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
for my father; and his Sucking dentures, whistling ‘A Boy Named Sue’, my father constructed cold frames, terminuses —one metre x one metre x one metre, four facets, and a crown, hinged and flat, threaded with sparkling wire—of the dark Goliath dwarfing his father’s orchard since seventy-seven. Come winter they’d clack like men across a … 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
even sunstruck the ribs rise from Bennelong Point like Arthur C. Clarke’s black slab I storm the frets, stopping only to whirl when your aperture’s cocked at my spine this hair’s a tornado of sand ridiculous, you needle, a blond gothic no licks of laughter (Father, Son, Ghost shedding Prozac) my Scorpio sting: fuck off, … Continue reading
for Michelle Cahill Some evenings are this fragile. Rainbow lorikeets court baroque chords creaking in my nest of bones. You wrote to wrap my limbs. Morning will sprinkle the conifers, Which of us abandoned the other? We cannot answer with insect wings, serrated jacaranda. What colour is truth? Some days we trust more than desire, … Continue reading
(in memory of Val Plumwood) The sound of crows is known to us for its mournfulness, its insistent black edge to a bright world. There was a day when she stepped into a clearing and surprised crows at their other speech, the cheerful joyous rapture they know from time to time when no one is … Continue reading
Hanging upside down perched in its own Heaven the cricket sings: “I have eaten and am full. This is good.” Does it sing for us? Possibly. If we too have been touched all over by fire If we have balanced for hours on the infinite porosity of earth and know what it’s like to be … Continue reading
Poem and Dish 