Rountable Readings 1.0 - Divinity
Roundtable Readings
A collection of writings on:
‘Divinity’
Curated by Lili Ward
Thank You to Dikstein’s Corner Bar for hosting the first event.
Thank you to all the writers whose work you are about to read.
Thank You if you are about to read this.
Theme: Divinity
The idea of the theme is to as loosely or solidly influence your writing as you like. It aims to generally unify one reading with the next.
Divinity: Noun
The state or quality of being divine
Divine:
1. Of or like god or a god.
2. (informal) very pleasing; delightful.
Divining:
Discover something by guesswork or intuition
Have supernatural or magical insight into ( future events)
Irving, Dallas, Texas.
By Lili Ward
A land of custom number plates and cleaned pavement, groomed.
I'm sitting under king bed sheets in apartment 3801 of the Meridian gated community in Irving, Texas. The outside is made from the kind of Plasticine-faux brick that makes you want to drink bottled water. The label on the bottle reads ‘Cow Coliseum’, then inaptly dons a black and white graphic of a jumping horse, the style is new, attempting to look old, modernly yearning to be vintage, its distress and wear are meticulous.
They love stars, I skipped out on a 30% jersey cotton racerback singlet with tassels reading:
“The stars shine big and bright in Texas tonight”
The number plates all have stars. Custom, pink:
*TEXAS*
DOG4
********
I walk into a Neiman Marcus and linger on the perfume level, three well groomed white women in their late sixties perch behind each fragrance counter. Scrolling Facebook reels for the duration it takes me to smell 17 perfumes out of my price range. My nose is singed with floral toxicity, red raw and probably gleaming, clinically cleaned.
I cannot smell anymore.
I look up from a sample and smile at the blonde woman in the hot pink power suit. Bold choice, she seems bold, her face doesn't flinch as she swipes.
Her eyes are glittering at a video of a baby goat befriending a tiny monkey. This is sweet. We both understand the popularity of such a video. I extend her the courtesy that I would when my mother watches me open a soldier reunion video link she sent me on Whatsapp.
I offer a glance in the woman's direction that I hope conveys a shared acknowledgment of faith. I pull back on the godliness of the eye contact, she seems God-dy, Dallas is God-dy, i don't feel like talking about God. So I lean more into the divinity-of-natureness of my facial expression, such depth, I'm nailing it.
She will not look up.
I exit the Neiman Marcus on Main street and meet my mother. A Subaru Forester is parked up next to us at the traffic light and a woman with a hoarse voice is yelling Jesus' name. She holds a sign made on cardstock in Sharpie. I'm hardly 2 metres from her and the only word amongst at least 8 that i can make out is:
‘SALVATION’
The meekness of the sign seems to bear no correlation to the unapologetic volume she is singing along to the prayer song with. The young man in the driver's seat is wearing a midnight blue ‘Missouri University’ hoodie, tourists, humph.
He is sufficiently entertained by his peers' performance.
She is even louder as they turn the corner, skidding away from us.
I feel like mum isn't saying anything because she's religious, she is ashamed of the way the woman is making faith look crazed and psychotic. Possessive.
She is wondering if I think her faith is crazed and psychotic. Possessive.
I don't know how to answer that.
It is very silent between mother and daughter.
“Bit intense” “yep, sounds like she's got a sore throat too”
“Mm yeah” “yep” “yes”
We hold hands as we walk toward the CVS, homeless man sits out the front amongst the following contents;
A banana peel
A stick of women's deodorant
Two half empty yellow pill bottles
A pink and grey polka dotted duffel bag
53 hot pink pills splayed across the pavement
Things are strangely colour coded, I feel strange and pink and nauseous.
I eat a banana on Elm street. I am overcome by the feeling that not many people eat bananas here in this city business district of Dallas. This feeling is not supported by anything other than the fact that no one near me is eating a banana at this exact second.
I don't find it difficult to starve myself here, but then again I do always find it difficult to identify whether or not I am starving myself.
In a land of custom number plates and Bain Maries for peach cobbler and trying to starve myself.
Letter/Poem written by Simone and Justine
to the stone and the water, to the Moonee Ponds Creek
Wurundjeri Biik, 8/4/24
I let the words be flowing water,
wind
It exists but it is always becoming
To the stone, thank you for my bones
I confide in your texture
Let me listen to you in me
Our bodies dreaming together
Where do we meet?
Ingrown
By Ruby Day Smith
Sitting in white light trying to nurse my cup of coffee for 2 hours. Stone cold!
I’m thinking about how last time I had a layover in Bali my passport got stolen and I was marooned and I felt sanded, raw and leaking snot. At the end of a 7 day cold I was having a caustic hot shower and pulled a long, thick line of it out of my nose. It looked like a clot like a pregnancy and it felt so good, like the waste from fighting the flu was spun yarn, shining molasses thickly salted.
A Western Bulldogs scarf wearing couple on my right-
“This milk is heavenly!”
Despite what early career Naarm artists c2010 will have you believe, an airport is a space you can exit and enter just as you do anywhere else. In public spaces this is usually a flavour of amused detachment, sometimes poetically charged when I’ve been reading a good book. Albeit not a very cunt-led grindset but still somehow conducive to sentimental, stilted continuations of email chains to friends and lovers.
What fissure links this nasal space to my sour pleasure?
The stomach biting cold coffee
The tan period stained crotch of my muji underwear
The 2cm aroid lump in my left breast, an off centre pit in my small rapid chest
Condense
oily duck fat potatoes
Swilling slick peaty mud in between my teeth
Architecture of the gums
inhale, a beat
Condense
The residue braised in between fibres
Lard and sweet grass
Where I sleep, there are a hundred sheets of sodden mat between this wall and the neighbours’
Expand
My buds are aching in rhythm because I bite them
Sharp little teeth tearing away the new growth
Rounding it’s corners, pruning the edges
Pushing outwards
Rattling the loose earth
microfoam peters into ellipses, rolls into collision
This milk is heavenly!
Wooing Prayer (6)
By Reba nelson
Iesu, swete Iesu,
mi druth, mir derling, mi drihtin
mi healend, mi huniter, mi haliwei;
swetter is munegunge of the then mildeu of muthe.
Jesus, sweet Jesus-
my dear, my darling, my Lord
my Savior, my honey-drop, my balm;
sweeter is the memory of you
than honey in the mouth.
Sweeter is the idea of you
Than angels in the house.
Sweeter is,
Sweeter do.
Chestnut deity; I try to roost, I’ll try to roost.
A halo or false photograph;
Wooing Prayer (6)
Vivo autem iam non ego vivit vero in me Christus.
Iesu crying rivers of blood in the wall of a Norwich church,
Iesu drowning in-in-in reflections.
There is mildew, there is becoming, there is the fourth. The earth is wet because it is
weeping. Mould is a stretching outward –
Filioque Dream, Seraphim Pace.
Mutations of love, & Thou shalt not writ over the door. Looping radio waves whispering,
glistening, blistering: I see Sophìa.
Birds in straight lines, oh Iesu, before my meals I reach out, pray to the doves who come to
pluck me.
In the maw of wet mouth, all the pricking. Boiling corpuscles – oh, oh, oh!
I am hopelessly enmeshed with what grace that he werkyth in any creatur.
Wonderous colophon madness, rede blode trekelyn, save me in the middle. Save me from
an excluded middle.
Save me from temptacyon! I must avoid the logical Merry-go-round.
Hyr gostly fadyr,
Forgiven, left to float, homecoming towards electromagnetic cloak. Monophonic streaming,
my plainchant must be must be Heard.
Contact-mic on angel wings, Iesu, Iesu, Iesu; that which sings is not to be trusted for
in Hell there is no dancing. Sydenham chorea, my swete Saint Vitus. So as men may
rest in inward felynng, sauour fynden. Strasbourgian Excess…send them to pray for
absolution by the mountainside.
On lofsong of ure louerde, number six,
Ich,
Six,
ich six ich itch.
Mi druth, mir derling, mi drihtin: truth!
That's About Listenings.
