Nocturne 20 / Away to Nowhere

by Shellie Harwood

                                    I

A truck carries the piano, burnished,

to the borderline between Ukraine and Poland.

A rush of gentle hands lift it to ground,

one stone’s skip from the battered tracks.

A slight man lowers himself to the bench,

rests fingers on ivory.

Shepherd of exiles,

he will play them through.

Ukrainian mothers step from trains, as weary dancers,

lift arms together, pour their children over the border

like liquid gold. The pianist plays on as light drops,

cut-gloved, bare-fingered,

he caresses Chopin’s Nocturne No. 20,

in C sharp minor,

ushers the refugees, like a waterfall,

into Poland, another land’s clay on their shoes.

Plays on, tempo marking: “Lento con gran espressione”,

meaning “very slow, and with many expressions”.

And so, at tempo, they have come, slowly,

with many faces, nothing more to lose.

                                    II

Olesia’s mother lives in a whisper,

her hands tied behind her back

as she waits at a small café, waits

blindfolded, for Odessa to fall.

She sips strong coffee through a paper straw,

with birds inside her chest. Big wings beat

hard against her brittle bones.

She mouths a letter to Olesia while she waits

for her city to crumble, a letter about the

birds inside, about the grief of all mothers.

She is soaked in the sorrow of Odessa.

A puddle fills, refills beneath her chair.

She prays for skies to close.

Olesia writes to her mother, Come to me.

Come away from Odessa. Olesia’s mother will not.

Will not float across oceans on her own despair.

She has an occupation. She is the record keeper now,

for lost Odessa. She sips, her blind eye turned, and counts

the fleeing feet that shuffle by the sad café,

feet on their way away to nowhere.

Splash Study

by Leigh Lucas

Hippocrates detailed the ailment, Darwin suffered it sailing to the Galapagos and Lawrence of Arabia on camel crossing sand.

Seasickness comes from confusion of the senses, a dissonance between expectations and actuality.

Get to the deck, eyes on the horizon

: I double down on avoiding anyone who might ask me how I’m doing, or who I suspect might care.

: Compulsively, and like a champ, I date. You wouldn’t believe how rarely death comes up.

This one is sweet, he speaks slowly, he thinks it’s dark that I’m researching seasickness. I resist the urge to pat his pretty head.

His father was an engineer in the Merchant Navy—that’s the direct translation to English, I don’t know what you guys call it—and his job was to make sure the motor never stopped. He traveled everywhere and saw the world. But mostly what he remembers is seasickness: You get dizzy in the beginning, but then you learn to cope.

Get to the deck and find the horizon. It will pass.

Epistle

by Allis Hamilton 

after Niall Campbell

Understand this is handwritten: scrawled 

on paper rubbed with ochre, red 

as a chough's sly eye; sent, wrapped 

in vine leaves and taped to the back 

of a snail’s spun shell; or, rolled tight, 

tied to the leg of a homing pigeon – 

one who knows where to place the scroll 

to have you stumble upon it when 

you wake, staggering, fresh from a dream – 

the page dribbled with drawings and laced 

with half-solved mysteries and twisted myth. 

I am writing this for I find myself recalling

your oblong house, its ivy a-sprawl 

of tangled limbs nudging every window, 

notebooks swollen with intricate maps 

of sea floors, elaborate etchings of ants; 

your tortoise plodding around the back garden  

munching on dandelion leaves or grubs. I come 

to realise our bodies cannot always follow 

our floating thoughts; that this life may kiss us 

goodbye before together we eat artichokes again, 

drifting on a boat that takes us to the star-lit dance – 

you singing folk songs all the watery way. I 

want to tell you, I still hum that tune. Only now 

I smell jasmine flowering in spring rain, feel 

ancient wind telling the silver eye when to fly, 

watch mycelium break the soil only to soak 

in pale light, hear the forlorn bird’s unceasing song.

Homesick (Letter to Ovid)

by Maureen Scott Harris

            Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.

                        – Ovid, Heroides

Dear Exile, everyone knows of your misery

in Tomis. Its rivers plunged down rocky slopes,

refused to release the land’s animating spirits.

