Yawn by Sarah Rice

Funny how a yawn travels through a room

a pied piper gathering all the rats

In that instant we all draw from the same source
a great swallowed gasp shoved into our lungs

like socks stuffed in a bag
and the long outward sigh

That we try to hide it up our sleeves
makes us culprits in common

like playing truant

with a friend

It’s mostly like this
our bodies that bind us together

despite talk of mind’s united

mutual goals – a Weltanschauung

No, more likely it is that we all pee

bare-footed in the night

with toenails that particular pale shade of shell
and a shadow pressed onto each heel

That at a certain point in the evening
we reel our shoulders in on tiny strings

to catch the small warmth of our elbows
and shrink our silhouette

We all lean the same way as the bus turns a corner
grow a wide-legged stance on a train moving

We all rise
on tip-toe

at the edge

of cold water

And sneezing scares us somewhat
those first few seconds when the breath comes in and in with no end

We know the mundane imperative of bowel
and the incredulity of a broken heart

Our bodies loosen in warmth or water
and we all leave hair on the pillow

We share in the first great O
our mouths make for milk at the start

And the milky grey our eyes
all turn at the end.

© Sarah Rice

Posted on The Tuesday Poem with permission.

Editor, Jennifer Compton

I wasn't aware of Sarah Rice or of her considerable mad skillz as a poet (amongst other things) until I went to the event celebrating the inaugural Ron Pretty Poetry Prize – and the minute I walked in the room and spotted her I went kind of wow! (At that stage I wasn't aware her poem Speaking bluntly had won.) But there was something about her aura that took my eye. And her witty bumblebee ensemble of yellow and black – not quite Iris Apfel, but on track – certainly took my eye. And then she read her poem (well she knew it off by heart) and again, quite something.

Ron chose her poem as the winner - "for the sustained brilliance of its imagery, for its unity, and for its imaginative insights into the nature of language." Since then I have read a lot more of her work and I plan to read a lot more before I am done. Her take on things, her eye, her sense of equilibrium,

her insight into the human condition, they are all very more-ish indeed.

Ian Gibbons, Sarah Rice in yellow and black, Ron Pretty, Anne M. Carson, Steve Armstrong.

Sarah Rice is a Canberra-based art-theory lecturer, visual artist and writer, who co-won the 2011 Gwen Harwood poetry prize, and won the 2014 Bruce Dawe poetry prize, amongst other awards. Her limited-edition, art-book of poetry Those Who Travel (Ampersand Duck, 2010), with prints by Patsy Payne, is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Award Winning Australian Writing and Best Australian Poetry 2012. Yawn was short listed for the Montreal Poetry Prize.

Listen to Sarah read her poem.

http://montrealprize.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Sarah_Rice_Yawn.mp3

This week's editor is Jennifer Compton who lives in Melbourne. She is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. Her most recent book is a verse novella Mr Clean & The Junkie published by Mākaro Press.

In addition to today's feature be sure to check out the wonderful poems featured by the other Tuesday Poets, using our blog roll to the left of this posting. 

