The Perfect Diary is in a week-to-an-opening format, with a work by a contemporary Australasian artist or writer featured every week.

Below you can find the works by our contributors that appeared in the months of January, February and March of The Perfect Diary 2004.

You can see works from previous months and years by using the links at the bottom of this page.

Warning

We wish to advise
readers that there is
no nudity in this
poem, no violence,
no coarse language
or sex scenes, that
nothing here will
offend aboriginal
communities. Muslims
and Jews can read it,
together if they wish.
No Christian sensibilities
will be trampled.
Only the trees need
worry, the trees for whom
reading is cannibalism.

Garth Madsen

A definite clue.

She acts all cartoon cowgirl
when he’s around.
He is the sweetest thing,
his smile like a cradle.
She flirts like a pornstar’s daughter
and tells him she only ever hangs out with boys.
He blushes nectarine and hands her a coffee.
She sits with her feet dangling off a high chair
he looks at her like he’s 10 and she’s a wizz fizz bomb.

She kicks and her pigtails swish around like little go-go dancers.
She tells him that she’s listening for clues out her window
on how to be a better person.
Last night she heard a man yell
‘ Don’t ever go pole vaulting’
in a fake Indian accent.
She thinks it’s definitely a clue.
He tells her, when he was a sailor,
the soft breeze under water would carry
the most ancient of songs
able to heal the wounds of man.

When he spoke she would look at him,
circling his face
sliding down his water park nose
nestling in his ears
fluffing his bald head with her hair,
his gentle eyes always adoring.
Her lips
coloured pink
ajar like an attic door
he wonders what it would be like to explore.

Giggles leave her mouth like mini bunnies with eyelashes.
She spins red cardigan tease
and leaves.
He can feel her go,
like she has all the rainbows in the world rushing after her.
Empty with bliss, he sits.

Emilie Zoey Baker

Huge adolescent males
squeezed into desks
and ridiculous shorts
grown into year ten giants
from year eight punies
could these be the same boys?
Adult bodies with prickly faces
alas retainers of schoolboy minds giggling
plucking each others’ leg hairs
powerful limbs
plastic expressions
what do you do with a centaur
half man half child?

Sue Clennell

TERRACOTTA

I’d lived there for
perhaps eleven years in the
tile-roofed, brick-based white wooden house on
the slightly sloping hill down to
the old gully that was to be
filled in with garbage
until levelled off
as park
before
finding myself on
some errand or other
up the back steps & inside the
brick & stucco-based cream wooden house next door
accidentally looking out of their kitchen window
onto the orange-red roof of our house
& a few other orange-red roofs
down in the shallow valley of
an old terracotta village
I’d never seen
before.

Graham Rowlands

Travels in the Wonderstorey

One day last tear I took a flurry over the wavy motion. My map was full of cymballs, trombones, accordions and saxophones, but I couldn’t whisker on their ploys. I was cooking for the steaming of strife, strundering what pot of coral I could strive by. So I took that flurry over the wavy motion. It was roody that day. I took that flurry and peered into its peachy broom, but I couldn’t yet shear steaming.

It was splinter, so I was wearing my cosiest wood, even though it chafes. It was splinter and it can be wet, the tether lewdsome and creamy, and I wished for my lute, a flute or a pair of songs. The turf was spumey, the rice was sheeting and it was splinter.

With a waltry sind at my scallop, I talked along the mirm, foisty scarp, shattered with kelpy hands washed in by cracking brashers of the wavy motion. I stood, whinnying on the shand, the sind shifting my dirt, and cooked for steaming and a coral. I talked, and talked some more, following a nervous toad all the way to a frown, till I left the shand behind and came to a suspended hooter over a rorty diver. The nervous toad was crusty and strong, and I stroked it, hyping it would show me the steaming of strife. Were there corals here?

The rorty diver mouthed into the wavy motion, and I crimped across the hooter. Below, a lagoonish steamy brute tailed and weaned, where the diver mortar mixed and waxed with the motion mortar. Perhaps this was strife? No, not yet. There was a fliff so I rhymed it. It was a sky fliff, full of frog shattered blocks, and the rhyming jangled. Passing a vaulty steaming fountain in the twiddle of the reams, I steered down but was especially hairful, as care was in my eyes, not to sumble over the stide. Talkers can easily sumble into the meamy solten tagma of the tart and get drozzled.

I came to a belted sheach at last where the sind cowled and tooted. I watched hopping whunks of rice trumbling through the high for a time, then got cross with another hooter and crimmied past a poundy caved woast, before whinnying some more at a saddle. I came to fo’csles on the shand, all spying to statch hingers from the wavy motion, but 1923 was the last time a fo’csle ever statched a hinger in these tarts. Before I left, I made sure to throttle some of the motion, for the journey can be song and a spoonful of motion strays all sooty thaws.

I pauntered into the strainforest stringing the shand, the toad now behind me, creaking dawsily. It wouldn’t swallow me into the strainforest. The wonderstory was full of creepy, rivy ants, smelling me of their strife. Was this the coral? It was steaming of a sort, but the glances weren’t all mine.

Coming to a yawning gulf, I twitched my rent. By that rhyme of day, anyway, it was moony. Inside, I sniggered and looked for toast because I was old, but the toast was crummy. I heard a strummingbird chuff, shell-like and dry, stony, bony, like a smirmy deakin in the wonderstorey. I plucked my shed out of the rent, blotched it, whinnied and hooted myself, and it grew away. And there it was. Here was the coral, the steaming of strife, when I least inspected it. Too much whinnying and hooting, too much stranging in the smirky wonderstorey, too many splinters and nervous toads, and we can grow away.

Andrew McKenna

Chelmno Villanelle

She helps the new ones off the filthy train;
they look to her for guidance and for truth.
She reassures them, indicates the gates.
These are faces she will not see again.
As the guards watch and chatter in small groups,
she helps the new ones off the filthy train.
Their worn shoes fill with mud and frozen rain
as more snow gathers slowly on the roof.
She reassures them, indicates the gates.
She smiles and waves and points them on their way
as the mounted horses lift their cold hooves.
She helps the new ones off the filthy train.
Her mirror broke, fell all the way away.
In the end there is nothing left to lose.
She reassures them, indicates the gates.
Sirened awake each fresh relentless day,
her nerve returns; she steps up to the queue.
She helps the new ones off the filthy train
and reassures them, indicates the gates.

Ian McBryde

u
figure

i
grew her
to fat, so she filled the room
when i walked away. her curves her hollows
became me, forever and before we had
met, i had always been the
jam in her
bun
with each
lip-smacking and the letting fly of
lumps she weighted me, we left each other
waiting, and no one under
stands there was less
of her to
love

Julie Simpson

2003 January February & March, April, May & June, July, August & September, October, November & December,