This entry is part of a series, The Disappearing» Clouds Afternoon Jazz Sprinkles For Jill Jones (1) Clouds Abercrombie Street, Chippendale Reading your electrical poems in a Northcote bar in winter was just too much: like trying to drink beer sailing freely through the air: free of the glass, sure, but harder than buckshot to [...]
Maternalique Sure as a first balled fist, ____________________it wells you awake _______as from a quake– _____the want _______________to give a swaddled __________star to the night’s arc. You step out _____and the landscape lengthens. Each parcel of dark _______________a mouth to be fed, each umbra hunkered __________to its suckling. The fog rocks the gray, _____loving it [...]
The other week I had a few dinner guests over and I was bringing up the subject of sainthood and pathology. One bright guest (he attended Harvard) said: “Oh no… I’m tired of all that Freudian analysis of sainthood.” I said: “me, too. I don’t mean it that way, but I think it is interesting [...]
April 11th, 2012: I wake up at 5 am, inspired, and begin to scrawl some hasty haiku on the back of an envelope. It is rare that I am awake before my husband. It is still a kind of grayish-dark outside, and I am lonesome that I’m the only one awake, but also secretly luxuriating [...]
The Astronomer Just stars, and grassland – ___to stand on the limit of the world ___and then climb upwards. Here is his tower, ______his staircase curled and vagrant as any dream: It is pictured next to the cow. How constant the constellations, this city now wheeling beneath them. Here is his quiet heartbeat. He must [...]
The People of Distress Going through a box of old ephemerae I found a tiny notebook called The People of Distress. The day I found the notebook was the day I started reading up on the gnostic gospels late at night in Vermont, stoned, the laundry rinsed by the thunderstorm, its slow musk behind our [...]
This entry is part of a series, The Disappearing» Rouse Hill Time travelling on the motorways we watch the landscape change as cramped steel and concrete give way to open space Somehow bare and more exposed Billboards tout BRAND NEW LUXURY HOMES carbon copies of a pre-packaged urban dream past the outback steakhouse past the [...]
It’s Fair Our life is boring. The fat caterpillar makes a ring on your walking stick. I want to be consumed by wind, the smell of oyster mushrooms and red horses. When folded, things become unrecognizable like hotdog paste. Thank god for the unresolved. The corner of your mouth a heron holding lavender in its [...]
BARTAB: AN AFTERHOURS BALLAD Two Handed Engine Press 118 p. ISBN: 978-0982002001 Cesca Janece Waterfield’s poetry is palpably stunning at times. Raw and evocative, her debut book, () veers between profoundly personal poems about the nature of life fueled by substance abuse—and a refusal to accept traditional boundaries—and the prose poem-narrative of two musicians floundering [...]
No system can endure perfection. All systems thrive on defining imperfections either by way of “sin,” “error” being inappropriate, being “unprofessional” or being “counter–revolutionary.” Such offenses are punished or censored when it is an “I,” reformed when it is a “we,” and revamped or improved upon when in relation to an “it.” The one act [...]
This entry is part of a series, In a Dark Room» It was late in the smoke-painted bar, a quarter past the blue hour, when The Interviewer pulled The Poet into an even darker room. And in the dark of that darkness, came the first question. Tell me, said the Interviewer, where do your poems [...]
This entry is part of a series, The Disappearing» Charlotte Street The pavement is a narrow procession of footsteps returning home in darkness. There is a raw gas-smell past Island Street, the rancidness of lamb-fat that clings to plum-coloured brickwork. A palm tree rustles perpetually through the windless night with percussion of heavy plastic. There [...]
from [Practicing Vigilance] I’m looting the altars of my former forgiveness like a cacophony of snow blowers I’m between making dinner plans and opening a can of sunshine onto the supernal room standing in a very quiet desert forcing the mean soliloquies out with their un-simulated volcanic ash hardening my exact replica. I used to [...]
Conformity is motivated by a need for communal belonging or acceptance, or to deflect the worse pains and consequences of failing to be accepted by one’s desired group. Based on the anxiety of expulsion, punishment and ostracism, or disapproval and towards the enjoyment of privilege and status. When failing to conform, or when losing face, [...]
This entry is part of a series, In a Dark Room» It was late in the smoke-painted bar, a quarter past the blue hour, when The Interviewer pulled The Poet into an even darker room. And in the dark of that darkness, came the first question. Tell me, said the Interviewer, where do your poems [...]
