MASCARA POETRY - ISSUE FOUR

Mascara Poetry have recently published Issue 4 and it's full of brilliant, stirring work by a wide range of poets from all over the world. I am very proud to have my work alongside them.

Michelle, Kim & Adam have presented one of the best publications this year.

Issue 4 features:

Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Francesca Haig
Sean Singer
Indran Amirthanayagam
Kylie Rose
Liam Ferney
Jessika Tong
Peter Davis
Jal Nicholl
Debbie Lim
Tenzin Tsundue
Ashley Capes
E A Gleeson
Jane Kim
Michael Sharkey
Ross Clark
Ouyang Yu
David Gilbey
Zenobia Frost
Kristine Ong Muslim

http://www.mascarapoetry.com/

Ashley

Minutes - Tiggy Johnson

Minutes

I glance at the clock
sure half an hour’s passed.
A minute has. One minute.
I look at the ceiling. Suppress tears.
Wonder if fifty years will pass
before hand-over time.
I circle the room, moving
in slow, steady steps.
Need to clear my mind.
Need to stop the noise.
It hurts to stand. To walk.
But the screaming’s subsiding.
I persist. Focus on the pain,
hope it’ll block the noise.
Son cradled in my arms
still crying, but not so desperate.
I want to look at the clock again, but
I expect only another minute
has passed and I don’t want to count,
one by one, the twenty-eight minutes
until I expect my husband back.
I hum. Sing. ‘Hush little baby...’
I rock as the words screech
He seems to be calming. I hope.
The verse is finished and I don’t know
what the next one is, what happens
to the diamond ring?
I have to think. Need to know
But the words don’t come in time
He cries louder, I’m rocking, humming.
The diamond ring? I have to know.
‘Hush little baby...’ The diamond ring?
‘If that mockingbird...’ Shit. The ring?
The clock. Twenty-four minutes to go.
I walk quickly as if it’ll help me remember.
Then, it comes. I smile. Relieved.
‘If that diamond ring don’t shine...’
Hum the rest. What if it doesn’t shine?
But I’m over it. Couldn’t care less.
I repeat the first line. Over. And over.
The crying stops. He’s looking at me.
Smiling? He’s tiny. Cute. Mine.
Still has that new baby smell.
Can’t help but to smile back.
‘Hush little baby...’ I’m still walking circles.
‘Daddy’s gonna buy...’ I hear a car in the driveway.
Move to the front window. Sing ‘Daddy’s home.’
But I’ve forgotten it’s hand-over time and
Daddy walks in and kisses both of us.
‘Hush little baby...’

Tiggy Johnson

(first appeared in Tamba 38: Winter 2006)

http://www.pageseventeen.com.au/Tiggy.htm

Not Going Anywhere - Robert Morris

Not Going Anywhere

darling she said
not that you'd leave
but should I find you
if you do
I think you know
what I'd do.
Things, born of love
threats
drops of poison from a bottle
I'm not forgiving
I'd throttle you
and if there were another woman
I'd kill her too
now let's forget all this
come sit here
in your favourite chair
I know
you'd not
go
anywhere.

Robert Morris

http://www.smallchangepress.com.au/titles.htm

Levels of Incapacity - Jane Williams

Levels of Incapacity

it seems only yesterday

he was free loving his way

around a world open to

suggestion his suggestion

now unexpectedly sixty

the wrong side of a pension

fresh from a triple bypass

he shouldn’t have survived

trying to explain why he prefers

meditation to medication

for the pain he can’t otherwise prove

to the young customer service officer

wearing jeans for genes day

(there’s a brochure on his desk)

smiling rhetoric like the myth

of his own immortality depends on it

gauge your level of incapacity

professional evaluation

here to assist you in any way we can

back into the workforce

Jane Williams

http://janewilliams.wordpress.com/

Storm - Jonathan Hadwen

Storm

like a storm that does not mean to sink a ship

your sadness settles on this tiny house,

we founder, the dog and I

until gasping we flee outside,

a brief saunter in the eye

while over dripping trees

clouds can be seen

all around.

