It’s the way he stands nearly naked in the winter sun turning on and off the railway station tap. I have seen people look less reverent tuning Mozart. I have seen hands give coins to beggars appear nonchalant compared to the way his hands give this water to his body. Don’t tell me this is … Continue reading
This one is called Grandchild, this Happy Days, this one is Soliloquy, this is Crosby and this one—Maria Callas. Blossoms of light they stand, idle and blessed like luminaries. Soon, in her hands she will hold the spent petals, the public scents— but for a moment she pauses, lifts her head, as if some perfume … Continue reading
At dusk she walks to the lake. On shore a few egrets are pinpointing themselves in the mud. Swallows gather the insect lint off the velvet reed-heads and fly up through the drapery of willows. It is still hot. Those clouds look like drawn-out lengths of wool untwilled by clippers. The egrets are poised now—moons … Continue reading
To produce one kilogram of saffron, it is necessary to pick 150,000 crocuses Soon, she’ll crouch again above each crocus, feel how the scales set by fate, by misfortune, are an awesome tonnage: a weight opposing time. Soon, the sun will transpose its shadows onto the faces of her children. She knows equations: how many … Continue reading
Judith Beveridge is the author of The Domesticity of Giraffes, Accidental Grace, Wolf Notes and Storm and Honey and more recently Devadatta’s Poems. Hook and Eye: a selection of poems was published in 2014 for the US market. She is the poetry editor for Meanjin and teaches poetry writing at postgraduate level at the University … Continue reading
Let us be gentle Tonight: When hordes Of vampires Drift away Before dawn Let me sleepwalk into your eyes Sleep deeply in my arms Breathe my indolent pulse Take the roads Off my mind- This serenity This confident yield Between strangers Is love © Jad El Hage Jad El Hage’s published works include in Arabic, … Continue reading
Dry defying fingers drop Today’s papers before me – A youth drank and bled He made the front page Dotted by the morning drizzle I’d seen him before A rocky village on his shoulders He sang out of tune: ‘I wish love was an open door I wish love was a raining rainbow’ Mad, he … Continue reading
The sky breaks like a mirror And yawns fire A Princess whores the Dragon A straw splits the river in half A pirate drowns in a stream And we stray, rolls of ricks In a storm, Locusts feed on us. Unthinkable that the babies cry The adolescents fall in love The pregnant submit to labour. … Continue reading
Let there be snow My beloved tucks her hair under a pillow of smiles Let there be snow My beloved sleeps in the open like a morning star Let there be snow My beloved shields the olive tree where the Master knelt to pray Let there be snow My beloved tames the wind – a … Continue reading
Jad El Hage is a Lebanese / Australian poet, novelist and playwright. He published his first creative works of poetry in 1966. He has worked as a journalist since he was sixteen, and also as a book editor and radio-broadcaster in Beirut, Paris (Radio Monte Carlo), Athens (Harlequin Arab World), London (BBC World Service) and Sydney. … Continue reading
the hued emerald thickets of desire to lace fling themselves have a cold like at the vigilante this one? in the air doves i’the ask the developed world shade about life & ambitions suffer s punishment for being a lovely per son a weak friend this is not all a mass high-five or even people fatigue mum said rest dream of a in … Continue reading
Attracted to all things electrical, you passed along the way like a weird storm then returned, waxing lyrical about your adventures: the glow- worms that lit up the tropics like guide-lights on a runway; dinosaurs grumbling in their graves; the plethora of cats that scattered when you moonlighted as a monsoon. And what about those … Continue reading
The intervals between trains are shrinking, streetlights shaking — one or two blink out with every repercussion. Planes fly lower and lower, guard dogs whimper, and every so often a seismograph flutters as if to warn us that the orbits are out of whack, that waves rake the ocean floors and the hairs on the … Continue reading
Bottles in gutters, alley cats on the slink under streetlamps that crystallise in the corners of my eyes — shopping trolleys gliding by like giant legless ice skates — this brittle night taken out of the fridge — it’s spring but cold still, still as glass. Sobering up, a breeze … Continue reading
Toby Fitch is the author of various chapbooks and the full-length collection of poems Rawshock (Puncher & Wattmann 2012), which was a co-winner of the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry. His latest collection is Jerilderies (Vagabond Press 2014) and he has a book of inversions forthcoming, as yet untitled. Born in London, Fitch grew up … Continue reading
The oranges made a gorgeous, swollen pile. —Fiona McFarlane, The Night Guest 10:15 on a Saturday night: my housemate’s asleep, Tiger Coils roil an air wet as whelps (a bitch yelps), Mulder’s chest hair exposes itself like clockwork. Grindr trills Bud what ya into Familiar thrill. in general? in bed? Whatevs HAHA proving his youth. I … Continue reading
Stuart Barnes is a Tasmanian-born, Queensland-based poet whose writing appears in a variety of publications. He is Poetry Editor of Tincture Journal and Verity La. In 2014 he co-judged the ACT Publishing Awards’ poetry category and was named Runner-up in the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript. He blogs at http://stuartabarnes.tumblr.com/ … Continue reading
Laid out flat in the back of the station wagon my father borrowed I look up: the leaves are immense, green and golden with clear summer light breaking through – though I turn only my neck I can see all of them along this avenue that has no limits. What does it matter that I … Continue reading
No one is going to come and save you. And because of this you must fold your clothes at day’s end despite the urge to abandon them to the backs of chairs. You must shake the crumple of sleep from the sheet. You must clean your teeth. Wash the teaspoons. Fold your pyjamas too and … Continue reading
We thank the clouds that come and go and sometimes linger We thank the cumuli for the brooding that arrests our busyness our preoccupations We thank the storm clouds for our passions and the lightning that splits the dead stumps our hearts had become, opens them to the rain We thank the quills of cirrus … Continue reading
Poem and Dish 