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4W PRESS © Copyright 2017 fourWpress Copyright remains with the author/artist. No part of this book may be reproduced without permission. Acknowledgement of fourW for material subsequently reprinted in any form would be greatly appreciated. fourW twenty-eight NEW WRITING Wagga Wagga, NSW: fourW press, 2017 978-0-9942020-3-1 Editor David Gilbey Selection panel Alex Segal Tracie Miller Michel Dignand Breanna Blundell Acknowledgements Booranga Writers’ Centre wishes to thank Create NSW, Charles Sturt University and Wagga Wagga City Council for on-going financial assistance for its writing programs which inspire, foster and develop writing in the Riverina region. Edited by David Gilbey Coordination: Sandra Treble Design: Adam Bell Cover photograph: Amy Randell Printed by Chambers Whyte, Wagga Wagga fourW calls annually for contributions of previously unpublished prose, poetry and artwork. Manuscripts and original artwork must be submitted by the end of June each year. Submissions as Microsoft Word documents sent via email are preferred. Writers are asked to limit their submissions to four stories or six poems. Booranga Prizes In 2018, all submitted work will be considered eligible for the two Booranga Prizes. The best poem and best short story will be awarded a $250 prize. Send submissions to: fourW twenty-nine [email protected] Current and back copies of fourW anthologies are available from Booranga Writers’ Centre: e-mail: [email protected] Telephone/fax: (02) 6933 2688 arts-ed.csu.edu.au/booranga www.facebook.com/Booranga Contents Editorial 1 2 IVY ALVAREZ Lucky An orchid root is not grasping a crumb of bark. But it is. With its finger, slow-footedly. My age is finally true: a hundred and two. No, a hundred and three. Some are old-born, scorned, abhorrent. To not have a father is no detriment. Many have lost theirs by sheer dint, a purposeful accident, misspent, through inattention. Perhaps that was their intention, a paterfamilias dropped between pyramids of fruit, rolling beneath a table, falling out a shirt. Surely they are replaceable. Surely there will be more. What do orphans know? The dubious pleasure of age and snow. My wrinkles wait in the wings, demand a skin regime. The humidity rises, a morning cloak, my ever-love. 3 SOFIUL AZAM To a Gunman Like the mysterious rise of your enemy’s language, I’m simply out there where love gets voted down, where hate crimes are only other things on the rise, where misfits like me either remain misfits all their life or make headlines only as upturned cockroaches. If I ever trembled before your gun-barrel, I’d say: Before you are done with me, stay with me a bit longer. Do me a favor – wait a little with me to watch squirrels climb up a tree over there by the lake. Look, how smart and death-defying they are, hoarding nuts into that tree’s gnarled twigs hollowed by termites and swept clean by the south wind. The music of ripples on the lake soothes their minds like rain. By the way, did you know rain is the buzzing of bees vertically landing on flowers? The moment I think of flowers I see the redness of roses immaculate as the blood you will spill today. It’s as if you’d by mistake pour coffee onto my writing. Once I reined-in the leash of my unrest by looking at those smart squirrels bringing nuts to their babies. I often come here to detox my evils. Shower me, if you like, with bullets as if to water dying roses of my blood – ink for your death script. Take this blood as my offering. Even though no holy verse is ever written in blood, only love gets bloodstains out as sunlight does darkness. 4 CHRISTOPHER BARNES Lord Byron Joins a Dating Site If solitude is ravaged, a fifth wheel Release from pain to jawache below the surface of revived moons The vacant amped-up, instinctual, top-to-toe blood-stirring Might thank this batphone for a sample ring We loathe the fragile lapse that’s unimportance Even bliss has its palsy to yank Glossary of slang: Fifth Wheel – Gooseberry; Amped Up – Excited; Batphone – Cellphone. Lord Byron Downloads a Zombie Movie When to their hughies on a fuddled gale, Shall call my spirit, dark Guinness-tinged, pugilistic, When, pois’d he rip-tides thick speech, Or, dark in mist marks the spot before an unfermented head. Oh! May my shade’s giddy-pluck veins drain To mark the spot into a jotted fragment, a pub-crawl swig alone. No lenghthen’d scroll if that with bed-readiness this liver has glued My epitaph shall be with lurk-remembered charms If that only bugger-all shall lucidify Oh! May no other gaffes be misremembered. Glossary of slang: Hughies – Vomits. 