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
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
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
Apologising to unicorns is problematic. They rarely understand our purposes. Tenderness will often be seen as the manipulative gestures of a fear that seeks death – for itself and others. Unicorns sleep most comfortably in heavy traffic where the hum of self-absorbed commuters leaves them invisible. To find a unicorn in a forest is like … Continue reading
In the abandoned hours, I can hear The boorish sibilance of garbage trucks On their rounds. The shy, nocturnal air Builds a brittle nest with strands of fear. Insomniac crickets tick, like manic clocks, In the unmown expanse of the vacant lot Where, last week, on the razor grass, A young woman was raped And … Continue reading
Your plumes are as black as the dresses and jackets we wear at the edges of burial plots. I’ve read stories of the storms you portend; how you are a cipher to an inch of rain. For weeks, I’ve watched you plane the sky’s bayberry vellum, seen falling light transpose your silhouettes into a straight-cut … Continue reading
There is no Poet of the Month for December. This month we shall indulge in new poems, for some of the wonderful poets that I featured as Poet of the Month in 2014. It has been an absolute pleasure for me to get to read and of course to share their poetry. You can find … Continue reading
She looked so pretty in her blue jacket and shoes. Colours make me happy, she said. And you make me happy, I said. Or I wish that’s what I had said. All the colours have passed out of her now, like blue leaves drifting down from the trees. © Richard James Allen “Explosively powerful … Continue reading
For Chee and Stephen Who I was in the past, Who I will be in the future – What distractions these are From who I am now. Who I am now, Here, with you. In this moment, You have rewritten my past. You are rewriting my future. What I don’t understand about Who I was … Continue reading
for Karen Your beauty cannot be translated, but I would fail not to try. It generates a weather no meteorology can describe. It is most like a flower, a flower with moods. An unstill life, in no need of arranging, it arranges itself. It is not fixed, so how can I fix it? It doesn’t … Continue reading
Fifteen thousand years I have slumbered In my icy casket, a hoary Princess waiting Not to be kissed, but punctured By the pick of a prying scientist. My blood, dark as a fairy tale Leached insidiously into the Siberian snow, And my flesh flared red and fresh Enough to eat. My lower limbs devoured By … Continue reading
Time passes so slowly around here, everything seems to be weighed down by this heat. My feet are so lazy and my eyelids wish to indulge in another nap on the swing. I seem to blend in quite well with my hometown, its streets are much more quiet than usual and its souk’s usual hustle … Continue reading
Two halters of rope around your neck, and two bodies jammed hard against your sides, is all it takes to hold you while he slips his blade beneath your eye. You hear the wet slide and suck as he scoops the eye out. He does the other, they roll together in the dirt. Does it … Continue reading
My father knew stone. He’d sit cross-legged at the hearth, felt cloth on knee, bent over with hammerstone, wooden punch, and bone tine, knapping at flint or chert, knapping it to knife point, sickle blade, arrowhead. I’d watch the stone give way beneath his deft blows: fine flakes splintering from face or rim. The curved … Continue reading
It’s dusk, and I’m listening to an old Indian devotional, the woman’s voice is a coil of plum honey. As the sun slips down the empty western sky, the tiles of houses are silvered in light. At some angles the sun is forked by newly budded branches. I’ve stared too long at its gold-lash pinwheel, … Continue reading
Do not judge me by my size I am almost invisible on a white page I could be mistaken for a spec of dust. Power is not in how big you are, power is in how big your actions are. Oh! The responsibilities I have Please, can’t you see my size! A barrage of words … Continue reading
Poem and Dish 