Jonathan Hadwen

http://www25.brinkster.com/jkhey/poetry/index.asp

Even the Wind Has a Poem - Julie Beveridge

Even the Wind has a Poem

words spill
from sleeping mouths

walls hold secrets
exposed in cracks

even the wind
has a poem

i wait for inspiration
to teach itself to read and write

in the drunk and dimly lit
corridors of my mind

feeding myself deliberate lines
i edge off the excess of language

into a blank and patient page

Julie Beveridge

http://www.cordite.org.au/?p=918

Lily - Michelle Cahill

Lily
(photograph by Ian Cameron)

Not the lilies, their November tongues or clitoral folds
or her almond shaped eyes that follow the camera lens,
but something about the stems strapped to thigh, how
hands buckle down the gnarled, uneven stalk each length
locked in the hiatus of hips; lips profiled with irony say
with vagina and sass you can go a long way and some…
Satin ruched over her best points like a minimalist gorge.
Art in the corners of her mouth breathes a private sigh.

Michelle Cahill
(First appeared in 4W, Issue 18)
www.ipoz.biz/titles/ac.htm
http://www.mascarapoetry.com/

Grounded - Graham Nunn

Grounded

Coming back, the land didn't know him.
Not the soft air, peaks and skittering leaves
or blurred faces rising out of the fog
along Kingsford-Smith Drive, not the river
haze of the city
opening into his eyes
through trickle of morning sun
or the aging pier at Breakfast Creek
he half-imagined had been built for him —

the land under his feet and brooding
in shadows cast by the sheer rise of the city
had forgotten him. The odour of the river
drummed into shifting rock
was familiar, but wafted the frail taint
of foreign ghosts. He thought he knew
the sounds: low hum of ferry coming into dock
with passengers murmuring
home home

but it was not. The clouds
had grown heavy, the radio
in hard accents, promised more
rain continuing through the night.
In a crowded bar on Merthyr Street
he trembled like a sailor or fisherman
having seen the slope of the world and its infinite
smallness, having returned
with the illusion he had not changed, but friends
had grown old and disappeared
into home and heartbreak.

After short black and numbing
football on the TV, he rose
weightless as a ghost
and followed the riverbank, with drifts
of crows crying ironic above him
coming home coming home
the land didn't know him.

Graham Nunn

http://www.smallchangepress.com.au/index.htm

Sooty Sky - Kevin Gillam

Sooty Sky

these are black days. mine a sooty
sky. grit falls with rain. thinking wet,
won’t catch. black days are these. these
days aren’t those. past tense a
varnish. these minutes splinter. pierce
hands of fate. future pain racked. black
days these are. pills bleach a.m.
p.m. coma grey. these are black days

Kevin Gillam

Sick Again - Wayne H.W Wolfson

Sick Again

The anniversary of a dead ambition. The drops of blue paint on the floor, now smudged from someone’s foot, leads to nowhere.
The record player spits out my new thing, a car backs into a phone pole, an empty bottle rolls under the bed, murmuring marimba, she cries. We are a long way from Mozart.
The moon, what was left of night, fought its way through the cracks in the shade. The record still had three songs to its life-span.
The shadow of a cat on the polished wooden planks of the floor. I want to look, fleeting moments of poetry.
Poetry, mine. I actually am not that nice. Not for real, I feel like a phony, liar, hooves tangled in the jasmine below the bedroom window.
I am nice, but it is like an inconsequential doppelganger whom I have grown used to allowing to occasionally wander around.
She still sleeps and at least one of us does too.
I went down to the café. Standing outside, by my usual table was a cretinous little girl with a big belly, who stared at the newspaper kiosk without ever blinking.

Wayne H.W Wolfson
http://www.waynewolfson.com/

Ladybird, Ladybird - Justin Lowe

Ladybird, Ladybird

She did not
exactly glow
at the mention of my name

her hands
did strange things
around her throat

she tested
the strength of one leg
then the other

considered the world
to the left
and the right of her

I offered no gesture
of re-assurance
I am not like that

she wanted to know
how far I’d traveled
as though

no amount of poetry
could convince her
I

had been inside her all this time
invisible and all-encompassing
as the space between two words

this is a bad time
she whispered pertly

as though to a newborn.

