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Content From Issue: Volume 1 Number 2 (August 2014)

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

Editorial-August 2014

by Anne Elvey

John Felstiner’s book subtitled A Field Guide to Nature Poems asks in its title: Can Poetry Save the Earth? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). While Plumwood Mountain is not focusing on “nature” poems or “nature” writing per se, the question of the relation between poetry and the Earth—a relation that entails in some way writing consciously as a member of the human species in a particular here and now responsive to local and global environmental challenges—is at the heart of ecopoetics. I might wish to unsettle the word “nature” in so many ways, with Val Plumwood’s critique of the nature/culture binary in view. I might wish to dispute the word “save” that seems to privilege human (and sometimes divine) agency. But the field we are engaging in that brings the prefix “eco” to poetry and poetics, if not claiming a salvific agency for a poem, at least sees the poetic engagement with ecological damage (past, present, and sadly anticipated in the future, with all that means for individuals, communities, species, and their habitats) as critical. Felstiner, like many others, speaks of the way a poem might call forth in its reader (indeed in its writer) a kind of attentiveness to the other in all its specificity of place, community and kind. Others speak of ecological witness and of a tone that perhaps performs an ecological (rather than an anthropocentric) ontology—and comes from and opens to an ecological ethics and activism.

In the current issue, Julie Maclean delightfully imports Hopkins to Australia, capturing something of his sprung rhythms and imagery in her “Hopkins’ Oz in spring“. Alice Allan’s “Meteorologica” asks if a better use of a human body might be to act as a poultice for a wounded tree. Birds enter several poems, with B. R. Dionysius and Anne M. Carson, engaging in different ways with parrots; Carson’s Two green parrots seem “to make merry / against the backdrop of the approaching storm.” More soberly, Dionysius’ poem Orange-bellied parrot ponders “those swift / Last thoughts of a dying race” and a mortality humans share “the fear / Of the world living on without us”. He reminds us of our commonality across species: “There is no difference between us / Except how our cells unite”. Concerned with the failure of mutton birds to migrate south from Siberia to Australia successfully in 2013, Ann Vickery’s “Russian Bit Player” also moves across species: “Feathers pile thick on the shore, some of them mine”.

Amy Brown in her article on environmental empathy engages with two works (Peter O’Leary’s Phosphorescence of Thought and Kate Middleton’s Ephemeral Waters) to explore the empathic possibilities that both anthropomoph(is)ing otherkind and ecomorph(is)ing humans can produce in writing. Michael Kwaku Kesse Somuah’s “ENTITLED“, with its shifts of imagery and questioning, might also express a kind of ecological empathy; the speaker asks, for example, “Was timber deaf / to the robust sounds of the chain saw?”, then a few lines later, laments: “I pity your death / For you would have been a spot for some birds / and a serenity of lush strings for lovers.” And Jill Jones’ “Weed Grounds“, begins by speaking of “The way grounds become tired / of being told or dreamt”.

There are poems that ask in other ways about an ecology of writing. Dan Disney’s found, somewhat experimental villanelles each set two voices in tension: in (untitled #2) Alain Badiou and John Cage “converse”; (untitled #3) brings William Wordsworth and Pierre Bourdieu together. The structure of Shari Kocher’s “neither me neither you” sets up a different conversation between the “frail tents” of our cities, dying and living, and earth time.

This is a taster of the poems on offer in this issue. I am grateful to Harriet Tarlo and Susan Hawthorne for their advice on the selection. We worked together across continents, via email, wishing at the end for the fleshy interchange of ideas over a steaming pot of tea or glass of wine.

Kit Kelen has kindly offered a gallery of words and images that are part of an upcoming exhibition at Macau Museum of Art, titled pictures of nothing at all.

In response to our February spotlight on roadkill, Natasha Fijn has produced a poignant photo essay “Impacts on the Kings Highway“. Our spotlight for August is the Great Barrier Reef and the content including B. R. Dionysius’ “Great Barrier Reef” will be posted during August.

There are six new book reviews as this issue goes live online, and I hope to post two or three more during August. A list of books available for review is also on the book reviews page, so please get in contact if you would like to review one of these titles.

