States of Poetry

We've been in mourning just over a year,
or just under, depending on the date we're marking.
Not always celebrations, anniversaries
have a way of keeping their appointments:
they're ticked off at the level of the body
and brain, our biochemical wakes.

I've felt strange all week, sick and sleep-obsessed,
a willed agoraphobic. Show me the cave
I need to crawl into and I'll be there.

No headline-making bereavement here,
just the absence of two small dogs,
their apparitions appearing to join me in my chair.
This evening, with fever, I made room for shades
and only then did I mark the date,
our two dogs dead twelve weeks apart, a year ago.

Their anniversary arrived like a virus
assaulting the muscles of my heart
in a darkened room.

Barbara Temperton

Recording

Previously published in The Weekend Australian, 18-19 May 2013.

They toll hours. I trace the peak and trough of raven-call
through brick veneer walls to the hospital – an hour away –
with every throaty rattle, to my Aunt, morphine
pump filtering sleep. She's comfortable, her nurses say.
Housebound with telephone, I'm waiting, listening
for whispering oxygen, for rattle-claws on tiles,
black birds stalking roofs of this cinder block suburb.

Several streets away, Xanthorrhoea crown
the square of dry grass in front of my Aunt's
vacant house. Unlike banksia populations
infected by dieback, struggling in nature strips,
on road verges, in yards haunted by abandoned
cats and warring neighbours, Xanthorrhoea thrive.

Summer, a palimpsest of sirens, squealing tyres:
hoons burning-out their cars. Peace in these long, hot days
as temporary as sunset or red sunrise.
Aged grass-trees leaves, dried, rustle for want of burning,
relive bonfires flicking embers, altars shedding
resin and ash, crematoriums birthing stars.

Ravens escort each day into these shabby streets,
comb bins for kitchen scraps, find fresh offerings
at backyard shrines. They cold-call at lounge room windows,
cruise the verges, check out stained mattresses, TVs,
rusting patio chairs straddling discards left out
for collection. It's the season for kerb crawling.

Bottlebrush blossom stains the footpaths red. Fenced-in
in her garden, my mother strikes cuttings and grieves,
putting out prayers, chicken bones, cheap mince, nurturing
the Australian ravens. Her two raucous callers
keeping their day's appointments up and down the street.

The hospital is an hour away – maybe two –
depending on rush hour, the freeway. My Aunt's room
is where oxygen flows through tubes into the shrinking
spaces in her lungs. Landlocked with telephone,
I hear the ravens calling their claim from the roof.
Singing in counterpoise, neighbour at her clothesline:
Summertime
and the livin'
is easy*

Barbara Temperton

*DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, and Ira Gershwin, 1935.

Recording

Part of the river begins here, car carcasses
Filter run-off, houses fenced off
A two foot foam toy stealth bomber
Discarded in the buffalo – 'the F27C
Striker Brushless' neglected, ignored.

Broken winged, landlocked like concrete islands.
Part of the river begins here,
Sweet mud smell, the hill you slide down
On tin, the old man keen to shoot to shoo
You, his house as far as his scope.

To kill the grass they've killed the liquidambar
And the clean fill sand will absorb the poison
Near the salt bush tagged pink, ready for pruning
Bark crunching, parrots munching
Near the netball ring bolted to the fence.

A train, a truck, an aeroplane.
A fence, a concrete path
And day old dog shit scraped to the side
Below a clear blue sky hazy at the horizon.
With a video camera I imagine walking

Straight through the swamp, shoes squelching
A document, not now – not the right time, never the right time.
The DC266 Evinrude outboard dingy
Its fishermen, shiners of the torch
Throw cigarette butts in the water: 6:35pm.

The bridge monument – maximum load
Three hundred kilograms
Hugs the bank like Michelangelo's staircase
In the last of the sunlight, duck tracks
And great Egrets picking at the rushes.

They mistake feed for a chip wrapper
As salty as the day purchased
At the supermarket,
The Great Egret Supermarket.
I jump off the bridge, I'm heading home

And find a walkie talkie, possibly from the stealth bomber:
You used to be able to see the river floor, over.
Surprised at the amount of water in here
For this time of year, over. No frog noises though,
Over. Still, plenty of mozzies and guppies, over.

