By Izzy Weinstein
Loosely held in the palm of your hand,
Your Midas touch I’d reprimand,
But my impotence at your commands
Cries insolence to my heart’s demand.
Your secrecy marks cowardice,
Detested but I do not challenge it.
I am seemingly so powerless,
Plead mercy but you’re tireless.
I hate the way I don’t fight back,
But curtsy under your attack.
I’m fragile like a paperback:
Your words cut deep and don’t retract.
Embodied as a trauma symptom,
I wonder, is this Stockholm syndrome
What’s mine(d) is yours
What’s mine is yours, a pact unseen,
No question raised, a quest routine.
In every touch, in every find,
Yours to claim, in object and mind.
Dappled waters, unfathomable deep,
My labour’s ripple, a secret seep.
A silent poison, I inadvertently weave,
Unknown to me, my people grieve.
Knowledge given, a double-edged sword,
Your wisdom guides, yet risks ignored.
In the village, my family, that’s my cherished gold,
Yours, your secret untold.
Suborning your wealth, my veins entwined,
Choice is yours, in shadows defined.
Yesterday’s plea to cease the churn,
Yet, for family, I dare to earn.
Against the tide, I persevere,
In the face of caution, I volunteer.
Today, I halted, a lone decree,
As you persisted, relentless sea.
In the corrupt waves of Suriname,
What’s mined is yours,
Even my name.
By Lizzy Balls
By Eve Messervy
To be a woman is to be perfectly
destructive;
To be painted like Klimt
Bleeding gold
With a faint smile.
I met a woman who kept me asleep once,
Uttering such words
She made me cry.
She had not the gift of motherhood
Nor the touch of love,
Her hands were hard-worked,
her skin weathered.
She wore lines of lust and love
And torment
Tear burns beside her eyes like
companions to the lenses,
The mark of sorrow stained.
To be a woman is to be perfectly destructive
She said
Holding my hand as I slept
I see a sacred subtlety in the eyes of a women
A stone cold fire
burns the smell of florals
And feels like linen on naked skin.
Early morning beams of sun
decorate the sheets.
I open up my sore eyes
To an empty palm, I close my fist –
It dawns on me
As my reflection looks back
Into the tear burned eyes
Like companions, to my lenses.
My tyrant mind
Plays tricks with me
And dances like I used to dance
It conjures up the girls from Klimt
And bleeds gold
into my dreams.
By Emma Large
Labouring against me
in the sun-sucked twilight: our coolness
and the cold empire of the cathedral, my own
hurt grating against my ribs like the pluck
of fingers down banister rungs; the image
of us is numbed in the frost, without feeling.
I sit with my books and learn how to let go.
Then I’ll let the hot rock smoke
of a cigarette lick into my afternoons,
my evenings – the salt ash ruminates
on the living room floor, puddles on cathedral stone.
The nightly toothache of yearning
will spur me to my work, to be better, to grow out
my hair: all my desperate efforts, our image
flaming to desire, without reason. I look to the church
and wonder how they bear what they bear. Their unrequited
toil, to love what is missing, an Absence so silent
they fill its mouth with their words: the hope of you
comes to me like that, so warming, so willing.
By Izzy Weinstein
Oh what an art to draw that line
And walk away with those washed eyes,
A steady promise fixed in time,
A separate life to leave behind.
Oh what an art to find a soul
Where you feel safe, who you call home,
Whose touch is just for Love to know
Where poison weeds let flowers grow.
Oh what an art to let the rain
Seep through the scars and heal the pain,
The drops that cleanse defiled veins
And drowns the last new stranger’s name.
Oh what an art to just let go
Of someone that you used to know
Perchance to dream that next ‘hello’
Is that of whom who won’t forgo
‘Cause no one wants to start again
When lovers become your best friend.
By Rohan Scott
An animated stillness slips off the awning
Drip, splash, the gentle rattle of drizzle
Raindrops splinter light,
So forms the yellowed mist
The old trodden flags collecting,
Puddles glisten, reflecting
The cold is still, unshaken
The enclosure of edifices,
Keeps the breeze at bay
Clasping an ember between forefinger
A ghostly smoke drifts into the air
As the nighthawk draws their breath
The watcher is numb
By Celia Bate.
Prologue
On the thousandth Red Moon the world had seen,
Three Witches bore Satan’s baby from a tiny bean.
Marinated in a big black pot of evil water,
The bean grew into a little girl, the Devil’s Daughter.
A bellowing voice poured from the sky, jacinth,
“The girl’s name shall be Absynth!”
From birth, Absynth grew up in Hellfire Marsh,
An upbringing you might think rather quite harsh.
But Absynth liked the melancholy of the place,
Swaddling between reeds, shoving mud down her face
By day she’d dance amongst the fog,
By night she’d lay under a blanket of bog.
She lived like this for a very long while
The watery flats did her beguile.
Until the day she turned eighteen,
Where she found herself, lusting, intellectually keen.
With the brains of the Devil (kin of divinity?),
She managed to make it to the Great College of Trinity.
******
Abby wanders along the Liffey
She, like the river, meandering free.
Her careless steps taking her crest and trough
In her trainers, with their straps broken off.
Laddered tights, black eyes, short bleached-blonde hair:
A tough girl with a kill-a-man kind of stare.
As she walks, she sees a boy,
All tall, slim, gaunt, goofy and coy,
Spiky hair, too-small clothes.
The kind of style Abby’s Father loathes.
As he approaches, his pace slows,
Will he trespass within her throws?
He strides three steps forward and one to the side,
Aligns himself with Abby, his smile smiling wide.
“Shall I throw you over into the river?”
