Tidal Ghazal
The glove is tugged out and pulled in by the tide.
All other evidence was claimed by the tide.
The old woman who has spent half her life blind
can read shifting futures in the ocean’s tides.
The teacups and saucers on the houseboat slide
but don’t break with the waves of the forgiving tide.
Madness, they say, is often defined
by the tug and the pull of mischievous tides.
Our poet, Ms Frost, pays a costly tithe:
a tenth of her sanity to the ghazal’s tides.
It has been the kind of month that invites adventure in and won’t let it leave till it’s properly sloshed—by which stage it’s difficult to ever get rid of. I’ve been to see some outrageously good shows, rambled around cemeteries, written lots, and re-manifested myself as the love child (imagine that) of Tank Girl and Delirium. Hullo, April—where did March go?! This is where:
Early last week, Jason Webley arrived in Queensland to finish the Down Under leg of 2011’s epic world tour. Finally seeing him perform, after four and a half years of waiting, was a singular joy. Webley’s Brisbane show at The Zoo on March 23 attracted around 200 punters, all very ready to stomp and sing and become his makeshift orchestra.
When he’s on stage, the slogan on promo posters, “post-apocalyptic fun,” makes perfect sense. I can imagine Webley—in his beloved, battered dancing hat—as the kind of musician that would get us through the apocalypse and still have us dancing even after the sky had long since crashed down.
Those who came along to Webley’s farewell house party (/hosts’ housewarming) were in for an extra treat. The night turned into one long, glorious jam session. (I even got out my trumpet! And toyed with an unsuspecting ukelele!) You’ll find a garage-full of people playing Eleven Saints floating around on YouTube, no doubt.
Jason Webley @ The Zoo—photo by Zen’s dodgy phone
Earlier in the week, I was very pleased to be able to drag Mr Webley and a RagTag group of Brisbanites around my favourite of haunts, Toowong Cemetery—an adventure in itself. After several months of guilty neglect, I’ve been visiting the graveyard much more often. (I don’t know how I manage to forget the necropolis down the road–inside the gates it is always cooler and quieter than it could ever get in our sweltering house.)
More gravewalks means more grave poems—a good thing, since last year’s ramblings are beginning to see the light. Issue 35 of Cordite Poetry Review, Oz-Ko (Envoy) is online as of today, and I’m super excited to say that there you’ll find Warning. Consider it the introduction to that forthcoming cemetery collection I so often talk about (see! bits of it exist!).
And in extra shiny, super-duper rad breaking news, our own Jeremy Thompson is one of three poets commended by judge Peter Minter in 2010’s Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize, rising above over 1000 entries into the realm of Awesome. Whee!
Bear with me, because my segues for this blog are about to get worse. In fact, non-existent. Run with it. You might remember me raving away last year about a wonderful little Brisbane show called boy girl wall. Well, it’s back on this year at La Boite, and last night’s opening performance proved its just as marvellous as we thought the first time around. Maybe a bit more marvellous.
Lucas Stibbard in boy girl wall—photo by Al Caeiro
In 2010, The Escapists’ one-man show, performed by Lucas Stibbard—with live music from Neridah Waters—relied on the walls of the Sue Benner Theatre at Metro Arts (the set was literally drawn on with chalk), so I was interested to see how they’d handle La Boite’s in-the-round set-up. Fortunately, The Escapists have made something gorgeous out of a potential problem: a chalk-board green stage hits the horizon line and becomes a collage of blackboards rising into the rafters. In the vast La Boite space, Keith Clark’s lighting really helps to hold everything together (I only wish he could use his lighting powers to rig up a more powerful OHT).
Beyond the venue, not too much has changed, and it was lovely to visit the 20-something characters again (especially dear Power Box and the lovely, but somewhat gothic library assistant). The script is clever, life-affirming, and above all, maddeningly funny. Seeing boy girl wall again, the influence of Under Milk Wood (which Stibbard and I chatted about recently in Rave Magazine) becomes delightfully clear. If you enjoy being happy, you should grab tickets before the rest of the season sells out.
