Tamryn Bennett

(after the monoprint by Michael Donnelly) Stars empty themselves – no show tonight. The Bowl opens its mouth and your teeth shudder. The ground contracts with cold: you’re trembling. Your head falls against the steel cables the lights go off in Government house. Far above you the Arts Centre spire extends its white finger into the night: gulls circle crying holy holy holy Down here a Leunig festival of weeping alone in the dark while Government house is sleeping. Stars get nailed to the night sky. You take the silence for an answer. This poem was written for The Disappearing, an app that (literally) explores poetry and place, which you Cathy Altmann is a Melbourne poet, teacher and musician. Her poetry has been published on Melbourne’s trains and in numerous journals and anthologies and is now a part of The Red Room Company’s Disappearing App. Cathy has read and played [...]

Now that we have mapped the Ocean it is just so much more difficult for the boats to disappear. Even so, our phones died in tandem that first night, we smashed the bottle neck open against the sun spoiled steel of the barge. And the wine poured freely as all of those rivers, now redirected, might swarm to one arcane place. Today I would notice that this swing bridge to nowhere was not dismantled; that the asphalt tearing pines were left to tower the valley. Their spiny fingers leaning in and covering invisible mouths, as if to promise a secret well kept. Only then, I had never dreamed of being hidden by the cover of another body so completely – the freeway above seemed to silence itself. We will never go missing in the city but your hand on my leg felt close enough to a great endeavour that it [...]

You sit down to write a report entitled, “How is it possible for one person to kill another?” An hour later you wander off into the streets, leaving a blank page pocked with dark nothings. You see people cover coughs, remove glasses, wave goodbyes, adjust headsets, thumb mobiles, stub out cigarettes and arrange hair in ways that suggest intimate worlds and private moments. Almost every action unaware, an unnoticed use of the hands. You wonder how many more steps in the direction of unconsciousness would be required for one of those pairs of hands to be raised against another. You fall into the hole between the hand and the heart and stay there because it is easier than answering such questions. Australian born Richard James Allen has published nine books as a poet, fiction, performance writer and editor, most recently The Kamikaze Mind (Brandl & Schlesinger). His writing has appeared [...]

Ghosts bristle from the grimy grout of cobbles and tiles. Foot -paths, the Ouija board. Feet pulled by forces to trace, decrypt names. Whispers just audible to haunted ears. Pedestrians strollers and filth, endless streets. My mind an accomplice a terrified toddler, curious climbs the steps toward the attic a house planted on dead memories. Eyes catch shadows, shoes read the Braille of faces. Shades surface beneath my boots, blacken the soles on the sullen trail, a ghost-infested city. Ali Alizadeh’s latest book is Ashes in the Air (UQP, 2011), shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, Poetry. His next novel will be published by UQP in 2013. He is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Monash University. He has a website:

Because the river is never still enough to reflect the sky, I want to stay. I want to say to strangers, who say I love you, it’s untrue. The mirrors of their eyes only blind me. There’ll be no ovation. There’s hardly a road. Home is a distant thought, hovering on a squall. I spot a chapel in the shade covered in lichen’s dull brocade. No-one’s looking at me, kid. Take a flake of rock, scratch the word Ingrid into bark, letter by letter. By the force of my hand, I might earn permanency. Let that plane leave without me. is the author of Mortal (Washington, DC: Red Morning Press, 2006). She held both the MacDowell Fellowship (USA) and the Hawthornden Fellowship (UK) in 2005. Her poetry appears in journals and anthologies worldwide and online, including Cordite Poetry Review, Famous Reporter, Poetrix, Hecate and Moorilla Mosaic: Contemporary Tasmanian Writing. Ivy [...]

floats down river worries about mud lice and loss of power stops in no parking zones will recall a brief encounter with a Gospel piano enters the playground of roofs yields nothing to hungry dogs or startled onlookers no longer holds blood orange and old sausage bumps into bridges asks nothing of river bank mourns broken seals steals past ships notes other white goods on top of cars at the bottom of swimming pools cannot avoid direct sunlight releases carbon slowly into surging brown water born to beer once dated an esky hovers over houses is alarmed by outboard motor drifts past factories plays dodgem with bus stops glides through the drive through carries no change does not order a fudge sundae bears more than it’s own weight ferries the last of the sea gulls wishes for a raincoat finds a broken umbrella asks a drowned cat how many lives? [...]

Abendessen The statues of Berlin spent decades underwater- during the final days all of them were tossed, all those iron men were tossed into the canals for safekeeping. Picture the face of Geothe caressed by weeds, at home beneath a sheet of solid ice unmovable through the darkest months. There are no ghosts: only statues. Haunting is a notion too obscene, there are no ghosts: this house is clean. tourists, students of human atrocity swarm and sip from glass phials her ashen residues as verigated diverse and seductive as any French wine, or Belgian chocolate. The water itself remembers, though its course is fixed: the tour begins at Zoo station and will conclude at the Jewish Memorial. But where do they sleep these innumerable children of trauma? do they make their graves in the air, the famous curative Berlinerluft? or in the swamp which is the mother of this place, [...]

