We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 112
AUTUMN 2008
POETRY
Double-jointed
In the mesh of a tonal language, there’s sound
slipping over furtive vowels; with it, meaning dragged
crookedly in its wake, a worn hem coming loose.
Mouths learning to stitch together new vowels
and soar through the glide of extra diphthongs, with
the unexpected bark of geckos at night, their slight figures
softly brown against fluoro-lit walls. The word for always
makes me think of eels boiled eggs wooden combs;
tongues curling in the strongest green tea of the north.
The pulse puckers around the curved bitterness
of tiny white eggplants; from within an embrace
you’re reading snippets of vocab lists over one shoulder:
to forget to know to earn to teach: double-jointed
enchanters ascending miniature tapered ladders
that reach to hidden chambers.
JANE GIBIAN is a Sydney poet whose latest collection is Ardent (Giramondo, 2007). She works as a librarian, and studies Vietnamese.
Winter
There’s not much in view except the view
and a huddle of schoolkids skittering loud
against the drizzle.
Down the valley the world peters out
where absence portends more and imposes
a future that seeps not just under these children
but under whole forests,
along mysterious channels through dolerite
to an indeterminate, uncoloured end.
There are no seasons where it matters,
neither in the boardroom nor in the depths.
What has not been built takes over completely
and its dioxins will skate the surface
with the wind, against the current
until the tide can flood them back up river.
Its trucks will shoulder school buses
on thin grey roads where trees grow mist
between their branches.
Waiting at the vineyard gate or on the fishing wharf
for parents who are somewhere haggling
selling-up prices in the sunless cold,
other kids stare at the flat cloud
blow on their fists
and scrunch their shoulders against not knowing.
TIM THORNE was a founding editor of the Tasmanian Review, Island’s previous incarnation. His twelfth book of poetry, I Con: New and Selected Poems, is soon to be published by Salt.
Talking At the Third World
And I said
you
have to be free
To
be able to
express yourself
To
speak out against
that which is unjust
To
be
who you really are
And
he turned his dark face to me
and said
Is
that
a fact
white man?
WILL FRASER has published his poems in Australasia and the UK. His chapbooks, Leema’s Llamas, The Leema Conspiracy, and The Legend of Eno ‘Che’ Llama have been published by Picaro Press.
Island, PO Box 210, Sandy Bay, Tasmania 7006 Australia
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E-mail: island.magazine@utas.edu.au