The gentleman with the accordion and the pork pie hat, Mr Jason Webley, is finally touring Australia again (it’s been nearly five years!). While he was zipping around the continent, I snuck into his busy schedule to ask him 11 questions.
ZENOBIA FROST: You last visited Down Under four years ago. In that time, you’ve released a solo album and several collaborations. What’s been your most memorable moment since we last saw you?
Wow. That’s a big question… I’m not sure what the MOST memorable moment has been—a lot has happened in the last four years. I’ve been everywhere in the world and back, played shows in Siberia, in Morocco, Mexico City. Actually, the other afternoon stands out pretty strongly. I happened to be in Christchurch when the big earthquake hit. I was meant to play there that night, it was my first time and I was staying with friends not far from the city center. Luckily I was okay, as were my friends—and I was be able to get out of the city the next day. But it was crazy walking around and seeing the collapsed houses, the streets and bridges all ripped apart, and the clay billowing out of the earth like a million little volcanoes.
ZF: Southern Cross was written in Australia nearly a decade ago. How did the song come to be written?
JW: That song is partly stolen goods. When I first arrived in Australia I stayed for a couple days in Sydney with a Canadian woman I knew who hummed a Leonard Cohen song to me—she said he had written after learning of an affair between his wife and his best friend. I wasn’t very familiar with his work at that time. I had a cassette of some of his songs and loved his work, but I had never heard the tune before.
Later I went on to Adelaide for three weeks to perform as a street performer at the Fringe. It was a rather alienating experience. At the time I had been performing at a lot of festivals all over the US and Canada, but Adelaide didn’t go very well for me. The street scene was a bit more of a drunken mess than I had anticipated and I never really found my audience. It was hard work hitting the Rundle Mall day after day, and I remember at night I’d go and lay down in a park or somewhere and look up at the sky above me, not recognising any of the constellations, and think, “Fuck, what the hell am I doing out here?”
On that trip I became smitten with a girl I met. We had a brief affair that ended swiftly and left me feeling the same way that the foreign constellations and the streets of Adelaide had. The song came out quickly, and while I wrote, I was very aware that it borrowed a bit from whatever I could remember of the melody that the woman in Sydney had hummed to me. I didn’t realise until I heard the song later how horribly I had ripped off Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat. But I decided not to change it. People still give me shit about it sometimes when they hear the song, but I still think it was a lovely way to steal a tune, and I hope that Leonard Cohen wouldn’t mind if he knew. I think he might like the song if he heard it.
ZF: Your compositions range in style from the gloriously and joyously absurd to the heart-breakingly serious (I’m looking at you, With). Is there a particular genre/style you prefer writing and performing?
JW: I don’t like to think in terms of genre generally. Whenever I start writing a song, and it feels a bit like it fits too well into a particular category, I always feel a bit embarrassed somehow. I like songs that feel like they could have been written a hundred years ago. My songs, these days, do seem to get divided into categories of totally ridiculous silly songs and the serious ones… I think when I first started I had a lot more material that somehow lived in between those extremes.
You mention With. That was an interesting one. I wrote that song as some kind of hello, a welcome, but to everyone else it must look like a song about letting go—and I suppose I see it that way too now. That song gets played at funerals.
ZF: You’ve been compared to figures like Tom Waits. This might have been an easy comparison early on in your career, but you’ve long-since developed a sound all your own. If you could coin a title or description for the Jason Webley sound, what would you call it?
JW: I generally try to avoid defining my own music. That is other people’s job… If somebody has to coin a title for the Jason Webley genre, I hope I have nothing to do with it. I guess, on my flyers I lazily put “punk accordion” because I think that helps give people an evocative, simple idea of what to expect. But in a lot of ways that doesn’t make sense, the music isn’t punk and I only play accordion about half of the time. There are all of these labels though—stomp punk, gypsy punk, steam punk, punk cabaret, folk punk, whatever. They don’t really mean anything to me.
