Cirrus@Austlit

''Once you see the cemetery, you get off the bus,' my tio abuelo (greatuncle) Lucio said in Spanish with his Portuguese twang, his foggy eyes blinded by cataracts looking over my shoulder as he spoke to me, between his fingers a cigarette burning. 'Then you go to any local and ask for a Figueroa. All the Figueroas in Rivera are your relatives and we come in all shades and shapes.' Exhaling smoke, he flicked ash over the balcony, took another puff and continued, 'We're Black, Brown, White. Light eyes, dark eyes. Short, tall. Blonde, brunettes. With afros, curls, waves or straight hair like yours.' He cleared his throat, stubbed the butt into an ashtray then added sarcastically, 'But we're all Figueroas and you can thank colonisation for that. Those conquistadores couldn't keep their hands off our women or our land.' He belly-laughed as he pulled his blue comb out of his white shirt's front pocket and repositioned his storm-cloud-coloured afro behind his ears. I breathed in the past trauma, imagining the women who came before me, because of whom I am here, women of my blood being forced to submit to White supremacy and the patriarchy, their bodies capitalised.' (Publication abstract)

'History begins with someone else's memory of you.' This is how Julia Cohen opens her essay on abortion for the New England Review, and I know this because I have been relentlessly scouring the internet for essays on abortion and for poems, song lyrics and admissions of any kind. History begins with someone else's memory of you, and my mother tells me that, as I pressed steadily on the fleshy walls of her womb 28 years ago while she lay in the rickety restored cubbyhouse she shared with my father, a home brief and unassuming, she knew me. She couldn't possibly have known me, which seems a cruel but necessary diagnosis. I tell myself this because, if history begins with someone else's memory of you, if my mother knew me then, my own child's history began at my kitchen basin as I heaved bile and worry, the smell of my cat's litter fixed in my nostrils like some kind of malignant aura or rotten eggs. The air carrying a thick decay around me, never leaving. Until, of course, it did. Three weeks later, my queasiness departing my body with the same fervour, the same immediacy that my pregnancy did. A moment. A womb the shape of a could-be home. A sort-of child, as in something, someone, brief and unassuming.' (Publication abstract)

'It's trending again, the hashtag that blows my mind: '#thisisnotjournalism'. It throws me, because of the question it begs. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the start of my journalistic career. I have taught journalism at various universities for about half that time. I have written books about journalism. The lecture I give to students in the first week of the year is titled 'What is journalism?'. So, you'd think I'd know what it was. And yet when that hashtag trends on Twitter, it upsets me. It leaves me stumped.' (Publication abstract)

'If ecopoetics necessarily entails concepts and acts of ecological justice in the making and reception of a poem, it can also too easily privilege a conversation about human responsibility to nature while, to some extent at least, obviating human responsibility to humans. Much of the overt damage humans have done to the biosphere has come about as a direct or indirect result of humans mistreating and exploiting humans, and has been a 'by-product' of the violation of the rights an exploiter applies to themselves but not to their victims. I would also argue that the exploitation of animals for capitalist profit is a violation of life rights too, as is the abuse of ecosystems such as forests or rivers, wetlands or woodlands, and so on. In trying to create complex models of justice that account for intersectionality but also parallelism of rights and needs, and in accounting for the agency of living things to exist in their differences and with their own precepts of existence, we might look to the poem as an organic and practical tool of articulating and respecting what often seem contradictory narratives of being.' (Publication summary)

'Melbourne had just emerged from its fifth lockdown and the bar was packed. A little after six on a drizzly Saturday eve, every table was occupied by punters perusing the leatherbound drinks list and shouting questions over the din. The decor was bordello chic, all velvet sofas, gilded mirrors and midnight-blue walls. Tasselled lamps adorned the bar and bird cages swung from the ceiling. Wait staff carried trays of negronis, 18 bucks a pop. The clientele skewed young and female. Around the biggest tables clustered twentysomething white women, dressed up for a big night out to cast off the lockdown blues. They had the expensive hair, perfect makeup and slight hauteur of cool girls worldwide. As night fell, they drank round after round of drinks poured from the backlit bottles that lined the bar. It was 'Sex and the City' meets hipster Melbourne. Except in one crucial respect, it wasn't. Despite appearances, there was no alcohol in this scene. The beer, the wine, the cocktails-all devoid of grog. The bar was Brunswick Aces, Australia's first alcohol-free watering hole, and every carousing patron was sober as a judge.' (Introduction)

'In September 2016 I was asked to translate into Hindi Charmaine Papertalk Green's poem 'Nhananggu Yagu'. Can you do it in three days? I was asked. I'll try, I said and finished the work in time. The translation was published a month later by Cordite Poetry in an online anthology of Dalit-Indigenous Australian poetry curated by Mridula Nath Chakraborty and Kent MacCarter.' 

(Publication abstract)

'Spring, well over a decade ago. I head up the rise before the fruit trees as a tiger snake moves across the path made by my regular round of the tree paddock, a cherished place transformed more than ten years before this sighting, from a barren stretch of grass and rocks. I jump back when I see the snake, two metres in one movement, an impossible feat when I'm not full of fear. It takes a jump like that for my body to know a particular place as snake habitat. Spring is when snakes move their slowest, when they are seen more than they are heard. I still tread that part of the paddock carefully when the sun starts to sting.' (Publication abstract)