jemima is not my name

Pennsylvania

2011-10-27T10:00:00.003+11:00

There are packed bags in the boot of a car and a chill that’s felt as the wind winds through looped coils of wool in a jumper. This is you.

You are the motel, the diner, you are things in a vast expanse, where crass greenery grows from the driest of ditches.

You are the deep woods watched from a car window; The Interstate, intent on going on forever; a voice counting forward and then back (asking, are we there yet?).

There is the hum of an engine with a million miles to go, hands on a wheel, the changing of gears and you: a deer captured by headlights, stunned and stubborn and fragile as crushed bones.

You are words, logic, numbers — whatever can be caught in a net of frightened thought.

You are the heat of the moment.

You are everything that’s left in a room someone owned for a night — someplace imagined, scratched, rough and faded in memory.

Hands cover ears, breath is held imperfectly.

There is ink scrawled down an arm, a reminder on a wrist: you are pigment that won’t budge.

Cat’s eyes trail behind headlights; a needle thumps on vinyl somewhere — you are the owner of its long forgotten song.

Grain ripples in an endless field, burnt orange falls below a horizon, the land whispers small prayers: in this is you.

You are a smattering of memories never had.

You are Pennsylvania, a photograph of someplace I never knew.

(Image: Tema Stauffer)

You can hear some Rabbit tonight...

2011-10-26T12:39:00.001+11:00

Tonight Rabbit launches edition 2 and editor Jessica Wilkinson has put together a shin-dig at The Alderman on Lygon Street in Brunswick East.

I'll be reading some work with Zoe Dzunko, Michael Farrell, Ann Vickery, Mark Prendergast and Patrick Jones.

Feel free to swing by for some works and tunes at 6.30pm tonight!

(You can grab copies of Rabbit from Readings, Collected Works and Melbourne University Bookstore, I'm told.)

Birthday

2011-09-15T16:50:00.001+11:00

It was the first time you had smiled that way,

the lines on your face deep and whole, but no one really noticed.

It was the candles on the cake that had made the twinkle in your eye.

I can see that now.

Between happy birthday and she’s a good fellow,

we were eager for ice-cream cake and trifle.

Caught in the moment, we passed you gifts

that didn’t really matter.

When they raised you up on their shoulders,

high and proud, your brothers’ arms

did not let you down

until the men were told they must.

The earth took you whole.

It wasn’t fair, it was said,

that you were dressed in the frock your mother preferred

when you were always one for pants and casual attire.

It wasn’t fair, it was said,

that a girl should find herself in the ground so soon.

But between mouthfuls of cake,

with the wax of twenty eight candles spilled on your mother’s best cloth,

I saw the smile that I mistook for something

other than relief.

(Image: Gregory Holm)
(It is 'Are you ok day' today, preventing suicide.)

Africa: My Darling Patricia

2011-04-28T16:40:00.000+11:00

Africa lays a slice of Australian Suburbia bare like a gutted carcass amid a cloud of beautiful dreams. Here is company that finally does what many have failed to do. My Darling Patricia holds a mirror up to Australians in a most sublime and enigmatic way so we might see the grit and love in our own backyards.

Arts House Meat Market, Melbourne
Wed 27 - Sat 30 April.
www.artshouse.com.au

Collisons and bumps: happy anniversary

2011-02-17T11:02:00.002+11:00

Life is full of collisions.

Sometimes they're wrecks — the kind that make for massive change and re-evaluation, the kind that have you tend to wounds and find wisdom in the once rough-and-pink now smooth-and-white scars that are left behind. Reminders of coming full circle. Learning something more.

Sometimes they're bumps —like the kind that might happen in the street, right place, right time. They resonate without the markings on skin. They come more as nudges, reminders to buck up and flash some teeth rather than bare them.

Tema came as a bump after a wreck a year ago.

I collided with her work online. I tend to sift through images like a beach bum with a metal detector looking for gold and I found this image and it sparked words. Tema then stumbled upon Jemima, this here place with her work nestled in nicely, and then wrote to me from 10000 miles away.

Over the past year we've exchanged photos and more words. In her work I've found a little gold in times when I felt I simply wouldn't. We've mused life, love, words and photography never finding firm outcomes or answers but somehow we've continued to be small bumps for each other when needed.

So Ms Tema Stauffer, happy pen-pal anniversary. I'm looking forward to a New York 'cuppa' (she now knows what that means), meeting you, and a Brooklyn summer ...

Quickstep

2011-01-21T13:45:00.002+11:00

There is the toothbrush she used once that you bought for her,

which will probably go to waste

There are the times she broke you, almost, that led here, to this,
that had the line draw itself — a quick-start marker for something that now, you figure, seems as good a time as any for

There are the Polariods tacked to your fridge that one by one you will remove. And the lumps of tack, spaced four inches apart,

still clinging to the mirror of your dresser

There is that rush coursing though your veins

that makes it feel better now you're running down the track to somewhere you're not sure of, but hoped for, with her

Now's as good a time as any, you say

There was the slow burn to the quick: her blood-shot eyes and unsure smile just enough to drink up, then find your frame against hers —

mirrors in the moments you each allowed the sink of thick lips to dream for the night

There were the times that went unmentioned —

mornings where she noticed the pale blue vessels by your eyes as you slept, the faint mole by your lip. And never said a thing

There is her head over a bucket, heart thumping — the soft veins in her temples rushing, the 'huh-huh' sharp breaths in her crying, because she said her heart wasn't built for running, but pace she prayed she could do

There is something new, more fresh than stale words and broken breath, that puts a glint in your eye, a thin flush through your arteries — it dulls the whispers as your heart dances the quick-step

There is that careening feeling now that gives just enough hope to keep you running — tack marks in a heart dancing fast might heal,
if you just keep those eyes fixed ahead, and run

(Image: Tema Stauffer)

These Gods for Black Rider

2011-01-14T11:02:00.000+11:00

Allison Browning - these gods from The Black Rider on Vimeo.

Fuel for Black Rider

2011-01-11T11:00:00.000+11:00

Allison Browning - Fuel from The Black Rider on Vimeo.

Mister Jeremy Balius from Black Rider Press asked me to do a couple of recordings including Fuel, which was recently published in Best Australian Poems 2010. So here is my voice reading some words that together are called Fuel.

Tending Roses: Myrtle Jean and Agnes May

2010-12-26T14:07:00.001+11:00

Agnes May and Myrtle Jean are blooming now. Three years ago they were bought as stumpy little excuses for rose bushes and named after my deceased grandmothers. They, the roses, not my grandmothers, were each no more than a foot high, had a root structure, a few thorns and not much more.

The thorny version of grandma Myrtle Jean is mauve, the colour of Myrtle Jean's hair. My father would call my grandmother Myrtle the Turtle. There was the Sunday drives with Mum in passenger seat and my sister and I in back where Myrtle Jean would squeeze in and watch out the window with us as the world passed by.

We'd head off from home to collect her in the car for those drives, park beside her unit—the humble two bedroom place that she was so proud of, with perfectly prunes roses, hanging baskets and a small mown lawn. Mum would run in to get her. "Mur-tle the Tur-tle," Dad would goad us in a funny voice that sounded part swami, part cartoon animal. And we'd piss ourselves in the back seat, thin tanned limbs wound in seat belts waiting for Myrtle the Turtle to huddle in, ready to take a drive by the ocean, visit a few play grounds and get soft serve ice cream from the Mr Whippy van.

Agnes May, the rose, not the woman, was meant to be red. In life the woman kept dusty plastic plants around her home and collected silver charms and hotel soaps from around the world. Agnes May was five foot nothing, rotund and flamboyant with crimson nails, leopard print shoes and costume jewelery (that now finds its way onto my fingers and wrists).

A year an a half ago my grandmother, Agnes May, made her presence known in a meditation — there she was softer than she had been in life and she handed me a light-yellow coloured rose.

Sure enough when Agnes May The Rose bloomed she was yellow. True to the woman's nature, that bush defied its tag, still attached, wound around a branch—a picture of a flourishing bush with crimson coloured blossoms never to be.

It's taken years for the ladies to blossom. Some rather crappy soil hasn't helped and my half hearted attempts to placate it with fertiliser might have assisted a little.

There was the pruning I did, learned from my father when I was younger. I watched him tend his roses out the front that were the envy of our neighbours on the cul-de-sac lined with brown brick houses. Watching him, I learned to trim off the unneeded bits, strengthen the core, leave room for the little nubs to grow into new branches.

I have Agnes May's flamboyant rings gathered in my dresser drawer. Myrtle Jean's crochet needles sit in a small simple tin, decorated with images of China men, which she might have bought on that trip to Singapore she saved so hard for.

Agnes May had clutched her heart in the next room as my sister and I sat by the coffee table with crayons making Get Well Cards that we never got to hand her. We looked up from our drawing and watched as my father closed the sliding doors.

Myrtle Jean passed away smelling of Cashmere Bouquet powder, remembering only her youth, thinking me the cleaning lady.

Yet somehow in my poor excuse for a garden these women bloom, making their presence known. I am now an age almost half theirs when they left this world, old enough to know better. Old enough now to hear the lessons grandmothers teach little ones. Old enough to understand that getting ones hands in the dirt provides good grounding, pruning makes one stronger, labels need not matter and poor soil is no excuse for a lack of growth.

Mail

2010-11-15T11:08:00.001+11:00

Passenger call

2010-11-07T19:15:00.010+11:00

There is hope these days, Samuel, he had said.

When he had faded

they raised the covers

and he floated to the moon.

(Images: Jemima is not my name)

two little...

2010-11-04T10:50:00.001+11:00

Somewhere

there is home.

When she burrows into thought

you are surrounded by a white picket fence.

(That the wolf will blow down.)

(Image: Tema Stauffer)

St Agnes, dare I sleep?

2010-10-25T03:54:00.004+11:00

Saint Agnes, amber on my tongue,
you in me, you keep me young.

In this skirmish silence pray that early hours be kept at bay.

Caveat, fur, be near
for only those who know
do hear.

(Image: Jemima is not my name)

Jacuzzi dreams

2010-10-22T22:29:00.003+11:00

We make tidal waves

to fit jacuzzi dreams

and we drown

not knowing

the floor is so close beneath us.

(Image: Tanith Harley)

lights

2010-10-20T22:42:00.003+11:00

There are times you and I are home

sitting on a porch in silence

knowing more

curing words on flaming red hearts

longing for green lights

(Image: Jemima is not my name)

Polar

2010-09-17T10:00:00.019+11:00

[for birthday Marita, ice lady/little polar bear]

mirrored moments (with no reflection)

this frost wont bite

you and I, we can’t be here anymore

for this scandalous affair

and our love grows hot

(Image: Jemima is not my name)

There are those parts

2010-09-15T13:32:00.002+11:00

we leave behind

(Image: Jemima is not my name)

A Little Exposed: Joel Magarey

2010-09-09T10:50:00.018+11:00

Joel Magarey is a man who takes the bull by the horns in all respects. But we’ll get to that in just a moment.

The first time I meet Magarey it’s at an Emerging Writers Festival (EWF) artists’ event. We’ve been corresponding via email about the panel he’s participating in for the festival (that I’m facilitating) and he’s sent me bundles of his work as requested, promptly and enthusiastically. In person he’s the same: there is not a fleck of pretention as he chats about the festival and Exposure, his first book—a love story come a travel adventure detailing his journey through obsessive compulsive disorder. He admits he’s nervous and is ‘talking shit’ because of it.