Copy, over. Now it dawns on me – the camps
We used to see, the piles of rubbish,
Blankets, buckets, remnants of small fires,
Fishing tackle, they were aboriginal camps, middens
Right under noses, right here, over.

'Fucking hell' spray painting blue on a sheoak
The Hades totem forces a walk through puddles
Car wrecks half way up the drain, tip islands at high tide,
Oil slicks, rusting ruins in clay sediment
And oxidised metal mixing, they don't make 'em like they used to.
'

Slowly leaking into the creek —
Follies of the future
The high water mark
A white horizon line made of phosphate.
Part of the river begins here, car carcasses.

J.P. Quinton

Casuarina leaves disable the dog.
He halts on the track ahead, scratches,
then sits and sulks, his undercarriage
a matt of clinging tendrils.
My hands prickle with casuarina scales
so small they're almost unseen,
but my palms know they're there
and the dog does, too, his eyes accusing.
The she-oaks shouldn't have been a surprise,
but were. We came upon them suddenly
as we emerged from the jam and mallee.
I try to unthread their brittle strands
from the dog's thick coat, they snap in two
then two and two again.
I am brought to stillness
by the sense of something quickening
in the woodland behind me.

Barbara Temperton

Recording

IV

Bottle-green air,
red gravel, bark and branch,
filigrees of hazel,
blanketing roar of ocean,
inlet glints of stone.
Depths of quiet sounded out
in ducks' satellite pings.
There's no ribbon to tie these things neatly in train,
no music to make it sound okay;
just me awake, reading your email
as cockatoos swing and chime
high in karri's campanile.

Wherever we are,
whatever the trees and air,
there's a time we share
when the crown of the sky whitens and glows,
when the spectrum of things which divide us
– the distance, the history,
the lies, fears and ties –
retreat like shadows
around a firelit forest clearing.
And yet... the strange thing is...
that's when I feel most keenly
the happenstance of grieving.

VI

Our friend told me
he had entered his body
and found pleasure and comfort there.
You're swimming Bataan
on a youthful morning
to wash away thoughts of the world
and the pain.
But how heavy the body can feel after,
how steep the rise to dry land,
how hard to understand why
the pleasure of the moment
should carry such gravity.

For there is the water,
and here is your body,
knowing it can swim and not harm the sea
and yet there's the sign, saying,
'Danger. Men have died here.
Think of those who may drown, saving you.'
All places have their histories,
even as the water befriends our bodies
so indiscriminately;
you swimming there and I swimming here;
one body of water,
receiving dawn's thoughtless kisses.

VII

I had the strangest feeling,
coming out of the water,
as if I'd left someone behind,
or failed to gather up something in my arms.
White sand gleamed between granite
boulders, dunes bled tea,
sweating down secret cracks
to glaze the stone with slime,
tanning sea and sand.
Female wrens hopped
dark streams of weed,
foraging, quick and grey
against the cream,
yet I felt quite bereft
stalking back to my towel,
Empty hands dangling,
as if the reason for swimming
had escaped me out there.

Graham Kershaw

Recording

Evening, at the edge of the reef
a ghost net snags my fishing line.
Lead-core line is made to last and often
braided round plastic craypots tumbling
from West Coast to Madagascar
to shroud the coastline over there.

I write my dead friend's name in foam,
watch a wave rush it away.
In another's name a rose adrift
surfs an off-shore rip away
over the spines of whitecaps
and into her unknown out there.

Out there, in the gyre of derelict gear
and mid-oceanic islands of snarl,
cast off gill nets, lost purse-seines fishing,
shrouding the dead, the not quite living,
sargassum and its broken dreams.
Far off of the coast of this mute continent
rubber-skins of drowned Zodiacs
are being knitted into ghost nets.

I let my snagged line go and with it the reel,
go back, over reef rock and pool, to the beach.
An albatross is dead on the sand, gut blooming
plastic bits and pieces. Night is inevitable,
as is tide's turn and sea wind-writing in nylon
and polyester filaments, in salt and stinging sand,
in the razor-edge of grasses.

