Poems

Wednesday

Sharon Black

Ode to My Heart Valve

Busy little hammer on your block of wood,dark wine setting the house on fire,how diligently you work, how tirelessly, what scant attention I have given youtill now, unveiled – ba-boom –inside your tiny shed on a screen before surgery that will slow you almost to standstill.In an antenatal room, twice,I saw my daughters’ hearts tucked in below mine, and listened as your pink bouquetfell softly open, closed again.Through the clinic windows, winter darkness shuffles slowly in. The cardiologist is ticking offhis checklist, night is ringing its bells,the echo of their tolling bounces off the walls: busy little hammer on your block of wood,how perfectly compatible we are,how I’ll love you until that final nail.

Selfie with Blue-Ringed Octopus

Bad dreams ignoredlit raindrops on windows of the midnight busthen a footstep behind you like the girl on a Sydney beachwho picked up a tiny blue-ringed octopusmost dangerous creature in the seafor a selfie. It rested in the cup of her hand one small jelly spidertwo legs folded underas if it were on its knees praying.

Wednesday

Rebecca Watts

Leaving

We left in a hurryand I had to leavemy solid-wood mahogany and spruce guitar. They said to bring only what we could carryand it would have taken both my armsto protect it from knocks and scrapes as I would a baby –for it too was made with love and in the belief it would last forever. Now I’m more sorrythan I should say, to know I will never hold it againand pluck the bass string and feel the low humtravel through me, earthing me. At night I crouch awake and worryabout the fire that melts and blackens and harries to ashall the carefully crafted truths we once lived byand which made life beautiful.

Ruth Padel

The Shiver of Water on Moss

We have stockpiled umbrellasand old-fashioned radiatorsa heap of mad grinsreminding me of so many school mornings fog pearling my regulation scarfas I walked from the stationpast grainy ice-sheaths of dead reedsaround the swan’s nest yearning for a glimpseof last year’s mystic swan bride.The wild ballerina. The last chancehaunting the mist.

Nicholas Hogg

Gun (with Englishman)

Have you ever held a gun before?I once fired a revolver, point-blank at Mark Stoneley,loaded with a roll of paper caps. He cried,and told his mum, who told my mum. So, No, not really.We drove towards Mexico, through sand duneslittered with shoes, a rag doll snagged on a barbed wire fence.He said, It’s not a toy, and then made me put it togetherlike a puzzle. Barrel, slide, frame, and the jet-black magazine.Heavy as the dark in a folding star. Along a dirt tracklined by cholla and scrub, the road signspeppered with lead, I snapped in the rounds. Here. We stoppedby a runnel and a pockmarked fridge, where he pinned upa target, and showed me how to aim. Squeeze off the noise,he said, pumping out shot. The desert took the soundand buried it. Your turn.

Rebecca Watts

The Mainland

Folk on the mainlandare tightytighty.Folk on the mainlandwalk a rope. No listening on the mainland,only talking.To walk while you talkand to talk while you type. What use for the mainland?Polystyrene and mattresses.Bad juju on the mainland.Bad eating. Bad faith. What use for the ocean?For swallowing questions.Who when why what NO:shh shh on the shingle. Conundrum: how to slipthrough the mainland’s fingers.A few who have done this.A few who have known. What happens on leaving?The end of the story.The start of a new one:wingbeats, wind.

Wednesday

Tamar Yoseloff

Hymnal

It’s gruelling to be wanted – the desirer’s eyesall over you, his lips mouthing your namelike a benediction. His love is a prison, or a roomwith flocked wallpaper where a mad aunt sleeps,her dreams fettered by demons. The desirer carves your name in trees and walls,letters trapped in love hearts piercedby feathered arrows. You no longer recognise itor come when called. You never owned it,only a name, shared with strangers pressed into those thin White Pages,like Frank and Bill and Jack – manly namesthat pack a punch, American nameswith ten-gallon hats and loaded guns.

Tamar Yoseloff

Summerstorm

The past is unzipped, like the backseat loverloosening your tie. You were crazy about himin June, sleeping past noon in the grass,singing all night out of tune. By Septemberhe’d split, without so much as a goodbye kiss. It’s tough to be the one who’s ditched, the scrub who gets bumped from the nest.  Now you’re adrift in the city, its brick pilesblotting out sky; you’re not fit for this life, the sulky drama of the street. You want to killthe taste on your tongue; green fairy, bitter pill,whatever gets you by. Clouds mass as the curtain rises on the last act,you know already how it ends.

Peter Bakowski

A new role in a new town

What Martine had learned in acting school over the summer,about tone, emphasis, inference,is all useful in the con —herself as charming, consoling Ms. Real Estate Agent.Martine’s clientele — flush widowerswanting to sell the family home,move to a manageable apartment. Walking through the properties,noting brand name dresses hanging in wardrobes,pearl necklaces lying on bedroom dressers,a diamond ring in a no longer used ashtray…Martine tries not to grin, show her hyena teeth. She lets two – or three – months elapse…then when the widower’s out on the golf course,or hospitalised, in for a hip replacement,or wintering in Florida,Martine disables security cameras, alarms, gains entry.The clean sweep of valuables fills a laundry sack.