ZF: Your lyrics frequently stray into the realm of poetry (especially on albums like Only Just Beginning). Do you consider yourself a poet as well as a musician? What’s your usual song-writing process?
JW: It’s funny, I don’t really consider myself to be a poet or even exactly a musician. I’m a terrible instrumentalist (really, I am, trust me.) And whenever I write, I never would call myself a poet. I guess I call myself a songwriter, which is sort of a marriage of the two and sort of a compromise of the two.
I don’t have a usual songwriting process. Most of my songs, at least the ones that are worth anything, have arrived at my home uninvited, conveyed by their own unique form of transport.
ZF: I particularly enjoy the way your albums (especially Counterpoint and Against the Night) reward repeat listens by revealing layers and patterns in both sound and lyric. Webley albums feel like treasure hunts. The Cost of Living is a very different album, but a particularly cohesive album thematically.
JW: The Cost of Living was a different sort of album for me. I’m not sure if you notice, but there aren’t as many “treasure hunts” you mentioned going on with that one. There are certainly themes and there are a few melodic shapes that return, but I didn’t construct it in the same way as the other albums with all of the internal references between the songs. Another difference is that I also didn’t try so much to resolve whatever darkness comes up within the songs. For that reason, to me it is a much starker album than Against the Night and if it does somehow redeem itself and burn through the dark areas it touches on, it is because of something beyond my planning. I was a bit scared of that album while working on it. For a while I thought it might even have a bit of a curse. One of my best friends died shortly into the recording process and my father got very sick and nearly died right around the day it was released.
ZF: What are the benefits and challenges of working in collaboration as opposed to writing and performing solo?
JW: It is easier to reinvent yourself and try new things when you are bouncing ideas off of someone else. For me something in my inner-editorial board really relaxes and lets me make choices I’d never make on my own songs. Also, when I know I’m working with a new musician, even if they aren’t in the room, my mind starts going all sorts of places it would never go normally. That’s fun. But it can also be hard, and it is easy when working with others to write a lot of stuff that doesn’t actually penetrate very deeply. I believe Ayn Rand (who I don’t normally agree with) was right: nothing too remarkable ever gets done by a committee. If you have a bunch of people working on a song, it is very possible that the end result will work out to be much less than the sum of its parts. Although, maybe that’s wrong—the Beatles sure made amazing songs together and turned out a bunch of crap when they were on their own.
ZF: What kind of repertoire can we expect at your Australian shows? Old stuff? New stuff? Evelyn Evelyn stuff? Will we be treated to some songs we’ve never heard before?
JW: Well, since it has been four years, I do have a bunch of new stuff. Hopefully there will be a happy mix of it all: old songs, new songs, serious songs, silly songs, a few covers, a few old things that I wasn’t playing four years ago, and of course a few familiar songs. Last night I played a two-hour set in Perth, and I’m guessing that there were only about three or four songs that anyone there might have ever heard me perform when I was there last.
ZF: What are you most looking forward to getting up to in Australia? Do you have a favourite touring-Australia story from the past?
JW: I’m looking forward to getting to Hobart and exploring Tasmania a bit, since I’ve never been there before. I’m also playing in a bunch of smaller towns this time around—Canberra, Newcastle, Geraldton and Lismore. I’m very curious how those gigs will go.
As to Australian stories from the past—I’ve got a bunch. About half the songs on my third album, Counterpoint, were born in Australia. I still don’t like to think in terms of “favourites” but the full version of the story of Southern Cross was the one that stuck out from my first trip. An interesting anecdote is that I met Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls on that same trip, back before her band had formed when we were both street performers struggling and suffering in Rundle Mall in Adelaide.
ZF: Why the fascination with vegetables? And the number 11?
JW: The vegetable thing is or mostly was just a playful thing I did back in the beginning of my street performing. I’d wave a big toy carrot in the air to try and get the crowd worked up. You can also learn a lot from vegetables about how to live and die and about generosity. Vegetables are very generous. The number eleven is more complicated. It is an odd number.