Marco Polo by Ali Alizadeh

Marco Polo

Maybe it’s the natural
extension of immigration.  Maybe

it’s the awesome travel
bugs, making my wife’s feet

uncommonly itchy.   I’m not
surprised, at any rate, to hear

the paediatrician’s nickname
for our son. ‘Marco Polo’ suits

his - in utero - trajectory
along the Silk Road, from

Kublai Khan’s Forbidden City
to the snow-covered stones of a caravanserai

in central Turkey.  Not to mention
the Australian interregnum

where ultrasound scans
revealed his sex.  But our Marco

probably won’t pen a Travels
as he won’t know the other

of unending expedition, say,
cherished waterways of Venice, in short

a concrete home.  Are we monstrous
parents?  Why have we conceived

and delivered a life into the world
in transition?  If held to account

by a solicitous young man
with my eyes (and my wife’s better

eyebrows) one day, accused
of depriving him of his deserved

comforts of sedentary genesis
(motherland, mother tongue

two ebullient grandmothers, etc)
I can only offer an image: removing

picture frames, tribal ornaments
from the hooks; clearing the drawers

of wrinkled notepads with withered ideas
and perforated socks; tearing

the hooks off the walls.  And then
the bright outline of the picture frames

vacated on the otherwise drab
dust-darkened surface of the wall.  It’s this

record of the passage of time
the contrast between the original

preserved shade and colour
and the rest (ditto our lives) dog-eared

by mould, sunlight, scratches
of nature and accidents.  It’s this

visible discrepancy between
what we were and what we’ve become,

the possibility to uncover
and see it.  The nomads treasure

wisdom; the reality of aging
towards death.  You see, Marco

- I’ll tell him - if we can see
death looming, like a dark island

on the navigator’s horizon
then we won’t be shocked when

time’s run out.  This means
a life without our primal fear.  That’s why

we travel.

© Ali Alizadeh
from Ashes in the Air (University of Queensland Press)
Reproduced with permission

Editor: Kathleen Jones (UK)

Ali Alizadeh was born in Tehran in 1976 and migrated to Australia in 1991.  He graduated with Honours in Creative Arts from Griffith University, Gold Coast and holds a PhD in Professional Writing from Deakin University, Melbourne.  He has taught at universities in Australia, China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, and has also worked as street performer, hair-wrapper, and delivery driver.  He is a writer of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, drama and literary criticism and this is his sixth book.  He lives with his wife and son.

I love this poem - the elongated shape, like a journey, and the progression of thought.  Instability, repression and conflict have brought a flow of refugees from the Middle East across the globe, and it shows no sign of slowing down as the area becomes increasingly turbulent.  A sense of belonging is very strong in human beings - knowing where and who you come from helps us to know who we are. Giving birth to a child in a foreign country, realising that the child is never going to know their grandmothers, or the everyday details of the lives their parents have left, is a strange experience.

In the poem Ali Alizadeh confronts the questions he feels his son may one day ask.  Why?  Why did you leave and deprive me of my cultural heritage?  In return the poet presents the child with the images of hurried departure - seizing possessions, tearing even the hooks from the walls.  Hooks attach us to places, to material things.  The emigrant must leave them all behind.  But then he tells his son that it is death, the primal fear, ‘looming, like a dark island’ that is the real reason for the transit across the globe to live in a foreign country. ‘This means/a life without our primal fear.  That’s why/we travel.’

'Marco Polo' comes from the collection Ashes in the Air, published by Queensland University Press.  The collection covers a wide range of subject matter - much of it hard-hitting and political; cultural contrasts, the History of the Veil, Sky Burial (for John Kinsella), and personal poems that recall an ‘archaeology of suffering’ as well as the ecstatic joy of new landscapes and relationships - love ...

‘we flew from the profane towards a paradise

and earthly constellations, stirred by something
like the love that moves the sun and the other stars’. [My Divine Comedy]

Emigrants and refugees are nomads, often by force rather than by choice - a life of 'unending expedition'.  The loss of the Motherland creates a hunger, an empty gap between 'what we were and what we've become'.  But being a nomad also presents opportunities and a richness of experience.  As Ali writes in the poem, 'The nomads treasure wisdom'.

But that wisdom is hard-won.  In Ali Alizadeh's poem 'The Suspect' he describes what it feels like to be 'the other'.  In Iran

'I was an "apostate", principal's term for
the boy who failed Koran Studies and wrote

an essay on Leonardo da Vinci.'

But in the west, he is someone who makes other people nervous, '. . .   shackled to a passport

etched with Born in Tehran.  There I was
suspected of perfidy to the Faith, an Infidel

-wannabe.  Over here I am suspected
of terror.'

There is a bleakness about the conclusion, that someone with a Middle Eastern passport, and an interest in Western ideas and literature, can find themselves between 'the Islamic Republic's

Evin Prison, pliers pinching their finger
-nails;  or sleep-deprived and hooded indefinitely

in the dark solitaries of Guantanamo Bay.' 

'Ashes in the Air' is a brilliant, unique, collection.