Later he’s on the bull. Literally. We are at a bar with other festival participants. In the cavernous venue-come-warehouse there is a mechanical bull and Magarey heads straight for it. He’s a stayer. He manages to hold out a whole lot longer than the guy before him as the thing thrashes him about and, once thrown, he emerges from the plastic padded ring dishevelled and laughing. This is a man who doesn’t take himself seriously.

But his work is another story. Magarey’s writing has been widely published—name a literary journal and his work will have been there, but he wouldn’t tell you that. Magarey is a self-confessed perfectionist. Perhaps this is why it took him some ten years to write Exposure “which is a horrifying amount of time,” he muses. He reckons he feels a bit like a frog, one that “failed to jump out of the pot of water being slowly brought to the boil” but Magarey clearly states that he’s proud of the degree of commitment it reflects, “even if it’s a bit masochistic or something.”

Exposure is an unusual fusion: partly travel memoir, partly love story and partly ride through mental illness. It deals with some dicey emotional territory, which is the reason for our collaboration on the EWF panel, ‘Going to a Dark Place’. Exposure is a raw and honest account of Magarey during the 80s and 90s, both alone and with his girlfriend. He details both painful and funny episodes of his obsessive-compulsive disorder, which colours much of his left-of-centre travel experiences in some of the world’s most remote locations.

He describes divulging such personal anecdotes as frightening, “It made me feel very vulnerable. The concept of Exposure was to carry readers through not just a quixotic, not just an intimate, but – this was the most difficult part – an at-times-comfortingly revealing life story. So there were layers and layers of exposure, each level harder to reveal. Even the relatively easier layers were still hard. Stuff like how, not long before I left on my trip, I’d tried so insistently to help a policeman park his car that he ended up arresting me. Or, how up until the age of 12 I’d pretty much thought I was Jesus.

“That stuff was embarrassing enough, yet it’s much harder, for instance, to confess publicly to having repeatedly hurt someone you love – someone your readers hopefully love by now too, or to describe being compelled to perform mentally disturbed acts in exotic parts of the world you’re supposed to be having an enjoyable holiday in.”

It was the uniqueness of his story that piqued the interest of Wakefield Press. Those who find themselves with a fully-fledged manuscript after years of toil then face the daunting prospect of shopping about the finished project. Magarey went at it relatively unfazed. “I got very positive responses from publishers from the start, but it was still a long and difficult process securing one.”

Three out of the eight publishers he approached were very interested; one offering some invaluable feedback for a re-draft but in the end none offered a contract. Magarey set to reworking the manuscript with a view to resubmit, but “by this time I’d been working on the book for seven years, and it was slowly killing me”.

Luckily, not long after, Magarey was selected to go literary speed-dating at the 2007 Emerging Writers Festival. “When I finished pitching to Michael Bollen, Wakefield Press’s co-director, he said four magical words: ‘I could sell that’. And we’ve been seeing each other ever since.” Magarey warns me that I should make it clear that he’s joking now, that Bollen and he are not romantically involved.

When he realised the book was actually going to be published Magarey went through an agonising and uncertain period as he re-examined the vulnerable position he was potentially placing others in alongside himself. “I had to re-examine all the disclosures in Exposure – which is a very revealing memoir – that related to other people and could carry possibilities of hurting or affecting them, all of which had become somewhat magnified for me as possibilities in what was a horribly anxious time.” Magarey believes this part of the process was as necessary as it was painful. He made the changes he felt were important and then became more confident about the limits he’d set and the risks he was taking.

It was the affirmation, warmth and enthusiasm that came unexpectedly after publication that made the hair pulling and re-writing worth it, he reckons, the more personal reactions being the most rewarding. “People’s responses have been so generous, fascinating, imaginative and empathetic – I almost want to use the word ‘loving’. They’ve also been extremely revealing, often involving intimate personal disclosures – in a kind of reciprocation of the book’s own disclosures. It’s been a privilege to be invested with that trust, and I’ve had a lovely sense of feeling more connected or linked into humanity in general as a result, of bridging the gulf of difference and oddity. It’s the opposite of what I feared.”

So what’s next for Magarey? “An idea for another book is clamouring for attention,” he says, “but I’m forcing myself to have a proper break and a good think about whether writing another one will do me in or not. This one took a great deal out of me, and I’m a bit worried I’m like a woman after labour – forgetting the pain of the first labour too fast, succumbing to some inbuilt psychobiological deceit.”

Bull and horns, I suspect. It’s only a matter of time.

(First image: Shane Curry)

You asked me where I was going

2010-09-09T01:26:00.000+11:00

and I said, 'the snow'.

(Image: Amy Stein)

Theatre Review: Pin Drop

2010-08-28T21:33:00.000+11:00

We keep our doors locked most of the time. We have Neighbourhood Watch and the television is riddled with reality police shows and crime dramas. Fear is imbedded in our lives subtly and for many who have been in a dire situation, less so. In Pin Drop Tamara Saulwick explores into the idea of fear and physical threat.

Pin Drop is not about violence or horrifying situations as such, but more about the mind and body responses to the idea of threat regardless of circumstances. What would you do in a situation of home invasion? How do deal with walking alone at night? Being followed down a street would you freeze up or get angry?

Pin Drop shares the voices of eleven women. Saulwick interviewed people ranging in age, from six to ninety-two, about their experiences and feelings, and then whittled the recorded material down to a collection of personal stories that overlap in some ways. In shuffling and manipulating the audio material, taking on the voice and mannerisms of her subjects, Saulwick captures the humour and terror in the narratives using the relationship between movement and sound to create an overarching score of unease.

A woman describes her intricate get away plan if someone were to enter the house. Another has slept with earplugs in only to wake with a man desperately trying to get into her room from the balcony through the glass sliding door. Another woman describes her mighty adrenaline response to a home invasion.

The carefully chosen anecdotes lull the audience into a false sense of security at times: some are funny, but many of them are plain frightening. Saulwick transforms vocally and physically, finding an effortless strength throughout. Her performance is grounded and her presence, impressive. Vocally she fades in and out of the original interview recordings and Peter Knight’s sound design is as much a presence onstage as Saulwick. Together she and Knight make a sort of magic that immerses all the senses. Ben Cobham’s lighting design is flawless, working to create visual fragments. The result: a further heightening of the senses.

Some of the sound is created live: Saulwick uses everyday objects—sticky tape, a lock, scissors, a zipper. She toys with them close to a microphone so every nuance is captured, sharp and vivid, like the heightened sense of hearing one might experience when afraid in the dark. She wears ear buds to deal with audio cues and there is a clever moment where she removes them and runs them over a microphone. We hear parts of another woman’s story as though the woman’s voice might be the one in our heads.

Pin Drop creates waves of suspense and intrigue. And at the end you’re left still on edge, wanting to know what happened to the woman in the strip joint in Belgium, and did they nab the man in the other lady’s cupboard? There is no sense of closure — that’s not the point. The stories have been clipped short, the endings might have been happy but they’re insignificant here. It’s the moments of threat, real or imagined, and the feeling around them that is Saulwick’s focus and she maintains it. For this, Pin Drop packs a visceral punch and leaves behind echoes: the audience telling their own stories in the foyer later.

What: Pin Drop

Creator/Performer: Tamara Saulwick

Playing at: Arsthouse, North Melbourne Town Hall. 25 – 29 August 2010.

From my heart in a picture

2010-08-18T14:55:00.002+11:00

(Image: Jemima is not my name)

Before Shooting Season

2010-06-25T11:12:00.006+11:00

You wera bit soft. We all knew, but no’ne eva said. An’ in those few days before shootin’ season you were laughin’ again and you were ‘right and she worried less. Always made ya eat twice your size every night, more when she was happy. Workin’ boys, she said. You boys gotta eat. She made sweets then, custard and pie and I’d wolf it down and dig in for seconds. Get it intaya, he’d say. You’d be sittin’ there tryin’ ta shovel it onta to my plate when he wasn’t looking, when she’d be at the sink an couldn’t see. Never wanted to hurt ‘er feelin’s. He was hard on ya, always was so it wasn’t different then.

I rememba there was still the nip of cold in the air but it didn’t stop us kicking a bit after tea, him watchin' out the window. Ya drop punt was better’n mine and he hated ya for it. Shouldda been me, the burly one he said. But skill was nuthin’ if ya couldn’t hold it inna brawl, he reckoned. Get ya face packed in, he said, if they put ya on the field.

Ya couldn’t shoot a roo save yaself, he said, even if it was bout ta kick ya in the guts. The spot lights on the front of the truck had the tray dark those nights, us sittin’ in the back there with the gear in the season. Couldn’t see ya face but I knew ya wouldn’t look out. You’d hear the shots and he’d be pissed at ya for sittin’ there flinchin’. He showed you how to aim, watched ya jolt right back as the shotty kicked back on ya shoulda. Nah. He made ya come along every time, though he said your shot was shit. Wasn’t that night though. Not that one. Not the one we found ya.

(Image: Karl Edwin Scullin)

Charity: this time I'm giving it (an audio-video and lecture-rant)

2010-06-22T16:32:00.008+11:00

They used to like the crowds—more of us to catch—be it the busy suburban mall or the crowded streets of the CBD, those places used to keep them happy. Now I head to my little corner supermarket and they're set up, quite comfy, with their fold out tables and chairs (though they rarely sit—they must be ready, muscles coiled, to pounce). Seems they've twigged that it's easier to get good folk talking when they're not in a visible rush—those excuses, "I'm in a real hurry", don't really cut the mustard when you're strolling into the corner shop in your ugg boots...

The humble charity isn't so humble any more. Gone are the nannas and pops or school kids who might be volunteering to razz up a little coinage for the Red Cross. Now they've bought in the big guns, the average British backpacker, desperate for the money to pay for a Wicked Van or cheap Combi, is a scary breed. They have made the good old fashioned charity a thing we near despise unfortunately.

Don't get me wrong: I support two animal charities with regularity. I thought that made me a sort of decent person, but my explaining this in response to having forms thrust into my belly as I totter out of the corner shop, bleary eyed in the morning, just makes me fairer game. So as they've gotten more aggressive, rather rude and very uncharitable, I've gotten wiser.

"That's a bright scarf," one demands, rather than compliments. "Thanks," I say. I keep walking. I am not tempted by their cat calls. I now know that the abrupt "Excuse me, quick question..." does not guarantee it being an intelligent one and that "just a minute of your time" is never sixty seconds.

You don't really even need to be out on the street either: it's the same at home. Once upon a time I used to know it was Mum on the other end of the phone line (everyone else calls the mobile). Maybe I'd expect a sales call around dinner time once a week but not any more—they're trying to catch me out any old time and with more regularity. I suspect they think that if they call mid-afternoon I won't know its them—I'll be in between emails and I might even just appreciate their pitch, a diversion from my pottering or 'work' as I prefer to call it.

I had whinged about all of this for long enough. While I still need to fine tune my gruff 'No' at street level (I'm nice by nature) I suspected that I could politely educate the tele-workers with a quick lesson (no one likes long winded message) and so my new answering machine message was recorded.

I never expected a response to my education program but I arrived home on day two to find the following....

YourMic Home (Please note my answering machine never delivers the correct date or time. The tele-worker left his message for me on a Monday afternoon)
(First Image: D. Mark Andrews)

Fuel

2010-06-16T15:01:00.006+11:00

You asked to stop there for a can of coke, you needed to piss and the tank was empty so I pulled in. I stood by the bowser pumping gas to fuel dreams set on fire years before and you said to the attendant that you'd been short changed.

If only you knew the truth in that.

The tyres were near-bald and paint job robbed by rust and we were there ten metres apart, sliding doors between us and I was standing watching your mouth move.