By Ava (submission from Missouri)
Someone tried to capture this landscape.= Many different sides are brought together, moving energy. It isn't as easy as it sounds. Walking along the creek, it had gotten to a point in between the end of autumn and the start of winter where the cold was assuring and it still stayed light long enough. Holding hands, eating mushrooms, leaning towards the ground and only using your teeth to harvest them. I felt it in my stomach first. We walked home through the industrial district which wasn't as nice. Our heads together in front of a bouquet of flowers. Only a thin layer of blanket. Creating a cave, enclosure with Kashmiri wool. I forgot to breath. Mitch forgot also. He felt defeated after tripping and spilling his coffee. He was sad but he did not look so. A lot had started to make sense after he had let go. He didn't have to be anything. Reproduction, he thought, in all its forms is the thesis of life, or what society perceives, reproduction of culture, self, each other. Rain. Inversions, anus, volcano. MAgnesnium. BReath of fire. Trying to organise a recreation of a performance. We all stand around a building, holding hands and we try to make the building levitate. Transcendental flying is just jumping, it probably feels like flying. YOu told me you want to try heroin, I don't think you actually would. Eastern european immigration, and sensibilities. I don't know how you make it work. Male artists, art is about something. I think they understand aesthetics, materiality, at least the good ones do. Harvey loves heavy metal but he doesn't tell anyone. He has a friend whose boyfriend is in a hardcore band, he doesn't understand that. Five different colours of watercolour. Immanence, i bow at the feet of my guru, or I wish I could, I can. They direct me. Over and over again. You're pulling my hair but I like it. I always hated that feeling though, the pettiness. I hate petty violence, like pinching. A collection of flowers, mainly roses, are brought into a valley. I wonder if food really is nourishing. My relation to food changes. Building a fort. Two different types of disappointment. Josh sees me in the street, he has had a hair cut, i still am undressed, in clothes i wore to bed. He has been for a run. Personal enlightenment, his parents are staying in his spare room tonight. Stopping before they go on a cruise. Buying rural property. High ceiling and ballet flats on the floor i really wanted to have sex on the sofa but you brought me to the bedroom. Having sex without saying i love you. Your therapist said that to love men actually meant that you were capable of loving yourself. Do i need a divine mother or father? You asked me after i came back from india. Four brothers. All somehow ostracised from each other's lives, seeing each other at the gym and family events. You said you hadnt watch incest porn since you were a teenager, though you said you did watch a lot, now you just watch MMF. I would get you to explain the difference between a hysteric and a neurotic. In A parisian apartment, so far away from suburban ornamentation. I miss. Sleeping always, ergonomically apparently, seated. Lotus position. Second grade rupture. I asked my aunt for a 100k loan. In the beginning it didn't seem to really matter but he did like when love appeared out of nowhere. A surprise, to experience higher states of enlightenment sometimes, it's best to just wait. The symptoms of the body are often the most real expressions of change. In that silence when you let your body hurt, you are letting go. Sometimes you never know what it is that is gone. Clearing out the stomach and the gut. The knot at the base of your spine. Tefillin in the morning . large breasts. I cried in front of the enlightened german lady. Finding the smallest entry point, perhaps through the cranium. I think, i should of told you to investigate your source of inflammation. We were on the same page actually in the end, when it came to some things. I'm glad he’s not interested in telling people what to do. You really enjoyed the whole thing. I didn't understand the point of clean sheets till I was a lot older. George was concerned that his friend had become a cook, he didn't see it emancipating him from the suffering that they talked about. You lay down and complained of inflammation on the left and right side of your abdomen. At the farmers market once, my uncle almost conspiratorially told me that kefir didn't make sense because dairy was a natural inflammatory. Colours you have never seen before in the sky. I looked down after the run and my whole shin was covered in blood. I remembered slipping but the graze felt really insignificant at the time. The increased blood flow did not allow the wound to clot. On the back side of my legs were dirt. I had runners high. I shared that moment by myself. Tom and Lucy had been having sex extremely irregularly, sometimes once a year, but mostly spaced out by more than two, for the last six years. Neither knew what it represented. I haven't been to shul for high holidays i think ever in my life but i hadn't even been to shul since my brother died . An old school friend invited me but I lost him half way through the service, it went on all day. I found another friend I hadn't seen in years though. I left around 1:30, i walked to the place i get steak sometimes but it was closed. I walked further down the road and stopped at an italian place and broke my fast with a coffee. It was a shit coffee. I left home with the stove on, cooking chicken broth. I'm concerned about a friend. Whistling song. It really did fall into place again. Nothing felt like it changed and that was the problem. It's still getting resolved I guess. Language is being created around it, at least there's an attempt now. You seem to want to create something or tell me something. We have always been good at communicating something that is other. THe trauma probably resolves around the lack of touch, our relationship is too discursive, my fault i guess. Breaking the spine of a book. The book crumbling as you read it. Book burning art work. thinking , serotonin in the stomach, eugenic analysis of inflammation. I tend to avoid some people i went to highschool with in the street. THe only supplement they take is vitamin D. They only gave you one antibiotic, you really wanted the comfort of overloading the system. Rachel and Howard met when she was 27 and he was 25. Having both finished university they actually were similarly content with the direction of their respective lives. Not caught up in the pessimism of their peers they bonded over the reality of their abundance. They agree on a lot. Eating sandwiches together in the park. Swimming, that's all. They remembered everything. They stopped hanging out eventually because one of them moved away. That happens, people move and they come back. I like where i am. Walking around i thought sometimes he recognises me. Sometimes he sees me. Laughing sitting next to them. Talking about portugal. I like not knowing what to do. Cleaning in the spring. Always in contradiction to your parents. THrrowing away things. It felt good to be greeted outside. I do see a lot of stuff going on in the world. I said to you, I didn't realise you were so interested in the other. Reading exercises. I am again interested in pedagogy. Eating dirt accidently. She is comforted to read that the concept of surrendering to experiences such as childbirth is realised in others. Holding hands. It has been a month i guess, the flowers must go. They hold their shape even though they are dry. Radio analysis. Making the soup again. I yelled at you in my dream last night, i feel better. I hope you don't feel as if I am avoidant. Antioxidant rich berries leave a bitter taste in her mouth and aggravate the roof of it. I finally enquired with someone if, astrologically, there was something going on. It just felt strange to have the people in my life experiencing a similar sense of unease, it really did feel like it was connected. Almost immediately, I'm reminded of something similar to this. People can come together very often and find a commonality. Simon and Anna liked talking, they liked that they could talk together for a long time but they gave each other thrush. Organised shoes, moving to another city, following someone you love. He returned disheartened and sad, he had committed himself to love but he was finding that this pursuit had limits. His cat had run away, he was bored with the discourse, he went on his phone. He was weary of the sun. Money started coming in eventually. He became interested in ideas relating to post-work. He became exhausted again. He didn’t have sex for 5 years, then he reconnected with a friend and he lived happily with them.
My mother liked green, I don't know what colours my dad liked. I had a realisation about the colour of the void but I have forgotten what that was, I think it had something to do with the colour brown. Ben could remember things like being in his mothers stomach, the warm colour of the womb, and safety. He could remember things like being in the back of his family's caravan in between his mother and father, they had both fallen asleep but he lay awake, basking in the love and warmth again. Lying on the banks of a river with Gwen asleep on his shoulder, he was reminded of this scene but he felt a new sensation which now had the soundtrack of birds and the water flowing. A man with a semi erect penis interrupted, asking whether he was allowed to be naked. He drove to yoga later and chanted. He was tired. That’s about listening. meat and vegetables. Driving around and making out. The sun made me tired. Exposing oneself. In the end I said some prayers for you. I will never know if you received them. My friend had an ex partner message them that he had been communicating with her on the astral plane and that she was telling him that she missed him and that he was the love of his life. She told him that, in fact, that wasn’t the case and that she was in a happy relationship with someone and that she rarely thinks about him. Jasmine lived 20 minutes outside a small country town in which she worked. It was at the foot of a mountain range and a beautiful lake ran through the town. She spent 9 months working there. She assimilated into the tribalism of the town. She spent winter there. She was now living with her parents. She wanted to travel. Mexican festival. I was talking to this boy in Peru for a while. I never knew it didn't rain in Lima. It can go almost all year without it raining. I thought for a while that this could be a nice way to live. I would research moving there but I lost interest in the end. I liked the idea of moving around the world to be with someone. That didn't scare me.
