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Content From Issue: Volume 2 Number 1 (February 2015)

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

Editorial-February 2015

by Anne Elvey

2015-01-14 18.12.05

This issue of Plumwood Mountain journal was to have been edited by Martin Harrison, who died suddenly in September 2014. Not ready to replace Martin at short notice and in the midst of mourning him, we delayed the call for submissions and I took on the responsibility for editing the February 2015 issue, suggesting a theme “Otherkind”, but open to general submissions that were broadly-speaking ecopoetic. I have chosen 36 poems, reflecting an assortment of voices and styles, mostly Australian. These range from Michael Farrell’s resistant imaginings of practitioners human and other than human (“Nonhuman Practitioner Breaks With Light Verse”) to Jordie Albiston’s tracking of a mineral (“calcium”), to more conventional poems: about the other-than-human impetus for Isaac Newton’s insight into gravity (Rose Lucas, “What Isaac Newton Saw”); Judith Rodriguez’s subtle take on human-in-nature relations as blessing (“Benison”); a poet watching rather than swatting as a mozzie draws his blood (John Leonard, “Mosquito”); and the seemingly-simple interplay of bird and human domesticities (Wendy Fleming, “The Proper of the Season”).

2015-01-18 15.31.06

Toby Fitch offers two inversions of Rimbaud in “Metrophobia” and “Aphasia” both of which hint to me of the complex underside of our tragically destructive relationship with Earth; so, too, Bonny Cassidy’s “Stump, trunk and can” and Andrew Jeffrey’s “Perturbation”. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s excerpts from “Distant Landscapes I” perform in different ways an unsettling of human subjectivity in relation to tree subjects. With echoes of the ents storming Saruman’s stronghold in Lord of the Rings, Jim Walton imagines Australian flora and fauna battling against humans in “Last Rites”. Australians’ fear-fascination with sharks appears in Rachael Mead’s “Great White Shark” and B. R. Dionysius’s excellent “Angstcination”. There are pastorals, near-pastorals, an extinct pastoral, idylls, and evocations of individual species of birds. Susan Richardson offers with humour a response to Wittgenstein’s postulation “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him”.

I have kept the issue broad and the boundaries loose to allow readers to consider what ecopoetry might or might not be, and how texts might be read ecopoetically. Can there be any contemporary poetry without an ear to the damage humans have done, and continue to do, to the habitats of so many otherkind and to our own? Can there be an Australian ecopoetry without attentiveness to ongoing colonial injustices to people and land, nor without openness to the ecological knowledge of many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples? I am glad to include poems by members of The Borroloola Poetry Club from the Northern Territory, who engage culture and poetry in  “gem stones” and Harriett Johnston’s “The Shimmering Snake Slide”.

In addition to the thirty-six poems selected for the issue, there are an essay, a review essay by Lara Stevens, a photo essay by Rhonda Poholke, words and images by Marissa Ker, and an interview with Ann Fisher-Wirth, co-editor of the U.S. anthology Ecopoetry. We have a bumper crop of book reviews, thirteen in all. Reviewers vary in their terminology, and one thing that struck me in my editing is the way writers cross between writing of humans as part of and as separate from something called “nature”. I decided that this ambivalence is part of where we are as writers, readers and critics of poetry and ecopoetry, knowing ourselves as embodied and embedded in our more-than-human habitats, living on our own or (for most of us) someone else’s Country, and at the same time, for so many of us, disastrously forgetting all this and performing again and again our separation.

20150104_170512
Seaford Wetlands, January 2015

Thursday 29 January 2015

Published: January 2015
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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

The Shimmering Snake Slide

by Harriett Johnston

That best thing of all

It running chasing black

All blur of a thing

It shimmer on its belly

You never kill him

It’s dangerous and like Rainbow to us

You respect that snake cause

It come to earth from the sky

It bring rain and life

Can’t believe I got photo of him

You all gather round

All you mob come here and cheer

This photo I got like Rainbow

All over the ground

Borroloola Poetry Club: Diwurruwurru (Message Stick)

Borroloola is remote town located in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Territory. It has a population of around 600-700 people in the Dry Season; and approximately 800-1000 people in the Wet Season. The population of Borroloola is 95% Indigenous and is made up of members of the Yanyuwa, Garrawa, Mara and Gudanji peoples.