Sea wind rushing inland
papers sand dunes, spinifex, fossils,
with the names of my dead friends,
with the names of ghost nets.
Sea wind carves their names
into the hulls of abandoned boats.

Barbara Temperton

Recording

I drive in on Daylight Saving Time
with a pale, fat moon rising
over the Moresby Ranges.
New subdivision: Ocean Heights Estate?
It looks like Sandcastle Land.

Foreshore dunes
limestone-terraced into sharp ledges:
high-priced real estate
perched at weed-wreathed ocean edge
awaiting global warming.

Blowouts hibernate
beneath a skin of Papier-mâché
seeded with sunflowers,
native pelargonium, alien grasses.
Feral pines adorn the verges, neatly
supplanting saltbush, acacia.

Roundabout windrowed by sand
directs me to my soon-to-be street.
An adult date palm, transplanted like me –
gale-force sea-breeze flaying
its skirt of fronds – inclines toward the land,
acquiescing like the sand
to the so one-sided, the so-insistent wind.

In the near distance,
waves thrash about in the shallows.
Big dogs surf the trays
of 4-wheel drives heading home
from the 4-wheel savaged beach.

In the front yard of my new rental,
two stray ridgebacks are too cock-legged busy
pissing on green reticulation flags
to acknowledge my arrival.

Barbara Temperton

Recording

The river has always
sat in front of me,
mud between toes
shooting down grassy
hills on cardboard. My
brother dragged a sheep
behind a canoe
to the other side,
and painted a warning
on his rose canvas
when my sister drowned.
She was throwing rocks
when swallowed.

Dog barks heard from the kitchen.

Mum ran screaming up
the hill, a limpid wet body
in her arms, almost
like the canaries
the dogs killed
lying at the bottom of their cage.
A nurse heard cries
from five houses away
and saved her.

For a long time
I wasn't allowed near the river
and cursed it.
Its myriad voices, silent.

J.P. Quinton

Invasion Day

My thighs are cold in the crevice
where the Coke can rested
as I drove. By the mailboxes
the ginger guy is staring again
his back against
my box, meat-pie
eyes, fixed
upon the middle distance
not looking
at me, like I expect.

I disembark and seek out shadow,
walking in my skin-shoes where the pavement
is the darkest, where
my flesh won't burn. I'm white,
white, white – invisible
as ghost – the sidewalk of my hips
untrodden by their fingertips. A sunburned
country, empty.

I know summer from the sticky
pools of ice-cream melting in the eyes
of children, from the stink of burning
flesh on barbeques.

A guy walks past with a fresh
tattoo: the Southern Cross all slick
with blood and fluid,
packed
in Glad Wrap
like a lump
of steak.

I salivate. I sink
my teeth into his arm.

I am so hungry.

Kia Groom

Recording

from the Tibetan meaning 'to build' or 'to construct'

I.

In 1992, Alice made a Tulpa.

Carry an amulet. Kiss its three sharp corners. Shine.

It began subjective, but with practice could be seen: imagined ghost that flickered in the physical world, a sort of self-
induced hallucination.

Recall the chalk clouds. Recall the scent of symbols scratched on motel walls. Remember rising damp, the face in the mildew who told you

do not be
afraid.

In time the vision grew – Alice talked to Tulpa, Tulpa started

talking back.

II.

On the bedspread, summon your sixteenth birthday. Snuff candles, ask. Re-write time & split unopened jacket, tied with coils of braided hair.

Look at it – wish artifact. Wish perfect. Wish this skin, unbroken.

& suddenly, she'd see it summoned
against her will & bathed in fire
light, or else at foot of bed, this figure
staring, formless mouth
with words all of its own.

To make a Tulpa, carry books to bed. Lie on your mattress & dictate your woes to furniture. Lie & map imaginary houses.

III.
Friends began to ask
– who is the stranger in the house?
– the man with amber eyes who slender slips into your room?

Map topography of bodies. Think: how will his paper limbs assemble into flesh? How will it feel with one half of the bed depressed?