The sound of his words made Abby shiver.
She shot him a cutting black-pupilled glance
But she saw no falter in his prominent stance.
A flash from the future blinds Abby’s sight.
She sees forming between them a bond of great might.
Together, in bed, entangling limbs,
The platonic love, up to the bedside table, brims.
Secrets shared, affectations bestowed
Though in these actions, no love there was sowed.
His name was Lemon and from that day forth,
They became best friends, always headed north.
Until one day, with a change of the wind,
Things went south, the sunlight dimmed.
O’ to return to that perfect friendship, all-consumed,
But alas, no! Predetermination always had it doomed:
Abby marched from her lecture to the benches outside,
And lit a cigarette, “ah, carbon monoxide!”.
She looked around campus, “what a beautiful day”,
Then she saw her best friend, Lemon, and it started to rain:
He was sat down laughing, doing some silly gestures, a dance,
Then she spied Fair Sally, on his lap, with a second, indifferent glance.
“Oh how nice, one more friend!
Another person with whom time, Lemon can spend”.
Abby smiles, and then suddenly stops breathing,
She falls to the floor, violently shaking and teething.
With something new in her body annealing,
She realised what it was: it was a feeling.
On coming to, Abby opens her eyes
To lots of people gazing over her like flies
A dead carcass. “I’m dead to the Devil
I had an emotion. Hey Dad! I’m a rebel”.
“Absynth, are you okay? What happened?”
She gets up, brushes the dust off her lap and
Is taken up in a warm hug by her sweet, blond Lemon.
“I’m fine thanks Lemon, who is your new friend?”
Fair Sally was stood behind him, the little earwig,
Absynth imagining stabbing the little lamb with a twig
That lay by her foot on the ground.
“This is Sally, you’ll love her. She’s sound”.
Abby had felt a feeling like a human,
It was now high time she acted like one.
As Lemon hung out with Fair Sal more and more,
Absynth was convinced his “pure angel”, a whore.
And so she started a most vile, retalliant rumour,
That Sal was a prostitute.
******
Epilogue
Absynth is a good girl, though perhaps a bit scary.
Her beautiful complexion, devilishly lairy.
As a specimen looked carefully upon with a lamp
There’s nothing could be said she ought to revamp.
Though au contraire, from the preceding tale’s vault,
Exposéd, you’re introduced to her sole one and only fault.
Unlike her Father, Absynth could feel –
Arguably a trait with more sex appeal –
Though Poppa Devil sees only an Achilles’ heel.
Throughout her life, she worked hard to conceal
These foreign emotions. But when greatly suppressed,
She found herself anxious and stressed!
Passions ‘come problems when what’s wanting is took away:
Bob, Roger, Dean, Lemon, Jerry and Clay,
Bachelors listed in what order they may.
Like a baby; her boy-toys confiscated from play.
Her quick quips, jests and wit
Fall down to darkness, a junk pit,
Where they lie redundant and eventually decay.
Her once steadfast rationality wains away.
The sensible, calm, charismatic, young girl
Becomes an aggressively provocative churl.
By Celia Bate
By Emma Large.
Twin Lantau houses swelter empty
Most of the year round, even their walls
Never touch. Named like siblings,
Green and White Jade; in equal spirit,
In perpetual, feverish row. Air like anger
Ripples between them, too heavy
To hold itself straight: crumpling under
Heat and water, the kind of weight
That billows out like an oiled flag, the way
It rose up in the dusk. Then we wait
Until their edges dissipate to a truce
By darkness; all our gentleness
Comes back in the instinct, the grazing
Fingers against her knee,
The quiet vows in kitchen light.
My father hates this house, I think;
The insects purr too thick
In the garden, our anklebones
Are stubbed with bites. And I suppose
He felt its daylight loneliness,
The fury of a body’s ritual
That takes it blind, by night; the same
Rites that soften the longest fall,
The heart’s sweat and rise
Through old tides, its struggle to the drop down.
Same walls make quiet passage for love:
Slips, goes, no sound.
By Lianna De Bartolo
Your denim pools out on the hardwood
As you fall to your knees
Tantalus sinks, for my hair has been washed
And the beds of my fingernails, cleaned
In rapture you ask of my waltz through the morning
Entranced by vague visions of dish soap and lace
And how might I cut o’er the noise of your fantasy,
Borne still by the hopes of your wide-eyed bookcase?
Our carvings upon decayed coasters, worn thin
Exchanged in the small screen’s pink sanguine glow,
Bear imagery repeated, and through tedium born
Though notions of struggle your veiled eyes forego
Then I shall smile at the heroine whose lines I’ll recite,
Though pernicious be the flowers that bloom in this light.
By Joseph Clayton
Among the breeze,
Twisting its way between
A tangle of pebbles, windswept
A snatch of laughter
Half-chuckle, half-wheeze,
Among that dry, ceaseless wind,
Waves hastened and broken
Reflect the evening sun,
A glimpse of merriment,
The glint in your eye.
I fancy, for a moment,
You appear before me,
Playing cards in hand
And at once I am
Twelve again, and it is raining,
Tohunga Crescent slick beneath the deluge.
‘Last card!’,
and you smile,
Bella triumphant as ever —
The card shark with her
Tiny crown of curls,
We will head
Down the bay in just a moment
Once I retrieve my sandals
From under the deck,
And you have finished
Your chapter.
And then you are gone,
And as I thread my way
Back through the rocks,
Buffeted by that
Dry, ceaseless wind,
I can see Karl in his outhouse
My sandals, still under the deck,
Unretrieved.
You were a certainty,
Timeless,
And now, as the wind tears around me
I am unable to cry.