Diwurruwurru (The Borroloola Poetry Club) is an Indigenous writers’/storytellers’ group that meets at the local school, or at the local Warralungku Arts Centre, under the care of local teacher/poet, Phillip Hall. The club is made up of both adult and school student members and meets every Friday afternoon (and sometimes on camp out bush).

Diwurruwurru has established an annual poetry prize (with children’s, young adult and adult sections) as part of the Borroloola Show. This year’s prize attracted over 70 entries; and was a glorious testament to the club’s dynamism.

Diwurruwurru has also collaborated with The Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation, since 2012, to establish an annual poetry festival in Tennant Creek; to publish member poems electronically on The Barkly Poetry Wall and in the print publication, Coming to Voice. In 2013 the Club also worked with the NT Writers’ Centre to secure an Australia Council grant to host Lionel Fogarty (an award-winning Indigenous poet) and Amanda King (a digital artist) in a month long residency in Borroloola. This exciting program saw Borroloola school students writing poetry, learning to perform and then recording their efforts onto film. In 2014 twenty members from Diwurruwurru were invited to WordStorm, the NT Writers’ Festival, to launch the Borroloola poetry film onto the national stage – a wonderful celebration of creativity in the Gulf.

Diwurruwurru has secured many other publication opportunities in 2014-2015 as well: we have been selected to appear in the new Donna Ward Inkermann & Blunt publication and in the Red Room Company’s new ‘Poetry Objects’ series.

Diwurruwurru writes group poems under the guidance of Phillip Hall. Our creative process is to meet around a meal where we share a lot of excited ideas/stories. Phillip Hall gathers these together on a white board where the drafting process begins with much discussion, debate and hilarious attempts to pronounce/spell Aboriginal English and Language words. Phillip continues to work on the poem over the following week before bringing it back to the group for approval. This process is sometimes repeated over several weeks.

Under the care of Phillip Gijindarriji Hall, Diwurruwurru is a lively creative place where family and friends meet to explore, experiment and assert Indigenous Culture and Story. The message stick that it generously shares is one of pride, respect and strength.

Phillip Gijindarriji Hall

The Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation (ALNF) is proud to have hosted the Borroloola Poetry Club at the most recent Writers Workshops in October 2014. They are excellent writers and the ALNF is proud to support and encourage their ongoing activity as writers.

Published: January 2015
Harriett Johnston

is a proud young Yanyuwa woman and leading member of the Borroloola Poetry Group, ‘Diwurruwurru’. She loves Vanderlin Island (of which she is a Traditional Owner), fishing, swimming, poetry camp and bossing Mista Phillip (because he worries too much).

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

Zosterops lateralis

by Lucy Wilks

A pilgrimage has taken to a wood

my saunterer, idling in the warmth I sit

upon a rock and wait.  It’s for the good

naught moves but breath, it is a canvas lit

of expectation.  Leaf and stem will waft

the echoes of my stillness, readying

for colloquy; their parties know as soft

its fond, auspicious mantra.  Wants now wing

the air with small arrivals, one by one

a little, feathered hallelujah lands

to glean and forage.  Shadows render dun

their plumage, then the sun with gold commands

each flank to velvet buff, they blush from spry

and olive coverts.  Silver rings my eye.

Published: January 2015
Lucy Wilks

was born in Melbourne in 1960.  Her poems have appeared in Verse, Meanjin, Southerly, Otoliths, Rabbit and Cordite.

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

What Isaac Newton Saw

by Rose Lucas

At Woolsthorpe Manor,

his childhood home,

the famous apple tree –

or perhaps its latter-day descendent,

a gracious Maid of Kent –

still droops its gnarled arms toward the

clottedness of earth,

giving up its wormed and floury fruit to the grass,

to the possibilities of turbulent

and muddy transformation:

 

Outwitting the plague, he sat for seasons in his quiet house,

its losses and constraints,

the drabness of its close routines;

almost a poet,

he watched

with such stillness and

openness

and restlessness –

the quiet world unfolding in his garden;

an ordinary miracle that needs a different eye to see it,

a new tilt of the head, or sudden mood of

equanimity that allows leaves to rustle,

branches to brush the lawn,

a bird to move discretely and even

try out some autumnal singing –

 

each thing

sifting into

place,

judged   or

unjudged:

until an apple simply

falls –

a muscular movement of energy,

and chance –

and a new constellation of elements

spins

shimmering

into view.