The brittle shell of conscious conjuring had changed.

Hollow your head and light the neon Vacancy.

And with her will, Miss Alice made a monster.

IV.
Consider the shape of your hand as you teach yourself falling. Curl two fingers: beckon / closer.

A Tulpa is a phantom.
He is insubstantial.

Crown yourself with polished trauma. Balance amulet between your eyes & watch the dark soak through the floorboard cracks.

Students who succumb to fiction fail –

Kiss split plaster. Tongue holes in sacred symbols. Braid yourself, your ropes of follicles – restrain inside imagined houses.

they spend their lives in waking-dream, in half-hallucination.

Wait for tenants,
for an occupation.

Kia Groom

Tulpa

To read a landscape by another landscape;
Valley cloud reveals altitude.

To read the landscape visits the ego
That prevents a proper reading.

To this landscape, the circular fireplace
And a straight trunk – xanthorrhoeas present.

To read this landscape to the tune of other words,
As moisture moves us, is us, drowns us.

To read the landscape like a book
Means to think like a border

Like the roos who still jump
Where the fences have been removed.

J.P. Quinton

Recording

'It hurts to go through walls, it makes you sick,
but it's necessary.' − Tomas Tranströmer

I'd expected a labyrinth of small dark rooms, yet
the house was lit marigold         scooped out like a pumpkin for Halloween
Flames flickered and spat in a wide fireplace
         a seaweedy stench had swept in       brushed walls with sea mist
Oak beams as broad as shoulders      seemed safe
                           the floor dipped like a ship

There was a tavern of voices outside
             laughter        bickering sniggering
gossip in the street        lingering Victorian morals
                          Crash of sea over rocks    din of death bells
                                                                                                It was 1917

I was through that door that painting that wall to god knows where

A Woman in Blue Reading a Letter
a crinkly unfolding of paper sound
a letter that never came after the Somme

Her sigh       swish of skirt
            I turned    she passed the mirror        a silvery blur
                         a light crunch of shoe on wooden board
            I saw the horror of her unwed shame     in my own face
                         the same mirror that once held her

O to curl into the stillness of that blue velvet chair
                          its painterly stopping of time
Walls giddied me         terrified me the emptiness of that room
            She was banished
                            He grew as his grandma's thirteenth child

* * *

I went through silence a room bathed with pale sunlight
            It was late afternoon in winter
From a window         across a meadow towards the sea
I saw him walking away
He carried the burden of those walls
on his dark days          dark, dark, days
            Shoulders hunched
            he went towards the sea
                                       the openness of the sea
                                                                                 the sea...

Carolyn Abbs

'At the house where my father was born' was published in Axon: Creative Explorations, issue 9, vol. 5.2, 2015.

Recordings

'At the house where my father was born' begins at 2:35

grasses sweep grooves in sand, the way streams forge sweeps in earth;
their soft brown tips dangle, like me, the narcissist,
searching for recognition, the call and response
the topographic certainty, the black and white pinions.
cloud gaps are light patch are sunglasses on.
loose rock and lost watch – the alpine flowers dry,
the travelling snow is sliced by skis or sun or boot tread
with spring their tracks melt, before i can revisit.
i love the steep incline, the shared gradient and shrub steps
with black blocks cracked and blue blue sky.

ants block the waterfall path, they bite skin and scale
you won't see them then your feet are black, bitten.
you will run and they leave peaks peaks.
after four hours the marsh fly breaks the black spider web.
tangled in white glue there's no direct flight, earth folds.

the tangled fly is caught in another web, fangs suck blood slow.
the carcass pulled to darkness, the green head splinters.
all eight legs, she watches from a crevice. all blood used
to bring what once buzzed to her. the door is closed,
the wings merely frames. all eight legs.

red paint on glass, a construction mishap. the dried paint drips
become scratched name marks, he always slept on the verandah
all seasons, all eight legs. water crashes into water,
pools like candle-wax. lizards eat everything but the head.
the pane cleaned with a dirty cloth, streaks over the hare.

as if the last light means nothing, he munches the tops off,
doesn't react to window knocks.