5 ROBERT BEVERIDGE The Poetry Bowl The river of ghosts spatters over rocks beside the grey city smells pretty good. Down by the chicken farm the river delta is the poetry bowl and hundreds of hundreds of would-be writers dangle their feet in the misty rushes move their pens over nonexistent paper. 6 Craig Billingham THE MESSENGER rs Henderson claims the young man at her front door was well dressed M and handsome. He had a parting and a fringe, a narrow face, and he was wearing a dark blue canvas jacket with what appeared to be a bleach spot above the left hand pocket. He looked like an Art teacher, she claims, or a documentary maker, which pleased Mrs Henderson greatly – for some forty years she’d had a royal crush on David Attenborough. “Sorry dear,” she said, feeling she’d taken too long in getting to the door. The young man smiled, Mrs Henderson claims, smiled but kept his lips closed. There wasn’t much of him – he could have stepped on a garden rake and it would have missed – but what there was, she liked. She claims she expected the young man would ask her to buy a raffle ticket, or to vote for such and such in the upcoming elections, but instead he babbled and was nervous, the shabby talk a mockery of his tidy features. Losing interest – her capacity for tedium was not what it used to be – Mrs Henderson turned her attention to her neighbour’s plum tree, surprised how early the sunny-side had blossomed. She claims there was nothing so precocious in her own garden. “Mrs Flowers thought that I should meet with you,” the young man said. “I beg your pardon?” Mrs Henderson replied. At that, the young man leaned forward, such that Mrs Henderson detected a trace of rosemary on his breath, which matches the account given by the waitress from Bethany’s, one of the local cafés – that is, for lunch the young man ordered an entrée size bowl of gnocchi with a sauce of rosemary and sundried tomatoes. He drank tap water. “Mrs Flowers said that I should meet with you,” the young man repeated, raising his voice a little, and Mrs Henderson claims he looked about him as he spoke. Although Mrs Henderson doesn’t normally use such language, on hearing the name ‘Mrs Flowers’, the following is what came to mind: So, the nasty little tart got married. She looked to the young man for clarification, but his face offered nothing. The ridgeline of his brow seemed suddenly more pronounced, the features beneath it almost sombre. How old must he have been? Twenty-seven? Thirty-two? Certainly not so young as he had seemed when she’d opened the door to him. He’d aged visibly, Mrs Henderson claims, headlong through a decade. 7 “Mrs Flowers said that we should meet?” Mrs Henderson then asked. “That’s right,” the young man said. “And how do you know Mrs Flowers?” “I’m to be her son-in-law,” the young man answered. “I didn’t even know she had a daughter,” Mrs Henderson replied. The young man remained silent – evidently he had nothing more to say on the matter, not at that particular moment. Mrs Henderson claims that in lieu of further information he offered one of his thin, closed-lipped smiles. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but what does this have to do with me?” “That’s precisely why I’m here,” the young man answered. Mrs Henderson wishes it to be clear that she wanted nothing to do with Lulu Flowers and her ‘shenanigans’. But, on the other hand, as she readily admits, the young man had unpicked a stitch inside of her. “Well in that case,” she said, “you’d better come in.” The house was dark and cool, years of damp through winter, and several floorboards in the hallway sagged slightly underfoot. Mrs Henderson claims to remember the young man’s footsteps as he walked behind her, in sync with her own step. Once in the sitting room the young man sat lightly on the edge of Mrs Henderson’s best chair, as though, she claims, he was ambivalent about leaving a lasting impression. He took a great deal of interest in her ornaments – spice jars painted with butterflies and moths, a framed oriental fan above the fireplace and, in the corner, a large antique birdcage containing two impressive yellow paper cranes. “Home-stay students,” Mrs Henderson said, by way of explanation. “From the hotel school. A Korean girl made those for me, as a leaving present.” “That seems strange,” the young man remarked. “In what way?” Mrs Henderson then asked. “That a Korean would practise a Japanese art,” he said. “You know, considering their history.” Mrs Henderson claims she had never given this much thought – not the history, nor the cranes.

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