Shared Divine Ability Between Mother and Daughter
By Lili Ward
With more distance from its retellings my faith is wearing thin, the belief is now a soft linen left to brighten itself in a bleach bath a day too long.
I'm making myself a wellness tea I took from the break-room at work, in the corner of my parent’s kitchen when my mother tiptoes past the galley table. She is petite with a figure that suggests an active relationship with the maintenance of her appearance. Last night she went for ‘just a trim’ at Karma’s hair studio and came home with a completely transformed look and 15% more swagger in her gate. Balayage, money-pieces, an almost superhumanly severe quiff.
She points at the kettle and asks if i can make her a hot water, she is generously consigning a favour to her daughter. Giving a currently unemployed, living with her parents,22 year old a sense that she does more than just warm up furniture she does not own.
I make her a hot water, family recipe.
She has given me the gift of life, I am handing her this lukewarm mug, she will now give me a story.
Leaned up against the side of the table nursing her drink, she is for possibly the 7th or 8th time in my life, suddenly ‘spontaneously’ compelled to remind me of her divine ability.
One she discovered as a young woman, one she unknowingly passed down to my sister and one she's so sorry sweetie but you did not receive.
It is described to me as something between psychic, intuitive and all together divine.
Her first encounter:
She is 25 years old, once divorced, recently extradited from her Jehovah's Witness congregation due to mentioned divorce and living in the laundry room of her church friend Bianca’s family home in Tottenham.
The door opens onto the foot of her single futon mattress, on the back of the laundry door is a blu-tacked Tracey Thorn poster,
‘What a singer’ she says.
But those nights she is lulled to sleep by the cyclical melodies of the washer slash bedside table. One wednesday night, between rinse and drain she dreams bianca is pregnant, she gives birth to a blonde baby boy.
Over a cup of burnt percolator coffee the next morning she retells the dream to Bianca like an overtired stand up comic.
A week passes, B’s period doesn't come. In almost slow motion, my mother ushers her friend to the Somerville road pharmacy, all velvet track pants and waited breath, not a word between them. They pay for an accutest with gold coins and reddened cheeks.
9 months later Bianca gives birth to blonde baby toby. My mother feels divine.
My mum's dreams go on to predict the pregnancy and sex of womens newborns 3 more times before she is 50.
Enough times to consolidate her spirituality, not enough times to call 60 minutes for an interview.
The hot water is now room temperature at best, after a bemused sip, mum continues.
Now is my sister's turn in the psychic hotseat. Maddy is 5 years old and I am 3. We are walking barefoot holding paddle pops in one hand and eachothers in the other.
Artificial sweeteners number 1, 2 and 3 are binding our little fingers to the wooden sticks.
At this point we have lived in Newcastle for over a year, our lives are a never unpacked beach bag lined by an inch of sand and decorated by technicolour plastic swimming accessories. We stop at the bin to discard her sticky rubbish and maddy turns to mum
“A pregnant woman in a red top will be here soon”
“What”
The conversation ends, 12 minutes till the bus is due to arrive. I bear no witness to their exchange as I am experiencing the embarkment of what would become a lifelong obsession with artificial sweeteners number 1, 2 and 3 by sucking the pink remainders from each corner of the plastic pocket. I have the glazed eyes of a desperate dog when the bin lid is left open. I emerge from my sweet nectar when my mother softly gasps.
With rubber necks we all follow the women with our eyes, I'm watching the sun tessellate through the strands of her golden hair. She wears a bright red singlet trimmed with sequins, her thin fingers are tracing love hearts on her pregnant belly.
8 minutes until the bus, mother and daughter share a knowing look of divinity. I share the same tender exchange with what's left of my rainbow paddlepop.
3 girls, the holy trinity:
One psychic, one divine, and one so small and hungry.
Revolution Blues
(A Seance With Che Guevara)
by Jeb Costin
I was standing with you in the kitchen
when Tom came through with a painting, when the body went without a face,
a dot
on its head instead, and above it, the Chinese head scarf set against a sticky sky,
bloated, green, warning.
You said that you loved me! but love wasn't enough and anyway it didn't matter how much love
I could give you
in the end.
The village is hats or hoods, racist, pointed,
angels and klansmen.
The village is dark little men
each with a dozen eyes.
We did the speed from last night's table.
You told me that you loved me
and gave me another clumsy kiss, the eyes and the mouth are hooped, grey
and the nose is running late.
Now the moon is a communist, the townsfolk
are asleep in their beds. It all feels like so long ago, it all feels like so long ago.
The costumes left a cave in me.
The cave is shaped like a revolution, and only you could fill it, live in it, stoned, singing.
The cloud pulls apart
easily
and the face drags itself together, grimacing.
I call you a Nazi. And my heart is open and waiting,
just as heaven is
open and waiting
for a dog found starved to death
behind the butcher-shop.
The Head
By Marnie Florence
After a while, I no longer awoke to a different world each morning but rather each morning had
become a continuation of the last. Sleep became short bridges that pinned, fettered, and strapped. The days fell back to the moving stream and those days that I had spent on the banks in a standstill of incredible discomfort I quickly forgot.
At four forty-five on a Wednesday night, Percy and Delilah Lewis were starting to fight. They sat
facing the bright white head of a dog that rested on the table. When Percy had burst through the
door several days ago balancing the head amongst his bags and other things, he made way for the living room where he propped the head straight onto a fresh tea towel and called him ‘Raymond’.
Delilah hated the head from the beginning; its brown beady eyes and brittle hair made her feel
uneasy. These unique features seemed to remind her of Mr. Cheek, an old family friend who had a face that also seemed to extend outwards into a canine point. Mr. Cheek was a man that upon first glance was split into three parts. The largest of which were two legs as thin as pencils that held the rest of him up like the prongs of a fork. Then, your eyes would pan upwards to a tartan-covered body that was lumpy where the fabric would bunch and an area that was always too warm. Then lastly, sitting on a tiny little neck was his own head that would wobble in agreement, bow in disagreement, and twist around in a full circle to look at Delilah with dewy eyes that blinked too quickly. There was no way she wanted it in the house, but Percy was already trying out his new prize in every room, darting back and forth from the head to compare it against the light and tone of each wall.
Now it was almost night and the Lewis’ were sitting half-dead in the living room. Delilah had made a terrible mistake and in her own words she had “ruined another evening” that at the start of the day had such great possibility to be good. With careful words, that had tragically failed to conceal a hatred for Percy’s small, silent friend, Delilah had announced that she didn’t think Raymond was “quite the right fit”. After these four words rang through the dining to the living room, the pair grew hotter and hotter and they talked quicker and quicker and Percy banged his hands together like cymbals. And in the thick fog that had come between them, Delilah forgot all the sweetness she had rehearsed and bit Percy on the ear. Sunlight streamed through the window and Delilah and Percy were lying top and tail; Delilah was face down dizzy and worrying that she had “finally gone mad”. At her feet, Percy had curled himself into a short ball with his ear side down to muffle the throbbing.
Percy sighed, he felt full of spite, he scrunched his face up tightly and started slowly digging his toes into her legs - a quiet act of resistance that was perfectly failing to be a secret. This all happened in a house that people usually stopped to look at from the top of a hill. In fast flits
of white, it sat like an awkward gap in the pretty scene, and it looked like the last thing one would ever expect to have an inside. It was exactly like a picture, one that Delilah felt was now under attack. However, bright white skies had raced into the frame and new yellow light shot up from the stream below to shimmer around the house, settling on their windowsill and singeing the small beetles that were sleeping on the glass. It was midday, and Delilah was taking her first walk around the streets and the river pretending that nothing had happened. When she got back, it was almost six o’clock, and she felt so in love with Percy that she leapt straight into his arms thinking no more of the sandy head, which had seemed so important.