J.P. Quinton

I walk to the river,
I am searching,
I am searching for a jar of leeches.
In the distance I see something flashing
so I head toward it.

As I come closer I see
it's a mirror dangling from a tree,
and beneath it, a table with six sealed jars.

I open a jar, stick my finger inside
pull it out –
blood slides down my arm.

I feel the sharp clutch of a hand on my shoulder,
I turn and see a woman's
face covered in mud,
she points across the water
and says if I want my own leeches
I have to swim
to the opposite bank.

I strip my body of clothes
– pause for a moment –
enter the water, and swim.

In the murk I stop,
put my head up, I'm half way
the water is colder at my feet,
I can sense the muddy floor beneath
my arms ache, my head is numb,
I look back and see the mirror flicker
there is no one to complain,
I see my face on the surface
the river rocks and I wonder why I'm here.

J.P. Quinton

Yamaji Culture
A culture worth loving
A culture worth fighting for
A culture worthy of being loved

Why tell me I don't need it?
Why tell me I can't need it?
Why tell me I can't love it?
Why tell me it's not worth fighting for?
Why tell me it's not worthy of love?

Yamaji Culture
I love it – I laugh for it
I stress for it – I cry for it
I fight for it – I believe it's worthy
Of love and respect

I cry when you talk
As the colonisers
Conditioned you to
Talking of a culture to die
Talking of a dying race
When we are very much alive

I watch Yamaji culture change
Adapting to survive
Why don't you understand that?
Why can't you understand that?

Yamaji culture is a culture
Worth fighting for
A culture worth loving
A culture worthy of love and respect
Don't wipe all that away
Hang on – hang on tight
Country men and country women
Our Yamaji Culture

Charmaine Papertalk-Green

Can you smell it?
Not like the first rains
Nor the first blooms
But a rather putrid
Vomit inducing smell
Jaan-jaany
The bad smell of Australia

Like stinking body odour
Emitted at footy matches
Fast on social media
With each boo the
Smell got stronger
With each name calling
The smell got stronger
With each denial the
Smell got stronger
Yurna; Yurna
Lingering smell of racism
Australian style

Charmaine Papertalk-Green

Such a hollowness grows beneath us
such an undermining,
such a heavy, unwelcome silence
that we can no longer touch
this happy or unhappy life,
this grass, these children, this field of light,
fly as we might each fortnight
the surfaces lose value
– window, fence, city, street –
as we become beasts, turned inside out
under the fluorescent pool table light,
all our works futile
tantrums and bullying,
blood less than beer,
sour and dead in the mouth,
burnt metal in the mind,
and the sunlit plains, from altitude,
are a cold fluorescence over flat grey felt
on a beer-stained gaming table
and night before we fly in
and the day we fly out, the big picture is,
we seem to have been anointed
scourges of the earth, predators
snatching at harmonies
we can never grasp,
could never endure
deferment to,
as if watching this life
forever from some remove,
a whistling kite,
stringing together bare parishes
with insatiable searching,
motionless flight.

Graham Kershaw

Below Howarth Cross, tussocky fields
still wait for dead builders; 'Pick your plot now.'
Mice dart away through clover and thistles
dodging oil drums, chip wrappers, surprised
by the impossible song of lost looms.
Under Cobbled Bridge, off Belfield Lane
the stones erode along their grain, as lain.
On the underside, immortalised, 'Kipper Lips'
and 'Tina too much too young.'

Past cyclists, fisherman and fern-clad locks
two men on a scaffold are bricking-up
the last of nine great eyeless mills.
The sun-stone rolls over Blackstone Edge,
heavy, heavy. On Smalley Street, each drainage
grate is still in place. Doris hasn't moved
the old meat slicer, yet doesn't even know
me, as she squints over change, saying,
'You're better off than you realised, love.'

From the church, scrawled on the garage
my brothers' names, then the gentle rise
of Heywood Road dipping and winding
narrowly between dark hawthorn trees,
cobbled patches still breaking through,
hints at something we called 'country'
heading out one Sunday morning
blindfold toward the Heywood spire
with no thought of returning.