Justin Lowe

(first published in 'Glass Poems')

http://www.lulu.com/content/265422

Eggshells - Casey Asphel

Eggshells

your voice becomes
very brittle,
like instruments
in a 45 from the 60s

I could shoot Warhol again
with my words,
or maybe shock Goya’s
Saturn, they’re
marching through eggshells
now

you’re hurt and all I’ve got is a mouthful
of bravado, I can’t make myself
reach out and put arms
round you, instead
I’m leaning against the doorframe
reloading, new horseshit
ready to spit

and your look
tells me enough,
suddenly you’re
married to a stranger.

Casey Asphel

You and Me and Dora Maar - Amelia Walker

You and Me and Dora Maar

You wear red shoes to the Picasso exhibition.
I keep reminding myself, Look at the art...

Picasso never smiles in photographs
(appropriate for somebody so famous, so dead)
so many photographs -Dora's photographs-
this is her exhibition too.

Placards on the wall explain how they met
in a cafe: how she splayed one hand
on the table, and with the other danced a knife
round the crevices between gloved fingers
-a rabid, messy polka.
Picasso watched her stab and miss
and keep stabbing as her blood spilled and shone
-winking garnets, unflinching flesh -
he asked to keep the glove.

He painted her as a minotaur,
he painted her as a bird.
In a rare snap he catches her -Dora- off-guard:
small body, dark eyes staring into space,
she looks sad, she looks shy,
looks like half the girls who catch my train
-the cafe story just doesn't seem possible.
Then I see you, spinning on the heels
of your winking red shoes,
-suddenly anything is possible.

You are Dora Maar the Minotaur -strong,
sleek, shining creature of mystery and terror.
I am Dora Maar the bird -flightless, losing
myself in your labyrinth, wanting
yet afraid of you -ferocious you,
legendary you, mythological, unknown
you (and me?) and Dora Maar,
two women, three women, a million
funhouse mirror / images,
kaleidoscope wormholes and dancing knives.

~

I am Dora Maar the Minotaur
-savage, sweaty, lost
in my own maze.
I am invented, outdated, a legend, a lie,
slain and sliced up and squealing
at the sky where you,
you are Dora Maar with wings spread.
Dora Maar the bird,
circling above me, singing,
weightless, wondrous, out of reach.

You are painted blue but laughing,
rebuilding Guernica as a shiny silver egg.
You are dipping, diving, darting close
and far away (a brush of fabric, almost lock eyes...)
We are two women, so many women,
dancing careful art conversation
-proper as a white glove, polished as a knife.

Amelia Walker
(first published in Arabesques)

http://poetryandpoeticscentre.com/index.php/Interview_with_Amelia_Walker

Soup - Graham Nunn

Soup

ten pm. Chinatown
birds wait
in the window

he is drinking Johnnie Walker
and I am drinking beer

a bowl of something clear with
greens and pale meat

outside the steamy window
it is raining
he is smoking

pale blue curlicues
drift from his nostrils

move across the surface
of his scotch
like famous Highland mist

I watch the words
come out of his mouth
but cannot hear them

I am listening
to the birds
pursue their seed in us

Graham Nunn

http://www.smallchangepress.com.au/index.htm

submissions open

subs of poetry and related forms are now open

kipple will consider ONE poem per sub

e-mail your poetry and a short bio to

mountain0ash[at]gmail[dot]com

with the word 'submission' in the subject line

(place sub in body of e-mail)


kipple will publish as often as the material dictates. sadly, it is impossible to pay contributors. response time should be within two weeks. this blog is meant to serve as a small, simple poetry site. the one poem per sub rule is an effort to keep things managable and to avoid the pitfalls of kipple.


in the future, a downloadable pdf of 'collected kipple' may be made available. at this stage, it will appear seasonally and will depend on the amount of material submitted in any given quarter.