The next several issues will have guest editors and I will be posting more about those issues and calls for submissions at the start of September.

Thank you to all our contributors. It has been a pleasure and privilege working with you to bring this issue together.

1 August 2014

Published: August 2014
Anne Elvey

lives and works on BoonWurrung Country and pays respects to elders past, present and emerging, and acknowledges their sovereignty over their lands and waters. Anne is an interdependent researcher, poet and editor who is outgoing managing editor of Plumwood Mountain journal. Her most recent books of poetry are On arrivals of breath (2019) and White on White (2018). Obligations of voice is forthcoming from Recent Work Press in 2021. She holds honorary appointments at Monash University and University of Divinity, Melbourne.

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

How to Write a Eulogy for Your Goldfish

by Adrian Southin

Don’t say his scales glinted like lost deep sea treasure. They were more copper, and besides, he was a freshwater fish. Don’t mention his name, which your brother chose after a Pokémon fifteen years ago. That will only make the eulogy into parody. Do mention those fifteen years and that he was longer than the piranhas a ninety-nine cent fish like him are fed to. Eyes will widen: it’s harder for someone to mock you when they gape. Omit his cataracts. No one’s impressed by failing eyesight. Don’t explain how the sucking of his filter kept you awake at night. You’ll appear bitter. Mention how he only once tried to commit suicide by leaping from the tank, and how you brought him back by pumping “Stayin’ Alive” into his chest. That will sound heroic, and people will be impressed that you showed him that he had things to live for. Don’t mention that you didn’t think he actually had anything to live for, and that you hoped the myth about five-second memory was true. Don’t mention the year the tank turned phosphorescent green, then inexplicably cleared up; you’ll seem negligent. Don’t say you wept. You didn’t, and saying this would make you look unreliable. Do mention that you hugged his tank as he convulsed and twitched at the bottom of the tank. That’s compassionate. Don’t disclose that you only did it because you felt obliged to. Do mention how you still see his lazy circling in the corner of your eye. How you still think you hear the filter running from your bed. How the silence in your living room is more audible than the twenty-four watt motor or his water-smacking gulps of the shrimp pellets.

Published: July 2014
Adrian Southin

studies poetry and fiction in the Writing department at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He lives in constant reverie of the Canadian Pacific Northwest.

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

On a Car Colliding with a Butterfly

by Jeff Guess

Unfolding in late autumn air

unfurling down the slipstream of a road

into a tiny ragged orange flag

at odds in its erratic flight pattern

with the wind and wayside grass.

One could exaggerate such a thing

this idiosyncratic badge of small beauty

as if all of nature this afternoon

metamorphosed into two soft petals

fluttering down the runnels – here,

of what’s left of freedom. Slamming

against the windscreen – pinned in

the flattened moment.

Published: July 2014
Jeff Guess

Born in Adelaide, South Australia, Jeff Guess has taught English in country and metropolitan secondary schools, ‘Writing Poetry’ at the Adelaide Institute of TAFE, and tutored at the University of South Australia.  His first book Leaving Maps appeared in 1984 and was hailed by Judith Rodriguez in The Sydney Morning Herald as ‘a major collection’. Since then ten collections have been published, the most recent being Autumn in Cantabile (2011). Jeff has written three textbooks on teaching poetry and edited nine poetry anthologies. He has won numerous prizes for his poetry and been awarded six writing grants.

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

Three weeks into a heat wave

by Matt Howard

and the quicksilver pulse of roach or rudd

and these circles they riffle on the pool

and the jack pike passing under that spooks them

reminds me of when we were here in winter

 

how a hairline crack in the ice shook us

how we froze as water scuttled our shoes

how the reeds we rushed to are now further out

and how a mind is a drift of roots

 

and nothing sits passive in its place

Published: July 2014
Matt Howard

lives in Norwich, England, where he works for RSPB. Matt is also a steering group member of New Networks for Nature. Previous poems have appeared in several magazines including The North, The Rialto and Resurgence, with poems also in the current issues of The Dark Horse and Lighthouse. His debut pamphlet will be published by Eyewear in late 2014.