ZF: Your website says you’ll be taking a long hiatus from touring after 2011. What’s in the works for 2012 and onwards?
JW: I don’t have any plans. The only thing I know is that I will be taking at least a year off from performing beginning on November 12th of this year. I love what I do though and hope it will continue in some fashion for a long, long time, but a voice that I trust has told me it is time to take a big break and I’m going to do that. I’m not sure how long the break will be or what exactly I will do after the break, but I hope very much that I’ll keep performing in some way and that it won’t take me four years to get back to Australia again.
[This is the full transcript of an interview I conducted for Rave Magazine. Go read that too!]
SILVER SIRCUS supports JASON WEBLEY at The Zoo in Brisbane on Wednesday, March 23 (yay!), but the remainder of his Brisbane touring schedule is as follows:
March 17—Canberra, AUSTRALIA – The Front
March 18—Sydney, AUSTRALIA – Camelot Lounge
March 19—Sydney, AUSTRALIA – Explicit Manor
March 20—Newcastle, AUSTRALIA – Great Northern
March 23—Brisbane, AUSTRALIA – The Zoo
March 24—Lismore, AUSTRALIA – Gollan Hotel
Brisbane Powerhouse put on a very fine evening of drinks and nibblies at the launch of World Theatre Festival this week. I liked the idea of WTF from the beginning because it meant Ben Law’s face was on posters all over Brisbane and every time I saw one, I remembered The Family Law and giggled. (Ben, are you even part of WTF, poster aside?) The festival itself has a great line-up from Europe, the USA, Chile and NZ, as well as home-grown talent.
While we clutched our free wine and cider (the twittersphere keeps mentioning the WTF cider!), The Rat Trap, part of the festival’s Scratch Series of works-in-progress played out on the Turbine Platform. Sure, Polytoxic’s latest work is a little rough around the edges, but the audience was enraptured. With great costumes and a fantastic soundtrack (CW Stoneking and Amanda Palmer, together at last), the Polytoxic crew showed off some very promising choreography. I particularly loved the remote-control ratties and the swinging-from-the-lampshades dance routine. I wanted more from a one-trick strip to Palmer’s Missed Me, and couldn’t help but feel that the Siamese twins with the ping-pong balls were getting a bit too close to being offensive. But that’s what the Scratch Series is about—trying things out and trying things on, and The Rat Trap hit the mark far more often than it missed. With a bit of polish and tightening up, this will probably have the same obsession-creating effect on me that Cantina had at last year’s Brisbane Festival.
Apollo 13: Mission Control is an “interactive, intergalactic theatre piece” from the Land of the Long White Cloud. I was really excited to be one of the 100 “staff” working at Mission Control to help safely launch and land the Apollo 13, so I was a little disappointed when I ended up in the Press Gallery, looking on. Luckily, the friend I brought along managed to get in right up the very front, in the middle of all the action. The set is fantastic; audience members sit at 1970s-style computer consoles with functioning phones and video and shiny buttons. The cast went around sprucing up the new staff by handing out ties and tubs of Brylcreem. We (the pretend press) were handed a clipboard to jot down questions for the astronauts. We were all ready to be lifted off into funland.
The difficulty with a show like this—a recreation of a shuttle launch—is how to turn it from a historical event into theatre. Punters at consoles were given (rather involved) manuals to read, equations to solve, numbers to ring, and questions to answer, but ultimately nothing the audience did had any effect on the plot or characters. From the press gallery, there were lots of flashing lights and goings on—and lots of shouting—but I couldn’t see much meaningful interaction. I enjoyed the chats with the newsreader (great moustache!) and the astronauts, but my favourite scenes in the control room involved my buddy up the front hijacking the set, taking hold of a microphone, and making an air filter out of a tissue box, a vacuum tube, and sticky tape. His feedback was that the play felt like it couldn’t choose between serious re-enactment and freeform play. When he steered Apollo 13 in the latter direction, faces in the audience lit up.
