Press, November, 2023).
Hussein Habasch is a poet from Kurdistan. His poetry has been translated into more than 35 languages and published in over 200 international poetry anthologies. He has 23 books in several languages. He has participated in many international poetry festivals and received several international poetry awards.
Philip Hammial has had forty collections of poetry published since his arrival in Australia in 1972. He has represented Australia at fourteen international poetry/literature festivals and was the Australian writer-in-residence for six months at the Cite International des Arts in Paris in 2009/10.
When I was writing this poem my then young teenage son saw the draft and exclaimed “What idiot wrote that?” then added “And who was Jimi Hendrix anyway?” Dennis Haskell’s most recent collection is Who Would Know? (WA Poets Publishing, 2025): dennishaskell.com.au
Doug Jacquier writes from the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. His works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry have been published in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and India. He blogs at https://sixcrookedhighways.com/
Kit Kelen is the winner of the most recent (2024) Newcastle Poetry Prize.
S. K. Kelen’s poems “…offer an alternative vision of the world, a poetry affected by the world that in turn affects the world, allowing the noise and silence of the cosmos to reverberate through the reader" (Southerly). His most recent books, A Happening in Hades & The Cult of What Comes Next, are published by Puncher & Wattmann.
Jean Kent had her first poems published in a literary magazine (under Jean Sharp) while she was an Arts student at the University of Qld in 1970. Since then, ten books of her poetry have been published. The most recent are Paris Light (PSP, 2024).and The Shadow Box (PSP, 2023).
Christopher Konrad is a Western Australian writer and has poems and short stories published in many journals and online. He has received numerous awards including the Tom Collins Poetry Award 2009 & 2018. He has several books of poetry published and a collection of short stories, The Voyeur (Balboa Press, 2021).
Peter Lach-Newinsky has had six poetry books published, the most recent being: Watch this Space (Poesis Press 2024), I Love Sophy (Poesis Press 2024), When Stillness Comes (Mark Time Books 2021), Cut a Long Story Short (Puncher & Wattmann 2014). His awards include the Varuna-Picaro Publishing Fellowship Prize, the Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Prize and the Vera Newsom Poetry Prize.
Allan Lake, originally from Canada, has lived in Saskatoon, Cape Breton Island, Ibiza, Tasmania, Western Australia and Melbourne. His latest chapbook of poems, “My Photos of Sicily”, was published by Ginninderra Press. Such journals as The Hong Kong Review, The American Writers Review, Tokyo Poetry Journal, The Antigonish Review, New Philosopher and Fabians Review have published him.
Chris Lake is a novelist and poet. His works include Death is a Man Called Harry Meadows, a crime novel set in Manly, and various contributions to literary and genre anthologies. Chris is a freelance creator and consultant who specialises in strategic communications and disinformation as a national security threat.
Katrina Larsen, a New Zealand poet and teacher, often explores the dichotomous nature of people. Most recently published in ‘Going Solo’, her work often focuses on the spaces and roles in which we exist.
Earl Livings is an award-winning poet and fiction writer who has published two poetry collections, Libation (Ginninderra Press) and Further than Night, (Bystander Press), and a fantasy verse novel, The Silence Inside the World (Peggy Bright Books). He lives in Melbourne with his wife and their groaning bookshelves. (www.earl-livings.com)
Kate Lumley is a Sydney-based writer and lawyer who grew up in rural NSW. Kate has had her poems and short stories published in various journals and anthologies including Studio, Rochford Street Review, The Mozzie, Australian Love Poems, To end all wars, From the embers, and various Meuse Press collections.
Anita Nahal is a professor, poet, children's book writer, novelist and short-poetry film maker. Twice Pushcart Prize-nominated (22, 23), finalist Tagore Literary Prize, 2023, & winner Nissim Literature Prize, 2024, Anita has 16 published books, her latest being—Animals, prose poems on sentiency, decency and indecency (2025.) A Fulbright and NEH scholar, she teaches at the University of the District of Columbia, Washington DC. www.anitanahal.com
Jan Napier is a Western Australian writer. Her work has been showcased
In journals and anthologies both within Australia and abroad.
K A Nelson lives in Canberra but writes about intercultural relationships, manifestations of the patriarchy, and family life. She won the Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets in 2010 and other prizes since. She has two collections: ‘Inlandia’ (2018) and ‘Meaty Bones’ (2023) published by Recent Work Press.
Allan Padgett is a WA poet who has been published in Creatrix, Uneven Floor, Unusual Work, Plumwood Mountain, Recoil, Eureka Street, Extinction Elegies, Poetry for the Planet, Finding My Feet and the Ros Spencer Anthology. Allan’s first book, Lumbering Towards Infinity, was published in May 2021.
Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa) commutes between homes in Hong Kong, Philippines, and Aotearoa New Zealand. He is widely published across several genre in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English and his work has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia, Italian, French, Mandarin, Romanian, Spanish, Esperanto. He is the author and editor/co-editor of over 50 books.
Janet Reinhardt is a Sydney poet living on the unceded traditional lands of the Eora people. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies throughout Australia, the U.S.A. and the U.K., most recently in Sydney Crime (online), Poetry d’Amour (W.A poets Inc.), Cordite, Rochford Street Review, forthcoming in Hecate.