On days where the air was thick, and the clouds were full, Raymond would watch the adults trail out of the front door to cool off by the water. Sometimes at the end of their short trips they would stop for a moment, crane their long necks over the bank and look. Delilah knew that if you were to view the water from above, you would see how they shook with gusts of wind that almost flipped them. With enough vagueness not to give themselves away, some were turned over, others were so sunken that they didn’t move at all and the rest were all together where they sat drying on small hills. They shivered and shook the water off their golden stripes, glittering, gasping and falling back on their fronts. How could you tell sleeping from waking? She had no idea. But when the first one came loose and set adrift it sent a mighty ripple across the floor that immediately answered her question and freed several others into the waking spill. After this movement took the picture out of sight, Delilah found herself before a much larger bouquet of shells which had been lost in the background. It surprised her and was completely unlike those in the race downstream. Unmoving and sleeping on a dappled stretch of tiny tortoise pebbles there were three big clams. The right one sat slightly ajar, the second one fanned out and around the first and the third clam was harder to describe but it was quite like an island rising from the sea. Several months earlier, Raymond had chosen the third clam to be his favourite.
Colours of orange, yellows, blues and pinks rolled down from the summer sky and Delilah wished that her thoughts could be sung. For better or for worse she knew that she would remember the shells for a very long time. She liked their simple life and their complete surrender to the wills and wants of the currents and the tide. She decided in that moment, just for fun that she would remember the picture of the third clam for the rest of her life.
The curtains blew in the wind and the whole picture fluttered. Delilah and Percy lay again on the hot couch looking at thick wet leaves that they had carefully traced out of the dark. Percy pressed his chin on the soft flat top of Delilah’s head and tightened his legs in the knot that was keeping them uphill of the couch’s slope.
Delilah felt as though she was suddenly plummeting into the green-black square. Once again, she feared madness as it seemed possible that she was somersaulting out of the window never to return to the big white house or to the river or anything even close. Delilah shut her eyes but in the dark, pale outlines of strange faces and laughing animals were slowly coming to the surface of the blackness like the shapes of oil on water. She pressed her face into the pillow and decided that it was her tiredness. In the morning, Delilah was still lying in the living room feeling a little bit like she had ripped herself from somewhere or someplace in a giant unconscious effort to remain on the couch.
Delilah was woken at about seven by Percy tinkering with the glasses in the glass cabinet like a
musician with his glockenspiel. She couldn’t see the performance exactly, but she took the intervals and travel in between each sound to be his departure from the house.
The water and the sky were both pale grey and the inky black horizon line was poorly printed in
between them. The ends of the line trailed off into white and many of the bigger clouds were in
tatters. Percy’s heels felt sore as they rapped on the stone path and he thought “this is truly to be
walking on foot”. Although he felt this pain in his feet they felt like they were very far away. He
looked down to watch his brown leathery ovals advance along the path and from where he was to where they were felt like a big drop. Ignoring this strange sensation, Percy continued along the bank until he was a very small black speck that seemed to fall behind the white curtain, too. Standing at the bend of the stream Percy paused for several minutes. He thought of W. G Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and felt that he too had just taken a walk as long, he thought of his father who had grown up by the sea and how he must have stopped to look down at the water sometimes too.
He thought of marbles and magpies and shiny things and then with one heave backwards he flung Raymond into the stream and watched him float away.
I’d felt funny all day. A draft was coming in from the garden. But I just couldn’t make it out! “You know I was so cross” I always keep secrets but this one just sounded like a horrible whirring. I couldn’t make it out enough to keep it! I promised and promised. I even tried to say the words out loud. The adults were complaining too, I don’t know why? They can just step outside. But me! “Oh, I’ve tried to press my ear to the spyhole in the door. It doesn’t quite reach” And I’ve always feared I’d stretch too far and fall through. Because of this I felt particularly indoors. Oh my – so white on the wall. I winced “Like furniture”! As the wind swung towards me, the house shook. It swung the door once more. And low and behold swung my ears back with it. “Yay”! I suppose I look a bit funnier now but at least I can hear some things, and the whiteness is starting to melt away. “How wicked of my ears to belong inside and have to listen out”. Through that little hole I listened for the riddle. And it rushed down narrow paths, catching on the brims of hats, it pushed past the grass. To me! And a few days later when I definitely knew something was up I went right through the hole when one of the adults took me over the hill and tossed me in the water.
Untitled #1
By Kit
Rural crime
Flat on the ground
A Particular Pickup pace man at the bar a private function glittering pink speed
Astral Acid rain a kind of cosmic measuring
asian
Perpetual death dance ants circle the subwoofer
Im Mapping the changes
25 to life
Immediate future follows an immediate past
Imperfect imperfect
Words that incite competition
Either look up or down
Petroleum carpark porno ends in a fire
Compilation albums
A naked cop is still a cop cops in porn lick icypoles icycles
Scratching is the very last action
A still of an eternal loop as a vision of paradise
Dropped in acid left to be picked up again, in order to find a half- poisoned joy
Imbued with a beauty
Sarong
Bunny ears
Pills dacked
Shopping
Duffle bags
& a warped shelving system
Strategic beauty
Pursuit
Practices that rope more and more things in
Authentic outlets Exaltation
Our perennial appetite for self-transcending modes of concentration &
a human flair for high temperature visionary obsessions
Big city sensibilities chinese new year in melbourne
people of interest calendar landscapes
Rhythms of breath and sound
washing
Universal everlasting
Street obituary
Plastik medium men
Afterlyfe catchments
The wrong side of the cap he knew it was going to happen and then it did
Evil nangs
the devil is in my penis and there are demons in my semen not true
Emo paranoiac committed to the bit a lo-fi tragedy the inheritors of the end
Littering is the funniest crime
Make manifest an inauthenticity contraband
concealment
The absence of what it has been pulled from was acknowledged, without being mourned
A currency of loss
No recuperation
No more breakthroughs
We too once belonged more clearly to ourselves
Sandbags
Netting drops i hold
Catchment
Gathering
Density
Huddle
Hard-ended hardened string 2 rope
Funnels
Newspaper cone shaped
Print wrapped ear candle
Prison paradise murals
High density Taxidermy dingo head rat tails knotted in a big ball circle birds
Origami
Cityswan perpetual poppyswan & rainbow lorikeets
Plane farmers run to their red utes
Cartoon firemen
The australian rom-smack-com singlet theory
Shoulders
Animal boys girls gone wrong
She holds ice to her lips with ice pressed to their lips
Audience reveal
Incarceration graph waterfall
Melbournes dead waterfall
Salt stains freshwater
Self Sustaining Old folks
Diners & Dashers & Dregs
A Large marble sits towards the top of a staircase
Littlest brother drags mattresses onto the tracks. Big brothers got the shakes, a Snake bite kit & a de-fib.