At its worst, it felt a bit like a dud Thank God You’re Here segment; at its best, it was a joyous and chaotic rush of actors and punters playing together whilst machines made exciting pinging noises. I saw a lot of genuinely bored and anxious faces sitting at consoles, which is certainly a pity—but I think the cheers, when our astronauts came safely back to earth, were genuine too. There were moments when we felt like we were part of something momentous. I just wish there’d been more of those.
Find out more about WTF at: www.brisbanepowerhouse.org or you can check out my previews in Rave Magazine.
…after last festival month!
Brisbane has been fairly wild for the last couple of months. We’ve had festivals crawling out of our ears, blowing out our noses, oozing out of our eye sockets, and generally affecting us bodily. But in pleasant ways.
QPF was particularly splendid this year. My picks:
And then we’ve had Brisbane Writers Festival, and Brisbane Festival (with its glorious fireworks–and all of us gathering on the hills in the old suburbs to watch the city burn), and Valley Fiesta is coming up this weekend. But for Brissie Fest picks:
Unless we call it the Festival of Zen. I was fortunate to be included in Overland Magazine as part of the 200th issue’s 200-line collaborative poem. And I gained infamy in QWeekend Magazine a couple of weeks ago, along with Graham Nunn and John Tranter and co.–thank you to everyone who has sent photocopies, actual copies, or mentioned it. I felt like Harry Potter for about a day. It was bizarre.
So yes, not quite the Festival of Zen this month, but it’s busy enough to look like it from inside my mindtank. As a final note, I’ve been procrastinating by playing point-and-click hidden object games, and I’m presently in love with Mishap: An Accidental Haunting. If anyone has any favourites, please recommend them.
You know, it’d be cool to get involved in writing for games, because I’ve played a lot of mediocre games in the last few weeks that could have been wild with a dedicated creative writer or an editor on team. What we need is a poetry text adventure. How awesome would that be? Maybe I could pitch that to The Edge or something; they’re groovy folks.
*wishes for more time and funding*
Anyhoo,
A generally cheerful and typically hopeful Zen signing out.
~ Zenobia
The other day I was passing through Queen St Mall and observed the following:
This is irrelevant. I think all low-fat milk tastes like it’s gone off. I am having treacle cake and a glass of milk for brunch.
If you like poems, you can find something called I Dreamt You Were Dead and It Was Grand (A Love Poem) by me, over at Black Rider Press (come along with the Black Riders, etc.). Even if you don’t like poems, it will still be there. Even if you don’t like treacle cake, I will still be eating it.
No one in my house likes treacle. I would like to find someone else who likes treacle, and give them a hug. But I won’t give them any of my treacle. It’s English, don’t you know.
In other news, I’ll be doing performing at a poetry event called ‘Not Aloud in the Library’ at the Brisbane Square Library on the 16th of April. I will be reading other people’s erotica. Fuzzy-tingle times are not allowed aloud in the library, unless you are one of my housemates. Darkwing Dubs will also be performing, along with burlesque and circus acts.
In other other news, that same weekend I’ll be a busy bee at the state library on the 18th, doing a poetry workshop as part of Express Media’s Mini Publication Ride. It’s so awesome to have an Express Media thing happening up here in Queensland. If you don’t know them and their 
publication, Voiceworks, you ought to. Anyhoo, this is a four-week series of workshops. They will be on short stories (Chris Somerville), poetry (me), opinion (Benjamin Law) and zine making (Tiara the Merch Girl) – and if you do all four you’ll have your own zine at the end of it. You can book here if you want to come, which you really ought to. If you don’t, I’ll still be eating treacle cake, though I might be sick of it by then and have moved onto a different kind of cake.
Happy Easter. Avoid invoking the fertility gods today unless you really want to. Eat a lot of chocolate, though. Food babies are safer.
Everything that could possibly be crammed into a month has been, dear readers. I’ve moved house (down the road), kicked off a new job at Rave Magazine (whee!), and orchestrated not one but two Gentlemen’s Tea Parties at the Woolloongabba Tea Parties (with the help of a number of seriously Superior people).
