(for the siblings)

By Kevin Gillam

they are there on the cusp of a
little hill, in the trampled splendour

of a suburban yard. they are three,
elephantine trunks standing against a

background of untidy sky, their oily
confidences drab on Escher limbs,

and the still bricks and lost pickets
heighten the haecceity of these three.

I go and sit with them often. I sit
between them, face to a bleary just-risen

moon and while breathing deeper and deeper
I find a kind of un-stringed puppetness

owning me. everything around them is
not tinted, a landscape of slow bleeds

with aching grace: the cusp where they stand,
splashes of buffalo, pot-bellied air,

the impressionist light. some spire in a nearby
church tolls its god, and in the corduroy silence

that follows, this join-the-dots man of me
forgets numbers, this seep of leaving

rooted in turn in the clear outline on these three
draws me towards them. having no need for eyes

I follow the scent of sweet decay,
let my soles find exposed pasts, and since

no-one is around, I brush my cheek
across them, hold them, press my chest

against them, know their ribbed unknowns

a full stop reaches the end of its sentence

By Nathan Shepherdson

a full stop
never understands
the need to understand
what words are for

a full stop
feels it is superior
because it provides
meaning without letters

a full stop
does understand
its capacity to arouse
a body into silence

(into silence
into silence
into silence
walks a sleeping figure
a sleeping figure
with her necklace of full stops)

for obvious reasons a full stop’s favourite letter is i

a full stop has no desire to transgress its shape
a full stop is a self incubating form
a full stop will float in water but not in blood

memories are in fact a transfusion of full stops

(full stops
have now replaced
have now replaced
are still replacing
the sane
in the hourglass)

full stops colonise the reverse side of the mirror
full stops plot the continued downfall of words

full stops
can smell the lips of shadows
through a closed book

full stops
can be worked like fillings
into the teeth of language

full stops are sometimes set on fire
and dropped from a great height
onto the bare skin of an ending

on the odd occasion
a poet is blinded
when a full stop explodes

in an emergency
full stops can be made
by slicing the ears from commas
these will not have the same longevity
as ones naturally conceived

there was a king
who kept full stops under his foreskin
he felt they were sentinels
able to repel impotent likelihoods
as an old man
he had them set into a ring for his heir

centuries ago full stops traded their voices for stillness
full stops have happily held themselves hostage ever since

for those with the skills and the inclination
larger full stops can be filleted on a table
then added as seasoning to a cooked-up theory

full stops are qualified to operate
the elevator in the spinal cord
full stops monitor all movements
between moment and sensation

full stops will migrate immense distance to pursue conclusion

a full stop can kill an ego without moving

a handful of full stops cannot be lifted

full stops clog the pores in the face of an unwilling god

most full stops believe their god to be an eclipse
most full stops do not have a mother

full stops with imperfections
are sent to work for question marks

flies are attracted to full stops
when they are in flower

lies are the only natural predator of the full stop

one full stop equals the circumference of one thought
a full stop alone can hear gravity’s song
its black yolk heavy with philosophical protein

placed in the tear ducts at the point of death
one pair of full stops will absorb the entire memory

he could never bring himself to use full stops that were still alive
he would suck them back off the page through a glass straw

full stops are very superstitious about their placement

a full stop
will gladly dissolve
its own parliament
in its own mind

(a blank page
actually a cemetery
white with
white with
white with
bleached bodies

the bleached bodies
of crumbling full stops)

Danger: Lantana

By Ross Clark

(sampling Jeffrey Harrison’s ‘Danger: Tulip’ from Ploughshares Winter 2006–07)

Was I hoping to find my way to the creek, loud with unseasonal rain, and to see, perhaps, a few winter wattles, and catch a magpie or two warbling in a melaleuca, when I took a track I’d never taken before, through light scrub first and then a scrappy paddock, across a wet gully, then into another paddock? Beyond a paling fence appeared then, gradually, first the corrugated roof and then the bare weatherboard walls of what I suddenly recognised as The Southern Cross Home.

One stair was gone, and the long veranda where once two dozen of us had washed side by side in our own bucket and bowl every morning now had a few treacherous board ends and a couple of shin-threatening gaps, and much of the paint was peeling and lifting. One end was defended by a turret of lantana, swaying its cachous of red and yellow and white, the end near the room I’d shared with three others, to a total of thirteen. I noticed that not a window was broken, though

all now had newspapers pasted over them, inside. I had merely chanced here, but how quickly now I felt compelled to find my old room, breathe it. Lantana had thicketed the corner of the veranda as surely as in the fairy tale, but I considered the art of slighting, and crouched low enough to enter the musty darkness beneath the place, brushing cobwebs from my shoulders as I sought a gap in the floorboards. One I found admitted my hands and no more, yielded to my efforts,

the breaking of splintery timber bursting dust into my eyes a moment. I wriggled up into the hall, saw the shapes where pictures had been removed, stepped gingerly towards my dorm, pulled the knob towards me till the door yielded suddenly and dustily, then stepped towards the corner where my bunk had been, lower at first till Henry left, then the upper during Albert, Peder, and Vince. Without intention, I felt on the door frame where I’d pocket-knifed my height each year. Inhaled

but smelled nothing of then, only the sweeting decay of this moment. But lantana too, one cane of it through the wall, actually two. And two paces to peel 17 March 1986 off the window in three deft swathes, and to see the lantana becoming

a part of the building. And, concentrating, to see Saxon Creek was silent now, a gully where once a stream had sung to us all night. And the singing flowed down my cheeks for Albert, Peder, Vince and Henry and all the others in that faraway dorm.

And did I break the window and climb out; did I scrabble through the lantana; did I stride down the slope to the creek whose singing waters were now no more than a gully-bog? Did I stumble back to the picnic-ground with its signs of invitation and warning and drink from its bubbler? And did I unlock my late-model car, wryly recalling a camera still in the glove-box; and did I drive away then, thumbing memory’s album, trying to flick its fading polaroids out of the window?

Later, bathe my scratches against infection?