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States of Poetry QLD poems

(after Samuel Beckett’s Molloy)

still. but not quite.
I drew on the right
of time.

the other way (I have this solution):
escape that hazard
circulating always.

before I began
(before the hope of circulation)
I began better.

during the remaining of my of my
of my of my
(plus one in my),

I arrive at my mind ...

In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, MTC Cronin reads 'Little Track', 'The Grass is Full', and 'The Correct Way' which feature in the 2016 QLD anthology.

... (read more)

In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, MTC Cronin reads 'Above Us' and 'The World's Yard' which feature in the 2016 QLD anthology.

... (read more)

                 Woman

the real sea snoring half a mile away
the scrubbed brick walls of the double lounge and its
samples of african drums flood the speakers

Is that your shadow, weightless,
a smudge of grey dust
in the black trickery of the she-oak?

the ...

... it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
—Sylvia Plath, 'A Birthday Present'

Here's some activity you may have missed:
pompadour-lure hung three days after I
disentangle.
                       'It misses me.'
The fourth: A ...

Nan's budgerigar,
cat fed    squeezing like the morning
fog between oxidized barbed
wire and gorse
with an older cousin
with a slug gun

booting sheep skulls
stripped by gusts, our fathers'
1950s snares    swooped by plovers,
daring: 'yellow spurs! forearms
up!'   shooting star-
lings for laughs

...

From his ebony eyrie
the moon is salubrious,
round as the white lotus' root.
The desert's his adversary.

The moon is salubrious
with his godly left eye.
The desert's his adversary,
spiteful, like a hippopotamus.

With his godly left eye
the moon is neither ossuary,

Unexpected on a day like this—
sun shuttling through the 125th Street bridge,
plastic strung in Harlem's elms like tattered wreaths:
unseasonable, unreasonable spring.
Under the red shadow of the Grant tenements
lunchtime noshers clatter china at Bettolona,
dogwalkers spread out on the grass in Sakura Park,
men from the halfway home
drag their deckchair ...

How fine it is to mutiny
against my tired mind—

say self, you are through,
to smash into a mirrorball

of echoes all scaled
in dizzying Nordic blue

feel the universe tilt
and infinitely rebuild

to flicker
like a skerrick of spindle silver

needle-quick,
and never be held—

this is the freedom
of the uni ...

—for Vera Pavlova, in Mexico City

On the bus to Teotihuacan, we turn
a new god's name on our tongues

like a charm, jagging past
cinderblocked hills

chocked over the motorway,
grey pixels stacked so high they merge

with the smoked white Mexican sky—
then a guitar player in the aisle

begins a song whose only familiar
wo ...