 

Woolsthorpe Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire. ©Pauline Brightling, 2011.

Published: January 2015
Rose Lucas

is a Melbourne poet whose collection  Even in the Dark was published by UWAP in 2013. She is the winner of the Mary Gilmour award for poetry 2012-2014. She is also a freelance academic, currently working at Victoria University.

article

The Shimmering Snake Slide

by Anne Elvey

Harriett Johnston

 

That best thing of all

It running chasing black

All blur of a thing

It shimmer on its belly

You never kill him

It’s dangerous and like Rainbow to us

You respect that snake cause

It come to earth from the sky

It bring rain and life

Can’t believe I got photo of him

You all gather round

All you mob come here and cheer

This photo I got like Rainbow

All over the ground

 

Harriett Johnston is a proud young Yanyuwa woman and leading member of the Borroloola Poetry Group, ‘Diwurruwurru’. She loves Vanderlin Island (of which she is a Traditional Owner), fishing, swimming, poetry camp and bossing Mista Phillip (because he worries too much).

Borroloola Poetry Club: Diwurruwurru (Message Stick)

Borroloola is remote town located in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Territory. It has a population of around 600-700 people in the Dry Season; and approximately 800-1000 people in the Wet Season. The population of Borroloola is 95% Indigenous and is made up of members of the Yanyuwa, Garrawa, Mara and Gudanji peoples.

Diwurruwurru (The Borroloola Poetry Club) is an Indigenous writers’/storytellers’ group that meets at the local school, or at the local Warralungku Arts Centre, under the care of local teacher/poet, Phillip Hall. The club is made up of both adult and school student members and meets every Friday afternoon (and sometimes on camp out bush).

Diwurruwurru has established an annual poetry prize (with children’s, young adult and adult sections) as part of the Borroloola Show. This year’s prize attracted over 70 entries; and was a glorious testament to the club’s dynamism.

Diwurruwurru has also collaborated with The Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation, since 2012, to establish an annual poetry festival in Tennant Creek; to publish member poems electronically on The Barkly Poetry Wall and in the print publication, Coming to Voice. In 2013 the Club also worked with the NT Writers’ Centre to secure an Australia Council grant to host Lionel Fogarty (an award-winning Indigenous poet) and Amanda King (a digital artist) in a month long residency in Borroloola. This exciting program saw Borroloola school students writing poetry, learning to perform and then recording their efforts onto film. In 2014 twenty members from Diwurruwurru were invited to WordStorm, the NT Writers’ Festival, to launch the Borroloola poetry film onto the national stage – a wonderful celebration of creativity in the Gulf.

Diwurruwurru has secured many other publication opportunities in 2014-2015 as well: we have been selected to appear in the new Donna Ward Inkermann & Blunt publication and in the Red Room Company’s new ‘Poetry Objects’ series.

Diwurruwurru writes group poems under the guidance of Phillip Hall. Our creative process is to meet around a meal where we share a lot of excited ideas/stories. Phillip Hall gathers these together on a white board where the drafting process begins with much discussion, debate and hilarious attempts to pronounce/spell Aboriginal English and Language words. Phillip continues to work on the poem over the following week before bringing it back to the group for approval. This process is sometimes repeated over several weeks.

Under the care of Phillip Gijindarriji Hall, Diwurruwurru is a lively creative place where family and friends meet to explore, experiment and assert Indigenous Culture and Story. The message stick that it generously shares is one of pride, respect and strength.

Phillip Gijindarriji Hall

 

The Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation (ALNF) is proud to have hosted the Borroloola Poetry Club at the most recent Writers Workshops in October 2014. They are excellent writers and the ALNF is proud to support and encourage their ongoing activity as writers.