The first Gentlemen’s Tea Party at the WAC was a raging success, with Absolute Tits (and their very special guests); The Ragtag Review Band (pictured–thank you, Seb), poets Graham Nunn, John Knight and Ross Clark; Evelyn Hartogh; The Coin-Operated Boy; The Merch Girl; and burlesque darlings Bertie Page and Rita Fontaine (as Johnny Castrati). I had such a great time! Thank you so much to Tiara, Tim, Wayne and JT, all of whom kept me sane during the week and made the event run smoothly.
Next week’s event welcomes the addition of Miss BB le Buff and Phoebe Manning, and we can expect it to be an even more wondrous and gentlemanly day. There are fewer than ten tickets left, so contact Tiara at rubyfizz@gmail.com if you’d like to book.
In other news, I have a poem in the new publication The Tangled Bank, details below. Hurrah!
____________________________________________________________
The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, & Evolution has launched!
The anthology, which marks the 150th anniversary of Origin of Species, features over 100,000 words of speculative fiction, poetry, artwork, and essays about evolution.
An international line-up of nearly 50 contributors includes Sean Williams, Brian Stableford, Patricia Russo, and Carlos Hernandez.
Just US$4.99, The Tangled Bank is now available for download as a PDF at http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/the-tangled-bank-love-wonder-and-evolution/8340048
Check out “Darwin’s Daughter” by Christopher Green (a free short story from the anthology)
http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/darwins-daughter/8339953
For more information, visit the website, or our Facebook or Twitter pages.
So, I was whinging to mr oCean just the other day about The Belonging Quartet not yet finding a home when I should have been checking the mailbox. Instead, I only noticed the orange envelope waiting in the box by my front gate today (Sunday, on my way back from a heritage walk at the cemetery), and whatdoyaknow, that gosh-darned suite of poems has won the UQ Ford Memorial Prize.
Hurrah! I know I was up against some mean competition, so I’m a lucky duck, and very grateful.
Anyhoo, here’s the suite of poems:
1 House-sitting in the old suburbs
I try not to hunt for skeletons
in other people’s closets, but here
they wrap their bones
in wood and wallpaper,
and come to find me.
I don’t go out for days.
Clocks mean nothing.
I lie in the clawfoot,
reading the ceiling’s pine calligraphy.
I eat, I sleep, I talk to possums
who won’t talk back. I climb the hill
to the antique shops; later,
clean the house in a burlesque
frock, pillbox hat and 1940s
dance slingbacks—keep my last ten cents
in my snake-skin bag. Who loved
these things before me?
/
2 Hoping at the city’s edge
I escape for one last night
to my lover’s and fold myself
into white sheets like a secret letter.
My skin is a palimpsest of his touch.
I sleep without hesitation.
Early sun welcomes winter in
through the window, bakes
the wooden walls sweet, illuminates
notes written in lemon juice
on paper flesh.
Later, I sit on the back steps in yesterday’s
dress and watch the sun take slow,
blue gulps of time to make its light.
/
3 Biding time in the new suburbs
My ghosts come to collect me.
In the place that I must call Home, the bricks
are slick with paint not yet infused
with memories. There hasn’t been time
in all these hurried years to store them away;
they drift like dust through empty space.
I see things in the shadows. I am still afraid
of what darkness might hold
in its questioning clutches. In sullen corners,
things linger that I said goodbye to
long ago.
/
4 Growing a museum from seedlings
Here we have the stone I found
by the road in the shape
of a teardrop; a box of poems
and love-letters (mostly unsent, one or two
received); and on a shoelace, a key
that offers only the promise of opening.
Black-and-white postcards
line muted plum walls. I type
on an Adler at a desk
with hidden drawers.
I unpack bags in my burlesque
frock, strip myself of what-if thoughts,
and lie down blank to listen
to the hum of history
winding up and then uncoiling
at the foot of my bed.
We try to burrow into sleep,
but with tomorrow dragging restless claws
against the door, we must lie awake
and wait for it to remember
to come in through the window.
