Poetry

After the woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige Many seasons ago this was the starting point for the Narrow Road to the Deep North the very bridge that Matsuo Bashō strode across stepping off onto the sandy upward slope in late ...

My ba stands in our kitchen. The thwack of a blade against wood, cutting the head off of a fish for dinner. My ba escaped a war, only to spend his life longing to return. He talks often of sacrifice ...

Magnolia stellata Why does it stand blooming like a supernova, dropping bright litter in winter as though it’s autumn? Every star is broken. Every white, rimmed brown. Their light congeals, each petal almost succulent. Do tethered stars learn early they ...

The house where birds fly into windows is where my mother lives. I’ve lost count the times I’ve had to bury birds with broken necks after flying into glass— into horizons of the far beyond. It is the invisible forcefield ...

Screen: a partition, possibly from the Germanic skerm, protection. The flat surface of a computer or TV panel where images are shown. As a verb: to filter, check. Unclutter. To identify what is hidden. From a distance, a forest is ...

Half-dozen to a tree, wrote Strzelecki Before the bush was cleared for us and magpies. That they were dying out was one of the lies Of primary school. One of the small lies. Shot and killed but would not drop, ...

Empathy’s not the standard bearer of affect, or thought. Take Thomas Arnold to a chilly Victorian beach by all means; but he may not be amenable to embrace. We have all seen novelists fall, like magnificent buffalo, their heads too ...

It’s good to keep a tab on things that happened ages ago friends are for this G says ‘last time was a disaster’ & I’m like     ‘oh yeah’ Ah Picabia duping the Spanish masters to buy stamps in 1894 ...

1 We don’t have any bears in Australia But if memory serves, one of Tolstoy’s short stories does And I read it here in front of this fire In outer suburbia. In that story The master is drawn in by ...

1 and grasses in green abundance after snow recedes push at cumulonimbus hills shake shroud of winter pale as peach blossom caught in spring gust 2 Kobori Enshū bows tucks garden into corners lets moss grow on sleeping stone vermillion ...

she will not wait for us to be ready. She will not wait for a place to be set at the kitchen counter, nor for the kettle to come to boil. She will not care that we have two tickets ...

Threefold time enlighten me — Was, and is, and soon — Can a man sing tenderly To a tainted moon? Endymion, enclosed in fear, Hunkered, without light, Will call in vain for Cynthia, Computered to the trite. Lovers will in ...

The smell takes me there Inhaling the fresh water droplets deeply Back to that day It looks so close You can see it from Waiben Yet the way Dad drives the boat Sailing with my family to Muralag ...

We are always sensitive to land but especially tonight As you tell me of the breakings in your body As you see your homeland on TV I hold you ...

Oh the things that we know but are hard to explain… felt in our bodies not just in the brain The layers of histories intergenerational indelible stains… Collected… contained… Stolen… rearranged ...