Chris Ringrose lives in the Melbourne suburb of Newport. His poetry has won prizes in Australia, Canada and the UK. His latest poetry collection Is ‘Palmistry’ (ICoE Press, Melbourne, 2019). ‘Creative Lives’, a collection of interviews with 18 South Asian writers, was published by Columbia UP in 2021.
Frances Rouse lives in Toowoomba, Queensland. Her poems have been widely published in literary journals over many years, most recently in “Antipodes” (USA) (and upcoming), Red Room Poetry online, and the collection “Goya en la Poesía (Zaragoza, Spain). She continues writing poetry, and research-based stage plays and film scripts.
Margaret (Margo) Owen Ruckert has poems published world-wide. Winner of the 2007 and 2023 National Poetry Competitions, hosted by Women Writers NSW. Two books ‘You Deserve Dessert’ and ‘musefood”, explore café culture, while other books match tanka to landscape photographs. As Facilitator of Discovery Writers, Sydney, she presents regular workshops.
Gail Robinson finds joy in playing around with words and ideas. Her short fiction and poetry can be found in anthologies and journals like Westerly and Brushstrokes. She lives and creates on the Mornington Peninsula.
Fahredin Shehu is a poet, writer and essayist from Rahovec, Kosovo. For the last thirty years he has been an independent scientific researcher of Oriental Studies, Spiritual Heritage and Sacred Aesthetics.He participated in several festivals and conferences, among others, (International Poetry Festival Voix de la Mediterranée, Lodeve/ France, 2011; Struga Poetry Events – 50th anniversary, Struga/ Macedonia, 2011; Nisan Poetry Festival in Maghar, Galilee, Nazareth/ Israel, 2012; PEN Macedonia 50 th anniversary and Regional Cooperation, Skopje/ Macedonia 2013; Malta Literary Festival and Workshop, Valletta/ Malta 2013; Maelstrom Poetry Festival, Brussels/ Belgium 2016; Sapanca Literary Festival, Turkey 2016; 10 th Anniversary- Ottobre in Poesia/ Sardegna, Italy 2016; 10th Anniversary- Sandzaki Knjizevni Susreti – Serbia 2016; Vilenica/ Slovenia 2017).
Kathy Shortland-Jones is a poet, writer, teacher and mother living and working on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean Territories. Kathy’s poetry won the Red Room Poetry Forest competition in 2023 and was Highly Commended in the Poetry Object competition in 2019. Her poetry has been published in the Grieve Anthology (2023) and in the 2025 Big Screens Project for the Perth Poetry Festival. She is currently studying a Masters in Creative Writing through Edith Cowan University.
Sarah St Vincent Welch lives and writes on Ngunnawal and Ngambri County, in Canberra. She is the founder of the Kindred Trees poetry project, kindredtrees.com.au.
Angela Stretch lives on Gadigal land. She is a poet, editor, curator and writer from Otautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. The artist uses language and poetry through different mediums. She is the Director of Poetry Sydney and the Administration, Education and Programs Executive at Arts Law Centre of Australia.
Rita Tognini writes poetry and short fiction. Her work has been published in journals and collections nationally and overseas and has won prizes and commendations. In 2018 she was selected for the WA Emerging Writer Program. Her first poetry collection, Almost Like Home, was published in June 2024. https://wapoets.com/almost-like-home-by-rita-tognini/
Maggie Van Putten, born in New York and now based in Perth, writes what she calls observational blank verse, often capturing moments of lived history. Published in Creatrix, Gleam and several anthologies, she has also competed in slams. Her work blends memory, place, and an eye for telling detail.
Roger Vickery lives on unceded Gadigal land. He has won many poetry prizes, including the Bruce Dawe, Lane Cove, Thunderbolt Crime Poetry, Banjo Patterson Contemporary and the Woorilla Awards. His poetry, short fiction, non-fiction and plays have been published and/or performed in Australia, UK, USA and Ireland. In 2023-2024 he won the Thunderbolt Poetry Prize, a Tideland Ekphrasis award and he was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry prize and the Calanthe prize for unpublished poetry.
Louise Wakeling lives in Gundungurra country, and has been published in Cordite and Meniscus, and in anthologies such as Best Australian Poems, Contemporary Poetry, Best Australian Science Writing, and Moments. Her most recent collection is Off Limits, (Puncher & Wattman). She is currently exploring interactions between humanity and nature on our increasingly imperilled planet.
Rodney Williams works on Gunaikurnai country in West Gippsland, Victoria, as contributing editor for ‘Catchment’. A member of the Fringe Myrtles haiku group in Naarm, he’s had half a dozen books of poetry released through Ginninderra Press, with verse widely published in Australia & overseas, in Western & Japanese forms.
Paul Williamson lives in Canberra. He has published poems on a range of topics in Australia, NZ, the US, UK, Canada and Japan. His collections include A Hint of Eden, Along the Forest Corridor, and Edge of Southern Bright, published by Ginninderra Press. His background is in Earth Sciences.
MEUSE PRESS publishes this collection.
All work © the authors.
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