You were telling the attendant that there were not enough coins—the change was wrong—and you were pleading with your eyes with one hand in your front pocket looking casual and honest.

And you looked at me through the glass and back at him and you picked at lint from your stained pull over.

I watched your mouth.

You were hoping like fuck that he'd give you that two dollar coin so you could walk through those sliding doors, flip that piece, lay it on the dash, shove your feet up and feel just a little richer for all those years we'd spent.

(Image: Tema Stauffer)

Gone

2010-05-26T11:00:00.005+11:00

I will be reading this tonight at the Black Rider Press event at Willow Bar. It's a bit of a work in progress but what's life without a little risk? Come listen and share a drink...

The day he left, when you crumpled,

there was the phone call I sat at the wheel of my car on the other side of the city and she told me to ‘just get here quick’

He planned it.

He sold the boat that sat in the shed you never went into much

packed it all away

replaced the tough ropes the rats had eaten into and sold it to a old man who wanted to fish on weekends.

I stood there in his cavernous shed, my feet on the dusty concrete and looked at the empty space,

your hatchet marks etched into the bolted wooden cabinet he’d made where he stored his best wine— helpless swings some late night when the bottle-o must have been closed.

When it all got too much.

You couldn’t get past the lock

so you left your desperation marked into that wood:

ragged jabs, criss-crossing and splintered bits on the floor.

I drove fast down the Mitchell Freeway

found her by your bed,

the lace curtains still, the air stale and you curled on your side.

You had that freshly ironed sheet, dotted with small flowers, pulled up to your face, quality Manchester,

your hands clenched round the neat folded lip of it

and you in a heap in your stained night-gown.

She said they gave you a sedative

and I hovered

I hovered

and I didn’t know what to do

You were so busted

and red and full with it

and I had no wisdom,

I was full of nothing—

full of nothing for you.

Left years before

watched you run down the drive telling me I couldn’t take the old dressing table,

the one you bought when I was small.

And I took it anyway,

the swinging handles, child size, rocking back and forth as I dragged it;

its reflection mocking you as I lugged it away.

And I loaded it on a trailer headed for home

the home of a man that I didn’t love—

it was the first train out of town.

First train out of town—

I didn’t know that then.

You’re in some blood-flecked night dress—

you’ve been scratching at yourself.

Your hair flat

escaped the morning curling tongs and

she and I look at each other

a small mass to a lost lamb—

bloated and thick with the blow.

He’s in some motel room half way between your place and mine in the suburb he grew up in. He’s Staring at a blank screen, wondering how he’ll start from scratch. Wondering about the photos he left behind. The ones of us as kids. He’s wondering if he should have packed a towel or something. but they they have those here right? He’s wondering how he’ll explain to me and her why he didn’t warn us. Empty for knowing we’re stood there in that suburb that he stayed in for too long.

You lay on the bed like some saturated sponge,

convincing yourself this can’t be—

that there’s still hope for the life you made

with two girls and good crockery.

You’re hoping that he’ll be back to prune the roses,

hoping that just another sip will make it pass:

fade it out, turn the volume down for a bit.

And it does. (It does.)

Your dreams are richer

the mornings easier

the solitude almost bearable

but he’s still gone.

(Image: Todd Hido)

Waterproof: interview with director Marita Fox

2010-05-19T11:00:00.003+11:00

After reviewing Waterproof recently, an intriguing piece of theatre that was shown at the Melbourne City Baths, I spoke with director Marita Fox about what went into the work and what she's up to next...

YourMic Home

Short attention spans

2010-05-13T16:37:00.003+11:00

So you like your literature and you don't mind being read to out loud. It sort of reminds you of being a kid but then these days you often have hard liquor in your hand.

Liquor. Yeah, you notice you tend to drink more these days at those bloody events. The chinking ice and the drink, well the several, you reason, sustain you—writers seem to figure that a three minute limit actually means ten.

You know what, to be honest you've stopped going to these things altogether. Readings nights. Yeah. You've stopped going. The booze is cheaper at home and at least you know if the show on the telly is shit then in another two minutes there'll be a commercial break to pour another. Yeah another. It's a reliable night.

But you heard whispers about 'short attention spans' and something about whiskey and you figured it has your name written all over over it. Written, yeah, writing. Thirty readers sounds a bit rich, but you figure what the fuck? You hear that they're only reading for sixty seconds each. You can deal with that you reckon. You're not picking up women in your lounge room anyhow are you now? Women. Yeah.

So this 'Short Attention Span' thing, it's a fund raiser but you don't care. You heard those literary chicks are easy so long as you drop Bukowski into the conversation and while the blokes can prattle on a bit they appreciate a stiff drink, that's what matters. Good Liquor. Hmmm. That Whiskey girl—you heard about her. She seems to get a whole lot of girls in one place and that can't be half bad.

So fuck it. Saturday you'll go. It's an early start. Seven yeah. You can always head to that strip joint all those well dressed hipster-boys were banging on about. You could go there after. And you figure that if Brunswick Street Gallery has kebab joint either side of the place it can't be half bad.

A penchant for theatre and the perverse (IRAA:part 2; The Persistance of Dreams)

2010-05-08T11:00:00.004+11:00

Yesterday's post shed a bit of background on theatre company IRAA's work, a company I've watched for some years now—the why of which I have explained in the said post.

This week I wrote a short review for The Enthusiast about their recent work The Persistence of Dreams: The Sandman. With limited words and a lot to say I felt compelled to plonk a more extensive critique in this quaint space that refers to their previous works as explained in 'part one'. Enjoy...

IRAA's The Persistence of Dreams: The Sandman

“I am an actor and I play myself,” Roberta Bosetti tells us. She has told audiences the same thing in many shows and The Persistence of Dreams does not stray far from the IRAA formula. There is always a mention slipped in there somewhere; a warning of sorts that we’ll not be quite sure of what’s real and what’s theatre. When is Roberta the actor confessing and when is Roberta herself sharing secrets and stories? It’s this blurring of lines that has become a constant in IRAA’s work, the company being composted of Bosetti and her husband Renato Cuocolo.

‘What is your greatest fear?” you’re asked soon after the show begins. In Private Eye your might have been questioned about your fantasies and desires (you will have been watched without at first realising). In The Diary Project (2004) and The Secret Room (first performed in 2000) your attention would have been drawn to memory and confession. Both these things feature in The Persistence of Dreams but this time the tables are turned. Rather than be invited into the couple’s personal living space they come and invade yours.

We wait, an audience of ten, for 9pm. There is a knock on the door and the ‘couple’ enters, though this time we see their relationship change—tonight they play brother and sister. “Is this the house?” Cuocolo asks her, “Is this the house you dreamt of?” She is not sure and she wants to be shown through my home.

The evening will unfold in the way a seasoned IRAA audience member might expect though The Persistence of Dreams does not push as hard for the same level of disconsertion and discomfort that their previous shows have incited. Bound and blindfolded you’ll be privy to arguments but will still feel relatively safe. There will talk of home invasion and robbery. Cuocolo will mention Sharon Tate. “What do you expect when you invite strangers into your home?” he asks then he wonders out loud if I have eggs in the fridge. I tell him I do and he’s pleased. This reference is made clearer as he further quotes the film Funny Games (about a sadistic home invasion).

Cuocolo isn’t usually a performer in the IRAA experience. This time he is, but soon enough the focus of the show is on Bosetti. After the opening preamble she moves into a monologue about memory and shares stories from her childhood. She relays

E T A Hoffman's short story The Sandman as her mother told it to her as a child. The Sandman is a dark character that would throw sand into the eyes of children who would not go to bed. The sand would make their eyeballs pop out and he would feed the eyeballs to his own children. This character becomes a symbol of Bosetti’s greatest fear, which we later learn has been realised.

Bosetti describes her and her brother’s fear of The Sandman. The stories she tells focus on bedtime and something far darker is being alluded to but is always left unsaid. She often trails off leaving sentences unfinished. This has not always been the case in IRAA’s work where themes of loss and violation are described graphically and creep up frequently: The Persistence of Dreams is gentler on its audience than previous shows have been. Allusions to darker themes are certainly present in what is not said and there is a sense that something sinister has happened in Bosetti’s youth but it’s nearly lost in the mix.

Bosetti maintains a degree of tension in the room as she threatens to leave many times over (and I find myself fearful that she will). Cuocolo who rarely features as a performer in the shows keeps her in check and while playing her brother in this story he still maintains his usual role of director. At one point he accuses her of veering away from the script. She is just reciting something from Emily Dickinson, she explains. She is reprimanded; the script is presented to her and she resumes. In The Secret Room this device was necessary in order to let the audience off the hook a little. Bosetti’s confessions were raw, real and brutal. And so the script was referred to, shown to the audience—a way of saying ‘It’s ok it’s not real’, although with IRAA chances are that much of what you’re hearing has been drawn from their personal lives.

There are some big jumps for the audience to make during the hour-long performance in order to keep up. The show moves from an argument about the merit of fruit-and-nut-chocolate into Cuocolo dispensing a block of the stuff communion style. We are then quickly shifted into a dense monologue delivered by Bosetti where she removes her shirt and later, with blindfolds removed, we find her this way. Naked, we are told, you have only your fears and memories to carry.

Is one’s own home safe? Even if no one is there to cause threat we are still haunted by our own fears. The Persistence of Dreams tacks references, moments and stories together with ragged thread to pose a plethora of questions without any comfort of resolve or answers.

Once the duo had left, rigorous discussion began: this is one part of the IRAA experience that’s not part of the performance as such but always seems to be present—an epilogue of sorts, for the audience are performers in the work after all. The response was mixed: many confessed they’d tuned out at points where the feeling of risk was lulled; there was a desire to be more scared, to feel that something perverse or dangerous was about to happen. ‘What do you expect when you invite strangers into your home?’ we had been asked. ‘What is your greatest fear?’ Long into the evening we were still seated, among ourselves, searching for these answers.

A penchant for theatre and the perverse (IRAA:part 1)

2010-05-07T12:06:00.004+11:00

Over the years now I’ve seen several of theatre company IRAA’s* shows. (The company is composted of husband and wife Robert Bosetti and Renato Cuocolo.) Having always had a fascination with risk and implication of oneself in my own work, in blurring lines and in confession, their work seems to resonate in a perverse yet familiar way. Watching this couple play with the uncanny and the uncomfortable as though it were natural has always left me awed and stumped at the same time. The work is drawn from their personal lives but as an audience member you’re never sure of what is real or how much of their own lives is steeped in what you’re witness to. This week I had a taste of what I relish closer to home, well actually in my home. Their latest show The Persistence of Dreams: The Sandman is performed at your house.

But more about that later…

Back in 2004, in Perth, I was a dinner guest for The Secret Room. Between seven and twelve guests/audience arrive for a meal at the couple’s home. Visitors are greeted and are seated, dinner is served and group conversation begins but not until after Bosetti has quietly muttered, “You will hear what you usually hear, you will see no play, there will be no playing here tonight”.

In dinner conversation, Bosetti, who ‘plays’ herself, tells stories from her childhood. There is a point in the performance where she dumps a wad of paper onto the table mid-way through a dense monologue that depicts explicit sexual abuse. Bosetti has just given graphic detail about the past and now she casually slaps the paper down and states, “it’s all there in the script”. We're left confused. Unsure if this is theatre. But we were warned, “there will be no playing”.

Later in 2004, I spoke with the couple after seeing The Diary Project. The show was situated in the Melbourne Arts Centre where they had set up home for two weeks. For the fortnight they were watched by audience members through windows in their makeshift abode (situated in the centre’s gallery space). Bosetti, at scheduled intervals, would read from her diary.

