Leaves Literary Journal
Volume 1, No. 2, Autumn 2013
Contributors
Anna Fern
Stu Hatton
Stuart Barnes
Iain Britton
Phillip A. Ellis
Paul Fearne
Alice Melike Ulgezer
Les Wicks
Monday, April 1, 2013
Anna Fern
Anna Fern
in
my chest
a
grass tick buried deep
homesickness
cheap motel room
smoke alarm chirps
halfway there
dawn
chorus
kookaburras
chuckle and laugh
my
insomnia
driving
home from hospital visit
his
health improving
an
L-plater bunny hops
***
urgent proofreading job
across the pages he sprawls
purring
my velvet tin roof drummer
bounces to his own tune
purrs to the moon
spring shower
baby blackbirds hop on the lawn
cat sleeps inside
cleaning
out the freezer
my
dead cat’s kangaroo mince
rissoles
and tears
Stu Hatton
sands
Sweat behind the knees; craving
the shade that never finds us. When the only way out of a desert is to sit with
it awhile. Thought we saw the bird flying but in fact it was grounded,
lifeless. Drinking perspiration from a shirt. Deep in the desert, a bridge over
sand … for what purpose? Scarves failing to filter dust from our lungs. Rubbing
eyes with sand-fingers. We travel at night where possible.
after
reverdy
for
Paul
these are false portals
through
which nothing leaves
& what is the endless wall?
what
is the heavy house that sleeps?
a seedsman’s garden
overcrowding
of seeds, rose dust
if hope has no object, what are seedlings?
the
garden birds’ wings too short for the task
flows
Knowing there would be some way
to continue. So many forms of breathing (breath-forms), the many stations of
the breath. Breath spiral.
Bonding in the spiraling.
Breathing changes what happens. Confidence in uniqueness. Trying to find out
what the words want. The breathwork.
And then you know you’re in the
detail; glints of the not-yet settle. Let the breath itself do the breathing. A
house of breath is not a building. Countless forms of yes; yes-forms.
Time may enter or be entered …
as flows. Tending toward multiplicity, multiple vectors, multiple persons. Two
people will breathe this differently. A close reading of breath … a close
dissolving.
Unbounded breath; no beginning,
no endpoint of. No bounded system. Mind is part of the air. A home in yes, of
flows … flows flow through flows.
Stuart Barnes
Stuart
Barnes lives in Melbourne, Australia, where he writes & edits PASH capsule, a journal of contemporary love poetry. Poems
are forthcoming in Southerly, blackmail
press, sacred /
profane, Mascara
Literary Review, &Assaracus: A Journal
of Gay Poetry.
The Secret History,
your prized
thyrsus,
soon became mine
(no other could’ve prised my twenty-first
fist).
fist). In a leather bar
that Frenchman’s
spiteful
spiteful telling,
then the laughter—
The Bacchic shout† awoke
A shoot entwined your throat
Quickly
I grasped some antiquity’s
safer
veiled.
†… I have chosen
Thebes as the first place
To raise my Bacchic shout, and clothe all who respond
In fawnskin habits, and put my thyrsus in their hands –
The weapon wreathed with ivy-shoots –
—Euripides, The
Bacchae, translated by Philip Vellacott, Penguin Books, 1973
Iain Britton
paper-orange philosophy
first in queue
you open the door
to the girl with the
greenstone
pendant
here’s
where one’s beliefs change
every day
where prayers become power points
items of possession
healers of hurt
your conversation with
her
is predictably about
tomorrow
the colour of the
fountain
the sunset’s
haemorrhaging
couples tucked into
whispering
you approach her softly / by the lake /
at the water’s edge
you enter
the prizegiving
ceremonies
of her survival - her
reliance on walking
through gates / the
opening and shutting / each different
each for a particular
reason - a walk on the wild side
through panoramas
paddocks cities through invisible people
your friendship with her
stops at the lake
her
journey is one of many phases
here
today /
then gone
ubiquitous
in the next breath
and orange kites
criss-cross valleys in the sky
she leaves your house
every day
follows the path past
motels cottages volcanic stones
boats fishermen rivers
the living and the dead confessing
she’s there for you for
the morning
for the evening
for meals / she’s
there
because the newspapers
say so
because she’s become the
main feature /
because
her survival is fixed
on the rose bush
the palm tree
the rows of perennials
your shirts
pegged on the
clothes-line
she lives on the wild
side
in a town
which lives on sulphur
the tribal directions of a family
which eats with ghosts
beds down with ghosts
she
starts each day
as if things
were pushing her towards
the lake
the galileen
waters
wash her
feet
rainbows
beget rainbows
orange kites
grin
loose pumice
nudges
albino hedge-
hogs onto
the beach
she can’t be ignored
until all that’s ephemeral
is suddenly locked up
for the
night
Phillip A. Ellis
Phillip A.