Graham Kershaw

This morning I read of the nightwell,
filling mysteriously in our sleep,
disappearing by day, and it brought
to mind the gifts of Christmas, of starlight,
the open dark eyes of the children of Aleppo
on television the night before.

I dreamt of a family escaping through pines,
over the crest of a forest, young and old
struggling down to the shore of a great cold lake,
their only hope of escape; no boat was there,
but the strong might try to carry the old,
at least, if they cared enough

and it made me want to simply run away,
to escape the brain-ache of not doing
what we are best made to do, even knowing
our good fortune, knowing no gratitude
or peace of mind, no resting place for
a harried and haunted, half-buried mind

and then I read of the nightwell,
how it was said to fill mysteriously while we sleep,
then disappear by day, and it brought to mind
the gifts of Christmas, of starlight,
the children of Aleppo,
a family escaping ...

Graham Kershaw

Riding back from Heathrow, after Rome,
everything felt dark, sad, dirty, grim.
Only on the train did the old redemption come:
soft green fields, open loose-leafed canopies,
water tipped from shivering layers of leaf,
through clouds of shadow; all those rich depths
under bridges, in the ditches, between one hedge
and another; deep pools of shadow, pierced
by stars of wet light; mysteries gathering,
flooding, oozing into the failing day,
overwhelming the apparent and the assumed;
dark riches of numberless greens and greys,
too many, too fast to paint or say; immense poetry,
in fact, down amongst the fag-ends.

A private, dumb hoarding all our own, all this;
the debris of besieged beasts, hoarded trash
of dead philosophies, waiting every time
we fly in under that stifling blanket,
to something smaller than earth and sky,
the night crashing in, buses bearing up,
trains making do, faces turning
from the darkness and the light equally.
Me with my white paper hat melting
in my hand, you with your red scarf,
all the eyes of Surrey half-wondering,
half-wishing for less to wonder on,
if it might keep them from the telly.
Me a vicar, banished from Rome;
you a gypsy, banished to the road;
both fallen from the sky once more,
to be made real, this Monday evening.

Graham Kershaw

'Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly...'
– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

I un-wake to damage.
Light-bulb stutters, frantic
once off, once on, illuminates
imagined city
skyline.

Inside my bedroom it rains
for days. The head
full of synaptic hauntings
shudders. Old-milk sky
dimming.

I tell myself there is
a world outside
the world. Stay still
completely
still & gather dust.
& watch the fretful halls.

Walls convulse,
contract & close. The filament
at the bulb's chest flickers. Lethe
is half
dream-drowned in me.
There is a sickness not worth
surfacing. Better
to sink. To listen: soft light, soft
light & the pressure
the pressure of doorways.

Kia Groom

Recording

Itch in the vein, the road hot still
from sun, an asphalt stream
bisecting unlit houses. Slip of an alley
cat through a spittle of starlight.

Last cigarette, the way Em curls
her yellow fingers into small mouthed
sweater sleeves.

Clock tower bites light through the empty
parking lot. Gates we broke apart last summer, same
time I lost the laces from the leather
punctures in my too-small shoes, loom.

I taste penance, mouth wanting ash-dry and Em
ribs through rails, ducks under gate chain. I become
the sum of all my touches.

Here, the darkened grotto.
Here, stone-eyed Mary with her marble palms.

Under the Virgin's feet, Em's hips like Hail Marys.
Under my itch the scratch I cannot trespass.

Hail last of the cheap champagne,
Hail damp hair,
Hail sprinkler cycles,
Hail the scent of sulfide.

Flash of cop lights from the hill's dark lip,
and Em's hands nudging the dawn
down the bed of the sky, asking

one strike more. Just one
more toll of the hollow bell, before we lattice

fingers, streak through the blistered night.

Kia Groom

Recording

Dot by dot, the backs
of eyelids. Draw it slowly,
shape of sentimental spine.
You curve that way.

I breathe the countdown
& the world falls, air by air.

In the white room you cloud
over bedsheets,
unsettled weather, & no electric
light will dare illuminate.