In one diary reading Bosetti lays on the bed in the middle of the gallery-come-residence as she recounts the beginning of a pregnancy, one that was never to come full-term. She explains that on this day she had a curette to remove the child “whose heart stopped beating”. She stands, clearly emotional, and walks to the back of the room to a dressing table where she undoes the front of her dress. She draws a circle in red lipstick onto her flat belly and looks at herself in the full-length mirror. She cries visibly.

The audience leaves soon after ushered out by Cuocolo who then moves to comfort her. I am still standing there—due to speak with them about the work. It is clear that this is not scripted. This is not part of the performance. But then which parts are? This is always the question. And I don’t believe they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Standing there in the gallery space I became a performer of sorts—being watched through the windows I am in limbo, neither audience now nor performer, but both. Being offered wine and a seat in their ‘home’ I begin to tune out to the voyeurs peering in.

“We had to stop a performance the other night, I was too emotional,” Bosetti explains. And I ask how she manages to get through the intensity of this work she chooses. She says simply, “I just do.”

Part two, a review of IRAA’s recent work, The Persistence of Dreams: The Sandman, tomorrow.

*Institute of Research for the Art of the Actor

Road

2010-04-27T10:47:00.002+11:00

We sit like foxes,
trophies for the road side,
baking in the warmth of
the asphalt.

(Image: Garry Winogrand)

Things I remember

2010-04-13T11:08:00.001+11:00

The clavicles of your chest,

the way they protruded.

The pause you made

before you spoke.

(And I never knew if it was nerves or deep thought.)

A black cardigan

half fingers protruding from long sleeves.

A grasp.

You didn’t laugh hard

and I liked you even though

your thoughts seemed elsewhere.

And while I was planning tickets,

you were planning to buy

a Russian wrist watch

that I never heard tick.

(Published in dot dot dash, Autumn 2010 edition)

(Image: Philip-Lorca diCorcia)

Miscellaneous Voices launch

2010-04-12T19:01:00.002+11:00

Karen Andrews has produced a beautiful contradiction: A book of blog entries. While we're in transition, while there is a mild distaste in the literary world for the intangible, this book (a blook?) sort of needed to happen.

Miscellaneous Voices makes no statements but politely shows that literature, the real proper and good stuff, can be found on the inter-web too.

The launch of Miscellaneous Voices is this Wednesday, 6pm sharp, at Readings bookshop in Carlton. I am chuffed to be reading there alongside Stu Hatton, Solid Gold Creativity, Alec Patric, Amanda Scotney, Carole Poustie, Tim Train and Maxine Clarke.

Come along let us read you stories, share a drink, and show your support for us bloggers!

The F words and Jana Wendt

2010-04-03T20:24:00.003+11:00

(for Jo)

I was reading the A2 section of The Age today, a toasted hot cross bun in one hand and coffee in the other and the words on Jana Wendt in front of me. But this isn't about Jana, just a word she said in an interview. Just one word, a response to a two word question.

"'Greatest fear?'

'Forgetting'"

Now I suspect Jana might have been referring to forgetting things that make warm and fuzzy imprints on our lives, that fear of forgetting the moments that have warmed the cockles of our hearts. That might have been a more upbeat topic for a blog. But Jana is a serious kind of woman and she got me to thinking about the other things we're afraid of forgetting. I began thinking of the moments that create imprints that drive change in our lives, those events or moments that are not so warm and fuzzy; those things that leave the heart hurt, a little scathed. Those things that we are afraid to forget. And I wondered why we are so scared to forget ...

So I thought about that over my hot cross bun.

Later in the day my friend Jo, who has lost both her father and mother in the last year, spoke about grief: the way we hold on to the ache, fan its flame when it grows dull to keep it present. That if we let go of the pain the presence of the person, the moments, might go with it, fade and cease to be entirely.

And so we cling tight as the tide rises.

I thought of the moments that change us. The things that elate and hurt and shift the core of who we are, things that ricochet the body, life, into another path. I thought of how many times I've re-branded myself with a memory. Sometimes a reminder not to go there again. The recollections, small and constant punishments. Sometimes to keep the knots in place—the links to moments, moments that no longer serve.

I wondered how many times we drive the nail in, resuscitate that which can no longer draw breath, raise the dead, without realising it fully, until we ourselves are stifled in breath.

We remind ourselves.

Often, comforted by a cold presence in a room vacated long ago, we camp with fragments, worn fibres, shreds of memory as we reassemble the past, worn and yellowed, anticipating a present or a future without ghosts as we hold tight.

Jo's estranged father was an ex-heroin-addict, an alcoholic, an artist. Tragically brilliant. She said she grieved her dad in the way he lived his life, intensely, held onto his memory firmly and squeezed every drop from the pain. 'Sometimes it's like we're swimming with a weight and we hold onto it knowing we might drown but we won't let it go,' she said.

Time passes. While we might hold tight maybe we choose do so the next time for less time, with less fear of the forgetting. (A knowing.) (Maybe.)

'I'm grieving my mum now in the way she lived her life,' she said today, Slowly letting out, letting go of the memory of that last day. 'It's healthy.'

Stories from your day job...

2010-03-23T18:54:00.004+11:00

There are days when bread and butter is the order of the day. Where the writing is not so creative and at a desk in a mildly glib room you tend to the things that bring in the fun tickets. But there is music that makes using words like 'painful eruptions' and addressing someone on a forum as 'Princess' far more tolerable.

This little tune has has my office chair swerving from side to side today as I contemplated acneic cysts and such, dishing out advice of sorts.

So listening to this and feeling a little inspired, I wondered about all the awesome photographers whose images have made my words better, and the writers I've mentioned and envied, what their day jobs are... What music gets them by and through and I wonder and how many stories we could all tell involving things like rubber gloves, kitchens and chinking glasses and computer screens and telephone calls and the funny things that happen and revolve around 'how may I help you?'; those things that happen in a day sandwiched by writing or artistic endeavour. Hmmm, what we could tell each other over a glass of red and some background music after a day of it all ...

I'm filling your glass now, tell me your stories... I might write you something.

(Image: Venturi Scott)

Hush

2010-03-19T11:15:00.001+11:00

Hush you angel, you're told.

And you can't,

you don't.

Because you've never understood how to quieten,
there is something growling within you that you like to feed,

and you can't hear the sound of how for your own sotto voice.

(Image D. Mark Andrews)

Carrot cake on Cardigan Street (a slice of my day)

2010-03-17T16:57:00.004+11:00

Her hair is flame red, thrown into a careless and messy bun. In between head and toe are liquorish legs and pale white skin. She wears a white cap-sleeved tshirt, if it were not for the black bra beneath she would be almost doll like. Her skirt is candy-colour striped: blue and yellow. Her shoes are red and her feet are placed on the ground not far from his underneath the small glass top table on which he leans. His peach coloured t-shirt hangs carelessly over his modest frame, denim shorts lay level with his knees but short of his bottom which, in deep blue underpants, rests upon the wooden café seat. They wear white sunglasses to ward off the bright.

A jackhammer sounds as she fingers the clean ash tray on the table exploring its dimension then offhandedly picks up the metal sequin-encrusted container from which sugar sachets spill. Effortlessly two pairs of unfreckled hands collect them and the container is placed back. She moves her attention to the files on her lap embossed with words.

The boy notices, “Did you cut those out… Wow!”

The sound of a truck reversing drowns his voice but not his enthusiasm. She fingers the maroon felt words on her books that spell out each subject appropriate to the object.

“How fun was that?” he shoots.

“I cut the letters out of felt and I stuck them down,” she looks proudly at the characters. Each is the same size and a deep rich colour.

“You cut them out with scissors?” The jack hammer responds before she can.

“Yeah.”

A forklift squeals as they rise and leave.

(Image: Mia Nolting)

Fishing with Straws

2010-03-16T11:30:00.003+11:00

You're fishing with straws, he says

and motions to the water.

You say

you say nothing

just stare into the surface like it don't matter that some old man wants to chatter

some crazy old geezer with his face all pock marked and wrinkles folding onto themselves

and he says you're fishing with straws, y'hear?

And somewhere you know he's right.

Somewhere you know there ain't no fish in this water

and the pock faced man leaves

and you keep on fishing.

(Image: Sally Mann)

untitled

2010-03-15T15:09:00.004+11:00

The yellow bedspread in the room coerces like the sun.

The floral couch where I sit feels like home.

The hills hoist by the nectarine tree

has the smells of 'fresh' and 'gone'.

(Cropped image: Nirrimi Hakanson)

a how

2010-03-10T11:06:00.008+11:00

I was recently asked to make a note of how I write. I liked that I had to think about this—that the heart of what drives the words, what it is that makes them shoot out there in the way they do, surfaced: little bits of flotsam bobbing there like small treasures from a forgotten wreck.

When words fail, when they dry up and disappear (or the motivation to play with them withers), sometimes knowing how they're important in a simple and unintellectual way—feeling it in your bones again—is the pleasure, the magic, one needs to then incant them without effort.

They don't always come easily, sometimes they do but there are days where everyone else seems to have written some slice of perfection; some long piece of comedy or grandeur or tragedy that leaves me awestruck, that seems utterly unattainable to me. And I forget how the words fit into my own small jigsaw. I'm too busy looking at the completed puzzle next to me, fully formed by the smart-arse kid that maybe I get to be on some days.

Yes, some days you win, some days are a massive long fart.

I've often been overcome by the stench of foul moments of procrastination, where the natter in my head, gauche and mean, is the only source of words: things not worthy of the page. And in those moments it's easy to forget the how: the simple pleasure of making beautiful the things that are not so; to forget the simplicity in whispering things onto a page like no one might hear them properly. It's easy to curb your tongue for fear of being given ten 'Hail Mary's' for writing something less than polished, perhaps a little too delicate and revealing. (A topic soon to be a panel in the Emerging Writers Festival: the wee little reason I had to write my 'how') ...

'I write with great joy and great difficulty, in the window of a blog sometimes—a small cubby house to make it seem less scary. I write with the hope that small details might shift something or change someone. I write often and as though I am sitting in a confessional.'

(Image: Sergey Chilikov)

Babble

2010-03-09T10:24:00.001+11:00

I was a little excited when I heard Mr Sean M Whelan was going to dish up some Babble. Though I can't make it this Wednesday night, I'll certainly be there next month. Sean has been a grand supporter and delicious reader at Read You Bastards, his enthusiasm is infectious so I'm a little sad to be missing out on Wednesday Babble delights.

atonement

2010-03-05T11:02:00.004+11:00

Now, however many years since we last met, we do meet, here.
Here, your words come in waves and drawn silences, we live by markers and measures.
In this place, however many streets away it is that we live, we enact.

So, for however many million years since we last shared breath;
however many blasts, however many hits and wounds and blows we shouldered;
however many lures we made, anchors cast to ground this ship;
however many times we grew ill and lived to tear our flag to pieces,

there is this now,

and I ask you this: how is it that we atone?

(Image: Michele Mobley)

room

2010-03-03T10:30:00.006+11:00

; in this room
where we disappear
and might never have existed,
we wash away the falter,

in this room
where we have no name
limbs move like splinters,
a cause for something broken,

and you electrify your arm chair
and leave this lying here

; a favorite pasture

a favorite place

a favorite breath

a favorite brace,

in this room where souls disappear
sometimes we wander,
a place for more tomorrow,

scent fills the air

; favorite fingers

favorite face

favorite fervor

favorite space,

in this room
where we disappear
you electrify your arm chair
and leave this lying here;

Measurements: a joint affair. Poetry by Shane Jesse Christmass.

