David Simpson

To Cease

A clashing
Darkness
Wanting
Without holding
Winding
in the meantime
I am here
and the treasure
of the mean
is inhanced
and then let go of

Why do we plunder
When to die
is enough to get by
Don't give up
Or else we all will.


Climbing

Each step
Is like the last
it knows that wind has its mark
in times that are for the deer
i am in my most selfish spirit
because when we are through
i will have it all.

Volume 1, No. 2, Autumn 2013

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

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 Battle Continues

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.