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

Guilt

by Matt Hetherington

by the time they woke

the sun was gone

 

night had fallen

in love with itself

 

they were breathing dust

and hoarding numbers

 

be quiet

i already told you

 

they will

not survive

Published: July 2014
Matt Hetherington

moved to Brisbane in July 2013, after 18 winters in Melbourne. He is a writer, musician, very part-time very famous DJ, lover, non-god-father, humble self-promoter, sky-digger, lentil-masticating vegetarian bludger, frustrated housewife, connoisseur of fine scents and dog-biscuits, twin brother, old-school soccer nut, poverty-stricken aristocrat, and Bodhisattva-wannabe. He has published three collections of poetry.

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

Daughter

by Annerliegh Grace McCall

Her eyes are her grandmother’s

opioid blue

—quells storms

the willy willy                 she leaves tranquillity in her wake

 

Small hands conduct the hot silence

no alpine butterfly can resist

her fingers     wet from the spring

            —a tangerine bracelet

 

Gravelly gaze                her burning precipice

to walk the crosscut saw

is to leave behind new skin

& old

                       

watershed                     deluge

in her sweet skin

rain                  cloistered heat           

&  squall

 

a generation is a river bank

    no stock cross her waters

 

My daughter the debbil debbil

My daughter the stream

Published: July 2014
Annerliegh Grace McCall

is a Melbourne writer. She studies Creative Writing at Melbourne University.

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

Weed Grounds

by Jill Jones

The way grounds become tired

of being told or dreamt

 

and weeds, from the work

of growing unattended, unregarded

 

they’re ordinary, half-wild

and won’t be stopped easily

 

by the great mutants

the pests of language

 

attached and rootless in

the same unwelcome

 

beyond mirrors or concepts

meeting places

 

flowering and simply kidding

about being flowers

 

being sneaky and queer within

and beyond spaces

 

a bit part, a wall, a crack

broken field, a darkness

 

paths not quite flagrant

defiant and silly

 

a bitterness in fresh forms

taking and straying

Published: July 2014
Jill Jones

has published eight full-length books of poetry, including The Beautiful Anxiety (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014). Her work is represented in major anthologies including the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. She is a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, University of Adelaide.

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

Still Life with Boulders

by Stephen Oliver

Oparure Road, Waitomo

 

Not quite stubble, more the plucked flesh of fowl,

after the maize harvest, cut to the grain, close cropped

paddocks. An April sun draws shadows across the land,

 

velvety black, thick as sump-oil, the air glass bright,

though filtered as if the light voltage had dimmed, but

nothing as definite as that, except for the sliding

 

partitions that are invisible, so that the plucked flesh

has become crew-cut paddock, and barely a minute gone.

The scene slipping by seemingly so ancient every second

 

caught up in an eternity of stillness, and the light that

lacquers the surface of everything, shiny as an iridescent

backed beetle on line-after-line of maize stubble, in

 

the slow and wondrous tilt of the earth, barely audible

yet felt—each valley holds its own set of mediaeval ruins,

as if one fortified town had fallen one after the other,

 

reduced to foundations of stacked limestone, half buried,

boulders strewn over hillsides, loosed from some trebuchet;

the violence long since retreated back to the underworld.

Published: July 2014
Stephen Oliver

is the author of 17 volumes of poetry. Travelled extensively. Signed on with the radio ship The Voice of Peace broadcasting in the Mediterranean out of Jaffa, Israel. Free-lanced in Australia/New Zealand as production voice, newsreader, radio producer, columnist, copy and feature writer, etc. After 20 years in Australia, currently in NZ. His latest volume, Intercolonial, a book length poem, published by Puriri Press, Auckland, NZ (2013). A transtasman narrative. Creative non-fiction in Antipodes, June 2014, and poetry in Contrappasso, August 2014.