Untitled #2
By Kit
the builders have considerately
given us some peepholes
covered in paint
yes that's a big wheel
reminds me of a portal
animate
antimatter
when there was a fountain in Preston
looked suspiciously like a swastika
animate
must be Preston's strongest man or
something like that we have a Chinese
Dragon
he was trying to tell us something
I don't know what though
what else have we got
hashtag possessed bleach could be
reference to some anime movie I'm on adrenaline
and we're here
we've made it do you see what I see
do you see it
and there's some guy coming no he isn't
I wouldn't want all that
public stuff I'm not doing that
I'm losing it well probably maybe
um a bit too human really I don't like
but let's not go there hi I love you bye if you tolerate this then your children will be next
do you see what I see
do you see it
and there's some guy coming no he isn't
I wouldn't want all that
public stuff I'm not doing that
they wouldn't anyway yeah he's not
interested right I've kind of lost the
plot now haven't I
um let's call it a day
Two people
By Fergus Menner
Two People Here he comes now; he’s dressed a little strangely. One bare foot slides solemnly behind the other, covered only barely by the scraps of his shoe. Like a prison march, that’s how he walks—in this funeral procession of his, he moves with his head hung down as if in prayer. Look at the hanging vestments, piebald and pockmarked and mismatched—a real junk-like regalia. There is an itinerant implication in this getup, like the clothes were collected through time and only replaced when they were destroyed. He is shouting from across the street. There is no real diction in it; he just babbles, this glossolalist. Maybe he’s code-switching; he’s between screaming and shouting. His eyes are turned skyward, glancing and rolling and full of the heavens. There’s nothing up there, of course— just the sky and a skinny, sickly spring cloud stretching across it like a sleeping alley cat. Maybe he’s against cats. Perhaps he’s for dogs. When I was committed, they discovered through analysis that I survived a violent attack at a young age. This attack had ‘nested itself in the deep reaches of my dreaming,’ muttered the doctor as he peered in there. He was peering over his glasses, which he took off to clean every few minutes, a tempo, if you will, a breath before plunging back in. ‘The patient exhibited clear negative reactions to symbolic stimuli. Pathological. Treatable.’ They wrote this illegibly, in the report that spelled the end of my stint. Later, back in the street and off the prescriptions, destitute, I thought: I was born violently. It has been that way ever since. Just then he stops, his eyes flickering blankly; he seems interned for a moment in the material world. He catches the eye of a passerby, and they look at each other for a second before his glance creeps to the ulterior. Just as he stops, he begins again—that old, indistinct wailing. He glazes over as he is again interred into oblivion. When they discharged him from the facility, did they tell him good luck? Did his mother tell him good luck when he was discharged into the world, waxing in her viscera? When he was born and when he will die. These are the two things. When he was born, she left him to the dogs. Perhaps he was always for the dogs. This banshee listing from here to there, he's dragged along puppet-like by forces from above. Most of my time inside consisted of being prodded, poked, and paraded around—in lecture halls and operating theatres—and shuffled down cold corridors and kept confined. My room, my confines —yellowing pillowcases and a blue-striped bedspread—the cracked cornice in the left corner—the shifting of the room, my room, which contained me. Steely, how they stole into my chilly cavity, things were taken and things were borrowed and placed back at a later date—how I was compressed, hot and cold, and anaesthetised, against the pain but not the grating of the bone—that old thrum, I can still feel how it bothers my brain. He collapses, bending groundward. His knee goes first, and for a moment he stalls—genuflect and almost lucid, he looks up at the sky again. The sky wells in his too-bright eyes, and the skinny cat streaks across the reflective film. A narrowing now, his eyelids meeting wordlessly, he slips into the dark. Like an old templar, he kneels; strangely, he rocks back and forth, muttering. It’s almost like prayer. The rain of commuters circles him—they don’t take notice—and unfold around him like curtains, parted in the night by a curious child. He places his digits on the paving—ten splayed out in half moons, mumbling to the earth. I was deprived before I was born; I was born a paucity. The nascent, the new, the addition, birth. Even this was lessening for me. I should have never come in here. There just isn’t enough room. That’s why they took everything out of me. I was taking up too much space. I came into this world as a mouse. Poverty is monotonous—everyone is poor, or at least almost everyone; it's unoriginal. Like mice, everywhere, skint and hungry, sure, but boringly established. There is nothing new about what I am. There is only meagreness to me; I’m see-through; I’m a lack thereof. They’ll cross the road, but only because they are always crossing the road. I remind them of what they aren’t. When I was committed, they tried to take it all out of me. They wanted to find out how someone could exist so barely. But they didn’t find anything. Like death, I’m just a death, that’s what I remind them of. He waits a while in the crepuscular imagery of his half-closed eyes. He doesn’t see them coming. In that dark light, even for a moment, perhaps he feels free. Perhaps there is somebody in there with him. They wheel up beside him slowly, and even the siren is destitute. The crackle of their walkie talkies and the fluorescent yellow and the blue and white and red flashing—all of it going gauchely with the street. Wordlessly, they disembark, and they take him in without protest. But he’s already long gone, dreaming of another place, in his own private darkness. Maybe someone is still talking to him—someone the rest of us can’t hear.
The New Sublime in Conceptual Soviet Art:
By Maggie Kontev
Libidinal energy, relating to the libido, freed by Freud from its reproductive function, can be
used to view the relationships artists form with their materials. In this short text I will resurface
the understanding of the libidinal to briefly gloss over Soviet conceptual art practices, and point
to the divine qualities of art under socialism.
Two facets of Soviet ideology in the sphere of art are worth noting here; material cultures (the
medium) and the ethics of making art under a socialist economy. It was by stripping the libidinal
powers of objects during communism that conceptualism in the eastern bloc evolved in secret
and rural ways. This was art made without the Market. Art has always aimed to show the greatest power, whether it's divine or natural, that controls the world. Because of this, art gained its own authority from depicting this power. In a way, art has always been somewhat critical, as it contrasts limited political power with images of the infinite, like God, nature, fate, life, and
death. Like that of the Moscow Conceptualist group who “played” or created art in the
countryside snow. Russian art has always existed in the realms of rationality and immanence, as
part of the decadence and patriotism of its country’s image. So naturally, when excess materials
were restricted/libidinal powers were struck, artists turned to the qualities of the body and land - hence performance and earth art.
Moscow Conceptualism’s performative works represent sublime qualities which are uniquely site specific to Russia’s Soviet sphere and therefore separate from other conceptual practices
happening at the same around the world. This fascination of libidinal and non-libidinal based
economies (capitalism and communism), terms borrowed from Jean-Francois Lyotard, were used
as an extension to post-Soviet thinking, as a way to distance the Soviet Union from capitalist art
centers. It’s mainly used to detail the objecthood of artworks, impacted by their economical
social spaces. I use the phrase ‘social space’ quite loosely since communist spaces were always
under the scrutiny of the public eye, and like I mentioned before they existed in a (art)market-less society.
The inclinations of divinity speak to the ways of the Moscow Conceptualists, in a way that we
would never understand here. To quote Keti Chukhrov, “Such intermingling of...the sublime
with the everyday is the consequence of Soviet reality: a de-alienated economy, de-alienated
material culture”. Sublime and libidinal sensitivity feel relevant to the discussions of the Divine,
especially with its birthright in the church. What has always been a filtration system of
knowledge, artists like Rubens have decomposed that libidinal quality of religious texts, in order
to paint.
Putting words to the divine is confusing because it’s something that can’t be explained, but when I think of divine art, I think of the Collective Actions Group and the Moscow Conceptualists and how in the 70s they were call up their friends and fellow artists with specific instructions, such as:
Go to this station and walk to that field.
Under the otherwise quite strict conditions of Socialist Realism, the group would organise small stage events and perform actions on the outskirts of Moscow beyond the public’s attention. In the snow the participants were cleansed and disinfected from the city, feeling euphoria from the Soviet reality.
The divine, I once thought, originated from a collective experience, like folk-dancing in a circle
or watching the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. Like when Brian Jones orchestrated a mass
Kool-aid suicide or Laibach’s post-Tito punk shows. Most notably when Metallica played in
Moscow in 1994. Liaised by the demonstrators and the Soviet government, all the students
wanted, after decades of cultural isolation, was a rock show. In an abandoned airfield Metallica
played to 1.6 Million Russians, while helicopters circled closely to the restless crowd.
But while these were public events, the true divine is something unmatched to the collective
experience, and I believe is only really felt individually.
As I’m well aware we see libidinal propaganda all around us everyday, I fear it may as well just be propaganda of the Divine.
Untitled
By Jasmine harris
I, the hollow well you steep at. I don’t have to take anything you throw into me,
but I hunger for the dollars you pour willingly at my feet. Every cent carved in
desire; I fill my pockets. Stepping back from the brick, your body moulded to
memory.
I cross in front of cars with this false immunity you’ve granted me. I walk
knowing it will get me closer to you, faster.
But even in my valiance I fall to the bruise just left of my chest, the puncture
plaguing my brain I’d tried to cement with your sanctity. In my armour, mere
bones beneath your flesh, a stitch pulls loose.
Hands pooling, your every bite stained to me.
I am too tired to be afraid, so I close my eyes to the bloodshed. Anticipating you
bathing me in your rarity, dream of you asking the right questions. I open my
eyes instead, to gaping wounds and realise you were never as curious as i’d
hoped for.