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

The Rabbit Catcher

by Stuart Barnes and Michele Seminara

(1)

 

The little thickets were the only place to get to.

The absence of the sea

 

Set a white, extravagant quiet.

I awaited the great beauty of the gorse—

 

Simmering, perfumed,

Ringing the snares with its unction.

 

It was intent, like torture.

Its dead black spikes

 

Made a hole in nothing.

And its flowers tasted like vacancy.

 

(2)††

 

It was an ancient twist of the tripwire set me bleeding.

Clamped in the copper gleam of a human contrivance

I wait, aghast, as an indolent fly

Trails the blade-edge of our drama.

‘Murderer!’ I cry, but my words do not

Translate beyond a tortured weeping.

 

Doomed to the Sunday stew-pot

I lie locked as you penetrate the gorse

Your blunt fingers riving snare after snare

From the innocent land, your unworldly

Exploration driving you to desecrate

The sanctity of this eyrie hollow—

 

Where my simmering entrails come fresh

Into your dybbuk hands.

†a remix of Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ by Stuart Barnes
††a remix of Ted Hughes’s ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ by Michele Seminara

Published: January 2015
Stuart Barnes

Stuart Barnes’s writing has appeared in a wide variety of publications. He is poetry editor of Tincture Journal and Verity La. In 2014 he co-judged the ACT Publishing Awards’ poetry category and his manuscript Blacking Out and other poems was named Runner-up for the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. Twitter @StuartABarnes, Tumblr http://stuartabarnes.tumblr.com/

Michele Seminara

is a poet and yoga teacher from Sydney. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Bluepepper, Tincture Journal, Regime and Seizure. She is also the managing editor of creative arts journal Verity La. She blogs at http://micheleseminara.wordpress.com/ and is on twitter @SeminaraMichele

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

The Proper of the Season

by Wendy Fleming

Later, in moonlight, the tree will shock the window

massed white on glass. Now, I clear breakfast

dishes, wipe down the sink, over the bench

around the tap, then watch the blackbird

mouth filled with dried grasses, slip into the tree

through clusters of pink, white and green crab apple,

my mother’s tea cup, lace edged hanky, an altar cloth.

I remember being here last year, the same scene

All Saints Day, All Souls Day and then as now

felt the timeliness of all that’s gone before

how the position of the sun changes.

That the blackbird will complete her nest, raise hatchlings.

The tree bathes in full sun. I rinse the cloth and finish.

Published: January 2015
Wendy Fleming

descendant of Irish immigrants, the first of whom arrived in Melbourne in 1838, was born in Melbourne, grew up in the Mallee. For most of her life she has  lived in Melbourne and currently lives in Bundoora. Her poetry has been widely anthologised and in May this year her first poetry book Backyard Lemon was published by MPU and launched by Kevin Brophy. Current treasurer of Melbourne Poets Union, she has served in all committee positions including President. She is also co-convenor of Poets @ Watsonia, a branch of Melbourne Poets Union.

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

The Contentions

by Les Wicks

Anticipation of spring is like the flopsy fingers

left to mischief,

fantasy that folds our time.

 

This cut weather.

We rest on pillows amidst a flurry of bird wars – a

channel-billed cuckoo, that itinerant other

is hunting for a magpies’ ruin their

eggs supplanted by size & rancour. But

we people belong, don’t we? Turning poems. Immobility

& its dainty flowers,

wealthy in sequester.

 

For me, hurry would be surrender,

smokehouse resistance

will wash away the foundation

that June built with such bluster.

Victory is certain

so we snuggle

in tinder.

Published: January 2015
Les Wicks

Les Wicks’ 11th book of poetry is Sea of Heartbeak (Unexpected Resilience) (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013). Wicks has been a guest at most of Australia’s literary festivals, toured widely and been published in over 300 newspapers, anthologies and magazines across 20 countries in 11 languages. He runs Meuse press, which focuses on poetry outreach projects. http://leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