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

Tracts of Spinifex and Ivy

by Joyce Parkes

In memory of Judith Wright

 

Persistent rain and wind gusts downed

branches, whole trees, electricity fees,

returned a wood fire and candlelight

 

to prominence. The fire, like passion,

brought warmth to the room. Candle-

light, like memory, gave enough light

 

to write on the windfalls of that winter

when her eyes became readers with

glasses. Resting on her ears, the glasses’

 

arms heard of drifting and dendrite

years — its leaves of envy, animosity,

acuity, amity, tapping on her window

 

on days of denouement or how so.

Is she looking at a windfall kept

for the fire, or seeing a winter’s wrap,

 

would she dwell on convex and

concave* lenses, place a magnifying

glass on the map staring at her

 

and write on tracts of eucalyptus

and pine trees, spinifex and ivy,

discover place and pith?

*From the poem Some Words by Judith Wright

Published: July 2014
Joyce Parkes

is published in Cordite, Overland, Pen International, The Journal of the Australian Irish Heritage Association, Creatrix, The New England Review, Westerly, foam:eBest Australian Poetry 2005 (UQP), Abridged, Axon and similarly committed literary journals, magazines and anthologies in Australia and in seven other countries. She writes to unravel what produces irony, disdain, audacity, empathy and reverie.

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

Dorrigo Immortals

by Brian Hawkins

Theoretically at work, I have slacked off

to do my duty, noting the antic motions of the Topknot Pigeons,

the Catbird’s tinking,

and the Carabeens with their lofty wooden sails,

and capturing for the nth time

the cowled flowers of the sweet-smelling Cunjevoi

in artless photos that will die with my hard drive,

never to see the light of day, but which I take

anyway, just for the gesture.

 

Through the deep mysterious forest

tourists are charging like steam-trains,

trailing puffs of deodorant and conversationally

yelling at the tops of their voices.  Though they do not see

me, lurking in the shadow of a plank buttress,

or the million year old beings quietly eating lunch, we are all of us

engaged on the same project, our one duty to worship

the life we didn’t ask for or deserve.

Published: July 2014
Brian Hawkins

is a poet and ecologist who was until recently based in the mountains of northern New South Wales. He now lives in Canberra, where he helps organise biodiversity surveys around Australia.

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

ENTITLED

by Michael Kwaku Kesse Somuah

“Was Gold blind

to have thought

it would find its light

in the Iris of mother Ghana?”

 

I pity the bars after it

if only, there would be any

to restore its Kingly pride.

 

Cocoa did itself

by being inquisitive

to have come from Fernandopo

by not opting to be slaved

to marry the palm trees of Jericho.

 

I hate why it caught the eye of Tetteh Quarshie

or, were you smuggled unduly?

For,

I pity you on a land of capsid bugs.

 

Was timber deaf

to the robust sounds of the chain saw?

Had you not heard of the parks in harbor country?

 

I pity your death,

For you would have been a spot for some birds

and a serenity of lush strings for lovers.

 

Hey rivers!

“Couldn’t you have waned as vapour

to deploy an array of ways to explore you?”

“Don’t you know you are the epicenter

around which much of humanity lives and thrives?”

 

From the Nile in Africa to the Ganges in India

From the Cano Cristales to the Danube in Europe

From the Zambezi to the Rio Negro of South America

whose color looks like a darkly brewed tea,

 

I pity our godly Birim, Tano, Pra and Densu,

for losing that visual feast of memories

to this sin of galamsey and excreted human waste.

 

Agoo!

To be continued is an excuse

to flee from this poem

in this un-chiefly land

of twisted tongues

where our Oil find is a curse

in a meeting of Spiders.

Published: July 2014
Michael Kwaku Kesse Somuah

lives in Ghana and is an African Poet. International Poetry congresses and festivals have included his poetry presentations and writings in their programs. He is a multi award-winning poet and has participated in poetry events, readings and performances in and out of Ghana, including Greece, Cyprus, South Africa, Canada, India, and Holland. Michael’s poetry collection, That sweet name like magic has made me, was published by Susan Jane Sims of Poetry space-UK Limited (www.poetryspace.co.uk). Michael blogs at www.mkksomuah.wordpress.com

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

Russian Bit Player

by Ann Vickery

“Mutton birds or short-tailed shearwaters are in the middle of an annual migration from Siberia to the south east coast of Australia to breed. But this year, many of them are not making the distance,” ABC Bush Telegraph (14 November 2013)

 

Pushing through the wind, spirit finds weather.