Cassette Sonnet You gaze through a little window at brown wound around two circles and with a pen, straighten curlicues. A circle shrinks as a circle grows a half-drawn curtain in a rectangle. Fading names, epitaphs, hits. Dirty heads and the diva quits. All wow and flutter, the lyrics are mangled, spilling their guts which the machine eats. Unkempt brunette, cold on the shoulder, “You’ll dig it less when you’re older.” The cases break and melt in heat. They’re second-hand for 20 cents, yet the catch amid the kitsch is the write-protected glitch: You turn into your parents and it’s curtains. Stop/Eject, kaput! You dozed off to Gordon Lightfoot. A note on the poem These 18-line pseudo-sonnets are a hybrid of the English and Italian. Four enclosed Italian quatrains (abba), tailed by a rhyming English couplet. I settled on this form almost accidentally, but it suited the purpose of these [...]

Empire Five winters stone has kept my fingers agile Reaching into coat’s warm pocket hand navigates ancient Plovdiv in a piece of gravel—weather’s shrapnel— as my old coat’s wool weaves heat into my skin All this stone’s patient indifference observes in press of passing seasons All this discarded time reflected in petroglyph’s striation as now the oil of human hands laid on as now their second hand fever warms a fragment of lost Thrace lost empire Kate Middleton is a Melbourne writer. She has completed a music degree at the University of Melbourne, majoring in composition and is currently completing Honours in Literature. Her poems have been published in many Australian newspapers and journals including The Age,The Australian, Heat and Meanjin, and have been set to music by many Melbourne composers. She has written the libretti for three operas, including Lapse by Alan Lee, which was performed in 2002 at [...]

Suits black ink faded to green and stretched over weathered fingers the tribal heart an illusion due to my grandmother’s name layers of memory etched into his skin five cents a name and twenty dollars to hide his impulsive nature I never knew the other woman the symbols of his past shine through grease and scars and sweat and his honest work tools held aloft like a sabre hands that fixed all the people around them but still broke every thing they touched pieces of video recorders and televisions still litter our world I remember tracing each image with tiny fingers and feeling dwarfed by his greatness he lead by example those identifying marks saved him when I could not recognise his clean shaven face and screamed for my bearded oddball the diamond, the heart the spade and the club I learned the value of when to fold and spent [...]

Visual Poetry Rachael Briggs is a research fellow in the philosophy department at the Australian National University, and writes poetry to unwind. She is the winner of the 2011 Val Vallis Award for Unpublished Poetry, and the cafe poet at the Cafe Checcocho (through the Australian Poetry Centre’s Cafe Poet program).

The Magic Cat by Andre, Year 6 Stanmore Public School The feline stands as proud as a lion. It is as blue as the eyes of a dark panther. Its journey comes across the valley of the kings. Its whiskers white as a dwarf star. Even if its head is like the desert, Its body becomes the waves. Its gemstone is hard and heavy, Though can be lifted with the greatest of ease. Its silence is the call of the wind, And its presence is the breeze. The talisman is the only thing we have, Even though we have a lot. It didn’t cost much, but its value to us is far more. It is an Egyptian symbol, The last she could find. My mother travelled the world, Before she met my father. She got a monk to carry it across the Egyptian desert. And now she has given it [...]

The Poetry Object encourages young writers and their teachers submit poems and photographs about objects that are special to them. Springing from The Red Room Company’s education program, The Poetry Object is a free writing project for students attending NSW Public Schools in the Sydney Region. Special objects that inspired poems in 2011 included coffee machines, beloved pets and books, the Quran, cricket bats, musical instruments, jewellery and clothing, revealing the rich meanings that objects acquire as irreplaceable parts of our lives. As part of The Poetry Object 2012, six celebrated Australian poets have been commissioned to write new poems about their own talismanic objects. Winner of the Thomas Sharpcott Prize, ; performance poet and fellow Sharpcott Prize winner ; Judith Wright Prize runner-up ; 2011 City of Sydney Poet, ; , an exciting new voice in poetry; and the inimatable . For three months The State Library of NSW [...]

Francis Thompson 1859-1907 by Robert Adamson He slept by the Thames in newspapers, a makeshift blanket, fevered talk. A loaded opium pipe. How much did it cost for his pencil to curve across pages? At dawn a red fox limped past and unsettled the sparrows. Francis drew down words, one at a time— worried about his best lines as they appeared in print. He addressed envelopes in a curved hand to enfold his poems— then walked to the Post Office at Charing Cross. A century later, I read ‘The Hound of Heaven’ by a river in New South Wales, hear a bitter chuckle before his ‘running laughter’— revelation’s soundtrack. has lived near the Hawkesbury River for most of his life. A series of juvenile misdemeanours resulted in him being sent to various detention centres. It was during this period that he first began writing poetry. His first book, Canticles on [...]