Sunrise Andaman Sea

by Tony Page

5 am still dark motorbike dew

night’s nectar no one awake

 

speed sheer round curves

mangroves to the right

 

limestone on the left

stretching north enigma

 

questions the opal air

eyes hungry for light

 

hide in excess of orchids

trespass the garden

 

hope no one hears

reach shore of content

 

hint of breeze furrows

the water with tropic code

 

here I sink into sand

dawn front row seat

 

sunrise of the secret

this time revealed or not

Published: January 2015
Tony Page

is a Melbourne poet, whose third book Gateway to the Sphinx (Five Islands) appeared in 2004. For 20 years, he worked in Thailand and Malaysia, but now lives in Australia. He has also written for the stage, with Who Killed Caravaggio?  completed in 2009. Recently published in Eureka Street, The Australian Poetry Journal, The Canberra Times, Right On, Peril and Otoliths, he is now finalising a fourth collection of poetry.

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

Stump, trunk and can

by Bonny Cassidy

Your torso parked against a salmon gum.

 

Or, you as a terrified hero-horse, chest

ground against the earth.

 

You made by fat, drastic thumbs;

and a squiff of zinc for your fag-end.

 

Now you’re a bastard

you might as well dress like one

and eat the meat that bastards eat.

 

The distended spider hanging

from a mosquito coast; its network of tails.

 

The bear at the centre of the colosseum.

 

You as teal-coloured, graven

with signs of delta: whiplash, eel and parvenu.

 

The cup with two saucers.

 

Your shin as a root that rests

while the body walks on.

 

You as a hull fading into view.

 

Planed by the rush, sockets thrown,

your face coming away in my hands

like an anchor.

 

Falling through streets—pausing

to lick the page, wake

muffled in the crotch of a long gaze.

Published: January 2015
Bonny Cassidy

is author of two poetry collections, Certain Fathoms (Puncher & Wattmann, 2012) and Final Theory (Giramondo, 2014). She teaches Creative Writing at RMIT University and is feature reviews editor for Cordite Poetry Review. Bonny recently undertook the Australian Poetry Tour of Ireland, giving readings and workshops in Dublin, Cork and Belfast.

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

soaked

by Jackson

for Richard Tipping

 

Inhabiting this

art

 

we’re not seated

on a carved chair

regarding

through glass

 

the sharked

polluted

eternal

ocean —

 

We’re the flensing edge

of any of a hundred

newly risen

teeth

 

We’re the cornea

of a boy bodysurfing

beside an

outlet pipe

 

We’re a blackened plank

floating around soaked

A message

without a bottle

Published: January 2015
Jackson

WA-based poet Jackson won the 2014 Ethel Webb Bundell Poetry Award. In 2013 Mulla Mulla Press published her second collection lemon oil. In 2015 she will be commencing a PhD in Writing at Edith Cowan University. Jackson is the founding editor of Uneven Floor poetry blogzine, unevenfloorpoetry.blogspot.com. Visit Jackson at proximitypoetry.com.

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

Perturbation

by Andrew Jeffrey

perturbation-andrew-jeffrey.wh.fw

The pdf file can be accessed here: Perturbation – Andrew Jeffrey

Published: January 2015
Andrew Jeffrey

lives in Sheffield, England. He is currently completing a sequence of poems about burrowing animals and the Writing MA at Sheffield Hallam University. He also teaches Experimental Writing.

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

Perigean Spring Tide Arrives in Yagoona

by Kent MacCarter

‘It is an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged.’ – Silent Spring

 

lost, Rachel Louise Carson

squinched a face of fish

a young woman          the other

day asked

me          are there any

states in America

that have

a Maccas?                 yo

 

I hear bagpipes? [convincingly

pulling off a Utah]

I asked

yes

she grilled          tattooed out upon the oval

tomato of a dusk

 

the outside tenor drone

the both of us

agitants          our sudds of spit

speedometres of what’s bitesize

a Christmastime             of pesticide

Published: January 2015
Kent MacCarter

is a writer and editor in Castlemaine, with his wife and son. He’s the author of three poetry collections – In the Hungry Middle of Here (Transit Lounge, 2009), Ribosome Spreadsheet (Picaro, 2011) and Sputnik’s Cousin (Transit Lounge, 2014). He is also editor of Joyful Strains: Making Australia Home (Affirm Press, 2013), a non-fiction collection of diasporic memoir. MacCarter is active in Melbourne PEN. He is Managing Editor of Cordite Poetry Review.