Surrounded by fishers speaking in tongues

you could name none of their catch. Eight years

of letters begging Imperial forgiveness never

bought your return to Rome, the theatre

for your infamous poems of dalliance, its

countryside alive with transformations.

Did your mother tongue grow rusty? Rumours

circulated. Some said you wrote poems in Getic.

Your late letters home, still pleading, were framed

by the Black Sea’s seasons, its weather blowing in.

Centuries later I write you from the murky edge

of the Anthropocene where we are all exiles,

ignorant of the land’s vocabularies, besotted

with our own. I imagine you beside that tideless

sea the Greeks called hospitable. Your mind turns 

again towards transformation. The carp on Roman

dinner tables was hauled from that sea. Beware

the Romans, you think, savouring how the fish

shines, garbed in its local name. 

Our Hands

by Dani Dymond

All through adolescence, I felt Amazonian in stature: only daughter

on the hockey team, towering above twelve-year-old boys, shoulders

like framing for a grand house as I outgrew swaths of denim, “floods” 

to rot the wood beam bearing my spine. Mom and Dad must have known 

what was in store: by my first birthday, I had a mouth full of molars,

ravenous girl. After Seventeen magazine lauded black clothing 

for its “sliming effect,” I bought nothing but midnight sky to drape over 

my body, a closed museum exhibit. I learned to stoop like a woman aged 

decades, disguised in plain sight––the better to hide you with, my dear. 

But no garment could hide these hands in Southern California’s heat: 

huge palms, wide and white, flat ghosts. They are my father’s hands, 

as if cloned and sewn onto my wrists at birth, gift with no receipt, femininity’s 

perceived enemy, hungrier even than my teeth. His callouses, denoting 

decades of construction sites, contrast my manicure as time 

and sunlight wear down the collagen across his forearms. 

This watch only cost me five bucks, he says, proud to be a saver, someone 

who keeps minutes captive on the cheap. When I first show him my fanned 

fingers after getting engaged, Dad pinches them with his own to see: for just 

a moment, genetics knit back together, a ring atop the overlap. My smile–– 

also his––can’t be contained, grin and grip in the looking glass. 

ghazal for the child we cannot make

by Kate Barss

calling a name to make a new one, this birdsnest need of ours.

i’m homesick for your rolling fat and muscle, bellied of ours.

your whispered crinkles hers, jagged constellations mine. your dough

texture. your feral grief, your slow comfort, made bodied of ours.

white scratch of wicker, the bassinet, wrapping flannel linens

of legitimacy, blanket of mom’s dovesounds, reed of ours.

at dinner the ache of you, straight couples talk about the mesh

of two. you would sleep between, breath of our chests, babied of ours.

ursula, gena, ai, ju, something of our father’s mother’s –

something private kate. you’ll grow flat, worried flax and seed of ours.

A Refugee’s Ghazal

by Tejeswini

For Agha Shahid Ali – a real ghazal in English

You stole my words, how shall I awake peace?

Everyone is playing, why don't you too partake, Peace?

A war for justice or a war of plunder?

We are gambling men, and at stake? Peace.

The sky turns grey, our world is smoke and rubble.

There are only shadows in suits selling opaque peace.

There are no flag draped caskets for those we bury in the dark,

your cruel God doesnt grant us, even at daybreak, peace.

Schools are used as barricades, books are burnt for warmth.

From where are we to learn how to make peace?

Forlorn soldiers walk the desolate streets,

nobody is left from whom they can retake peace.

You ask for my land, my name, my beliefs, my identity.

When I ask why you came, you say, 'come, let us not break peace'.

Heads lowered, we thank you for your kindness,

children in tow - Is this how to fake peace?

As I sell you cigarettes, my friend, you ask — ‘Do you speak English?’

I know four words I say — ‘Thank you, Be well, Handshake, Peace.’

Who are we? The Runners, the Refugees, the Borderless.

Those that are forsaken by God or Those that forsake peace?

Hear me roar — I write to the whole world this ghazal,

Alas! Only you can hear my voice shake, Peace.

I know you burn with rage, Shahid,

but I implore you, for your own sake, peace.