Sea steeping with panic at too much sky.

Unfeasted, the mutton birds deck the beach

rioting among trunks of kelp. Starved at

the end-point of love, their climatic passage

beats out high Siberian drama. We are all gulags

aren’t we?    Migratory cycles

of need, the energy and failure of the body.

Listening only when the expected comes unstuck,

deaf to the incoming tides. You reverse all charge,

rehearsing calm over the day’s ragged events,

a finetuned lament of self, adagio mia down the phone line.

Feathers pile thick on the shore, some of them mine

although I fail to recognise them.

Out-moulted passion, pastoral gifts of the said.

As are those birds, so are you to me.

Published: July 2014
Ann Vickery

is the author of Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (2000) and Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry (2007). She recently edited Poetry and the Trace (2013) and the ‘Masque’ issue of Cordite Poetry Review.

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

Sable Island Horses

by Siobhan Hodge

I am not an ocean narrative. My feet

are fingernail-soft, long hair

and wide gaze tangledrawn

to shifting tides that rip

and rail against the sand.

 

Sea-horse, island-bound

my carousel horizon

draws shipwrecks, lung

foam. Desperation echoes,

rebounds my own expulsion.

 

Sand and salt forced familiar,

my tongue grows stern

on sea-grass. Thickening fog

bars guests who would wring

copper or coal from our bodies.

 

Weedy morass, short-stumping

this newbred hide grips

all Atlantic spray. Pendent swing

of ice shies fetlocks upon

the slopes. Agency through exile.

 

We are our own.

Storm plains flex narrow dunes

to claim marrow. Cold bones

sink to sea, where we need

no hand to steer us home.

Published: July 2014
Siobhan Hodge

is a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Australia, studying Sappho’s poetry and its translation. She divides her time between Australia, Hong Kong and the UK. She recently published a chapbook, Picking Up the Pieces, and has had poetry published in several places, including Cordite and Peril.

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

The Silent Evolution

by Jan Price

underwater life size sculptures by Jason de Caires Taylor, near Cancun off the coast of Mexico

 

… an up-stir

shoots sand quick to slow sideways

as a grey stingray trails free of a dust-like cloud;

fluting cream underwings it flies away

low through the aged-blue ocean

soft-shadowing the newly reefed

vertical beings of deeper shades

as if here their height had yesterdays.

Sun shrapnels leisurely

through skylights of wave and wash

floating fragments down

dart-dappling waiting upturned faces

unaware

gathered they share shallow warmth

on sculptured flesh

and yet   stone-alone

obsessed only with the act of drowning

in bliss – lips smiling eyes closed.

Now a cello growls;

vowels round all four hundred figures

its breath skimming

intimate as sharks’ silk circling newcomers –

a rolled-brim knit-hated girl lollypop-cheeked

grins double-gripping a coins-unspent handbag;

a woman bare-breasted drape-hipped

arms cradling her belly

offers light’s wisdom to her near born;

a man keeling head up leaning back on his heels

arms wide palms open offers thanks

as if in a lightening-blue field of drought breaking;

a  nun with Please for a mouth

her face shadow-wrinkles in no other prayer;

a young man head-scarfed coral-knotted

hands at work but suddenly paused

senses love about his neck;

a man chin-relaxed blowing fish silver

bubbles mute sings ahhhh hymns;

a small curly crowned boy head down

sleeps sitting up without rippling fins;

a man arms crossed shields his face

from yet another promise soon to darken.

Shoals straining through the plankton melody

nibble from an English lady’s scarf

from a Buddhist’s large earlobe’s algae

from a mother’s orange sway-growing coat

from a hunched Chinaman’s toes.

And while fish of colours and stripes circumnavigate

feeding off the immortalised – all are unaware

souvenir hunters are dropping

black as frogs

snorkelling

against the light.