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

Mosquito

by John Leonard

I’m watching you, a blur of wings

And legs, floating around me —

I’m trying to brush you away,

Or grab and squash you.

 

Suddenly I see you’re on my hand,

Walking up my middle finger,

Testing with your feet, waving

Your proboscis thoughtfully.

 

I let you go on to find your spot —

A small sharp pain, and then

You’re sucking, white-banded rear legs

Held over your back.

 

Your transparent, black-striped body

Pulses, it seems to take forever

Until a dark finger of blood creeps

Along inside you.

 

You bloat, abdomen red now,

But once detached, you whiffle about,

Take two steps, as if to start

Feeding again.

 

No! You don’t need any more,

I don’t think you can fly! I puff

You away and you disappear across

Autumn garden-beds.

Published: January 2015
John Leonard

was born in the UK and came to Australia in 1991. He has a PhD from the University of Queensland and was poetry editor of Overland from 2003 to 2007. He has five collections of poetry; the latest, A Spell, A Charm, was published by Hybrid Publishing in 2014. www.jleonard.net

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

minor manifesto

by Kit Kelen

vestiunt lanae: mihi parva rura et
spiritum Graiae tenuem Carmenae
Parca non mendax dedit et malignum
            spernere vulgus.

But I am rich too: Fate, an honest patron,
Has given me a small farm, an ear fine-tuned
To the Grecian Muses, and a mind from vulgar
            Envy aloof.
                        – Horace, Odes, II.16

 

1

 

all of the trails brought me now vanish

the gate grows over

…lost to the world

 

then let’s make clear the play position –

I only desire to afford to be poor

I do not pretend that is not to desire

 

here heaven is with me

how else to imagine?

there’s still the odd delivery

the elsewhere seeping like a stain

 

hear the road, that it hums and grumbles

the pigment takes

 

if the lines can come

innocence will shape our soil

 

all that we need is fashioned for us

 

what does a magpie know about rain?

 

 

2

 

read in that light omens suggest

my tenure as fallible as the rest

this is the place to park

 

true, echoes from nowhere

come hammering home

 

the world is a market

no way not to play

 

but the world is many things besides

some of those biting are bit

 

 

3

 

here on my own growing gates

tending fences, commending their collapse

 

shrunk daily in circumference

one should acknowledge mastery

 

among sunfall and foliage

loathed and admired

is it not I who make

the landscape looking?

 

I am the field here

cattle numb in

 

rain is waiting

for thirst to be spoke

taps on my shoulder home

 

 

4

 

dawn again

this last

bright irony of the condemned

 

you see how the light is cast

lacks attention

 

the day grows over

everything done

vanity, vanities

 

out there the wall all window

you walk through it

were meant to

it’s in the bones

 

ramshackle lines

knot me

 

now living in the longed for time

breathing sculpture I am

the weeds pull round

 

 

5

 

all day today

my footsteps after

out of breath

 

sky is a wing

folded out over

the reckless stretch of facts wed to

sore distraction

 

some nights the anaesthetic wears through

you see what you’ve made

weep, laugh

 

 

6

 

gentle at strings and by all airs

 

you dizzying

the gospel of less

none left to preach

 

here goes though

 

best rule

simplest

easiest first

pick the windfall

before tugging

unless of course

limbs want a stretch

 

take out the errant weed alone

and leave the clump till last

 

arms with the barrow as low as they’ll go

 

7

 

I am more in it

by day the passages

and through dream light

 

myself entailed in

absence of action

the big told-you-so

voices in ether

their knowing untold

 

console the self with

what they cannot take

by sword, by fire

 

see how the storm’s hung our antenna

 

and deliver us from mail

as we who pen to paper impose

such willing distillations

a world

 

 

8

 

dive in

the screen is all deeps

 

spit into the vast

no disrespect

 

it’s all assumption I intuit

here beyond the rubbing out

 

what mannered vehemence

 

a breeze sets to paper

day fades the signs

or hollows damp

the pages where they’re hid for good

 

now ways of saying

edge the said

 

obscurity is something built

of accidents, the lucky breaks

 

9

 