Love Jihad

by Ashish George

My broken nose was the least of the damage

the police left behind, their clumsy hooves

toppling irreplaceable flame-bright earthenware gifts

you told me carried salt during Gandhi’s March to the Sea.

The goons shouted curses at family photos

and demanded the names of tweedy cousins born anew

in London, Toronto, New York, Cambridge—

scholarship lesbians who balked at tradition and split the difference

by eating pussy but not pork.

After the jeep hiccupped out of the courtyard

and my mother swept the archipelago of glass from the floor,

I asked no one in particular for a hadith to

silence the thumping pistons of sibilant rage.

The Prophet tore apart the moon to banish pagan doubts.

Easy to imagine his sword unsheathed to

briskly bisect those who refused him Khadijah.

I will search for you in the Quran and I will search for you between my legs,

just under the spot your fingers

provoked with powder from cardamom and clove.

I shuffled in a daze along the tawny Alleppey beach

and met the medley of braying deadbeats

holding court in a pockmarked quorum

called by whisky and boredom to jeer

the starburst of blood I paid as a debt to your hymen.

“A Hindu bride for a groom with no pride.”

“Will she prove herself with a beef dowry?”

“Book a flight to Pakistan before her father books your grave.”

Tonight they can box the ears of children who

don’t bet on laughter at the reprise.

Like a tripwire in the catacombs,

the violence we risk caught its vocation from fading skulls.

Here it’s still legal for husbands to rape their wives

and an evening’s entertainment to hang my grandfather

on his own land for raising a blade to a cow.

I am far from you now, my one and only love,

entombed with millions fastened to despair.

Forgive me for my distance and forgive this hellmouth

for wasting a delicate bounty no holy man can resurrect.

April, 1986

by Elena Croitoru

My mother felt her stomach 

& swallowed an iodine pill 

as if life could be taken back

by the mouthful. One never knows

if the limbs & torso will turn out

melded together, she said

& we didn’t understand 

what she meant but took

our pills with slightly bitter 

water. In lead-heavy sentences,

my mother told us Chernobyl 

was the machine-made god pulling

down our side of the continent

& although the tower blocks

swallowed us whole, their walls

wouldn’t protect us, just as

they never hid us from anyone either

& we couldn't help think

of all that concrete poured for nothing. 

My mother said that every cloud 

could carry radioactive decay

into our tender lungs

& we'd have no choice

but to keep it inside our bodies

as if it was one of the few things

we'd ever been given. We learned

our faces would swell & test the love 

of those around us, so then 

we'd know it was real although

we wouldn't have a chance

to live it once again. Even those

who would mourn their dead

would pick up a slow death

while standing by their graves & that

made us understand how much

of our killing went unobserved.

We knew we were too soft

for this world & there were no rules

for keeping anyone alive anymore.

Aubade

by Khaty Xiong 

By morning, the myth finally faded.

Whole oceans reduced to a single drop.

Lamenting throughout the landscape,

caverns and canyons, blisters of islands

seething in natal forms. The earth cornered

in every rock. By memory, the lowland deer

emerging from their graves in an attempt

to graze. Slow and thirsty, they drink

unnoticed in these fields. Their mossy flanks

dribbling with precious dew. What else

was there to do? I covered my mouth 

and bowed deeply.

In grief there is also desire—

a shiny arrow void of all purpose. My life

a paradisal canvas bursting with spells

and sores of the gilded tongue. Meteoric,

blood aglow, my shadow parting through

my bones. And for a time, everything

living for too long and not long enough.

My mother, who died quickly, tossed

hastily into the wind. My despair tumored 

and blooming, oneirically untraceable.

Beyond desire, the accursed dreams—

birds mending borderlands, beasts felling

stars, eternal life in the eye of the garden.

Upon the tides, the celestial idyll betrayed

by dark. Such is the will of a seeded colony,

the devoured home sailing into absurdity

without guide or glossary. Needletails

sending off into the sky in lieu of sacrifice.

Were I to wake from this, I would miss

my mother turning away from me, spring

inflorescent, the isle of dawn breaking 

over my left middle knuckle. 