Published: July 2014
Jan Price

Jan Price’s poetry has been winning literary competitions (including her section in The Great River Shakespeare Festival Sonnet Contest, Minnesota, 2011), appearing in anthologies (such as Woman’s Work and Taking Flight), newspapers and literary journals in Australia and overseas for a number of years. Her artwork has appeared on book and journal covers.

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

(untitled #3)

by Dan Disney

we made pleasure our guide, an ideal

excitement amid the pedants and perfection of delicate elders

in the heirloom of boredom’s salon

 

we found a savage torpor

habit gratifying those masters of rustic conversation, who expressed their birthright

while we made their pleasure our guide, an ideal

 

divination for self-abandoning minds

playing parlour games with the lower harmonies of scholars sharing trademarks

in the heirloom of boredom’s salon

 

the enragements egalitarian, law and benediction

rational as museums and causing intolerable disgust, we were (necessarily)

made for pleasure, guided toward an ideal

 

facsimile of elegance, the vanities of gentlemen

cadent in oversmiling and transfigurative language, commonly violent

in the heirloom of boredom’s salon

 

operative manners are a shortcut to rank

while nature germinates huge forms, visible companions within our empire of gourmands

pleasure is our guide, an ideal

in the heirloom of boredom’s salon

William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’

vs Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Cultural Pedigree’

Published: July 2014
Dan Disney

teaches in the Literature program at Sogang University (Seoul). This year, his critical writing appears in Orbis Litterarum and Axon; translations appear in World Literature Today; book reviews appear in Antipodes and Verse; poems appear in The Warwick Review and Postcolonial Text. He is completing a book of villanelles.

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

(untitled #2)

by Dan Disney

there are pictures to look at, books to read, the gods indifferent

to our assemblage of gardens detaining monsters

and being cheerful helps  lost men cast virgin light into shapes of tradition

across nude vectors of architecture there are  books to read, pictures to consult, techniques

for naming thought treading experimentally into communal form, a

metamorphosis of seized by want and being cheerful helps

the imperatives of music shift across flesh, we are disorderly inside the old

regions of the sacred hardly astonishing as plants

fructifying the myth of ourselves, a jurisdiction of pictures to look at and books

on the indecent principles of being cheerful helps

Alain Badiou, ‘Philosophy and Art’

vs John Cage, ‘Lecture on Something’

Published: July 2014
Dan Disney

teaches in the Literature program at Sogang University (Seoul). This year, his critical writing appears in Orbis Litterarum and Axon; translations appear in World Literature Today; book reviews appear in Antipodes and Verse; poems appear in The Warwick Review and Postcolonial Text. He is completing a book of villanelles.

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

Great Barrier Reef

by B. R. Dionysius

(i)

 

They say it’s the length of Japan, if that group

Of home islands was stretched out beside the

Queensland coastline; a great lung of Poseidon’s

Branching from the continent’s spine of white

Beach, exhaling microscopic spores into the sea’s

Vast cavity. Atlantean sunk beneath the Pacific

Ocean’s mythic blue abyss, the living tissue is

Larger than Cook’s England, as legendary as

Arthur’s Albion & as treacherous as Lyonesse.

After all, it conspired to hole the Endeavour.

 

 

(ii)

 

Along the brain-corrugated reef, light harpoons

Into water translucent & smooth as Murano glass.

Photons lobotomise; calm waters protect volcanic

Nibs of mountains we call islands. The reef is a

Front gate; white picket fence that keeps out sharks.

You can make out clam bunkers shut fast against

Riptides that blow subterranean wind in their faces.

Here, the wet metamorphosis of garden caterpillars;

Black & yellow striped nudibranchs, inch over polyps

That house migrants in their hundreds of thousands.

 

 

(iii)

 

It is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon ultramarine.

A billion generations have crowned its hard teeth

Before we came down from the trees. Here, time

Is measured in the millennia that green turtles have

Spent heaving their way up beaches to deposit their

Golf ball-sized capsules. Or how barnacles cling for

The length of the British Empire’s reign upon a rock.

Such perspectives diminish our enterprise; as bulk oil

Carriers slide carefully around the razor-edged reefs;

Like a sapper probing for mines in the Afghan sand.

