New Poetry by Linda Adair

Steeped in history

The afternoon slumps ---

habit calls for a cuppa.

The mind craves something staunch

to reboot as the coffee-fuelled resolve dissipates

a bold breakfast brew would do the trick.

As the jug boils, I consider

my comfortable options versus

those offered by history ---

the green tin or the red

the Irish and English blend respectively.

The choice would have been clear once.

Dusty leavings swept off a factory floor

became the green, after first pickings

were boxed in red, and

chopped leaf takings of the cheaper Assam

fortified the displaced natives of Erin

whilst the best Indian  leaves that money could buy

steeped in the teatime parlours of an Empire

built by war, plunder, and brutality.

Why else would the troopers wear redcoats

but to hide the bloodletting of battle?

Gold letter status 'By Appointment to Her Majesty' on the tin

that emblematic red coat my great-great grandfather once wore.

At Lambing Flat the Crown’s men

read the Riot Act to stop the slaughter of Chinese miners.

But that was on a good day.

Usually the ‘traps’ defended ‘squatters’ rights

as they took over Wiradjuri lands.

- © Linda Adair 2020

Linda Adair is a poet and editor of Rochford Press/ Rochford Street Review who lives in Leura on the unceded lands of the Dharug and Gundungarra peoples. During Covid, Melbourne Poets Union published and zoom launched her debut book The Unintended Consequences of the Shattering. She has been published in 25 Miles from Here Pure Slush Vol 21, Messages from the Embers (Black Quill Press, 2020), To End All Wars (Puncher & Wattmann, 2018) and various journals. Her work will appear in  the forthcoming Work Lifespan Vol 5 Pure Slush.

 

New Poetry by Jeremy Nathan Marks

Pidgin (speak white*) 

Today I heard a young man

speaking in tongues 

from a televised platform 

in the heart of downtown 

Cameras rolled banners waved

and the passion of his audience

warmed the deliverance seeking  

If what the man said made sense 

to those in attendance 

it bewildered everyone else 

but as a form of recompense 

we’ve been promised an encore performance 

Meanwhile a man with an eagle feather 

sits on a train track in the middle of nowhere

he is accompanied by several others 

beating drums singing songs in a display 

the powers that be say is a threat to commerce

In this country we have two official languages 

two solitudes of which “tongues” is not (yet) one 

but there is a lingua franca a dialect that unites  

It is called Speaking White.

- © Jeremy Nathan Marks 2022

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in Canada. New and recent work appears/will appear in places like Flash Fiction Magazine, Garfield Lake, Expanded Field, Unlikely Stories, Ginosko Literary Journal, Wondrous Real, Microfiction Mondays, and Eastern Iowa Review. His full length poetry collection, Of Fat Dogs & Amorous Insects is published by Alien Buddha Press (2021). 

* [The phrase “speak white” is apparently a racist insult used by English-speaking Canadians to shame French-speaking Canadians for speaking their language in public.- Editor]

New Poetry by Erina Booker

Relics

ancient tors

follow the coast,

dark and gnomic,

granite plugs

peaks and mounds

the hunched bulk of Tibrogargin

Beerwah’s spike

the Glasshouse Mountains

of a homesick Cook

charting the east coast of

Terra Australis

South -

a distinctive profile,

a Mountain of Warning

signals a reef

in that latitude of sea

smaller plugs jut up

from Gondwanan rainforest

following the reefed shores

unevenly

like an erratic ECG

that pulsed in spurts

of lava    hot red rush

coating peaks

in an icing

of molten minerals

erupted fingers crawling

down crevasses

poking fissures in

the flanks

exposed    cooling

wearing down

to be blown away

then flowed away

in later tropic wet,

your sweet-soft exteriors

destroyed over time

time and time again

inexorably

inevitably

the rain and wind of it all.

- © Erina Booker 2022

Erina Booker is a Sydney-based poet. She has published eight collections of her work, and contributes to journals and anthologies, internationally, in Australia, and online. She enjoys giving recitals, seminars, and judging competitions. Erina has a Major in Literature within her Bachelor of Arts degree, and a Postgraduate Degree in Counselling. She knows the value of words and the pauses between them.

 

New Poetry by J.T. Whitehead

Nocturne No. 23

“My dreams should come to me like a lover comes to me,”

she said to him. “They shouldn’t enter my room like an intruder,”

she said to him.  “You confound me,” she said, “being both.”

Nocturne No. 27

Well after bed-time, in the book shop, our son read the title on display:

“The Art of Happiness.”  He said, 6 wise years behind him, 

“That’s a blind man seeing.”   Closing time: the lights went off.

- © J.T. Whitehead 2020

J.T. Whitehead has published 300 poems in over 100 literary journals, including The Lilliput Review, Slipstream, Left Curve, The Broadkill Review, The Blue Collar Review, Home Planet News, The Iconoclast, Poetry Hotel, Book XI, and Gargoyle.  His book The Table of the Elementswas nominated for the National Book Awardin 2015.  Whitehead lives in Indianapolis with his two sons, Daniel and Joseph.