2010-03-01T11:09:00.003+11:00

I recently posted a piece called 'Measurements', here on Jemima. Soon after, my phone beeped, an SMS. 'I just rewrote your poem!' Shane wrote.

'What? Like edited? Huh?'

'Like remixed it? Took your words as inspiration? Something like that.'

'Which of my poems was the origin?'

'Measurements'

'Send me yours.'

So the email arrived and I read Shane's poem; a 'remix' perhaps? In all honesty, it's a completely other piece (with a few moments in time shared with my original). His version remains true to his own rich and dense style that deserves several re-reads to digest the layers. I'm still consuming.

So, here is the outcome....

Measurements [A response]
Shane Jesse Christmass

it was a box of flesh on the nightstand that ask to be reprieved
if it were or could not move, that’s the words
too small for a possibility than unrighteousness
& it enables humans more neatly
making notes & cases when we’re physically unresponsive to die

upon my back be your palms
that can’t hold scientists than that consciousness you keep
the walls are the portable alternatives but they’re portions only
but despite this you blow with the rich & them fashion-troubled & measured crowds
for there is nothing bound by being bound to the so-repeated help

able shall sometimes to see scrying terrors goodly
in with my environment there’s no room nor evidence
that one might respond to a latter brain or provide walking with a face evermore
there’s set places of salt water squeezed from presumed touchscreens
strapped to measure for the presence thereon of power

if today I can control the day with Thursday
then there’s nothing no one can do to presume there’s a gram of lump-in-throat
for the fascinating work chest, near the outside bin skip
is a moment of welcome panic & fear
but not here, not in the Fitzroy, here we should try whirling over what is
the hundred conscious of patient’s responses
the awareness & which this expresses their size

this measured man of mine
stars we want like the asbeels & their still reflections
like a synthesis to beg & drivel text to those that be warred
or act like just not to be lost in measures
with old stories & a wrist of a reminder
the person name is pressed into blankets
someplace to have absolutely the abyss

bound in the mirrors & plates are the days that hold you
reading the question that became dated fables
like moments from the dark you while with the box of flesh & you measure
half to a legal battle of teaspoons
of cold stars that communicate
with what they showed
active chance, me & fear…

Written by Shane Jesse Christmass
Written In Fitzroy.
18/02/2010.

(Image: Svea Kemper)

a word

2010-02-19T10:00:00.008+11:00

She collapsed in the house. It was her hip. It went. Then she lay in hospital for six months and never did get back to the black and white photos, the newspaper clippings and figurines and vases back home.

“Ciao Bella,” she would say as I walked past. She was five doors up from me and she would sit on the wood bench, with a long worn cushion, out front of her place, a double story Victorian terrace. This was our exchange each time I passed, it was all I knew to pass her lips. Two words only but they were frequent.

As I neared her place I wished I could speak with her lilt. Wished I knew more words, perhaps enough to make a sentence, maybe comment on the weather or her vegetables, something more than ciao and si and no. “How was your day?” I might think, but I had no words, not her words. There was just the ‘ciao’ between us and two fat grins.

She sat and watched the world in the way I would like to; her arm propped on a walking stick, she sat for hours out front there. Just watching. She had the kind of calm that comes with wisdom, the making of peace with the way of things. The kind of calm that grows in roses and carnations, tomatoes and parsley—the things that older people keep well. They tend. My young hands, free from the marks that sun makes, my fingernails too clean, have no right to tend. The word belongs to the calm. The wiser. Those who know the peace in watching seeds germinate, who walk to the corner store to buy twine and spend moments, rather than seconds knotting it around smooth stakes to which deep red tomatoes grow.

She lived on the bottom floor of the terrace. Her room was at the front. There was an old fashioned sprung bed clothed in a bedspread from an era well beyond my own and a fireplace, the mantle holding framed clippings and photos and trinkets .

The floors were linoleum, each room presenting a different pattern, another colour. The lounge room homed a red vinyl couch, the kind she might have spent a fifty on in the day, the kind you’d find in vintage stores now for ten times that.

On the top floor, where she might not have trodden for years, there were three rooms, big old chests and two wardrobes in each, beds with old springs. The linoleum here upstairs, a patchwork of pieces nailed down over worn spots. In one room large polystyrene fruit containers filled with water lay in the corner, small droplets falling from the ceiling.

On the landing six stairs lead up to just a tiny space, what at first glance looked to be a confessional. But peeking into the dark space, bulbless, a bathtub lay dirty and disused. A room the size of two coffins with a tub and a hook. Dank.

Among crockery and Mother Marys and Jesuses and vases she was not there when I wandered in on the day of the home open. There were pieces of her, walls plastered with photos of her youth. Stern black and white images from long, long ago. Wedding photos, her daughters or sons.

“She passed on six months back,” the real estate agent

tells me. And my many months without a “ciao” are explained. She was alone. “Her husband passed on twenty years ago,” he explains. And it occurs to me that the clothing in the framed photos on the wall, her daughters' dresses, date back perhaps to the nineties. I wonder if her husband hung them all, if it was he who nailed the patches into the lino, fixed leaks and things.

I don’t know the answers. What I know of this woman is no more than a word exchanged on a front porch. I know her only as much as her smile and intonation.

Today I am a visitor with no greeting. Her home is filled with strangers. I don’t know what I thought I’d find here. I am touched but I feel guilty. I have made myself a cheap voyeur to the life of a woman who has already touched me, who told me more than objects could with just one word.

(Images of her house: Jemima is not my name)

Measurements

2010-02-18T10:00:00.029+11:00

In the mirrors that were you palms

that can’t hold, plates that hold portions only

but not flesh,

you measure.

Half a gram of lump-in-throat,

two tablespoons of cold fear,

three ounces of salt water,

squeezed from ducts

in silent muffles.

There was a face pressed into blankets

someplace where you forgot to measure for a while:

A free fall

frantic with

frozen time

layering

that,

those measures,

old stories, your dated fables, onto

moments in flight.

Rations for the war,

just in case.

You place things into a satchel, neatly.

Make note of time, strapped to a wrist:

a reminder

to not forget

so you’ll not be

lost in the abyss.

Because bound and measured

there is no room for panic

or fear,

not in this small room you keep;

the walls skimmed,

skinned

small etchings cleaned away.

And the breath you blow

rich with words and small confusion

might raise your chest,

a moment of reprieve,

if it were not bound by yesterday’s wartime

you choose and box and keep.

(Image: Jason Holley)

small gods

2010-02-17T10:00:00.013+11:00

There is this cold concrete;
that which has cradled ants and things,
on which lays cigarette butts and remnants of long nights.

On this cold concrete there is
skin,
the thud of a heart laying in rest,
restless thoughts.
And body;
the unbroken pieces finding haven
against a warm wind.

There is this cold concrete
to cushion hot thoughts,
to cool arteries and veins,
human parts.

On this cold concrete there is
a hard head
facing up at the world
asking no one in particular if this
small place,
this false start,
this patch of cold,
is all there is.

(Image: Tema Stauffer)

Knowing

2010-02-16T10:00:00.079+11:00

When we are young our parents know the size of our clothing, our favorite colours, favorite food. They buy our underpants in bulk packets or in three sets on hangers and they prepare our meals, ensure they are balanced.

We leave at some point; after that point of half-knowing, where secrets are kept and parental rummaging has begun, where doors have been slammed and meek offerings made, compromises, to calm and to placate the morphed young-but-older things we've become. We leave at that point when knowledge is no longer shared and there seem to be no bridges for the fissures that have formed.

I left home a whole lot of years ago and recall lugging furniture onto a borrowed trailer, my mother screaming at me that I couldn't take the dresser she'd given me as a child. It was hers, she said. Back then I didn't feel her panic. I didn't understand the quiet distress behind her yelling down that driveway.

The shreds of this child she knew being pulled away like gum, my removal of the only tangible bits she understood, made for fear.

I wonder when parents stop knowing. At which point is it that it goes, and if it comes again.

I think sometimes my parents see me as the child, the teenager, who liked bright sheet sets and wore outlandish clothes. The one who would or could eventually be something they were not, but who would still fit the mould they understood to be good and right. Tick the boxes that go with nine to five jobs and nuclear families. I would be the girl who would grow out of phases and meet the 'real world' one day. They knew what I would be. What I should be. They understood that much.

Today, at an age older than my mother's at the time she gave birth to me, I wondered if there are bridges to mend the crevices that form from old fissures. That perhaps a phone call from one-thousand-six-hundred miles away, a crevice in itself, might tack some kind of something into place. I hoped my meek honesty on the other end of the line, a confession that would never fit a mould, might be enough of a silent shout to resonate with the woman who once stood by that trailer thick with fear. It would be an offering to have her understand a morning's worth of thought, the shifts and changes that happen over distance and age. I would hand over words, fill an empty mould with some sort of knowing, not the perfect and good kind, but a kind.

I make a phone call and it's peppered with gaps, quiet, and names of people who I don't know, they are pregnant or recently coupled, there is her ironing, my nephew, the temperature—it's been too much lately, and her friends, concerns and silence between topics. Her stories are told. And I find a silence where I tell my own.

The dresser lays in some share house back there. I sold it before I crossed the boarder some years later. In the room where I now sit there is furniture that she's not seen, people have entered this place who she does not know. A careless confession lays worn and ravaged across phone lines. And I wonder when my mother stopped wanting to know, couldn't fathom more than the child I once was.

Jenny Holzer @ ACCA

2010-02-15T11:32:00.003+11:00

In the main exhibition hall of ACCA, Holzer combines light projection and poetry that moves fluidly across the floor, ceiling and walls. Reclining on bean bags the engorged words move across the body, above the head. The language becomes sensory. In the cool, darkened space it both washes over and seeps in ...

Image: PROJECTIONS
Light projection
(With Felicity, my own projection of words and light, in the foreground.)

maps

2010-02-03T11:00:00.003+11:00

if you stare the way you do

wide eyed

if you say the things you say,

a mouth unblemished by the handkerchiefs tucked into my pocket,

if you prove these million year old measures wrong,

make maps defunct, with monsters at the creases of their pages,

if you plot new pages where sailors could find symetrical pleasure in another half world

half a sphere
if you launder fabric, worn and aged

and you pay for meals because the gristle I chew is no longer fashionable,

if you do these things,

if those painted canvases I hung are blank, the maps I kept in boxes, void,

if those moments in waiting, eyes glazed by red lights, seconds contemplating a mid-ground future

somewhere between oscillating waves, somewhere in the middle,

if all these things cannot be plotted on the history I press and fold and zip

then

who am I now,

and where are we to go?

liquor and linen

2010-01-27T18:37:00.006+11:00

liquor and linen (click on image below to read)

Wax—a confession of sorts (with audio)

2010-01-21T14:13:00.006+11:00

She is nervous It is her first time She removes her cotton underpants White They bear a large font Bonds This is written below her navel in cream

You instruct her to lay down Do you want to freshen up, you ask You point to a packet of baby wipes She does And you leave her From outside the door you hear her position herself You wait For a moment you wait by the door until you hear the creak of the bed fall silent You know she is ready

You walk in confidently This confidence, you reason, will allow her faith in you She will be less nervous if you take control You fold her leg into a ballet position, bent as one would to pirouette She is naked from the waist down She feels exposed You explain that this will hurt but it will not be so bad next time You turn your back, find the clippers in the drawer, you say, It will hurt less this way She nods And you trim the hair that spreads itself wide over her pubis The hair is fine, full and long

She tells you about her boyfriend and you ask questions to sway her attention from the dominant buzz in the room Her toes are curled Anxious