Near the Border

by Michelle Porter

the volvo our nannygoat drove was a coffin hauler

assembled on the side of a highway         she never found

her way back         and she said

there’s another 200,000 miles left in me

the volvo that belonged to our grandmother was

aerodynamic as a bag of bricks         features included

bombproof skeleton    bulletproof engine.         and she said

one last drive south to milk river, will you come?

we were her passengers    do you remember how she

didn’t buckle herself in the volvo          didn’t look up

a route          just lay her hands on the steering wheel

cursed the tremor in her fingers it was the end

of a drought and we could smell rain coming on

you said look at the sky          and she said     the flesh

isn’t what it used to be           but look at the bones

her soul was no airy thing     high beams

rose out of her lips in a rush     the rain was coming she

was in the driver’s seat     her last breath on that bed

in that hospital          we were her passengers

you said     where are we going?     and she said

down south near the border

there’s a river     you can all come

Land Bridge (one vast sestina)

by Nehassaiu deGannes

Perched at the epicenter of the epi-

center. Stamp of maple floor cornered

on my screen. I'm a quasi-solo dancer in a gallery of pixels, drifting.

Insisting––– like tectonic forbearers long before Zoom–––

A connection corridor! How long from Yalta to Mackenzie, from New York to

(Where Are You?) before being swallowed by The Bering.

See? To be Sharmila. Drowning on a sofa in Queens. Dreams bearing

food forever out of reach... for two long weeks. The gut’s epi-

leptic yawp, “Oh, for ah–––” haranguing like that so-and-so Son of York.

Scared of stepping out. Even to the hallway. Hunger corners 

you. Temple Closed. Fridge Empty. No cyclists zooming

deliveries from the shop. Oh, for a snowdrift

of milk to thaw and pour from the note that You'd drift

under a strange neighbor's door, who'd appear like Beringia–––

arms outstretched, a refuge? But the camera zooms

in (all cataclysmic distance refuted) on the mute dark television: epi-

curean shows too painful to watch. Are there witnesses standing at corners,

who (to quote Lorca's Poet In New York)

are our "hobbled great king[s] [and Queens] in the janitor's suit [?]" York

is a city in Alabama, Sierra Leone, Alberta, Australia. Are we drift

(as in glacial deposit?) Root (as in quaking grove?) If one of us subsists on corners

of paper, what's the Dance about? Clang pots. Lay bare

what this takes to survive. Throw wide a window and float evening epi-

thalamiums to grocery clerks, nurses and Gilda, whose fellow subway worker zoomed 

in on a cable dangling near an electrified rail. Saved lives! Now, his soul zooms

too towards his God and continental assemblies of flora. Pass York.

Head towards water. Retrace (in thin air) a favorite Hamilton walk. Epi-

stemological banners still booming, "Everything Is More Connected Than We Think." Drift

with me: "Dear 11-yr old Emerson in S. Dakota, your letters to postal workers bearing

gratitude remind me to breathe... to utter 'Thank You,' cornered 

in my Brooklyn nook. DJ spinning from his silo'd corner

of LA. Grateful for my mother by her Great Lake window, ZOOMER

issue at her elbow. Oh, to hug the Don River's suburban green scar, born

of The Last Great Maximal Thaw. Shout out to all a' yuh in places not named York.”

Dance to virtually throng 'cause lost are rush hours of fleshy human drift?

Dance to exist. There is a list. 1408 words begin with epi.

Crumpled mask + glove littered corners. Our Yoricks.

Friends who schedule re-Zoom-ions. The strangers who drift

into lives like Sharmila's, bearing donations of food: Life's quietest epic. 

Ocelot (And an Anthology of the Other Things They Tried to Keep Out in the West Indies)

by Sheba Mohammid 

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door...