I’m shaping the ruins

my own trackless waste

 

let me my work

the guess of chores

to comfort

to the point of fate

 

my own affects

to lounge about

I’ll swim the given sea

 

such wild iconic waves toss off

as mutual in admiration

 

 

10

 

let there be also

lacking effects

passing unnoticed

 

let lack itself

set free

not be my hairshirt

but victory

all of my kind

 

Saint Epicurus, here’s my candle

it gutters, there’s proof enough devotion

 

 

 

11

 

in absentia

hoarding provisions

plots and fictions

 

one vague sadness washes me

the all I ever wanted of childhood

crowds now

matter of fact

 

not remembering what’s to want

even where the ways are lost

 

something sweet for my retinue

the provinces are led away

they as I legion

 

in differences

made little as possible

made to mean

 

 

12

 

sooner or later

they give me a job

 

teaching ahead of myself a road

as if nothing were known

 

o that it might be

 

we took the slow coast

framing tar

 

the long and the short

of all considered

 

forgotten in

a flimsy persistence

that laboured failing of words

where paws

have gone before

 

Christopher (Kit) Kelen is an Australian poet, scholar and visual artist, and Professor of English at the University of Macau, where he has taught Creative Writing and Literature for the last fourteen years. The most recent of Kit Kelen’s dozen English language poetry books is China Years – New and Selected Poems. ‘minor manifesto’ appears in the just out Scavengers Season (Puncher and Wattman).

Published: January 2015
Kit Kelen

Christopher (Kit) Kelen is an Australian poet, scholar and visual artist, and Professor of English at the University of Macau, where he has taught Creative Writing and Literature for the last fourteen years. The most recent of Kit Kelen’s dozen English language poetry books is China Years – New and Selected Poems. ‘minor manifesto’ appears in the just out Scavengers Season (Puncher and Wattman).

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

Last Rites

by James Walton

My Lord, God knows I am your loyal vassal

no word has reached us and our plight

has deepened, the sally gate has fallen.

 

Wombat sappers under the cover of black cockatoos

(We could see nothing in the moonless night)

advance relentlessly, undermining all in their path.

 

As though blind to all consequence, swooping acrobats

of sworn enemies are united in pursuit of the turrets;

plummeting as lightning shuttlecocks.

 

Ashen faced cuckoo shrikes echo our betraying steps

reveal our position to lolling parrot corsairs,

squeaking conceits are all about us.

 

The mopokes allow us no sleep, keep time

for the nocturnal barrage of kookaburra flak

in banging fusillades shaking us to the bones.

 

We are invested, mountain ash

drain the slurry moat the watch tower tumbles,

in the citadel yard my best were as mill barley.

 

No quarter left to give, the stairway swept

war painted wallabies advance no longer garrulous,

echidna scribes work the last door in sigilic rhyme.

 

No message is out of the demesne, owls shred

our weasel words to snow on tree ferns refracting,

the sentinel trapeze fronds impenetrable.

 

All hope weary traveller has left us, our journey spent

in the drunkenness of oil and the snuff of coal,

we were consumed in temporal amnesia.

Published: January 2015
James Walton

is from South Gippsland. His work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies (Australian Love Poems, APJ, Poetry d’Amour, A Sudden Presence) and The Age. He was shortlisted for the ACU National Literature Prize 2013, and Specially Commended in the Welsh Poetry Competition 2014.

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

Kakadu billabong in Yegge, cool weather time

by Lyn Hatherly

It begins in water, the human spirit. It lingers amid fresh green floating weeds, until the time comes when it must re-enter the world.
Rusty Peters, artist and Gija man.

 

From behind glass

in a train, travelling

blind and articulated as a worm

I caught its shimmer.

A brush dipped in cobalt

has painted new grass

earth-set roots wander in water

a lustrous green and blue oval

its edges vague as twilight.

The trees wade like skinny school kids

one with a hoard of blue-winged kookaburras

in the crook of her arm

all beaks and crests

 

so that I hover at the water’s edge

like a dragonfly with its wings in wide arcs

transparent with hunger.