Kathleen Jones is a poet, novelist and biographer, living between Italy and England.  She spent almost a decade living in the Middle East, where she began to be interested in its literary traditions, and to realise what it's like to be nomadic. Her latest collection 'Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21', published by Templar is about belonging and departure.  She blogs at A Writer’s Life and her website can be found at www.kathleenjones.co.uk

Please take a look at all the contributions in the sidebar and read what the other Tuesday Poets are posting. 

If you liked this post, you might like the memoir, by Marjane Satrapi, called 'Persepolis'. 

Tuesday Poem: Nature Writing 101 by Catherine Owen

Our minds can turn anything romantic.
Is the problem.
The sewagy mud of the Fraser a quaint muslin & the spumes

    pulsing out of chimneys at the Lafarge cement plant look,
    at night, like two of Isadora Duncan’s scarves, pale, insouciant veils,
    harmless. The trees are all gone but then aren’t our hearts

more similar to wastelands.
We can make it kin, this pollution, children one is sad about yet still fond of, their
delinquency linked to our own, irreparable with familiarity, a lineage of stench &

    forgiveness. Our minds can assimilate all horrors.
    Is the problem.
    The animals will disappear and those small, strange invertebrates,

the bees will vanish & in the well-oiled waters, fish
will surge their deaths over the sand bags.
But then we keep saying, ‘Let’s construct another narrative.’

    The nightmares must simply be called reality.
    And after this you see,
    it is possible to carry on.

© Catherine Owen (posted with permission of the author)

Editor:  Kathleen Jones

It’s always a delight to take a turn as editor of the TP hub and share poets or poetry others might not have discovered yet. This time I’ve chosen a Canadian poet - Catherine Owen is a Vancouver writer, the author of nine collections of poetry and one of prose, the most recent being Trobairitz (Anvil Press 2012), Seeing Lessons (Wolsak & Wynn 2010) Frenzy (Anvil Press 2009), and the chapbook Steve Kulash & other Autopsies (Angelhousepress 2012). 

Her collection of memoirs and essays is called Catalysts: Confrontations with the muse (W & W, 2012). Her work has won awards, been translated & published in North America, England, Italy, Turkey, Australia Germany and Korea. Frenzy won the Alberta Book Prize and other collections have been nominated for the BC Book Prize, the Re-lit, the CBC Prize, & the George Ryga Award.

Catherine is one of the  - newly categorised - Eco-poets and wrote her Master’s thesis, in 2001, on the ecological poetry of Robinson Jeffers.  This year she will be the narrator for a Canadian eco-musical called ‘Awakening the Green Man’, for which she wrote five songs. This poem is from a new manuscript titled The River Sequence, lyrics on the Fraser River, and it first appeared (with two others from the sequence) in an anthology of Eco-poetry called ‘Entanglements’ published by Two Ravens Press.  Catherine is also an art model for Paul Saturley and blogs at blackcrow2.wordpress.com  Her website is www.catherineowen.org
                   
What I love about 'Nature Writing 101' is the way it homes in on the real problem for the environment - Us, and the way we relate to it;  ‘our minds can turn anything romantic. Is the problem.... Our minds can assimilate all horrors’.  Human beings can turn anything into a narrative in order to live with it and the problems never get solved, we just find more and more ways of spinning the story. 

The whole fabric of the poem is constructed from the knowledge that the way human beings relate to their environment is through story - we try to make sense of the senseless by creating myths - we tame savage landscapes by romanticising them in poetry and prose.  Word webs become our maps of an unknown universe.  However big it is, however mysterious, we can contain it in a narrative, a verse, a metaphor. We reduce things to the size of our imaginations and in doing so lose all sense of the fact that we’re barely a comma in a plot more complex and gigantic than we can ever conceive. 

Catherine’s poems reveal a hard truth, that our pride, greed and lack of self-knowledge will do for us. In another poem she says ‘it is not enough/to have everything – nothing will soon be ours’.  Unless we realise that our nightmares are reality, someone else is going to be telling the story of our extinction.  The irony is that Catherine, in writing the poem, has also turned this ugly prognostication into something beautiful.

