Poem
States of Poetry 2016 - Western Australia | ‘There is No One to Complain’ by J.P. Quinton
I walk to the river,
I am searching,
I am searching for a jar of leeches.
In the distance I see something flashing
so I head toward it.
As I come closer I see
it's a mirror dangling from a tree,
and beneath it, a table with six sealed jars.
I open a jar, stick my finger inside
pull it out –
blood slides down my arm.
I feel the sh ...
Every morning, with an authority
of clinging, earthy foundations
a house sat in air.
Inside someone was singing an aria
about how love inflects its failings
and a woman, absorbed in her toilette
considered how pained words work
the world awry, even as air fills with song.
Outside a man hammered boards
to make a dwelling; crows sat on a wire
as i ...
Yamaji Culture
A culture worth loving
A culture worth fighting for
A culture worthy of being loved
Why tell me I don't need it?
Why tell me I can't need it?
Why tell me I can't love it?
Why tell me it's not worth fighting for?
Why tell me it's not worthy of love?
Yamaji Culture
I love it – I laugh for it
I stress for it – I cry fo ...
for BL
(from 'Paintings')
A hundred eyes
examine me like an insect,
red and yellow like fear.
What walks about me
in dirty boots, holding my ideas
ridiculous? Whose face
visits restless nights,
threatening to blank my dreams ...
Can you smell it?
Not like the first rains
Nor the first blooms
But a rather putrid
Vomit inducing smell
Jaan-jaany
The bad smell of Australia
Like stinking body odour
Emitted at footy matches
Fast on social media
With each boo the
Smell got stronger
With each name calling
The smell got stronger
With each denial the
S ...
A gap opened every evening
emitting a panting – as soft as darkness,
or stray dog at exhaustion's end.
Unsettling, like a straggly bird,
it dropped dark feathers
of prickling desire into the room.
It knew the edges of solitude
like the blue glacier's encrusted ice,
and morphed into a clouded mirror
on which each searching glance stuck fast.
States of Poetry 2016 - Western Australia | from ‘Emails to Manila’ by Graham Kershaw
IV
Bottle-green air,
red gravel, bark and branch,
filigrees of hazel,
blanketing roar of ocean,
inlet glints of stone.
Depths of quiet sounded out
in ducks' satellite pings.
There's no ribbon to tie these things neatly in train,
no music to make it sound okay;
just me awake, reading your email
as cockatoos swing and chime
high in ka ...
There was never an explanation
as to why he walked into the river,
took hold of a log
and floated away.
They found letters
but the love he expressed
in sometimes obsessive detail
was no explanation –
except, the coroner declared
that perhaps it indicated
'a lack of a grasp', etc.
Someone who saw him pass by
said that he was waterlogg ...
States of Poetry 2016 - Western Australia | ‘Perenjori Morning’ by Graham Kershaw
Such a hollowness grows beneath us
such an undermining,
such a heavy, unwelcome silence
that we can no longer touch
this happy or unhappy life,
this grass, these children, this field of light,
fly as we might each fortnight
the surfaces lose value
– window, fence, city, street –
as we become beasts, turned inside out
under the fluorescent po ...
States of Poetry 2016 - Western Australia | ‘The Heywood Spire’ by Graham Kershaw
Below Howarth Cross, tussocky fields
still wait for dead builders; 'Pick your plot now.'
Mice dart away through clover and thistles
dodging oil drums, chip wrappers, surprised
by the impossible song of lost looms.
Under Cobbled Bridge, off Belfield Lane
the stones erode along their grain, as lain.
On the underside, immortalised, 'Kipper Lips'
and 'Tina to ...