Ellis is a freelance critic, poet and scholar. His chapbooks, The Flayed Man
and Symptoms Positive and Negative, are available. He is working on a
collection for Diminuendo Press. Another has been accepted by Hippocampus
Press. He is the editor of Melaleuca. His website is at
http://www.phillipaellis.com/
The war is not over. We continue to fight,
find ourselves wearied, worn down.
The piano plays in a bar, where we find ourselves
as we listen to the sob and clubbing of gunfire,
and we wonder, wrapping thoughts around truth,
like the hands we wrap around our glasses,
whether it was worth it, this endless fight,
whether it was worth brutal force.
We ask who will win the war, and do not say
what we imagine to be the truth,
for it does not take the brave to stay alive
when we would rather be the cowards that we are,
finding a haven in a place
made of 1s and 0s, where we can no longer be weary.
Paul Fearne
Paul Fearne
A thousand
I never
thought
that sunlight
would be so
thick
as to drown
the evening
in its own
restless clawing
there are
chances
and bright
stars
that the
daylight cannot hide
there are
songs
that take the
breathing of dreams
to let wander
over sea shells
a corner
in a room
that a
thousand children have been taught in
in that corner
a thousand
tears have been shed
and each tear
upon hitting
the floor
has given
birth to a thousand dreams
a thousand new
cities
a thousand
works of art
untold
marriages
and untold
books
and when the
tears have dried
and the cities
have turned to dust
the art picked
by wingless time
the marriages
gone to a thousand generations
and the books
to mere ideas
I will sing a
new song
and it will be
more lovely
than our hopes
could bare
and it will be
for you
and our
children
and the
wishing of the sun
The beauty of love
love and all
it brings
hope and all
that it lets us wish
when we find
that special someone
we open our
hearts
and our souls
and everything
we thought was hidden
but when it
comes to that missing heart beat
there is
nothing like love
to bind the
gap back together
we never know
what it truly
means to love
until we have
been there
and then
when the sand
of the hourglass
no longer
falls
here we find
ourselves
through the
mist
and into the
arms of the other
but when we
can no longer feel life’s pulse
here love is
stretching
and bending us
to that deeper
part of ourselves
that is not
for touching
but for
yearning
and all that
comes to pass
when we look
into the eyes of the beloved
here we find
that something special
that we cannot
describe
only hint at
when the dawn
is at its most precious height
and the
sparrow is at its nest
and feeding
its young
but we must
not be surprised at this
for when all
the poets have had their say
and all the
bards have sung their songs
there is
something more that sweeps us away
and that is
the strength we find
in the arms of
the beloved
and dance
which is love
I can only say
one thing more
and that is
when we are
through with everything about life
we return once
again
to that centre
which is where
love is
it holds us
breaks us
and transports
us
to where we
want to go
(and that is
everywhere
and everything
and all that
cannot be touched
by any hand of
winter
or any lap of
any wave
on
the hearth
which is the beauty of love)
What we have
always wanted
a sense
that we all have
that the daylight is a thief
as the time between moments
is what the scorching of the sun will take
and when we are through
I will have it all
and then
when the dance is done
and nothing can escape us
there will be a foraging
in the oldest places
we will find ancient manuscripts
and know them to be new
and then
when the darkness has left us without sight
I will forge a new path to the sea
and we will come to know
what we have always wanted
Alice Melike Ulgezer
Alice
Melike Ulgezer is an author, poet and sometimes musician. Her first novel, The
Memory of Salt is published with Giramondo.
She is inspired by her love of mysticism and the desert and is based in Melbourne where she's working on her second novel.
She is inspired by her love of mysticism and the desert and is based in Melbourne where she's working on her second novel.
Tree Climb
Boasting dexterity of limbs
I climbed higher
through overgrown green shadows
reaching for apples
- displaced
in some mossy Oak Eden –
Feeling your keen eye
Sluice through the light
I turned to face you.
White cotton,
The shade of a panama,
And the conversations of well travelled hands.
Then the assiduous descent;
limb by limb -
without the fruit.
And all this just to reach you
Your chest a cage full of birds,
Your breath on my ear,
As you utter;
Rabbat.
Tel Aviv.
Down From The
Mountain
You came before dawn
And sat across from me in the kitchen,
Your hand a distraction of desire.
You told me that we all create our essence,
Then asked me about the man who had fallen in love.
But all I could tell you was, in my end is my beginning.
I didn’t tell you that I have been trying to decipher old
stones,
To count the alphabets of hands,
To mix wind with wanting,
Blood with bread, grief with rain
Or that seven is green and eleven is most certainly yellow.