Untitled 1. through 7.
By Lia mills
1.
The Commuters Poem
I sit on the train
Mouth ajar
Eyes up to God
And my thoughts float
up
up
up
The glint on the wing on the wing
On the
Of the wing and the glint on it
On The Wing
I sit on the train eyes up to god
And I wish for the glint I wish for the glint on the wing
On the whim as I pray every night as I pray and I pray the girl with soft hair eyes closed to hope to pray for the glint on the wing I pray
On the train I sit on a glint
On a whim
Can’t I sit
Can’t I sit
On the train can’t I sit on the train I sit
(Repeat)
2.
Doesn’t everyone want to be extraordinary?
And doesn’t everyone want to be liked by their fathers?
And doesn’t everyone want to be liked by God?
3.
A homeless lady dressed like an angel asked me for a cigarette. She picked me out of the people sitting outside the cafe as if someone had told her I smoked, as if god had.
4.
Let me go crazy!
Am I a girl, a writer, an artist, a poet or God?
5.
Would it be terrible if I prayed to God nightly?
Would it be so terrible to hope for something from a man.
6.
When I’m in this daze and I’m waiting for a train at Brunswick station in the heat, the world sounds different. Or rather, for once I am listening. I sit, body warm and slouched on the bench, eyes up to God and mouth slightly ajar. Two men, both with vehicles of the future (one an electric bike and the other one of those single leg push-along wheelchairs). One man is trying to communicate a location to the other but they just can’t quite meet each other: “Oh, so right by the Coles then?” “No no, its kind of on the other side, you know near that park? The nice one” Google maps exists, of course, and this problem could be solved instantly, but people want to feel as though they know the land around them. Prove their status as a local. To be a local is very highly regarded.
7.
I keep walking up to the same sheet of water and asking:
Why Why Why?
It roars down relentlessly
The mist building on my face is delicate
Each little droplet attaches to a hair
And I am understood.
Ana Domino Heartbeat
By Liana Prosia
He holds tight n tender and his nose twitches because I think he wants to cry.
He turns to sleep as my head falls on the back of his neck and I'm not sure if he cries or not but soon I am asleep. My dreams are stressful, corridors full of chairs that I'm bumping into, rushing around unsure why, heartbeat in a panic and I'm screaming. I'm screaming and I'm living in an apartment in a city and I'm sharing a bedroom with two women who can't speak the language I speak and there's a tiny curtain separating us and I'm screaming. And one woman is folding clothes and the other is sleeping.
And I'm screaming but then I wake up and go to see a friend. We discuss love with tenure. I speak of the dream and she asks what does it mean and I respond quickly that I'm going through change again. I'm admiring of her and she sees me and so I lay my body beside our things, on the grass beneath us and smoke. I swindle my body underneath the grass and feel the pores of my skin fill with dirt and I wonder why I should feel this world. If I stay on my antipsychotics I will remain sedated and the world will have a lesser hold. I can't touch myself the way I used to here but at least I can lay still and fall asleep. The ground has a hold on me and some roots know my name and I'm afraid if I stop my medicated habit,
I'll skid my way to the most chaotic parts of this place and pull all my hair out to cope.
I'm afraid to cope instead of live. Do you ever get out of recovery?
I know I have a condition that will most likely pull me in and out of hospital rooms for the rest of my life. Which reminds me: On the weekend, he and I made boiled eggs and hashbrowns, coffee and yogurt for breakfast. We sat side by side at the table so we could both look out long windows onto the green farmland outside. We listened to Kakudo Manami and he spoke about how it feels like we are in rehab. What a nice rehab we've got here. It's because of the yogurt, I say and fantasise that I would come here and be treated one day rather than in a hospital room. Only for a moment. Because these places hold my presence for only a moment before I return to what I can afford. And hospital's have drugs I need and dirty couches I must sit on. I can afford to love and so I can afford to feel the ache and trip on chairs, screaming amongst strangers that just want to stop and I can afford to stop but I also can't.
In a much bigger sense.
Bigger senses, feel the dead.
I live such a beautiful life, thank you God. My Mother's friend who lives at the start of the street I grew up on, who Ma would go for morning walks with my whole childhood, prays to her dog. So when we would pass her house on our way out to the roads I would too. Her dog was a brown Pomeranian named Bella. I loved her. She was small and soft and when I went to their house to pick up a DVD I would play with her and talk to her in my mind. Chris' husband, (who she soon divorced), had a large collection of DVDs he pirated and burnt. He had them coded with his laptop so he would search in the name of what u wanted to find, to see where it is being stored in his study. He was so tall and German and I've forgotten his name. The neighbours in front of our house had the same breed of dog named Snoopy. He got attacked by a bigger dog down in our park one day and I was sat in my backyard, upset at the time and heard him loudly weep on his way home. I thought for a moment the sounds were manifesting in my head from my pain.
I found out he died days later and was sad when these neighbours bought a Poodle only weeks after.
Weeks after,
he finally tells me how he feels and I can understand. We don't touch each other because we are friends too and this is edged with an obliviousness. Simultaneously want to explode and too go so far in. The cops at the rally scared me today, so I reacted a coward and I stayed off to the side. But I heard the tension and alluded violence and visualised bodies being thrown to the ground. I didn't feel satisfied walking away and couldn't say goodbye to my friends.
Later today I did say goodbye to a long time friend who is off to Mexico indefinitely. She gave me a phallic painting and emotions simmered in my throat while she talked. The emotions in my throat have fallen down my diaphragm now and I hear them rubbing against my organs and I'm angry.
Mouth twitch anger.
He sat and panicked in front of a church and denied the cross when for a moment he asked God why. The cross isn't important but why shy from the conversation. It's so cold she bounces and curses.
And together they are fine.
They are fine,
I've woken to the radio on, low drone bubbles through the kitchen as I wait for water to boil.
How does infinite romance exist ?
Romance exists,
nearly fainting to the lyrics ‘Satan's day’. It's crazy how personal fainting becomes. Like I will not lose consciousness right now! I will not vomit on my boots around all these pretty people! But then noise begins to fade and I'm a shell holding on to everyone's shoulders as I walk out the crowd. Air becomes so delicious and how I love to hear him breathe. Falling asleep to his ragged exhales. That song show me love by robin s comes to mind so I'm playing it, the intro is so fuck off. Lyrics hit." Heartbreaks and promises I've had more than my share. I'm tired of giving my love and getting nowhere. What I need is somebody that really cares. I really need a lover, a lover that wants to be there. Don't you promise me the world."
I've turned the music off now. Inner dialogue is like a constant prayer. Songs are like getting stuck or maybe like wanting to remember and relive. Writing is like informing my body and my other eyes.My mum prays that angels watch over me but i don't like the idea of being watched over even if it's benevolent. Eyes are intense and I search for them everywhere. Watching a band play, so many hands doing things with instruments and shoes tapping and details on jackets and yet I'm searching for their eyes.
The absurdness gets to me some days. How two men can shoulder to shoulder in front of me and I can feel threatened yet they may not even know of me standing there.
When a child comes up to me at work holding there upset together, then falling to a heap of tears in there mother's arms as soon as she arrives.
As soon as I feel love I am free.
I am free.
As these days I don't need to search so tirelessly for what is true as I trust it will reveal itself in the end. I'm not at the end today so I do still grovel foolishly. In the days where I feel the ends are all around, convinced I shouldn't stay up late, I find anything past 3am to be holy and tender in its scatteredness.
Sipping Jasmine tea at the kick ons, it's a very misty night and I would spend all my money for this air. "12:44 there's a knock on my door, you want more."