– “Love after Love,” Derek Walcott

Standalone shattered pieces,

mighty from the bricklayer’s hands

binding together a familiar countenance as ten years later,

an ocelot would be sitting in her

living room with imperfect posture poised to launch

on a velvet settee

but after all satisfied with licking its patterned

fur as it had entered through the back door

by the kitchen where years before

the bride kept her bouquet of imported peonies and tinged dahlias,

set it on the table, forfeiting the toss and instead filling the house with pollen and

the keeping of days

but she should have

known where stiff cocoyea brooms swept, scraping piano tops, scrubbing the

outside out,

pulling down shutters and setting tables with gifted

propriety, washing plates, inviting absent guests; legs folded, elbows at rest,

digging into undulations of fleshy taste of

cocoa pod, thighs beneath

a well-pressed skirt, stretching legs to

whitewashed walls, cooled by spinning fans

saying grace

in the monotony of elegy

or the rhythm of war

that the Arima sun would come

like this, like it always did

beneath window sills,

through louver slits, ventilation blocks and latticework,

unstoppable, shattered shards through the spaces

between, bringing in

fragments of Blanchisseuse: particles of leaves, hibiscus stamens, agouti

fur, julie mango pulp, hummingbird tail,

an atlas of albicant lilies, sections of sapodilla seeds and

flesh, dust to

dust, indistinguishable in

the jouvert of a lacouray

where Sahara blows across Transatlantic passages of time

and haematic embers of Sainted Soufriere ash from

Vincentian volcanoes find their way into a living room long after

the louvers were shut.

Dreamt

by Adrienne Braun

I dreamt I got a chair,

a room full of chairs, sitting

there waiting to fix up

this alone, as if a child

could shore up this side,

and a partner that. As if

we would sit and chat,

as if my mistake with you

didn’t keep jumping out

of the past to sit on

the rocking horse chair

going this way and that,

as if life did not repeat

did not repeat

did not repeat

but

something we could walk

around at last.

Old Medicine

 by Elizabeth Oxley

Once every week, Larry drives to the nursing home

from his downtown beauty salon to paint

my grandmother’s fingernails red. Her eyes

are cloudy. He shakes the bottle. I see him

when I drop by to kiss her quiet cheek. The television

blares snowstorm news as Larry draws his brush

across her yellow ridges, by a window overlooking

fields shorn to the corn-quick, spare woods

where hawthorn each year sprouts its blood-berry,

white petals a flotilla of land-stars, floral storehouse

for cosmic remedy. Before plastic bottles of pills,

there was willow bark for fever, the sage hand

scavenging medicinal roots and leaves. And what

of the hand itself? Its love was present in the poultice.

Larry separates my grandmother’s fingers—

thinning feathers through which pale sky passes.

Her smile blooms blank against the backdrop of a hissing

oxygen machine. I watch from the door, the nurse

murmuring any day now. Larry gives my grandmother

an extra coat, and she lives three weeks more.

On the Writing of a Feminist Poem

by Jessica L. Wilkinson

Just because I am staring out the window—at the tallest

stringybark some thirty metres away (yes, about that far),

where a kookaburra was, just a minute ago, perched on a

high branch reaching sideways: that bird I used to loathe

(I was too self-conscious, its throaty laughter I would take

as an affront) but now I’ve grown to love because I’m more

attentive to her impressive chest (come close, I want to say

and let me ruffle through that creamy colour with my weird

fingers): she’s since flown off in that way they do, a bit un-

balanced, like a bayonet mounted on a firearm: in her place,

a rosella surveys the yard, her eyes much sharper than mine

(I’m sure of it) and triangulating insects in the grass: it’s so green,

so green out there, like a radical carpet (we’ve had unusual rain

this past Winter) and I wish I could be like her, with good vision:

that I could wake up in the morning and see my own feet,

my fingers with their gnawed ends reaching for the alarm

and not the netted blur that makes precision a kind of laboured

task: it’s two months through Spring and still a little cold:

I dress in layers, so this cardigan has stretched a few sizes up:

I am so daggy and so bored (so bored and tired), even though

the world out there is magnificent and not at all like my heart:

that grey between the trees intensifies the green, like a musical

joke, a feat of misdirection: she’s gone already, a flash of red

across the yard and out of frame: I’m talking about the rosella,

but things are pretty shifty: how a magpie wheels around and

down to stick its beak into the dirt, pulls at a worm that took

all day to get from bush to twig and now it’s dead: there are

so many flying things about, attuned to the moments I would

grossly pin to a timeline: no wonder the poet’s obsession with

birds and being envious of plumage and organic coasting on air,

even though that envy is bullshit, as if the bird is free and grateful,

as if the bird is overwhelmed with soaring majesty, as we are,

imagining ourselves out of the animal kingdom and into the green

encroaching on the gravel driveway from lack of visitors these past

two years: the green recovery, like a little note to say that, despite

everything, the world without us will be alright: I’m coasting about,

nestless and hungry behind glass: and the grey sky is rolling and heavy

and the kookaburra is back in the stringybark and the green breaks

once more through my own wheeling distractedness—doesn’t mean

that you can interrupt me.                      Please don’t interrupt me.

Epode (Aftersong)

by Robert Couldry

‘Goldfinch, do you know you’re a goldfinch,

do you know how much?’

– Osip Mandelstam, quoted from the ‘Voronezh Notebooks’, 1937

From Butyrka, the train forges on, for weeks on end, across dense taiga, frosted earth.

Unsleeping rivers, brittle skies hurtle by, barely registered.

Finally, in a floodlit Siberian railway yard, the train unloads

an endless skein of broken men, shuffling in the dust and metal.

In the grip of a formidable fate, you have given up on survival,

but not on truth, you have not given up on poetry.

You are that goldfinch, always ready to sing,

always aware of the milky, spectral tone of your song.

On a fetid, feverish bunk, you’ve weighed the cost of duelling the dictator.

For Nadia, your beloved, another cost, the burden of grief.

At a Moscow prison, her parcel of food and clothing is returned unopened.

‘Addressee is dead’. ‘Next’.

Not only did she love you, she knew the lineage of language,

the fault line of poetry, the fissure where strophe meets antistrophe,

where both meet catastrophe.

Nesting in her memory, your poems were nurtured for decades, recited silently,

as prayers, incantations, secreted in teapots, vases, nondescript cupboards.

The hidden manuscripts were coded as ‘goldfinches’, prescient, terminal.

Do you know you’re alive,

do you know how much?

Winter closes in. Days stagnate, nights grate.

Beds crawl with typhus. Boots scrape on stone.

What salve, what halo, can still your fitful sleep?

The ripe flesh of a poem, vowels like nectar, consonants spitting and crackling,

maybe an elysian morning in Voronezh, a rare feast of egg and sausage

and the earthy smell from cartloads of hay.

Yes, your muse is beside you, a scented aura cradling your heart,

rumpling the bed-sheet, her candour, her joy, her irreproachable goodness.

Under a balsamic moon, you read poems for the camp mafia.

In phantasmagoria, even hardline criminals can cherish poetry,

their drunken, raucous clamour cuts the night,

‘Read it again’, they urge, ‘the one about the soldier’, ’the one about the wasps’.

Your faint grin, gimlet gaze reflect the candle glow.

On the last day, trying to eat weevil-infested bread, an inmate interrupts,

‘Save it for later’. You look up, wide-eyed, with sudden clarity, with sudden serenity,

‘When later’, you murmur, knowing there is no later.

Somewhere, along the way to eternity

a light breaks through

After this, after all, the ‘goldfinches’ still sing, this the epode, the aftersong.

Robert Couldry aka Dhiraj, born in England, has travelled widely in many countries including India, Tibet, Myanmar and Ethiopia and now lives in Australia. He self-published 2 collections of poetry in recent years, ‘The Cymbal Clash of Sky: Poems from Tibet’ and ‘Depart Into a New Tenderness’ and is about to publish another collection of poems and a poetic/photographic memoir of Myanmar.

Peaches

by Margaret Ray

For Anita

Everything has intentions

of its own, even

this knife. A knife’s intention

is to cut, which is what

I am using it for:

cutting this peach

into under-ripe wedges

because either patience

or flies come next,

so here is the knife

filling my hand

with intent so full

I almost cut my thumb

across the two-year-old scar

of just such

intentions. The pit

into the plastic trash bag

where it will rot

unproductively.

We’re not doing

our best. Intending

to help, your phone

keeps suggesting

you add your mother

to emails, not good enough

to have taken her silence

for absence. The peach

isn’t good, but

can you imagine?

next year there may be

peaches again.