I didn’t tell you of the chance semiotics of an unbound
silence,
The sugar trace of owls in the heat and dust of the
desert,
About the trees of my grandmother's street, or the milk
That dripped from the breast of a spirit woman, to suckle
you baby.
I didn’t tell you that nothing compares to the mad
laughter of nines,
About making love in the grace of chance crossings,
Of endless, uncreated text.
I didn’t tell you that sometimes
It takes all day to understand what color I am,
That I know you drink wine secretly in the Mosques
And, that I know who you are, an exile in the garden of
spirits you don’t believe in, playing dice with the stars.
Or that ever since you told me you would meet me,
I have been here, at this station,
Sitting on my suitcase for the
first time,
No longer carrying it around
on my head.
And that in waiting some thousand years or so,
I have learnt to sleep here too
And have finally remembered
the words of my father,
A revolutionary who could
never bring himself to pull the trigger,
He said; “Come down from the
mountain,
Leave a hundred seeds for the
peacocks
Say your salams to all the
prophets
And plant a rose bush over my
grave.”
Baby
Bird
Listen,
Baby Bird
Hidden in the skirts of the mountain
Outside time counts to ten.
"Why is it that no matter the promises, you still
haven't met me,
Here where I have been waiting
Hidden like a ruby in the mountain outside time?
Can you imagine the years it takes, setting out early one
endless morning,
To go beyond the birds who didn’t make it
- scattered up the beach all torn ink and feather -
Beyond the gauze of land and beyond the years it takes,
Setting out early one endless morning to reach you?"
The soul of the rock hums the first sex of the earth;
Fistfuls of apparitions, the rapture of resistance,
The bond of salt,
Water remembers light.
Iron hums its favorite old story;
The first sex of minerals, the lust of magnets,
The desperate energy in their clamped coupling,
Cobalt contractions and heat,
Light remembers wings.
Ion hums a tightly bound knuckle of secrets;
The turning hymns of salt and light,
The centre of the soul of the rock,
The first time.
Baby Bird, thirsty for the text of water,
Sharpens her beak on the page of the rock, clears her
throat and sings,
"Read the rock for me Ion! Read the rock!"
Ion, in the soul of the rock, humming the secret sex of
the earth,
Says that iron remembers the first time,
The years it takes to reach beyond the edge of the blue.
And the hymns of the myth of water,
Her being subject to gravity, her intoxication in the
fall,
Her surrender to space as she passes over,
Her endless transmigrations.
The memory of her, says Ion, is Heat
And Heat, says Ion, is the big remembering.
The rock takes nothing, the water passes over.
Water remembers Ion humming in the soul of the rock,
Iron humming in the soul of Baby Bird.
Rock doesn’t have any reason.
Doesn’t want for anything,
Doesn't search for anything.
Baby Bird thirsty for the page of water,
Lowers her beak to the rock and sings,
"Read the rock for me Ion! Read the rock!"
Listen! Can you hear iron humming the secret sex of the
earth, of magnets and mercury, copper tin and the keen steel kiss of the memory
of heat - of looking up, of moving from tree to tree?
And can you imagine the years it takes, setting out early
one endless morning
To go beyond the gauze of land, beyond the birds who
didn’t make it-
The rape of an alphabet scattered up the beach all torn
ink and feather-
And beyond the years it takes, setting out early one
endless morning to reach you?”
"Yes, yes! But read the rock for me Ion! Read the
rock!"
Listen! The rock remembers heat in fistfuls of minerals,
Iron cleaves to mud, mud to the intricate clay of the
soul,
To the years it takes to reach you or sand to desire, glass
to mirrors, mirrors to stones.
Baby Bird, I was all the time alone, travelling in that
big remembering.
Humming in the iron of the soul of Baby Bird,
Ion remembers water bound tightly as a knuckle of
secrets,
Turning in the centre of salt and light.
Baby Bird asks the rock,
"Did you ever write my name on a slip of paper
And slide it under your pillow at night?"
Memory of water in the soul of the rock speaks,
You forgot, that I have been waiting for you,
A hidden-turning in the iron-salt-light of this water,
Of her endless incarnations, listening as she passes
over.
Baby Bird lowers her head to the rock,
"To touch you is to remember that language.
To remember is to grind seeds to make color,
Sand to make a mirror, mirror to make a stone.
Ion! Rock of my heart! Listen to the humming of iron in
the soul of this water
As it tells itself its favorite old story! As it tells me
its favorite old story!"
The sex of the still earth - a hymn in the soul of Ion -
Doesn’t want for anything, doesn’t search for anything.
The rock takes nothing, the water passes over
And listen, Baby Bird, hidden like a ruby
In the mountain outside time
Counts to ten
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