We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 111
SUMMER 2007
POETRY
A Text for Baldies
I think we baldies recognise each other at a considerable distance, the light shining on us in ways unknown to those others in their various thatched accommodations (by baldies I do not mean those proliferating new folk shaved like monks while lacking life-long vows who have perhaps assumed baldness for charity’s sake or because fashion flutters its Jezebel eyelashes at them or like Shane Warne have tweaked the science of Ashley Martin for other image-driven reasons…).
No sir, I mean those who have come to accept the bland tonsuring of Time with a certain equability, forsaking the inevitably sad stratagems of the comb-over whose lamentable case every puckish breeze discovers. How often have we been tempted to accost such Quixotic wayfarers, crying out: O, let the light of your hairless windswept domes, perennial risks to young skate-boarding flies, so shine before men (and discriminating women) that they may see your locklessness and no longer feel luckless!
BRUCE DAWE An updated sixth edition of his collected poems, Sometimes Gladness, was recently released by Pearson Education. Noel Rowe and Vivian Smith wrote of Dawe: ‘his verse of comment and observation brought a new range of timbres to the use of the Australian vernacular’. He has published thirteen books of poetry, one book of short stories, one book of essays, four children’s books (Penguin) and edited two other books.
Reading Late
...The truth in a calm world,In which there is no other meaning, itselfIs calm...Wallace Stevens
The room was motionless, the land was dark.
My book lay in a pond of light. I read that night
until the book became the pond,
became a quiet afternoon, a shallow lake,
insects dipping lightly on a mirror.
The words became a world without a book,
became a living lake all round
the room, until the words became
a summer night as perfect as the thought
of afternoon, and water, and my feet
stirring cool places in a peaty deep
calm as the poem – a summer afternoon
as flawless as the silent summer night,
peaceable in lamplight, reading late.
ROBERT BOLTON has recently had poems published in Salt Lick Quarterly. Picaro Press published his Three Laws of Succession and Other Poems in 2005. He lives in central France.
When I Move
on my grey occasions,
reptilian and slow,
will I remember how it was
when my blood raced
from running?
Or my skin, hot from sun,
felt sea flow over it
like silk?
Will my fingers remember
how they ripped open
your letters,
to read and re-read
in private joy?
Will I forget
the laughter in bed,
our arms entwined,
that firelit room, snow
falling outside
in a dark garden?
BARBARA FISHER lives in Sydney. Her first collection of poetry Archival Footwork was published byIndigo in 2001. A second collection, Still Life, Other Life, is forthcoming from Ginninderra Press.
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