Wbkwebfkwe KINDEST REGARDS, FUCKWIT
By Lily Rose Pouget
Ewjbfjwkbefkjwebfkwjekwebfkw each one kwjefkl
Ekfnlwkenflweknflek ready and grinning. The kfkei
flaccid wkejfkwejbfkwjebfkjebfkbwkfjwbfkjwbfkfe
Efnweknfwlknflwkfnlwkenflwkefnwfeff wiry priests
Wkejbfkwej performing superb efefeffe somersaults
wdwdwdwddwd doubling the dfkdnfkdnvkdnvkdn
Vvnkdn tinnitus jfdbfjdbfjd Bang, bang efefefefe
Ffefefefefiiefeinfienfienfennfienfienfienff Their
Efeff shapes kefnkenfkenfknkenfkenfkenfknfknffl
Fefefefeffefel flailing fefefefefefefefel hanging ede
fundamentally wrong. Either ekfnel body was efefe
Fefefefefefeffe fumbled oddly efefefe some mmhv
fell off wfwfwfwfwfwfwfwfwfwffwfwfwfwfwfwfl
Fwfwfffl and exploded . Blood, intestines and cloth
flew.
All material taken from pg.10 of Murray Bail’s short story The Partitions (pg. 159-170) published as part of the
collection Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories (1975)
Dowsing
By Riley Orange
Our “intuitions” are simply opinions; our philosophical theories are the same. Some are
common-sensical, some are sophisticated; some are particular, some general; some are
more firmly held, some less. But they are all opinions.
Dowsing is a form of divination employed in attempts to locate groundwater. A Y shaped
twig, or two L shaped ones called dowsing rods are held in both hands and their motion are
said to reveal the location of water. Dowsing originated in ancient times; the oldest account
of this practice being in 1568. Sir William F Barrett wrote of dowsing in 1911 of this incident,
where the site of a convent in St. Teresa of Spain was offered with one objection – there
was no water supply:
“Friar Antonio came up with a twig in his hand, stopped at a certain spot and appeared to
be making the sign of the cross… he made some movement with the twig and then he said
‘dig just here’; they dug and lo! A plentiful fount of water gushed forth, excellent for
‘Drinking, copious for washing, and it never ran dry””.
Modern science regards dowsing as a pseudoscience, which is founded in fact. Yet this
notion is based upon the measurability of the apparatus of dowsing as a precise instrument.
But what is a dowsing rod without the cognition of the person following it? If we were to
consider the subject practicing dowsing as the real instrument, dowsing is more of a kind of
intuition. A dowsing rod is thereby a tool, manifested, lending tangibility and perspective to
the fog that guides intuition.
Dowsing provides an example of the way intuition locates our internal truths and beliefs,
constructed by presuppositions from our lived experiences, which may hold true to us
despite contradictory truths of the world outside. Just as modern science rejects divination,
Friar Antonio may never have found the groundwater without trust in the dowsing rod. Is
this substantial enough evidence for Friar Antonio’s belief in dowsing? Or is the only goal of
intuition being to lead to coincidence? Regardless of intuition originated in superstition or
muscle memory, it becomes the web of truths which cyclically defines and affirms our world
view. Just as dowsing may take you to water as your intuition takes yourself to it, it can be
scientifically rejected, and can take you towards nothing.
I find my intuition most strongly in places that I do not know. At the park next to the pool
where I swim mostly, on the first truly autumn day of this year, the sun touched the top of
the trees in a way I did not know. These trees surrounded a sink of grass where they shed
their red, yellow and orange leaves into it in a way I did not know. This unknown filled the
larger part of me in that moment; and the unknown became my intuition. In it I understood
everything. The things I did not know constituted my truth.
A Daughter Your Mortar
By Jasmine Nolan James
Mammy you hurt me
With that smile which tears apart
Your lips as eyes falter
I am afraid of your pain
Like hot milk
It leaks from your embrace, and
I cry too.
You are my reason for unhappiness
For yours is by birth;
Mine inherited.
I carry it;
Cradle obsessively
It cannot slip
Into my womb, my faults -
Which you did not deserve
A daughter
Your mortar
Let me crush your fears
For they are loud and cruel
and interrupt us
Your maternal calm
Premenstrual Divinity Disorder
She is my Self;
The red being in my breast
She enfolds under my flesh
And ripens, with the subtleties
of an assassin.
Perhaps shy, she conceals
Three times out of four
Her menace; like ice.
It drips
And my veins fill until
I am stupefied and rolling
For I am without control..!
Her monthly arrest
Will continue to startle and
Worsen when I weaken
I am but hooked to the promise of time
For it never fails and
Heals wisely; my Self.
The Way it Comes In
By Zeke martin
Light comes in too quick
you never quite catch it
Before it leads you to
something new.
And uh oh
it’s off again
Bouncing about the room
Maroon in the bottle,
caught in their eye
Offering at best
a glimpse of you.
It points noisily at the gaps
where you might gawk forever
In the shadow
hung
all about you.
Not even the mirror dares a chase,
knowing its tricks couldn’t stand the test of time
But that cloud runs deep through your veins
some of us even try to put a window in
Hoping to cut the whole puppet show short,
but find only the wet porousness of skin,
Like an animal trembling
in blind headlights.
Some sleepless nights
I find myself howling,
Taunting that fiery balloon
to stay put in yesterday afternoon.
And then it comes,
with mythic riddles and parental rebuffs
And draws me like lightning
burning so hot I could cast its shadow.
But Icarus sweeps the plunge,
and I’m a candle succumb in your thumbs,
Like a swing drawing back from a lamp,
like the syntax belies the story,
Like the law of the bucket hat cast in the wind,
our hair in autumnal hymns,
Like the love that we just can't drown
the moon, the sun and the lown,
It’s something about way it comes in,
the way we reach out,
Suspended again
In a flicker of doubt.
Between Each of my Toes
By Antigone Yannoulidis
Before I get in, I brush my hair with my proper hairbrush, not my comb. It frizzes at the
bottom, my ends so split. I turn my hot water spindle lots of times, lots more than the cold one.
But when I turn the cold one, I turn it a lot of times too, because it doesn’t bring out any cold
water for a while.
Then the shower’s way too cold. One leg inside the shower, and my right hand under the
water. I turn the cold spindle back a few times. Once it feels right, I step inside and turn away
from the faucet. Wet all my hair down to my forehead. I mean my hairline. I never tilt my head
back into the stream of water fully. It reminds me of the time I was so little in a blow up island at the pool and I capsized with Dad.
So, I turn around completely, if and when I wash my face.
I always wash my face, cleanse my face twice. Very rarely my neck, only if I remember.
I let the cleanser get all foamy between my fingers, shut my eyes and rub it all over my
face. When I’m soapy, I feel all my little blackheads on my skin. Only when I’m soapy. I have six
or seven distinct blackheads next to my sideburns, on each side. Such an urge to scratch. Such a,
such a sudden urge to scratch. Circles, move your fingers in circles. Feel the blackheads, just let
yourself feel them. If you scratch them, they will become more, I say. Don’t scratch them. Just
circles, rub the foam in circles on the blackheads.
I rinse the cleanser off; I can’t feel the blackheads anymore. Why, I can’t feel the blackheads anymore.
I do my second cleanse. The blackheads are back. I rinse it off quickly, remind myself I need to soap my legs. Don’t scratch the blackheads. One big white piece of soap.
I rub my chest, my breasts. Under my breasts, between them too. I do under them twice.
I rinse. I rub the soap against my arms, towards my back. Just above my ass crack, so the soap
seeps down my crack. I think about if I have pooed today. I use my left hand to clean my asshole.
I feel the small scar tissue from my scratches. Small scar tissue.
At this point, I remember my vagina, so I soap my pubes with my right hand. Pull my
pubes under the running water, exposing my clitoris. I use my right hand, this time, to clean my
vagina with no soap. I swipe two fingers over my clitoris, thinking about what vagina’s taste like
to me. If it’s sore, I’m a bit more careful. My left hand: I clean my hole, my perineum. I use my
thumb, left thumb, with the big nail, to scoop inside my vagina. I scoop backwards, my nail faced towards my asshole as I enter myself. I am worried it may hurt; it never does. Just a small amount of whiteness catches under my nail, and I rinse it out quickly. Use my pointer finger on my right hand to scrape any left. There is no space for any more of my finger to clean inside me today, I am withdrawn and tighter than I should be. If I want to clean inside, very deep, I squat and open my legs near the drain. Only my pointer and middle finger from my right hand, sometimes my ring finger goes in too. I make sure to scrape away from my walls, cupping my discharge. I run my fingers through my pubes many times, pulling any strays. Next time someone licks me, there will be less hair to catch between their teeth. I watch my pubes run down the
drain.