 

 

(iv)

 

The rich organ now wears Asian funeral white. Its

Cancer the antithesis of black Western mourning.

The technicolour algae depart from their luxury posts

Like passengers on a stricken liner, leaving ghosts in

The shell. The sea is on a slow boil. The coral is dying

Its emphysemic death as parts of the great lung collapse.

It is falling into the shade of bleached whale bones as

Pieces of brain wash up on the beach; a tidal keepsake.

No need for a glass-bottomed boat to sail the future.

It is a scab on the ocean’s leg that is best left to heal.

Published: July 2014
B. R. Dionysius

was founding Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival. His poetry has been widely published in literary journals, anthologies, newspapers and online. His eighth poetry collection, Weranga was released in August 2013. He lives in Ipswich, Queensland where he runs, watches birds, teaches English and writes sonnets.

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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

Orange-bellied parrot

by B. R. Dionysius

This arrangement of their molecules is sliding apart

Like sand dusting down an eggtimer’s crystal throat.

They’ll come to an abrupt halt & form a tiny mound

Of bones to decorate the bitterness of the salt-marsh.

Their heat will radiate out into the night; other forms

Will be taken from them & prosper, as their flight-

Energy is recouped. Impossible to know; those swift

Last thoughts of a dying race; that flare, then watch

As the warmth dies & blackens like a spent match.

They ignite our desire; square up to death, the fear

Of the world living on without us. It will. Our time

Is already burnt. There is no difference between us,

Except how our cells unite. We’re all the same flock.

We’ll all fall out of the sky in death’s grand migration.

was founding Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival. His poetry has been widely published in literary journals, anthologies, newspapers and online. His eighth poetry collection, Weranga was released in August 2013. He lives in Ipswich, Queensland where he runs, watches birds, teaches English and writes sonnets.

Published: July 2014
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From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

Two green parrots

by Anne M. Carson

Two green parrots wing across a granite sky.

Grief and hope together again, as close as

fingers on a hand, feathers on a wing.

 

They don’t fly straight as arrows do into

a standing target, they are not ammunition

fired out of the sky’s dark mouth. They dip

 

and rise, weaving sinew and delight into

strands of effortless grace, calling as they go.

What do humans know of the calls of birds?

 

But it sounds like liquid pleasure, it sounds

like they laugh and make merry against

the backdrop of the approaching storm.

Published: July 2014
Anne M. Carson

Anne M. Carson’s first full-length collection, Removing the Kimono, was published by Hybrid Publishers in 2013.  She has won and been commended in numerous poetry prizes including being long-listed in the inaugural Canberra University Vice Chancellor’s Prize. In 2014 she established the SecondBite Poetry Prize. As a Creative Writing Therapist she has edited three books. She teaches Poetry Writing and Appreciation to adults.

Back to issue
From: Vol.01 N.02 – Making way for other kind

he doesn’t see distress

by Geraldine Burrowes

he’s noticing the guide’s sparkly clips

holding back

her hair we read

as it suits and hangs

 

she is imagining

dismembered bodies of little penguins

caught in the street mural   everyone ignoring

civil and warring

parties tackle the bigger issues

they dismiss fifty years of research

respect for filling the dish

by winding up and moving

forward

 

sandbars submerge under objects in currents

in the end we’re wandering in

and out    with muscle loss

water drop-off

 

electrons in multi-wavelength

energy levels like rungs on a ladder

seeing with radio eyes magnitudes of bubbles

the black hole’s cosmic jet

and still we’re misunder-

standing debt

Published: July 2014
Geraldine Burrowes

Geraldine Burrowes’ poems have appeared recently in Rabbit, Otoliths, Cordite and Southerly. Others were published in Visible Ink, Paradise Anthology 5, and Baw Baw Writer’s Pre-Scribes. One of her poems was Highly Commended in the 2011 Geelong Writers Poetry Competition, another Commended in 2013. She is also a visual artist.

An Australian and international
journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics.

Plumwood Mountain Journal is created on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and to elders past, present and future. We also acknowledge all traditional custodians of the lands this journal reaches.

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