Your skin tastes clean sky,
polished gray. That clarity,
sharp on the tongue.
I snap off the hallway,
let shadows nip like kittens.

You are so still you shimmer.
So still you gutter out.

My ribcage phantoms. The rain
pretends to know your name,
but at the window only nail taps.
I watch your eyelids lightning.
I watch the static gather.

My chest is a wet sheet tattered.
Your shape embossed in the folds &
at my center black mold.

The light cracks, depressed
switch of the thumb-pad &
I see the vacancy,
the pale stretch of my own skin.

You are gone so thoroughly.

I lie in the damp & listen
to my wanting thunder, thunder.

Kia Groom

Recording

;

(found in rubble beneath a church — New Norcia)

Distempered walls crowd in cold at the old
schoolroom, resonant with the chant of times
tables, scrape of chalk on slate; a nun might
have leant over a child, white dust on her cuff.

This afternoon, light from a slit window catches
a silver crucifix and reflects onto the dome
of glass cabinet, like sunlight over water.
The exhibit: a small suede boot, without laces.

I sense the vitality of a diminutive foot −
slip my hand into dusty suede and press
tips of my fingers into indents of toes.
I want so much to believe
the child's foot pulled from the trapped shoe
and ran and ran...

Carolyn Abbs

Tenement Building (black & white photograph)
Chris Kilip, Tate Britain, 2014

you view the house from across the street
part of a terrace it fills the frame
the roof is cut off no sky dim light

upstairs      a balcony
door    window        bricked-up    defiant
downstairs a curtain is torn
you move in closer         but can't see into the room
front door pint of milk on the step
dustbin on the kerb

it's the pint of milk that disturbs you
you wait if you wait surely someone
will fetch in the milk...

not even a sparrow pecks at the silver-top
the house bereft of sound
is like the backdrop to a disused stage
rain has left sheen on the tarmac

a month later you read:
bulldozers arrived like thunder

Carolyn Abbs

'Surely Someone' was published in Cordite Poetry Review, no. 49, 2015.

After you died, Nana, I went to your room,
it was dark like that place beneath the breakwater
where barnacles cling and children never dare hide

I opened a blind, a stuck window, breeze fanned
and fanned the room, light across your dressing-
table, triple mirrors. Amidst perfume bottles,

hairbrush, amber beads, your art deco box,
walnut with inlaid mother-of-pearl; guiltily
as if invading privacy, I lifted the lid,

postcards of seaside scenes, turquoise Quink,
stamps, shells, keys, coins, and with sand-like
grit beneath my nails, I heard an echo of the tide
a slow swish, swish...

I tried a jet-diamante comb in my hair, the mirrors
shimmered silver; as if through mist, your blue-
grey eyes came back, three times, to look at me,
waves swept and swept the shore...

the room so empty without you

Carolyn Abbs

'Triple Mirrors' was published in Westerly, 60.2, 2015.

Recording

'Tripe Mirror's begins at 5:17

Sadness overwhelms me in this circle of cut
flowers; some face me, plead for help, but if

I were to cradle one tulip-heavy head in my palm
like a premature baby, would its petals (that remind

me of my mother's skin when she was old) fall
to the floor? Others turn away in a dried blush

of shame. Just a few plump bodies flaunt sheen
on velvet cloaks, yet stems stoop weary.

They wait in colour-obliterated twilight.
Forgotten.

Carolyn Abbs

'Tulips in Black & White' (an earlier version) was published in Black & White Photography, Issue 72, 2007.

Barbara Temperton (photograph by Di Sinclair-Thomas)

Barbara Temperton finds inspiration in the diverse landscapes and stories of Western Australia. Her poetry has received awards and is published in newspapers, journals, and anthologies. Going Feral, her first solo collection, won the 2002 WA Premier's Book Award for Poetry. In 2007, Barbara completed an MA in English (UWA) under the supervision of the distinguished poet and academic Dennis Haskell. Fremantle Press published her MA project as Southern Edge: three stories in verse in 2009. Barbara was Westerly magazine's poetry editorial advisor from 2009 to 2011. Ghost Nets is her work in progress.