You know you must gain her trust now, while it doesn't hurt, while the clippers skim her skin, untouching, the blade secretly harvesting what will later be disposed of You will do well to charm her now with your even voice while it doesn't hurt (You deepen it at first, she will understand this, you, as authoritive though it will not be the voice of a teacher or a police officer It is the gentle yet firm voice of someone there to make the pain bearable though you, the someone, are the inflictor of this pain) She does not watch as you dust away her hair What is left is centimeter-long armory A barrier that you will soon remove

If it were not for the backdrop of the bed, from the waist up she could be any woman chatting in some cafe If there were a fashionable table to divide her torso you would not know But today there is no cup of coffee in her hands They are placed on her stomach Folded neatly, her nails a pearlescent shade of peach, short and groomed

You place the clippers back into the drawer and now you work with wax

She flinches

You raise her leg to ninety degrees, upward, and her foot hovers high above her belly You can see the way her flesh darkens as thigh becomes a wash of something else Something more, more than thigh or things that few lay hands on But you do not see this It is just flesh to you It is there before you but now these days the texture, tone, shades of flush escape your attention You understand the variations there, yes And once you might have been more curious but not today Not any day these days Your arms move in the perfunctory way This is routine and while your eyes flick between hers and your task, your attention is on her words The things that move her Life

The ceiling fan marks a rhythm and you work to time You are hot, a little bothered but you speak to her in gentle tones And while you do as she has asked, she talks quickly about her work, her evening plans, her life At times she might flinch but this is short lived Yes, she is nervous but she keeps her voice steady You are fast and gentle and she sees this Though pain is there pressed into her skin, she trusts you

She perspires lightly and your gloved hands do not feel her small panic There are buttocks and folds and things you prefer not to name in casual conversation or words You do not name them For despite your work, despite knowing the intimate parts of her and many others, few know what it is that you do

Seldom do you confess to those who do not know you well Though today you feel liberal Today, in this place, well beyond the door that separates you from her in that room where she fusses below her waist, you will hint at something that you did not intend to You will hint at this because it has been too long between confessions Because the lack of other meaning in the day, a day full of wax and flesh, the confessions of others, demands that this; this woman, the wax, the work, be poetry rather than shame.

(image: Martin Witfooth)

Audio:

YourMic Home

Boots from Canada

2010-01-08T15:56:00.004+11:00

Boots from Canada

You sleep softly on fire in a city that knows her footsteps from time to time Your bones slip into each other Your bones slip into her honey-milk hands that are framed by the brown couch in the lounge room She looks like home You sit on the couch and it cradles the shy-love-lust and her brown-cow eyes bore into yours Several cups of tea and wine entertain your hands until the glasses and mugs are dry You blink and she's still staring and you're not sure of what to say so you tell her everything except for what you want to You don't know how to interpret any more than the back of her hands She's gone now And before she went you said goodbye A cold porch under your bedroom-feet and her in boots from Canada And you wanted to raise your voice to bridge the distance but you realised that she speaks only in whispers So you're here on this bed that she passed by once You're here on this bed with bones and a bare mattress in a crowded city that she once drifted through

(image: Emma Jay)

Published in Page Seventeen, November 2010

Popular Carver: Popular Mechanics.

2010-01-07T09:29:00.003+11:00

There are few moments where I clasp my hands to my mouth. Fewer still where I simultaneously drizzle tears. Today I did both these things.

Raymond Carver was the man everyone tried to set me up with. I’d heard a lot about him, everyone else seemed to know him well and felt that I should too. These friends were full of accolades—sure my curiosity was peaked, but with all the gushing I was dubious.

Working my way through 'What we talk about when we talk about love' allowed me several moments with Carver, seventeen to be exact. Each moment had me wanting another. And with each, I found my courtship with Carver moving from like into something more like love.

It was 'Popular mechanics' though, a brutally sparse five hundred words that left me feeling utterly broken. In this he both wore me down and won me over.

Carver takes a simple domestic argument; a moment in time where a husband is leaving his wife, puts a child into the equation and in doing so shows human desperation at its most abysmal.

There are those films where you hear the dad say something to his kid like, “Sonny, It’s about time you saw what life was really like.” Reading Popular Mechanics, I felt like that kid. I felt like that kid watching the nice neighbors through some slit in the curtains go at it full throttle, watching their story and my little ideals about the world shatter.

Carver uses understatement like a knife being slowly sharpened for the final line: “In this manner the issue was decided.” Never will such matter of fact words wound you so deeply.

Carver is my man.

A non-nokia new year.

2010-01-02T14:49:00.009+11:00

I own an old Nokia phone. A 6610 model to be exact. When the old one broke, one that once belonged to an ex-boyfriend, I was relieved. In that old phone he had set reminders for his friend’s birthdays, there were old messages in nooks of the memory space. There were slivers of him in that phone—slivers that I thought I'd sliced. And despite erasing each reminder he had left as its alarm went off there were always more alarms, more reminders through the year—reminders of a past that I really wasn’t part of anymore.

The phone broke some time ago and, because I’m technologically challenged I tell myself, I purchased the same model on EBay.

It is the second of January today. My phone has just reminded me, by way of an alarm, that it is Stuart’s birthday. I do not know who Stuart is, nor do I know who put the porn on my phone or why they chose an Eminem cover for it—Eminem stands proud, his tattooed bicep flexed and a rather tough smirk is on his face. There are ring tones by Lincoln Park and images labeled: ‘Morgan’ (she has large assets), ‘Car’ and ‘Ass’ and ‘G-String’.

At the cusp of a new year we make promises. We let go of the past year and with determination clasped firmly in hand we stride or stumble through midnight and into the hope that another beginning brings.

2009 now lays like some vacant lot where the home of my last year’s experiences has been joyfully demolished. The best, salvaged while moments frozen in their infancy are left behind, discarded—things not fully grown but from which lessons have done so instead. There are lovers and portraits that no longer resemble those in them. There are messages, photographs and transitory strands of time. All these things are happily left to burn out like fireworks at midnight.

It is the second of January 2010 and my phone reminds me that it is Stuart’s birthday. I do not know who Stuart is, nor do I know who put the porn on my phone or why they chose an Eminem cover for it. I do not know the women in the photos nor the numbers left behind.

It is 2010 and my two day old memories are rich. The strange alarms and old messages, embers from someone's forgotten past, are gladly no longer my own.

Bronze Jesus

2009-12-28T11:05:00.033+11:00

This piece seemed kind of fitting to plonk up here as Christmas is only just gone and my thoughts recently have been rich with childhood memories of summers on Rottnest Island; of moments where life was big and the possibilities infinite, a time where in a small skin I felt big, a time when my Dad ruled the world and could tell me anything, where my parents were perfect, stories had happy endings and flawed boys were flawless ...

Bronze Jesus

You stand like Jesus. You glow like I imagine he might.

My skin is polka dotted. Though I’m hoping you won’t notice. My small limbs are painted with red mecurochrome antiseptic and I’m starting to scab, I’m wishing I wasn’t, wishing I was better at riding bikes. Standing before your deep bronze skin you don’t notice mine even though I’m glowing too.

You’re chatting to Dad about cray pots and boating weather and I wish I were big enough to come too, strong enough to yank up those pots. But I feel sorry for the crays and I’m too small to be allowed to stand that close to the edge of the boat anyway.

I’m still in the shade of the verandah and I want to tell you things but instead I stand behind Dad looking at your calf muscles. My terry-towelling jump-suit has left the red splotches very visible. My bony shoulders protrude, decorated with ribbon-tied straps. My lanky body (which is not as brown as yours), my flat chest and my oversized feet, that are bare on the concrete, make me want to hide even more.

But I still want to climb over the balcony rail. I want to stand beside you in the sun and tell you how many fish I caught the other day. Though I put them back—and I’d seem stupid saying that because you pull cray nets and that kind of thing.

If I were wearing my Karen Carpenter Jeans you might think I were more grown up. You wouldn’t see my bony knees. My skivvy would cover the blotches on my shoulders, but it’s too hot for winter clothes.

I push aside my home cut fringe—too heavy for my face and try to think of other things: the Bubble O Bill I’ll buy later from the shops with the five cent coins I saved. I’m thinking hard so I don’t keep staring at you and right now you matter a lot. But what I don’t know now is that one day you’ll grow to be leathery, that you’ll marry your pregnant girlfriend. That there’ll be a Sunday where you’ve had too many. A Sunday where you mess up the barbie, get third degree burns and then drink away the pain. Right now I’m looking at your bronze skin. Your hair that makes you look kind of like Jesus. I’m hoping you’ll notice me. But you’re still making plans that I’m not involved in.

(Published in Dot Dot Dash 2010)

This is How

2009-12-26T19:35:00.001+11:00

The good folk at Black Rider Press published this little piece. Editor, Jeremy Balius is one wondeful literary man.

You can view the text at Black Rider Press' The Diamond and the Thief

YourMic Home

Trolley love (an ode to the Coles upgrade)

2009-12-18T19:32:00.007+11:00

I press my dollar coin into the mouth of the new thing with streamlined metal vertebrae, shunning the larger framed carcasses, bulky rachides, beside The smooth action of her wheels, fluid The shiny linoleum floor, a bed of air The sound of crying children, faded The fluorescent lights, moody And Joan’s voice calling Paula to checkout number one, a seductive melody

Diedre and Scooter (and fending off guilt)

2009-12-17T11:50:00.008+11:00

This week has been tinged with red wine. Red wine and tea, in the in between moments. And my minds feel much like a sponge that’s mopped up too much of the wrong things. And along with excess there have been those slices of life: a dominatrix, two wounded birds, thoughts on mourning, reflections on shopping trolleys. There were stories there, are stories there, but somehow pre-Christmas excess and pre-birthday celebrations saturated all of the words and they turned to mush.

So I’ve sat this week with the guilt of not processing these things. Cursed my brain for firing off sparks without any flame. Life seemed too big to put into words. So instead, to keep my promise-to-self to post regularly, here is a more fictional slice of life. Something to fend off guilt until the dominatrixes, birds and trolleys with wheels that work, until mourning and parallels to knitting all speak a little more clearly.

Until then meet:
Diedre and Scooter (a snippet) ...

Diedre lay on the floor of the laundromat.

Scooter sat close to the dryer watching it turn round rhymically. His face looked goofy. Dumb. And he watched fascinated by the rotation of his old underpants and worn cotton Tee’s. His head playing out a circular kind of nod as his eyes followed each rotation.

Diedre stared up at the ceiling, at the lifting paint. She couldn’t move in this heat and the floor felt cool.

Scooter stood, began jumping up, reaching above his head to grab at the peeling paint. Diedre watched his jeans fall lower each time his feet hit the ground.

She always thought he had a dinky arse. Nonexistent. Dinky—it was the perfect word. She though of the old bung bicycle in the shed with busted springs that pressed up against the cracked lining of the seat. That was Scooter’s arse. Naked he looked a bit like a sick horse, all iliac crest and paper-thin lilly-white skin coating the bone. And Diedre though of her own fleshy bits, rounded, offering more than Scooter ever could.

(image: Anthony Giocolea)

Sarah

2009-12-11T11:00:00.011+11:00

Sarah’s hair has grown. The part that was shaved above her left ear is now two inches long. The rest of her hair is shoulder length. Blonde. She lays back. I work on sculpting her eyebrows.

“Are you back teaching?” I ask.

“Twice, yes twice. Six weeks.”

“Mmhmm. You’re still doing shifts at the milk bar?”

“When you last saw me it was like, 'hi I’ll just be a moment and whaaa and then …’ It’s a bit confusing to explain. You know. Life is like ... Nine to five. Yes the milk bar it’s … And you know.”