Please take a look at the sidebar and read what individual Tuesday Poets are posting on their blogs, and if you like our contributions, we would love it if you could share them with your friends on Twitter and Facebook! 

This week's editor, Kathleen Jones, is an English writer who lives in Italy.  Most recent work;  a biography 'Katherine Mansfield: The Storyteller',  a novel  'The Sun's Companion' and a collection of poetry 'Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21'.  She blogs at http://www.kathleenjonesauthor.blogspot.com

Two Poems by Dorianne Laux

DARK CHARMS

Eventually the future shows up everywhere:

burly summers and unslept nights in deep

lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.

Here’s the corner store grown to a condo,

the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,

the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail

no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.

The clear water we drank as thirsty children

still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then

we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.

The old tunes play and continue to move us

in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,

lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.

We continue to speak, if only in whispers,

to something inside us that longs to be named.

We name it the past and drag it behind us,

bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,

dreams of running, the keys to lost names.

CHER

I wanted to be Cher, tall

as a glass of iced tea,

her bony shoulders draped

with a curtain of dark hair

that plunged straight down,

the cut tips brushing

her non-existent butt.

I wanted to wear a lantern

for a hat, a cabbage, a piñata

and walk in thigh high boots

with six inch heels that buttoned

up the back. I wanted her

rouged cheek bones and her

throaty panache, her voice

of gravel and clover, the hokum

of her clothes: black fishnet

and pink pom-poms, frilled

halter tops, fringed bells

and her thin strip of waist

with the bullet hole navel.

Cher standing with her skinny arm

slung around Sonny’s thick neck,

posing in front of the Eiffel Tower,

The Leaning Tower of Pisa,

The Great Wall of China,

The Crumbling Pyramids, smiling

for the camera with her crooked

teeth, hit-and-miss beauty, the sun

bouncing off the bump on her nose.

Give me back the old Cher,

the gangly, imperfect girl

before the shaving knife

took her, before they shoved

pillows in her tits, injected

the lumpy gel into her lips.

Take me back to the woman

I wanted to be, stalwart

and silly, smart as her lion

tamer’s whip, my body a torch

stretched the length of the polished

piano, legs bent at the knee, hair

cascading down over Sonny’s blunt

fingers as he pummeled the keys,

singing in a sloppy alto

the oldest, saddest songs.

                                                                                        Editor: Eileen Moeller

Dorianne Laux’s poems bring a gravitas and solidity to the ordinary aspects of American life, transforming and making them numinous, instructive, cause for celebration. Her work is brutally honest, and yet full of a compassion that can transform the difficult aspects of our daily lives, make them seem more beautiful, funny, lyrical, deeply human, clearly meaningful. 

I love that she writes about Cher and Mick Jagger, about waitressing in the 60’s, about old boyfriends, about being a strong woman growing up in the 60's, about surviving in the millennium, working through the existential issues that plague us all. Laux is a poet beloved to many of us in the U.S., and one of our most generous, most effective teachers. 

Dorianne Laux

Her most recent collections are The Book of Men and Facts about the Moon. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Oregon Book Award and The Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry, Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, and Smoke from BOA Editions. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University and is founding faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program.

This week's editor, Eileen Moeller, lives in Philadelphia, PA. Her poetry blog, titled, And So I Sing: Poems and Iconography is at http://eileenmoeller.blogspot.com

Check out the other Tuesday Poems in the sidebar. 

Truths by Helen Heath

Let’s not talk about
the whole truth.
Better to let small parts
speak for the whole –
a look, a hand
in the small of my back.
Better to find that
the truth lies
in the smallest things we do.

I chose this poem by Helen Heath because it is the first poem posted by a Tuesday Poet  that grabbed me - with its simple elegance. On the surface it is straighforward, but underneath it has an elegance and grace that is quite breathtaking.  I could wax lyrical, but that is hardly necessary as the poem speaks for itself. It stands alone, a beautiful truth, as rare as any jewel, although perhaps a few words about the author will not be remiss ...