Wednesday

Peter Bakowski

Saul at sixty

In hibernation and a huff. No work for six months. Will I have to invent an illness as explanation? My desires are simple — a pot of English breakfast tea, a piece of nougat. I can’t affect ‘a lifestyle’. I am sick, though, of this view. Brick wall. Drainpipe. Grey tracksuit pants on clothes line. Norbert hasn’t telephoned. Best get a new agent. Tony will know someone.  Introduce my name into conversations. ‘The theatre needs invigoration.’ That sort of thing. Young. Is that plausible? I can play young. The wonders of makeup. What do I want to read? I want to read a script.

Graham Allison

Dreamatics

Bukowski’s ghostis horsing in the garden – careening crazily –a grounded Red Baron flying a Fokker Eindeckerdrunken-legged – arms thrown out as wings,then elbows hunched, hands close together,forefingers squeezing triggers, letting them have ittwin machine-gun style – teeth and lips spittingbursts of rapid fire – his face splits laughing,shirt and eyes wine-stained.

Wednesday

John Talbot

But the Greatest of These

Her home, but not (she knows) her house.             It is his house, his wall, his garden.             She takes it hard, and means to harden So far as courtesy allows. Am I alone in feeling he             Could ease things with a breezy word             Or passing smile when they conferred About the rent? Damn charity, That blessing no one wants to name.

John Talbot

To Speak of Joy That Is in Marriage

Crabapples strewn. I knew that lure             would draw our blackbirds round the trunk. What do they care the fruit is sour? I like their pluck. Let’s us devour                         each acrid chunk of windfall, too, before our hour lapses.

Wednesday

John Talbot

The Pando

Seizing her axe she brought it down with blows One altered morning when the same sun rose Differently on her than him, which meant She knew the backyard aspen’s lease was spent. It fell to him to prise the stump’s grudge out. And yet how intergrown he was with doubt About it all, as whether a given tree Were ever uprooted really, or ought to be; Whether the nettedness in everything Meant that to strike at one root could only bring Stress to the covenants of knotted love Beneath our feet we’ve no conception of.

Peter Bakowski

Jacob Strengall, backstage at the Three Elves

Glad I decided against the tie, the polka dots. That freelancer Houghton is covering the Festival.I’ll buy him a pint during the break.Doubtless he’ll bang on about his latest cricket book,how well it’s selling in India. I’ll start with an icebreaker. A dog poem.Follow say with three poems about Wanda —what went right then wrong.I hear rumours about her —migrated to far North Queensland,living with Noel, an itinerant shearer…volunteering in an orphanage in Kolkata,managing a cattery in Edinburgh…She was always restless,going straight to the travel sectionof any bookshop… I’ll finish my set with a series of poems about objects —a white ceramic tea strainer,a colourful box of Epsom salts,a small brass model of the Eiffel tower.

Kate White

Papillon

We were to meet outside the stationat the top of the High Street, one AugustSaturday afternoon, and I became aware,walking there, of new sensations:the way my hair brushed my shouldersin the heat; that inner unease I’d heardwas called butterflies and hadn’t knownwhy, until now; the painful drag, of whichI was in denial, of stiff clogs on my feet,and then, the relief of meeting himand being asked a question I could answer:How was the film last night? As we descended into the crowded town,I recounted the plot of the blockbusterI’d just seen, starring Steve McQueenand Dustin Hoffman.

Peter Bakowski

View from a porch

Passers-by, accelerating on your errands, you overlookthe spider’s labour — a silver thread from thorn to thriving rose,the wind waking every leaf.Crow, ego with wings — you announce yourself as king of the street.Above — a wafer of moon. Not ready to leave the sky.

Wednesday

Nicholas Hogg

The First Human to Wear Gold

Out by the river, picking over driftwood bleached like bone. Or digging in the earth             for a succulent root,                         when the light once forged in an ancient star is found. Nugget of fire from a neutron             bomb so bright                         that the sky still burns. Now rolled in a palm.

Wednesday

Claudine Toutoungi

Accompaniment

Stood for ages waiting for the sun to turn up and pay homage to a clutch of brilliant orange poppies. It declined. But the poppies couldn’t be bothered to get hung up on feelings of betrayal and bobbed about — ditsy and undimmed — perhaps slightly drunk on some fringe classic I couldn’t catch beneath the growl of road construction. Sonata for a cabbage white, solo -fluttered? Maybe a soft-shoe shuffle from the ants?

Philip Hancock

Railings

Young and too much lip,I’m stuck on railings, up and down the slip roadsor round the parks: topping and tailing from a paint kettle,mindful of bounding dogs, that my trailing leg might topplethe gallon stock can. I’m a gardener as well,hacking back brambles and nettles, freeing the bottom plinths.Exposed: no place to shelter or skive, not a shrub to go behind,miles to tramp to get to the other side. I’m less bother on railings,out of earshot, safe behind bars, the old board offcut my only ally,dragged along to keep my knees dry.