love

goes fishing.
off a bridge.
catches one.
big.
into the bucket.
threshing.
and flicking.
eyes unbIinking.
beckoning
come with me.
back.
to the river.
and love.
forgets why it came.
and jumps

KEVIN GILLAM

Sexual Encounter (No.2)
“In the name of science”

Mr Seymour was the best looking teacher at Gallaganbone High
The only thing post Jurassic
my side of the black stump
Mr Seymour taught science and was sporty
so sporty he always (winter and summer)
wore shorts.
Short shorts.
Shorts that allowed his boys to breathe
shorts that gave them the freedom to move
shorts that quite often
let his boys relax so much
they’d slide
                   out of their
                                      nylon hammock
slippery-dipping
                              silently
                                              onto the wooden stool
sunning themselves in the light
which fell through the window of our Year Nine science class.
Actually, Mrs. Seymour was our sex education teacher
but Mr Seymour’s two big black furry balls
passed on more knowledge than the Dept. of Education
could ever hope for
despite their lack of qualifications.
They’d lounge contentedly on display
ensuring all the boys would never take a
communal shower again
and for all the girls to never ever miss a class.
I got an A in science that year.
I wasn’t the only one
because when Mr Seymour looked you in the eye
you didn’t want to be caught
studying his testicles
so the only place to look
was up
to the periodic table cleverly placed on the wall
just behind his head.

WALLET

My boy writes his own business cards:
Name, address, phone, fax, mobile, hotmail,
Pikachu in one corner trims to ticket size,
Slips his spreading network into pockets,
Into the card slots of an auxiliary wallet—
Bark-coloured, full-grain Merino leather,
Security nylon loop with popper enclosure—
Slyly palmed from father’s study drawer.

A boy stands in a South Bronx vestibule—
Reaches for his pocket. Charcoal-black:
The colour of a semiautomatic.
Eager to define himself to the people
Of his new country, the West Indian boy
Capered to the embroidery of 41 gunshots
(Embossed by 19). One bullet tunnelled
Up his leg—so pathology tells us—
To nudge his wallet back into his hand.
“Look. Here I am. This is me. After all.”

My boy flips his wallet like a police badge
(“Where’s the gun! Where’s the gun!”),
Parades his freshly-minted ID, its formation
A hormonal imperative, adding value—
A serious wood-brown snapdragon, ribbed,
Four card slots, dual note compartments—
Partitioning his brain’s growth
Into coin purse and plastic windows.

STEPHEN LAWRENCE

Why can’t the sea leave the island alone?

Why are some people born without a fear of water?
Why is the ferry a mother hen one day and a shark the next?

Why is the house of shells always a disappointment?
Was the old bridge more beautiful because it was dangerous?

Why do waves keep returning the things we throw away?
How can the sea bear to give back the sun?

Why do we waste our pity on the lighthouse?
Why is the blowhole so attractive?

Why is the other island a turtle and this one only an island?
Why can’t the sea leave the island alone?

TRIC O'HEARE

Sex in public

As many people do, I tend to worry. I worry about a lot of things, but mainly about money. I find myself awake in the middle of the night.
Sometimes it helps if I get a glass of water. Recently, doing just that, I saw my neighbour Bob through the kitchen window. I like Bob, he lets me use his Whipper Snipper. Bob is married to Jane and as I wiped a glass with the floral tea towel my mother bought me for my birthday, I saw Bob and Jane rolling around on their neatly cut lawn. It was a full moon, so there was more than enough light to see every detail of their frantic and fevered love-fest. They were moving from flowerbed to flowerbed - arms and legs entangled in a sweaty passionate beastly embrace. It’s hard to believe they’ve been married for all these years, I thought to myself. After an hour I lost interest.
“There’s nothing better,” Bob told me, as I helped him wash his car the next morning.
“What?”
“Having sex in the open.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Trust me, abandon the doona - spice up your life”.
I like Bob. He’s pretty smart, after all, it was his car and he watched me wash it.
I thought about what he’d said. Just add spice. And he’s absolutely right. If your idea of a romantic night is a meal loosely based on something from France and Barry White smooching from the three-in-one, try livening things up. When you retire to the bedroom, casually fit all the lights with 200 watt bulbs. Pull up the blinds, draw the curtains, open all the windows and get it out in the open. Once things get started you will not only be releasing years of inhibition, created by wrestling under the covers, but you’ll also be offering what is, after all, one of the greatest gifts.
Love - you’re not only making it, you’re sharing it. You’ll be the hero of your neighbourhood.
And if you want to take the show on the road - use public transport. Use the car. Use your local cinema. Use bathroom facilities, especially at social gatherings or family functions. The day you can add two counts of Public Indecency to your CV is the day your life will surely change.
For the better.
“I must say, I’m very impressed by your curriculum vitae.”
“Why thank you.”
“We’d be honoured if you’d accept this extremely well paid job offer.”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
And if you do, remember, you’ve got Bob to thank.