Taking Mary Home

by Ann Giard-Chase

By the time they found him,

he was halfway down Elm Street.

She was bumping along in her wheelchair

hanging on for dear life

as he steered her – hell bent for leather

around the potholes and stones. (Google it!

It’s something about riding horses at breakneck speed). Anyway, he was eighty. It was November.

Snow was falling. Home was ten miles west

as the crow flies. He knew the way.

He escaped! the nurses exclaimed,

his bed empty as a sparrow’s nest in January,

Aunt Mary’s bed the same. It seems

Uncle John had had enough of institutional life:

the daily parade of pills, the watery mashed potatoes,

the vacant, bedrock stares of the Alzheimer patients

of whom his wife, my sweet Aunt Mary, was one.

In her heyday, she’d been the village seamstress, mended

the farmers’ overalls, stitched my prom gowns,

pinning the delicate tissue patterns to lustrous

yards of satin and chiffon, her feet flowing

back and forth on the iron treadle like small engines

until one day her memory floated away

to some unknown place and left her all alone –

a tiny bird singing in the darkness,

picking through the rubble, lost among the ruins.

Taking my Mary home is all he said

when they pulled up beside him in the van, lifted Mary

gently from her wheelchair and buckled him in

beside her. He never went home again

to his house in the village, to the cattle by the creek –

to the place his bones were always lonely for.

Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I imagine him

whistling a happy tune as he wheels Mary down the hill,

past the white-steepled church to their home. She rises.

She’s lovely as a bride. Their hands clasp together.

They’re ready for this. They hurry everywhere –

into the bend of gold light leaping across the galaxies, into

the luminous cradle of stars where they are born

over and over again in the slow and clamorous fires of eternity.

The Cage

by Jo Gardiner

It was never going to be an easy death. He lies alone,

cheeks hollow, eye sockets dark. The acrid scent of his body

stalks him, its sour reek. His life has shrunk now to the size

of a fish’s small heart. He thinks he hears flies crowd

in as footsteps disappear along the corridor to another ward.

He’s railed against it for years until no one cared except

his tall, large-eyed daughter who remembers the wildness

of his heretic days. But she’s been living two years now in Saudi

near the bird market where girls in bikinis under their abayas

slip past the moral police just as she’s the only one he lets slip past

his rage. After a flight across one half of the world to see her father

before he dies, she’s trapped now in her quarantine hotel in Melbourne

and spends her days in isolation fighting red tape and updating

exemption applications for a permit to fly home. To kill time, she sews

new dresses with fabric from the souks. In her dreams she hears the night

heron cry on its spring passage to the wadi beyond the city. When will

he die? the forms ask. A calendar pops up to help her choose. She calls

the white hospital room near Holgate where she grew with a regent

honeyeater in the back yard. Ringing through his voice thick with Endone

and anger, come the bellbirds’ clear notes from the eucalypt canopy

where they feast on nectar and manna. She remembers playing with her brother

in the watergums there, the hot smell of earth after summer rain, the grey-

headed flying foxes coming through dense air on warm nights, the sharp tang

of native ginger in the rainforest gullies of the tightly folded hills, the old

masked owl that haunted the Matcham Range. As they speak, she drifts

through the lengths of cloth, she’s hung from lines strung across the room;

she bought them near the Masmak mosque past the royal jewelers

and silk merchants, beyond the gold market in the Souk al-Zal of old Riyadh

where even the sparrows are golden, and the pungent scent of Arabian oud

drifts from woodchip smouldering on hot coals and mixes with the smell

of coffee beans and spice, the cheese washed with honey. Now, she floats

through blue and violet silk, glossy as any purple sunbird or kingfisher’s

plumage, and sheer gauze brushes soft and feathery against her face.

In her voice he hears the wind flow through summery oriental palaces

and every bitterness falls away. Dad, I want to see you, but they won’t

let me out of here. I’m trapped in this fucking room. I feel as though

I’m not going to get out alive. Me too, darlin’. His first laugh

for a year comes from deep in the place we breathe from. Me too.