We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 110
SPRING 2007
POETRY
Wherever You Go, There is Always a Mother
There are those days when I abandon the ship
of myself, kick the crew overboardand leave me anchored and forgotten
like the Mary Celeste (sails flapping
like a butterfly pinned to a lily pad).No one cares except
the small mother inside me I have madewalk the plank and swim shark-infested waters
towards a far shore.There she is: a bobbing cork with a tight blue perm.
Her dress billows like a bride’sat her hips, sensible drawers windsock with sea.
She’s treading water with unbearable patiencegazing, not at the circling fins on the surface
but instead at the bigger pictureof my petulant bulk in the distance.
She dog-paddles with one hand
holds her bag aloft with the otherso as not to get her tissues wet
in case I need them.Having exhausted all other possibilities
she’s wondering if an aspro might help.
JUDY JOHNSON Pandanus Books published her verse novel Jack earlier in 2007. A third poetry collection is forthcoming from Five Islands Press.
Dangerous Goods
Sign the declaration on the package envelope
and you are a liar or a failure
but it’s legal either way
because you never know in advance
and no one else will ever find out
the nature of what you send
out into that echo-less emptiness
the future
that void from which nothing much returns
or ever replies to let you know:was it explosive?
did you blow someone’s mind?
was it flammable?
did it start the fire of revolution somewhere?
was it corrosive?
did it eat away at bigotry
callousness or ignorance?
was it an aerosol?
did it spray out inspiration to enter anyone’s lungs
seep into body and mind
and change how they think?
was it contagious?
did it enter all who breathed the same air
or touched each other?
was it radioactive?
did it send magic rays of unseeable energy
infinitesimally small particles of power
piercing through all barriers of resistance
all those walls and armour and fortresses everyone builds against awarenessand start them mutating
into what they can be?
into unimaginable possibilities?
into glowing centres of warmth and light?hope and hope and hope
with no hope of ever knowing
and no worry as to whether it works
this business of never knowing
where your dangerous material came from
or where it is going.
EDITH SPEERS is a widely published and award-winning author of poetry and prose. Her most recent collection of verse is Four Quarters (Esperance Press 2001).
Nothing Grows under Lantana
Will that shy albatross be available only on inter-library loan?
The latter part of our methodologies are the result of haphazard life events, it just turns out that way if you happen to grow up in the Shire
although I think we missed a session designed for non-Nauruans was it?
Or venturesome second-generation denizens of an economic exclusion zone
self and/or territory? Some individuals with unreconciled histories
are actually addicted to the BBC World Service, it’s a political thing.
There’s a fierce rhythmical dance going on in the parallel room, unsettling our
discography with green German bridegrooms. Others also seem to lead operatic
lives, ‘the happy few’ on their number plates, abandoned in the neon ecology
of Canberra Gothic. The bar-girls, for example, they’re great, teasing each other
about how they’re going to ride dandruffy camels across central Australia where turbo
props repeatedly crash into Namatjira country, and then retire to soft, blonde arms.
The world is a weird village of many objects, and that’s just the top, left-hand panel.
PHILIP MEAD teaches Australian literature at the University of Tasmania, and edited The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (with John Tranter), now in its third edition. He has published a volume of criticism on Kenneth Slessor as well as selected volumes of Frank Wilmot, Margaret Scott and David Campbell’s poetry. He has recently completed a critical monograph, Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry, to be published by Australian Scholarly Publishing in 2008.
Island, PO Box 210, Sandy Bay, Tasmania 7006 Australia
Ph: (03) 6226 2325 Fax: (03) 6226 2172
E-mail: island.magazine@utas.edu.au