DAMIAN KRINGAS

BL00D’S RED NOISE

A tail-taken kangaroo, highway 32’s dead.
Crash’n’carry.

Then as you walk right out
beyond a desert town’s bluster lawns & air-condition
the silence presses.
Your shoes crash land                this macadam crack
on the dryland’s thin skull.
        One bird sounds like 3am TV
                the breeze an argument in progress.

This empty gun air abrades a skin which no longer fits/
excavates the bladder.

Your clothes are a barbed wire fence
as fingers wriggle down towards the burrow.

You have mined the shrubs for moisture
built houses on the distant hills
of what might have been.

The sweaty truth you now have a need
to listen to yourself.

LES WICKS

Pokie Face

Anyway, so I popped into a local pub,
which turned out to be an RSL
                      but who can tell in Sydney?

And as I stood in the middle of a sea,
or rather a scam, of bland Pokie Machines
I realised I was watching poor Proles dreams oil the wheels of Orwellian nightmares,
stuffing their cheques in with all the gusto they could muster
while Packer played polo with a dead man’s millions.

And you know that there ain’t gonna be any food in the fridge
when the old girl’s got her Pokie face on -
eyes glued to her Clockwork Orange, pulling up lemons
as she gambles her minuscule income away and drinks cheap piss at the local Rissole,
she’s the muso’s woe, subsidizing tax scams
and facing West at eight p.m. to read the Pokie creed -

“Poverty shall not weary them, nor age neither.
We shall suck their minimum wage, dole cheques and pensions away vampirically
at the going down of the son
and at dawn at the early opener.
Lest we forget that it’s a mugs’ game,
and there’s a million mocking alcoholic melancholics knocking off every minute,
and driving drunk to get sunk in the Pokie trenches of Suburbia.”

For Madge has become the offal in her local Rissole,
and she wears it well with her war widow’s shawl and her shambled lonely gamblers’ gin grin,
and a Pokie face - a joke a which only the tax man chortles like a change machine.

And I feel like a sadistic voyeur
as I’m watching her
fondle one of the legion of Mephistopheles Demons next to my friend -
a successfully disheveled Greek poet
who’s just pumped his last fifty bucks into the yawning Consumerist crevice
of what he calls
“The Queen of de’Nile.”

Just like my old man
who I watched pump money into the Burwood branch of the TAB
           when my mother said “do something with your son,”
so he took me to The Track.

Yeah he took me to The Track with cousin Mario
who ended up on the Inside
for running a guiltless plantation of pot for the local Cops and La Familia.
Yeah they took me to The Track and then sat down stairs in the betting office
           while I sneaked off to watch innocently sleek steroid filled beasts
           be whipped like kids caught jigging by yob dwarfs in glamorous drag.

And I still remember how the gaggle of Wogs
babbled a pot-pourri of Greek-Vietna-Lebanese-Italian,
but were united in that they all wore that “last hope of the working bum” expression
           that I see on the old girl’s dial today
as she pays heavily to avoid
that phone at home that never rings from her son on the nod in Marrickville
and a grand-daughter having too much fun in London

Lest she remember that she cannot forget
that there’s nothing left of her War Widow’s Pension but her cigarette ridden
Pokie face.

BENITO DI FONZO