Helen has been one of the true champions of the Tuesday Poem blog, generous not only with her own work, but also showcasing other up-and-coming poets, interviewing authors, and generally being a stellar member of the local writing community. 


Helen blogs at helenheath.com.


She lives in the seaside village of Paekākāriki, on New Zealand's  Kapiti Coast. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University in 2009. Her poetry has been published in many journals in New Zealand and Australia. Most recently she’s had a chap-book of poems published by Seraph Press called Watching for Smoke (2009). Currently she is working on a full-length book of poems.




Alicia Ponder is this week's Tuesday Poem editor.  She lives in Eastbourne, is the co-author of two art books, and several New Zealand School Journal plays and stories.  She blogs here at an Affliction of Poetry.  


For more Tuesday Poems, click on the Tuesday Poets in the sidebar.

In The Desert by Stephen Crane

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter – bitter", he answered,
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."





Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was an American poet, novelist, short story writer and journalist. His life was short, but eventful, and his output prolific. I have it on good authority (ie the internet) that he is regarded as one of the most innovative writers of his generation and that he won international acclaim for his American Civil War novel 'The Red Badge of Courage'.

I came across this poem in 'The Oxford Book of Short Poems' (Oxford University Press, 1985). It was originally published in 'The Black Riders and Other Lines' in 1895 by Copeland and Day. This was his second published book of poetry with a first print run of 500 copies - and a few issued in vellum. Crane apparently referred to them as "lines" rather than poems and they were printed entirely in small capitals.

I like the striking image of the "creature" in this poem, and the repetition of "it" sounds.


Janis Freegard is the editor of this week's Tuesday Poem. She is co-author of AUP New Poets 3 (Auckland University Press, 2008) and lives in Wellington, New Zealand. You can visit other Tuesday Poets from our blog list to the right.

The Blue and White Tablecloth by Carolyn McCurdie

Should we throw it away?
Your fingers rub at a stain by your plate.
Not a stain. It's a hole,
and I could mend it, but won't.


When the light shines through it, you notice
the thinness, and soon, here and here, more holes.
And see how the blue lines are worn
by the pull of connection


from my side of the table to yours,
by paths of conversation,
of passing gravy, salt.
How many years have we stood


pegging it out,
watching its white,
its snap, salute blue
kick high, swing, kick,


touch toes with the blue-white of sky?
This is the one that still drapes
fresh air across our table,
that smiles a picnic invitation


of lettuce from the garden,
apple from the tree.
Of course we should throw it away,
but on the days when it’s just me and you,


we bring it out again and laugh
at how silly we are.

Carolyn McCurdie

Thanks to Carolyn McCurdie for letting me use one of her poems for this week's Tuesday Poem.

Carolyn is a Dunedin writer who has published a novel, 'The Unquiet,' (Longacre Press, 2007). This poem is typical of Carolyn's crafted style of poetry. Her poetry quietly, assuredly, draws you into the story it is telling with an alluring lyricism.


It was hard to choose which poem of Carolyn's to use - she has written so many fine poems. In the end I chose this one because it is a favourite of mine and effortlessly demonstrates the attractive musicality and patience that all of Carolyn's poetry harbours.

I love the way this poem seamlessly relates an ordinary episode in a way that at the same time alerts the reader to the deeper issues of life - in this case, relationship, age, time and constancy.

It reminds us of what is most important in life; the relationship between two people that through 'the pull of connection' has weathered knocks and has survived, and goes on surviving.

It may be considered an old-fashioned concept for the 21st century - a faded, worn, blue and white table-cloth on a table - but this is a table-cloth that has 'snap' and has been seen to 'touch toes with a blue-white sky' as it flies in the face of a more modern, designer-label world. As such, it epitomises the essence of sustainability.' Kay McKenzie Cooke

This week's editor is Kay McKenzie Cooke a Dunedin writer who has had two books of poetry published; 'Feeding the Dogs' (Otago Univ. Press, 2002) and 'Made For Weather' (Otago Univ. Press, 2007). Visit her Tuesday poem 'some time' and others by the Tuesday Poets (look in the sidebar on the right for links).