My right hand is getting wrinkly and white from the soap, so I swap hands. Rub the bar down my thighs, over my stretch marks. I rub the soap on my calves, scratching them so much to make it lather. My feet, between each of my toes. I stand back up, turn around. Armpits, in case I forgot them. Belly button, just play with it. I look at my belly. When things were bad, I would hope to see all my pubic mound when looking straight down at my feet. Now, I breathe in deep, let my belly get big and filled with air.
No one will treat you differently, I think. I hold it close.
Cold shower, if I really have it in me. Less than a minute.
You know you’ve done worser things, you’ve done harder things than this.
Taps off. Step out, do not slip or trip. Grab my big yellow towel and cover my body, not my hair.
Drying order.
My face. I check for my blackheads; I rub my skin and they have disappeared. Then my
feet, between each of my toes, my calves, my thighs, my feet again, catching any drips. My vagina, my bum, my crack, my upper back. My armpits, my forearms and shoulders, the rest of the bits of my arms.
When I put my panties on, my pubes soak them just a little. I rub my underwear against
my mound, catching any last soaks. I always have a wet patch at my clit.
Fur suit
By Stacey Collee
You left me in your
White sweater (Berlin) and
I felt beautiful
Obsessed with memories from nights prior
When you had sex with me on the floor
‘Alpha’
I whisper, to which you reply
‘What?’
Batman and Robin and
Poison Ivy
Ice man and his frozen heart
Beautiful Princess frozen in time
Objects of lust and fantasy
Handsome man in your
Living space full of objects
Where we love and where we fight
‘To survive love
You must become love’
Slowly becoming sympathetic
To our own failures in time .
For Now
By Lola Hewison
So the pointed hut we lived in for months and months
I mean years
Grew mold on my finger tips that scratched my thighs at night.
It gave me shorter legs each day
Forming wooden stumps I had to regrow.
My stomach lets out cursory purs
And it reminds me of your dogs fortress of teeth.
Yes, it inflicted rubble on my skin
It’s an ugly facade but it gives me warmth.
Okay, please pass that yappy chalice
Because it’s slippery and formidable,
A menace
sitting on heady cushions of pregnant dust
& performative acts that pave a silent ego .
Dancing,
holding hands with eddying tendrils that grew my current burly beard.
As you can see, I’m sexy and strong with a chest full of hair and a strapping pair of blue pants.
But I’m also skipping into the living room
To find my latest crossword -
Where I’ll lay on the heated ground and suck on artificial sweeteners next to
my brother who’s biting his toenails before lunch.
I’m puffing on those bloated floats that kept my arms adrift
Until i'm caught rolling bare with a bushy tail between my legs.
But i'm also laughing because I resemble the jester with the skinny red leggings
Jumping harmoniously in time with my cockscomb crest
And I’ll clap at the end of the watchmakers shift
Because she’s keeping time closer & closer and
occasionally minutes feel like decades and so do all your faces.
I’ll be clicking my aging wrist until
that beady paw stops its incessant twitching
At the haste of your ringtone in the distance.
graciously spitting pirouettes through the hallway.
As images run laps around me
And words I can chew so easily
Like those ones I can return to again
—
“It was humorous, seeing mark sit with such joy in such a large, unnecessary vehicle.”
—
To me, the night was plucky
I mean clucky
(I mean, I’m sorry you feel stuck)
and it sits parked preposterously, under a cautionary flashlight,
Greens, reds and blues and pockets of sun that illuminate the
The gaping hole that’s actually my camera roll,
enveloping like the sky that’s folded, that's really just the sea.
You’re sitting on the edge of the cobblestone
With this ugly man,
But maybe he’s not ugly he’s just got that little darkened spot that enlarges with age.
You’re sitting, mutually tapping your knees in the song of wind’s direction
And you kind of fucking love each other
And that’s random because you’re like 30 years apart
But this dimly lit scent pervades the air,
it wreaks
And hums
until you’re reminded of the looming
Empty vehicle that sits in your peripherals
and you know what it represents.
The faceless words turn purple with embarrassment
And swinging inside this quietude,
Sweeping through dirty curtains in my motley attire
I read
‘The Sea was Folded’
And imagine only the sky folding neatly between the pockets of tapping knees
Untitled
By Izzy martin
Your shop window reads
Probably not open but maybe
We sit on the bench out the front
Heads back roaring like ordinary witches
Feed pigeons movie popcorn
From a plastic cobalt bucket
Faces spliced with real estate
Agent pictures from the window
opposite , a doggerel overlay of
Suits, sold, for lease you told me
About the theosophical society
Where i was temporarily indoctrinated
By a group of psychics
With red flaking skin and a penchant
For ghosts with no discrimination
Between religion or creed
While discussing a marge simpson figurine
Your blue eyes widen
At the sound of collision
Behind me, your favourite pigeon
Annihilated by a truck
The air is stinking of feathers
Its heart popped out globular, a cherry
Beating fervently on the asphalt
THE PUREST GIFT
By Viva Wilton
There is something so vulnerable about seeing someone larger
than you in any aspect,
Stripped down.
Like seeing your grandparent in the hospital
Tucked in like a child
Dressed in white
As if they’d just been born again
And if you believe in that sort of stuff
They are closer to being born again than they ever were
And there’s something so fresh and new about that
The fresh and new of the gauze under their legs and the crystal tubes
The dried blood forming patterns of flowers recently wilted
The woven blanket that is so white you couldn’t even describe it that way
cos you can’t really see it
Is pushed up right under their chin
So they’re really just a head
And they look so tired
Their folded faces like a Bible
I’m talking about my grandpa
Here’s there now.
In the white white fresh and new
He is a fully conscious baby who opened his eyes just to say something religious
which almost felt scripted
And he told me to read this book that he had given me
As if it were his dying wish
And I cried because I felt guilty I hadn’t read it already.
But this book is 500 pages in small print and has a particularly stony hard cover so it
weighs a tonne and isn’t like I could easily take it around with me and read it in
places I normally would
If I was really as much of a reader as I think I am
But my grandpa is asleep again so none of it matters much.
I think of the time he was staying with us for Christmas
And asked me to come to midnight mass with him
But when 12 o’clock rolled around I was too tired despite laying my outfit out on the
end of my bed that evening
So I heard him stepping heavily through the door without me.
He says grace before dinner every night and names every single family member
including the ones that have died and considering I would have been running around
all day winding the 47 clocks in the house for him I was always famished and would
stare at my laden plate until he was finished speaking, ending on “Babka”, the name
of my great grandmother who is dead and whom I’d never met.
There’s a painting of her on our wall
And it’s nailed in high enough for her to look like Jesus.
So much so that we find ourselves kneeling mid sibling-wrestle match beneath her
frame.
Grandpa says grace because his wife would do the same every single meal for all of
the days she was around for. She turned white beneath the Tasmanian stars one
night and became one of the names uttered towards the end of his spiel.
Read that book, he said, it’ll change the way you see everything, he said.
And I’m talking about my grandpa
Having now read it
And everything is a derivation of Him.
He who could not cast the first stone neither.
He stamps flat-footed about the kitchen like an on-land boat.
I think of Noah’s ark and how there isn’t a pair of anything in this place apart from his
feet.
And now he is a part of the bed that ends before his hips do
And that smell is so distinct.
It is white. It is white.
He spent most of his working life in Antarctica
Where most things are invisible
Because the snow sucks the sound and reflects the light
And is so so white
And it stuck to his hair, now stained forever
And nobody spends most of their working life in Antarctica
Unless you are some sort of God of Winter
Like a sacred elephant seal
Huffing between two glaciers.
Like a newborn baby
Formed between two warm bodies
Like an angel.
I am scared of his two great wings.
I can see them growing from the old blood
I can see them forming under that new white blanket.
Thankyou.
Send questions and submissions to Roundtablereadings01@gmail.com
Themes for forthcoming readings are announced on Instagram @roundtablereadings
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