 

Elysian underworld, the fragrant surface,

the near heavens are clouded with feathers,

that mingle each time a jabiru

digging for file snakes or eels

strides alone through clear pools

his pronged toes in wet earth

and his glossed green-black wings

flap-fill the sky.

 

The billabong

shimmies, thickening with flying

floating, creeping

 

saratoga and long-necked turtles nose

among sunken pandanas roots

their ancestors are drawn in ochre

and x-ray on cave walls.

Organs and dry season fat on the inner eye.

Magpie-geese steer hatchlings from rush cups

through paddling-fields of wild rice

a river-dwelling ray skims the shallows.

 

It waxes, all of it, white and pink lily flowers

red claw, prawn, the trilling of bee-eaters

jacanas with their long toes on point

making glissades across green pads.

 

And the billabong will wane, regular as the moon

(all of it)

 

or the human body

tucked tight as a joey

until it swells wide and roo-tall

until it curls small as death.

 

Seeds of life and lotus

will be locked in a dim hard earth

 

The dry, Gurrung, licks up blue flow

that hole is where the spirits in this underland

linger, and they dream of Gudjewg,

the season wet with green floating weeds.

Published: January 2015
Lyn Hatherly

Lyn Hatherly’s focus is on poetry: editing, publishing, writing, and teaching and she is one of the managing editors of Five Islands Press. Lyn has three published books. Acts of Abrasion, Sappho’s Sweetbitter Songs (Routledge), Songs of Silence and is working on her third poetry collection: ‘We are many, and one’.

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

in the suppositions of where food comes from

by Geraldine Burrowes

the clang of the chain

a modern cow can produce

ten thousand litres a year now

 

how to remain in over-

work wingtip formation

surfing the up-wash of the bird in front

flap choreographed precisely to get where he’s going

circuiting sulphur blue moons

 

high costs in a chilling collapse of compassion

species are falling in absolute ways

all we’ve spent    undoing

 

earn      a burn-out    score

eventually

learn in return

an oversized teddy ramification

drawing the essence of the map

stare out the window    all the way shaking

the swing structure up and flipping

it over to get

to the shopping board

where the sewer-market snake head snaps

and even as you cut

it’s biting you back

Published: January 2015
Geraldine Burrowes

Geraldine Burrowes’ poems have appeared recently in Cordite, Plumwood Mountain, Rabbit, Otoliths, and Southerly. Another is forthcoming in The Age. Earlier works were published in Visible Ink, Paradise Anthology 5, and Baw Baw Writer’s Pre-Scribes. She received a Highly Commended in the 2011 Geelong Writers Poetry Competition, and a Commended in 2013. A first collection of Geraldine’s poetry is forthcoming in 2015 in the Rabbit Poets Series. She is also a visual artist.

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

Ideodell

by Nicola Themistes

i.

furling rosehips turn

through the fingertips

spidermoss & sparrowsong

the nest of a blue wren

the pearl would not exist

without the creeping caterpillar

ii.

i whisper not

to the furling shades,

nor whistle songs

to your ragged gaze –

nightshade fruits from every blossom

& no hyacinth left to bud in hindsight

Published: January 2015
Nicola Themistes

is the author of Spectacle City: An Allegory. Her works have been published in Cordite, Southerly Journal, and Outcrop: radical Australian poetry of land. She lives in a forest somewhere in Northern NSW. Poetry is life and life is poetry.

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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

I exited bamboo,

by Michael Aiken

lantana, eucalypts, stept

from a shell on the shore of the sea

pacific and awake

to nothing.

 

I was born with small birds in my eyes,

hair of sticks, leaves of sand

paper coarse and wild on the edge

a single lawn, a grove in the mountains.

 

Sacred place, elided and eroded

erased.

 

I emerged from bamboo

I enter bamboo groves, a forest-copse

semi-seen.

 

I am the silvereyes and coucal pheasants

never remembered

 

a fox on the beach carefully eating eggs.

Published: January 2015
Michael Aiken

is a writer and singer from Sydney. His writing has appeared in various publications including Best Australian Poetry, unusual work, Shampoo and foam:e. His first collection, A Vicious Example: Sydney 1934 1392k1 – 1811 1682k2 was published by Grand Parade Poets in September 2014.

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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