While she doesn’t have the words to tell me, I know. The tumour she once mentioned casually, spoke of in the past tense, is back. Sarah is a client. Someone who comes to see me once a month. One of many who come in the name of vanity yet unintentionally divulge much more, small slices of life, things that have happened in the day or week. Moments.

When Sarah lay down on her first visit and I hovered above her head, her hair fell back and parted to reveal the old thick scar. “The hair doesn’t grow back there properly,” she explained. I nodded and she told me of the tumour, that now with things being better, with more stability, she and her husband were going to buy an apartment. She was teaching and making extra cash with a job at the local milk bar, extra money for the apartment.

In recent visits her hair has been shorn back in places, patchy. There are scars. She makes attempts to explain things and ...

Silence creeps in. There are gaps between sentences where she’s not sure of where she meant to go, where I want to finish them but I’m not sure of how. And I wonder if she knows. I wonder if she’s aware. And I close the door behind her as she leaves her appointment. Tell her I’ll see her next time. And I wonder if I will.

(Image: Tierney Gearon)

Something to do with lettuce

2009-12-07T11:00:00.003+11:00

He hands me the lettuce over the low fence that separates our yards. His is weed free, full of herbs, fruit trees, fertiliser and rocket. Mine holds a small up ground pool, erected each summer to appease my need to be close to water. My yard is a mass of concrete, quaint second hand yard furniture and succulent plants that hold their own against my well-meaning hands, fingers I wish to be green but, at best, are a pallid shade of lime.

He moves to sever another lettuce from the ground and I tell him, "it's ok. I probably won't be cooking tonight, I'll eat out". That I'll let him know when I need another. He fills a jar of fresh oregano and hands me over a potted plant. I smile.

After explanations of how to care for the plant that cowers in my arms (It senses my inability and I sense the inevitability, though I wish that were not the case). I lay out my bounty on the kitchen bench.

John, who bears an Italian name too long to pronounce, who insists on being called John, passes me these lettuces frequently. And with optimism I go to wash them, but hesitate. I take many small animals, slugs and things, back out to my own garden to destroy my own plants because I can't bear to flush them down the sink with the remnants of soil.

Sometimes I pick off the outer leaves hopeful that the creatures lurk only on the edge of the vegetable. Leaves and bugs are laid out on my own soil. ‘Composting.’ I say, though I know nothing of what this means.

Those lettuces that don’t have company, free of six legged creatures, are stored.

And the lettuces gather in my refrigerator and wilt. They beckon to be prepared into a salad, some form of healthy meal, and I open and close the refrigerator door and the light within illuminates my green guilt until they resemble lifeless forms. As I throw one out another replaces it. 'He has a bounty of them in the yard, it makes him happy for me to take them,’ I justify because I cannot bear to tell my neighbor, the old man who lives in the same house he grew up in as a child, a man who still sleeps in the same room he did as a boy, that, while I love his stories, I really don't care much for lettuce.

A guest post on 'Literary Minded'

2009-12-03T10:48:00.002+11:00

I'm cheating a bit today, but in doing so I'm bringing your attention to a wonderful space full of all things literary.

Miss Angela Meyer kindly invited me to guest blog in her neck of the woods, a little suburb called 'Literary Minded'. This made for an excuse to pick up an old favorite, have a re-read and dribble all over it again. Alice Sebold's writing is so sparse yet so rich and this is primarily what I had a good waffle about in my guest post.

Here is a snippet with a link to read on some more over in Ange's space if you wish ...

"Guest post: Allison Browning on Alice Sebold’s Lucky

It was in an impassioned conversation with Miss Angela Meyer on the floor of a particular writers’ festival venue, relishing the taste of ginger beer, that I expressed my love for the sparsity of Chloe Hooper’s writing in The Tall Man. Angela and I continued to chat about those writers who have an understated way of inciting emotion and I remembered being affected by the withheld tone in Alice Sebold’s Lucky, in much the same way that I had been when reading The Tall Man.

With Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones soon to be released as a feature film it seemed a fine excuse to shine my desk lamp on the lesser known Lucky and the prose that just … got me.

I first fell in love with Lucky years back when stranded between European airports. The dignity in the writing left me red-faced and puffy-eyed, I must have looked like some forlorn woman—the kind who’s left a lover behind in some other city. Sebold’s dignified yet blatant and honest style of writing had me looking most undignified.

There is a difference between emotive and emotional writing. Sebold wins with the former. She delivers some brutal and confronting memories relaying the story of her own teenage rape and the aftermath, without a shred of self-indulgence. She has an ability to ... "

To read more click here

A simple question (and a moustache).

2009-11-27T07:30:00.004+11:00

In a job and galaxy far far way (one where I shape eyebrows, squeeze pimples and wax people's nether parts) she asked, “So do your eye brows actually grow?”

I continued to snip and work on hers. “You mean long?”

“Well it’s just that you’re trimming them and I wondered ...”

“No they only grow to a certain length,” I said, “or I’d be able to style them like your hair, like a fringe cut. They’re like your leg hairs,” I said. “You can’t grow them out and style them like you can do to a poodle. Your hairs just grow to a certain length and fall out.”

“I can’t believe I just asked that.”

I love how the child-like mind still exists somewhere in there—in amongst the chaos and adult responsibilities and dramas we craft. It’s reassuring that the questions we used to ask Dad from the back of the car seat on long drives are still there, intact.

I remember being seven and I’d grown sick of the seventies heavy-cut fringe my mother sculpted. I told her I didn’t want a fringe any more. The girls at school didn’t have them. We needed to cut it off.

“We can grow it out,” she offered.

“Why can’t we just cut it off?” I asked.

The logic was there. It was simple. I couldn’t see why she wanted to do things the hard way.

There are these beautiful moments of innocence still that show themselves in moments of need, the more mundane moments of being ‘adult’. When responsibility is about to take a stranglehold on your creativity, on your faith in something more, someone asks a question that makes you think of people in lycra at a dance party, people with pink pouffy leg hair shorn poodle-style into those nasty leg warmer things. Or people in a cafe reading Kafka with intensity, eyebrows curled at the ends like old fashioned moustaches.

When life becomes magical and hilarious from a simple question in a strange room—a question that makes one woman blush and both laugh hysterically—you know the world just became a whole lot more OK again.

(Image: Uprisings by Kozyndan)

A way of working things out

2009-11-21T19:34:00.001+11:00

Relationships have a way of working themselves out don’t they?

In the early days you find your own language, your way of being. You spend little spats of time together flirting with the idea of something more, not knowing what will happen. And then you fall into a groove.

This posting on Jemima feels like we’re getting to know each other again. I’m nervous. I’m not sure what to make of us these days.

I didn’t expect to feel the need to hide behind the second person but this post, that is the official one below, is just that: me peeking out cautiously from under a blanket. But then it’s early days in this renewed relationship.

Perhaps we’ll converse about life in poetic prose for a while as we get cosy with each other. And you can play the cocky observer at the next table saying, “Those two lovebirds over there, they’re on a date. It’s obvious—look at how awkward they are”.

But we’ll work it out. We’ll find our language, fanciful prose or otherwise and we’ll grow to be …

Maybe we’ll grow to be some funny odd unit that speaks ... Perhaps we’ll grow to simply speak our mind, whatever the format. Whatever the case I hope we grow to be endearing.

There is an itch that comes. Then goes. And comes again closer to your birthday.

Your notice the second hand on the biological clock.

You meet friends for drinks at the pub and your pupils dilate when you play aeroplanes with a kid called Kingston.

You drink pints and talk about the same things as usual but there is a child on your friend’s breast and he’s cute and sweet and smiles. And you were present for the nine months before and these nine months after and since everything feels even you figure what if …

What if …

And the child cries. And after conversation of music and life and dinner and beverages you unlock your bike from the fence by the pub. Brush away the rain from the bike seat. A changeable Melbourne day.

And you cycle home

and you figure things are fine either way. If or not.

Either way. They’re fine.

Teaching oneself to jog: literal story, an analogy, to take as you will.

2009-11-15T10:00:00.001+11:00

‘I’ve been teaching myself how to jog,’ I told a friend today ...

Nearing your next birthday it is possible that you might realise you’ve gathered a million excuses as to why you’re not physically strong, a mountain of reasons not to do a great many things. You realise you have become, and are a little too comfortable in being, a certain kind of person who is defined by a certain number of years in which a certain number of habits have managed to take a firm grip on your neck, a grip which makes most everything feel uncertain.

You’re stationary.

You notice that there are those on the periphery of your world that hang on by small threads. Sometimes it’s you clutching on tight, sometimes them.

Neither of you are game to shake off the grip.

You realise that over however many or few decades old you are that the faces have changed but the dramatic overtures are the same.

You become aware that you are wearing different clothes, that you have more freckles, yet your heart still beats with that frightened tone you thought you muted.

In many moments you have said ‘next time’.

On many days you have said ‘tomorrow’

But today you wake up on a day that’s somewhat close to your birthday and you decide to teach yourself how to jog.

(Image: Chris Scarborough)

Jemima is not my name: a new beginning

2009-11-13T15:14:00.002+11:00

Jemima was my rag doll. From the age of two till six she was pressed under my arm or held in the nook of my elbow. Her hair was a mass of long plaited wool. She was an old-fashioned lass dressed in the usual rag doll attire; a floral flock with petticoat and pantaloons. As I became aware of my girlie parts around the age of six, not wanting her to feel left out, I drew them in on her torso in pen. After four years of being wedged under my arm day and night, a loyal security blanket, she finally went bald.

Jemima is not my name, but she was my first lesson in loyalty and my first experience in heart ache.

She met her fate in an aluminium dust bin with a dented lid when my mother grew sick of her munted face and faint stench. At the time there were no plastic wheelie bins. And I know Jemima would have been happier for being buried in an old fashioned sort of bin.

I now plan on being far more loyal to this little place, this blog, called, or not called, Jemima.

Jemima is not my name so I’ll walk the middle road in this here place—a little conversation and some snippets of work might do the trick. I hope it, the conversation, and they, the snippets, fill the quieter moments, yours and mine.

untitled (snippets from a longer short story)

2009-10-23T09:23:00.002+11:00

(A snippet from the short story 'Your shirt')

There were those wolves — no, they were foxes. I kept calling them wolves — I could never seem to get the name right. I was scared the first time I heard them howl. It sounded like a child crying. But you explained that they were only going through the dust bins searching for scraps. Before long the noises became familiar and I didn’t hear them any more.

Your double glazed window and I grew intimate. Catching glimpses of everything and nothing much. My eyes like the shutter of your Lomo camera behind me. (Both of us taking records, memories for later.) My hands pressed up to the thick pane watching vapor trails. They lined the sky making patterns, crossing out clouds, making maps for birds. They were just pollution you said, but to me they were magic. You said those things in a voice that sounded sing-song. ‘Wa-er’ you’d say missing the ‘t’. And ‘grass,’ with a sharp sounding ‘A’. ‘Ass’ you said. Like the other name for a donkey. Splayed out on your bed, I’d listen to your melody. ‘Just a common twang,’ you’d said it was. But your song made even the dirty words seem beautiful ...

(Thuy Lihn blogged about this piece here and quietly filmed a reading here)

city #2

2009-10-08T22:17:00.001+11:00

(a snippet from the poem 'City #2')

I’m weaving you into words as you lean into me, the sallow Northbridge light pressed into your torso.

Our bodies don’t melt into each other, not this time,
but my romanticised notions are cushioned against your thighs ...