Newsliness: I’m in Famous Reporter! See below.
Welcome to the second summer of the year. Well, my second—the first was the bipolar (seriously—0 degrees to 30 in a couple of days?!) Wisconsin summer way back in May/June. I’ve been dreading the Australian variety because that means Sweating and Christmas Decorations and…well, that’s about it, isn’t it?
Anyway, it’s here. This morning the front lawn had exploded into dandelions. A red dragonfly approximately the size of France flew by. Nesting birds have spent the last three weeks using my skull as target practice.
I have put my togs on. Not being I like swimming, or because I’m going near any kind of body of water, but because it seems like the only appropriate uniform for the sort of day when I’m going to be doing a lot of overdue housework—and homework—and my little Queenslander maintains a steady temperature of Surface of the Sun.
But! I do have reason to celebrate. I have a huge bucket of finest gelati (nectarine, lemon, cardamom) and I have finished the linguistics class I should have dropped out of months ago. The only thing I got out of it was a variety of phonological puns (see blog title)—they were good. Beyond that, good riddance.
And today I have a date (another one! she came back!) with Simone de Beauvoir. Taking the phone off the hook, kids.
Last but certainly not least, Ralph Wessman at Famous Reporter has published a chat we had regarding poetry and Stuff and Things. You can read it here. In it I claim that dead poets are copying me, amongst other things. And, re-reading it now, I realise I had (another) Gillam fangirl moment in the interview, too. Ah well, it happens.
Bucketsfull of amazing poets can be found in Issue 40, including Geoff Page (squee!), Graham Nunn, Max Ryan, Nathan Curnow, Ross Donlon, Kent MacCarter, Cameron Hindrum, Sarah Day, and Anthony Lawrence. But you’ll have to buy the journal to get all the goods—and you should.
There’s also a poem from yours truly in the print version. (You might have seen it before if you’ve got my chapbook, but I think it’s twice as nice to see it in Famous Reporter.)
Stalking the Moon
We sail under the moon
and it sails through the sky
oblivious—or not wanting
us to know that it has noticed us.
We neither lag nor gain, passing under
the arched backs of bridges
(lazily curious or curiously lazy
in our skyfishing).
We lace backwards and forwards
across the waist of the river,
tying ourselves to the city in case
the moon should dive
(we’ll be a steady net to catch it)
or turn and lift us up
(looking into its face would surely be
too like a mirror)
and swing our steamboat from its anchor
like a censer in a dark cathedral.
The moon only looks over its shoulder
and hurries when morning comes
(with torchlight strong enough
to scan a row of beds for stragglers)
to urge its late body, full with travels,
into a slow descent.
And there is no doubt that the sun
is gaining on us, too.
(Still, we follow.)
Good luck with summer, guys. Haul out the barbeque, roll out the slip ‘n’ slide and put ice in the kiddy pool. Then send me photos of you in your cossie and silliest apron, in the backyard, covered in suds and eating a burger. Don’t forget your hat; plovers and sunshine want your brains.
Er, signing off.
—Z
No, seriously. The Birds are coming to get me. None of my housemates or friends-who-live-nearby ever encounter nesting birds around my suburb, yet every time I step out of the house, birds scream and swoop: plovers, magpies, minors, even crows. This afternoon three plovers left a tree across the road and swooped me while I was still on my front steps. A few weeks ago, several species of bird (including a pair of wild budgies) teamed up on me at the cemetery when I was trying to leave.
Considering that all cats like me (seriously, even cats who supposedly hate the world will put up with me), I’m not entirely surprised that birds seem to have a vendetta against me. Kittehs and birdies aren’t exactly best friends. Still, it’s weird. Weird to the point of freaking me out. Does anyone know anything about bizarre bird-curses?
On a happier note, the very kind Dr Jon over at the livejournals had some lovely things to say about my Queen Zen poem, and its connection to (and origins in) some strange and wonderful products over at the Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs.
Zenobia Frost 