States of Poetry Poems
In black chalk the beast
brusques forward Silence Rubens
has stopped his mouth
with a single line He is already
awed by the den
he will find himself in even now
as his mane curls into wisp
of emptiness A study on paper
But there in white chalk the grim
pose brightens
into ...
The grass grows longer on the easeway.
A pelican swipes the sky
towards the seascape we can't yet see,
its webby legs outstretched:
& ...
Perhaps the best cells are the ones we can't kill off,
a persistence of the fittest, although mutation's
always painful. It's two thousand and fourteen,
and I know no-one who has been
uninjured. It thinks in me,
this shadow. I put on sunscreen, and am surprised
to come in contact with my skin.
In the same day, I'm chatted up in a café
by an aspiring nove ...
for Ian
And suddenly:
the men
are holding beers
and standing round
the trampoline,
and not the barbecue;
turning over toddlers,
instead of steaks.
The women
make the salads.
Fiona Wright
Recording
for Eileen
The light's older
in these sandstone suburbs,
jam-thick.
A clipped-haired man held a dog leash
saying one of us is single,
and even the leaves
had hunched their shoulders
in the gutters.
A waiter, golden-brown as a bread loaf,
squirted water at the pigeons
that sat cock-headed at the tables. My tart
Strange, that there are sequences
we live as cinema, if I looked
over my shoulder
I might recognise the front wall
of my bedroom
opened out towards the camera,
my furniture as hollow
as a stage p ...
In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Francesca Sasnaitis introduces Kate Llewellyn who reads her poem 'Oxytocin' which features in the 2016 South Australian anthology.
... (read more)after David Brooks
Red-
tailed Bedouins
of Poetry, black
cockatoos embroider
the sun into us,
seam-rip it asunder.
*
On the Fitzroy's
bank at midday,
cracking seeds of eucalypts
that outrank Council, a hundred
Banks' black cockatoos,
a paroxysm of commas.
*
With their subtler
comp ...
From his ebony eyrie
the moon is salubrious,
round as the white lotus' root.
The desert's his adversary.
The moon is salubrious
with his godly left eye.
The desert's his adversary,
spiteful, like a hippopotamus.
With his godly left eye
the moon is neither ossuary,
'February Snow' by Sarah Holland-Batt | States of Poetry Queensland - Series One
Unexpected on a day like this—
sun shuttling through the 125th Street bridge,
plastic strung in Harlem's elms like tattered wreaths:
unseasonable, unreasonable spring.
Under the red shadow of the Grant tenements
lunchtime noshers clatter china at Bettolona,
dogwalkers spread out on the grass in Sakura Park,
men from the halfway home
drag their deckchair ...