Dumpling House Anarchy: a story of falling in love

2009-07-23T14:29:00.001+11:00

Dumplings are a Melbourne institution. Those Bite sized lumps of goodness are the panacea for all ills. A diminished wallet is no obstacle to dumpling heaven - ten bucks is all you need to have yourself a meal fit for a king and with the option to BYO you can't go wrong; the dumpling meal really does provide it all.

While each dumpling houe may differ in service, the chaos is much the same. Part of the bliss in the experience comes from accepting that while you may not always get what you ordered, you will always get a darned good feast.

Now a dumpling aficionado, I know the house rules well. I understand the terseness of the staff and embrace the fuss-free, no-frills service. I respect the little man who shouts at me—Seinfeld Soup-Nazi style—while I'm waiting in line at my favorite restaurant.

It wasn't always that way though. I was once a dumpling virgin. Back then I'd not yet learnt of the beauty that those lumps of joy possess. And, coming face to face with the disorder that's so intrinsic to the dumpling house, I wasn't sure I'd survive it.

Having arrived from small town Perth with no real dumpling culture, I was taken by the hand to Melbourne's China Town and into the splendid madness of the dumpling world. That first time as I entered the fluoresent dining area, replete with plastic tablecloths, I cowered. I didn't know my chilli oil from my chilli sauce. I didn't know what the plastic cups were for, nor where to find a bowl to eat from.

My friends, knowing locals, expertly navigated the menu, which looked as fat as a Melways directory. They poured jasmine tea into my humble plastic cup as I watched on bewildered. Staff staff flew past at light speed and I was instructed by friends to just sit; food would come and I would understand, 'trust me'. And I did and it did and I was changed.

That night I experienced the sheer magnificence of the spring onion pancake, the joy of vegetarian duck and the delight of steamed mushroom dumplings. I had been living a half-life until then. The meal was shared (the only way to do it) and the various dishes almost covered the table completely, plates overflowing with generous portions.

I became enchanted with the unpretentiousness of it all. There's no chitty-chat with a faux-friendly waiter sniffing for tips. No décor to speak of. There's definitely no niceties nor frills or flaffing about—just mountainous portions of lavish dumpling goodness.

That first time when the staff finally began circling like vultures, quick and ready to pick off our near empty plates, I realised my time there was almost up. I snaffled and burped, rubbing an aching pot-belly and it was then, in my post dumpling bliss, that I understood the simplicity in it all. The chaos was just an illusion. The terrain, now navigated, seemed far less harsh and with the rules of dumpling anarchy understood I fell in love, most firmly, with the perfect order in it all.

(Published in Catalyst)

Monday Night in Melbourne

2009-06-10T16:20:00.001+11:00

(A snippet from the poem 'Monday night in Melbourne')

His hands shake but that's just the way they've always been. He drinks too much coffee but that's not why they shake. He likes the warmth of the cup between his hands. He cradles the mug's heat and chews his words. He doesn't like to say much. He prefers passion to burn in the background ...

... When their hands clenched finally those fingers wound around each other and became twisted like wire knots in a cyclone fence. There was force in the tangle of fingers. Those hands gripped and in the grip, words ground against knuckles.

Nothing is said ...

Nothing Much

2009-06-10T16:19:00.001+11:00

She's sewing the mooching.
And she's twisting each knot with knuckles that are about to burst.

Her luke warm tea mulls a dry mouth, pastes it back together

and the radio crackles nice and deep into
the fragments that are numbly twisted in.

Risotto on an island of hope.

2009-06-10T16:18:00.001+11:00

I wish I could make all the outfits I dream up. I’d be wearing a black pant suit tonight and we would build ice cream towers to reach the sky. You run me over senseless, I’m the white lines and you're swerving like a drunk.

There’s an over flow tonight and she stashed some of hers away. It’s a secret though. Don’t tell. I’m closing shop. We’re making risotto on an island of hope and I’m dancing on fairy floss, kind of fast. I dreamed of bouncing through the clouds, but slower - I’ve seen them from air planes lots.

So she’s killing the dead over and over and she thinks it’s funny and she’s laughing. We know the real story. That girl is crazy as a lark on crack but she sings just like a bird.

alex

2009-05-24T18:33:00.000+11:00

'We're victims of our own raw material' he says.
and talks of political hard-ons that I don't understand because I don't follow politics.

But I laugh because I like his words.

lorna

2009-05-24T18:26:00.000+11:00

(A snippet from the poem 'Lorna')

Lorna suffers. She has a ten-thirty appointment for her eye brows and a lip wax. She's sick all the time ...

... she does circles. Big laps like an old Volkswagon. She does laps around the display tables. She moves in a circle like a dog on a leash. She asks questions and fluffs about until I bite my tongue and leave her to smear lipstick on the back of her hand.

day time t.v

2009-05-24T18:22:00.000+11:00

I pretend to be Ridge and you pretend to be Taylor. And we kiss on the mattress in the garage behind the car. There is no theme music. Just the oily-marked concrete and the green mattress. Two of us. Bold and beautiful grasping at our first whiff of passion.

train to cottesloe

2009-05-24T18:19:00.000+11:00

He is sitting on the train and he wears short football shorts. He enjoys wearing no underpants. His legs are parted for those opposite to view his manly parts, those funny barnacles that gave up holding tight. A slack jaw cushions patchy stubble and he sits with palms face down on his hairy milky man-thighs.

child in a bucket seat

2009-05-20T14:58:00.000+11:00

(A snippet from 'Child in a bucket seat')

... The aged fabric.
A child dwarfed by a
bucket seat
sits laughing
poking fingers
into cigarette holes.

in silence

2009-05-07T19:42:00.000+11:00

Drum gently on the desk
in moments where you find
those fragments murmur
to make you shout

it's a simple torrid affair
to let crumple in the sheets
the urge

to scream muted

you drum gently on the desk

in comprehension
you're noted for
your guesswork
and for all those moments
of violent stillness.

in truth

2009-05-07T19:39:00.000+11:00

Everpresent
in my soiled mouth
you sit
waiting your turn

not to impress
upon
not to urge
to convince

in my disparate
reaching
of half-words
and disconnection
you curdle
and coax
a new button

nothing much

2009-05-07T19:36:00.000+11:00

She's sewing the
mooching,
twisting each knot
with knuckles
about to burst

Luke warm
tea
to mull
A dry mouth to paste it back together

and the radio
crackles deep into
the fragments
numbly twisted together.

we know

2009-05-07T19:34:00.000+11:00

Treakle dipped fingers
I've wrapped my
tongue among them
and I'm laughing hard
because I'm now
forbidden to speak
with your fingers
so immersed in
my mouth
You understand (?)

ground meat

2009-05-07T19:31:00.000+11:00

It's curious
the way we meet
that we're playing
hide and seek
and tag
a lot

to manage to find passion
in indifference
and we sink our
teeth in
and grind it all away
once more
until we meet
tomorrow

Will

2009-04-20T16:03:00.000+11:00

Will called
one of the babies
known as Ploeg
smoked it harder

Ethiopia is dead
he said
they plan.

Will called
they performed and
probed it harder
they planned it
days after
he said

1996 and
Ethiopia has
perished

Ploeg died 338
days after this.

(Published in Cottonmouth Anthology 2009)

outer space

2009-04-20T15:53:00.000+11:00

In fits and starts your head
rests against mine.
We're in the stars darling, you and I
we're resting in the clouds
with nothing more than
the toilet seat before us.

We're nothing here, a filler from
Bunnings fixes shut our ear holes
and we listen carefully to each other.
This loud guffaw comes galloping
through the night.
A loyal steed to rescue our faith.

The night sky is beaming and
we're senseless with longing.
You're near, nostrils flared and blazing wide.
We're closer now. Closer than before and
this panicked pudding is
saucier than ever.

maybe we could just hold hands

2009-03-26T10:41:00.000+11:00

myrtle jean (version 2)

2009-03-26T10:35:00.000+11:00

She is sitting in a recliner rocker,
grey eyes stare blankly beyond.
A purple lap rug that bears her name covers hips replaced years ago.
Blue-grey hair, once fashioned into proud curls, hangs limply against her scalp. Her shoulders shrug forward,
no longer expectant.

Without warning arthritic hands grasp her skirt.
Curved and worn fingers, now nimble in action execute flawless pleats.
Her mind is ticking again.
The fabric is folded in perfect centimeter-wide batches and just as quickly dropped.
The task forgotten.
Shoulders hang.

“How’s Hilda” she asks. Her eyes don’t budge from the blank canvas in front of her.

“Hilda’s past Mum.” This script has been rehearsed a thousand times before.

It’s a Tuesday, but who cares.
The lights are dim here everyday.
I walk the cold corridor in search of Myrtle Jean’s missing ugg boot.

no, I don't have one of those

2009-03-26T10:30:00.000+11:00

small town

2009-03-26T10:21:00.000+11:00

Even though my heart is still long gone
it’s still there
small town with you.

I forget the streets but I
know them like the back of my hand.
I let go of memories that nestle close
though I kept them at bay.

There’s something in the water
in your windy city that
I left behind.

Something in my heart that dwells
in different places now.

Names that linger and make me laugh
I shed my feathers when
I’m small town with you.

brunch in fitzroy

2009-03-26T10:15:00.000+11:00

(Snippet from Brunch in Fitzroy')

... it’s all quite peculiar you see
sight clouded by the conveniences in the attraction
you fed your ideas to your
rhododendrons
and reminisce of those days
back then
from that inner city
abode.

just another pretty face

2009-03-26T10:11:00.000+11:00

that’s all

2009-03-03T23:17:00.000+11:00

It’s silly
when I

like your mittens
and I’m three dollars short for

Your attention

And when it comes down to it,
it’s tragic the way I swan around
like an awkward kitten
trying to be feline.

That’s all.

here

2009-03-01T16:19:00.000+11:00

In that sun
I almost burst
Laughter spewing
Like the drunken
Nights before

And it’s just

Ok

I’m good and I’m

Here. Not a million miles away like I can be
When you saunter through and I say to myself

Oh

No

And I’m smiling
because it’s all so fucking funny really.

turn

2009-03-01T16:06:00.000+11:00

You’re there
and I say ‘come closer’
but you can’t

Your leg between my thighs
I can’t turn

for fear it will be over
much much too soon.

***

2009-02-26T15:12:00.000+11:00

(snippet from '***')

... it's a little like that.

We're stranded
& you find the ocean
haunting.

XYZ

2009-02-26T15:04:00.000+11:00

and in those times
where heat tempered
my tongue
you ached for the way I
placed them.

Pushed and punished
with empty tractions
skid off the rails
a silent place
a beat

I stroked fingers on eye lids
and had you believe
in breath.

untitled

2009-02-15T17:24:00.001+11:00

said bear

2009-02-15T17:23:00.001+11:00

bunny

2009-02-15T17:18:00.000+11:00

2009-01-03T23:13:00.001+11:00

Taste the corners of sleep

Touch the stars that have me close my eyes

(you’re mine)

To give you what you want I’d have to run a million miles

Change a thousand tyres

And be left with the scent of burnt rubber.

One Horse Town

2008-11-10T17:09:00.000+11:00

In this long long town

I trail circles

Meeting

a half cast fate

The bed sheets torn from

My stubborn toe

A foot in my mouth leaves me

Gasping

The air is heavy and humid

And I long to bathe in some tomorrow

The sun on my back

And another sweet something

in my suit case.

Agnes May

2008-11-10T17:05:00.000+11:00

In the ashes I held

When you left

I saw pictures

like the ones I drew for you

that night

Your crimson nails

too stubborn to call

before the ambulance

was dialed

My grown hands

that bear

your rings

still long to say goodbye.