Courtney Love is heading to Australia for her first tour since 1999. I saw Hole play at Selina’s in Coogee, Sydney in 1995 having travelled down from Newcastle with my bandmates from all-girl band Sycorax. I loved Hole! I still do. I remember buying the 7-inch of Retard Girl from Cooks Books second-hand book and record shop and relishing in the grainy sounds emanating from the beautiful blue vinyl spinning on the record player. Hole were so much better than Nirvana, in my eyes, but of course Courtney Love copped flak for everything she did, from what she wore, to her demeanor, to the circumstances surrounding Kurt’s death. Hole, and earlier bands such as Frightwig and The Slits, saved us in a culture of male-dominated rock and punk music in a town renowned for its macho masculinity.

             Sycorax playing at El Nino’s World Environment Day gig at the                              Hunter on Hunter, Newcastle, Circa 1995.

Hole’s show was chaotic to say the least, but it was beyond memorable. Supporting them was Magic Dirt, and even though I wasn’t a huge fan, lead-singer Adalita was a force to be reckoned with on stage. Selina’s was a mix of Hole devotees and yobbo-boy-locals yelling obscenities and spilling beer down our backs. I wasn’t ready for them. Looking back on it now I realise that I’d naively thought that the only people watching, the only people who could afford a ticket, were die-hard Hole fans, not packs of guys who didn’t even seem to know who was playing or seemed to care.

My friends and I pushed our way to the front. It was an epic mosh and I swear for nearly the entire gig my feet didn’t touch the ground. Being short has always made for difficult times seeing bands, but I stuck it out at the front near the stage despite the fact that I felt like I was hyperventilating, could barely feel my body, and my friends, who I swear were right there next to me, were nowhere to be seen. Courtney herself was a shambles, but the crowd didn’t care ’cause she was Courtney Love!!! and this was Hole. We didn’t want polished, we didn’t want ‘nice’. For every new song Courtney was brought a new guitar, an expensive guitar at that, but for every new guitar she was handed, fewer and fewer chords were strummed and the songs became a messy blur.

When Courtney climbed the speaker stack it was the perfect rock ‘n roll moment. She loomed over me like a satin-clad angel. When she jumped, my arms waved frantically in the air to catch her. She jumped and fell hard. It was simultaneously amazing and terrifying to have Courtney Love stage dive into my hands. Her shoes came off and were lost among the crowd. Someone found one and threw it back. It pegged bass player Melissa Auf der Maur in the head causing her to go to hospital and Courtney threatening to cancel the show.

When the gig was over I was disoriented and confused. My friends were nowhere to be seen and I, the least hardcore of the group when it came to moshing, had stayed in the thick of things until the end. I eventually found them, standing off to the side of the stage. They’d left the mosh ages before and laughed their heads off at the fact that I’d stayed up the front where it’d been so intense. I left the gig totally elated and totally wasted, with someone’s fingerprints bruised into my right shoulder blade, and the wire rim of another person’s homemade fairy wings bruised into the other.

I’m really excited to have two poems appear in the July Issue of Moko Magazine! This is the third issue of Moko, a wonderful new online publication featuring the work of writers and visual artists from the Caribbean and its diasporas.

Check out Radio National’s Poetica programme for their inspiring piece about the poet John Anderson and his writing about both the Yarra River and Merri Creek, Melbourne. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/poetica/

  

Cloudburst

It’s been raining
for awhile now

–Kimya Dawson

I

There is

the before                    and

                   after

the present           a lingering mass
inching back in
on itself
like a jellyfish washed upon the shore

before death
this was all there is
now we cling to photos
of his cheeky grin
pale hands of
ginger-freckled skin

II

the future is inaudible

a place of no footprints

like stepping on the shoreline of a salt lake

III

the night he died
a storm blew up
and gum leaves shook like pom-poms in the wind

it rained for weeks then

we’re travelling now
across country
to where the earth looks like fire
and clouds conjure the ocean
and all things metaphysical
guiding us
is a bright blue and yellow plastic boat
we don’t know where he got it
(somewhere second-hand)
but it sits wedged on the curved, black dashboard
as though on a rolling sea
pointing to mother-of-pearl clouds
and those cursing under their breath

it was the flood that stopped us from crossing
the highway at Sandy Creek
so we camped on the side of the road
in a constant cloud of mosquitoes so aggressive
their bites could be mistaken for chickenpox
in the morning
his brother swam in the pool of water on the roadside
his body floating
like a snow angel
above the asphalt

Published in antiTHESIS. 21 (2011): 172

Today walking along the footpath toward the beach, the sky misty grey obscuring the horizon, paperbarks lined the street, their skin shedding in the heat, bare feet hard against concrete, calloused and dry.

I dreamt of showing my little boy his first starfish, while he slept on nearby.

Where do they walk

those following the death road?

Short sharp milky gasps

of breath drawn cold.

Do they follow the same path

desire lines through hospital wards

and calloused streets?

On the ghost road,

out-of-date clothes, Tupac holograms

homes cast by shadow

Neon-orange cotton wool ball clouds.

Tomatoes in planter boxes nailed to telegraph poles along the laneway.

A silver-haired man walks in front of me, his metallic transistor radio broadcasting to the both of us.

It is the I don’t-know-how-many-eth day over thirty degrees and lemon gums ooze their astringent scent into the near-night sky.

Across the road in the high-rise, a woman obscured nose-up by the regulatory venetian blinds watches the sunset. From my balcony–a white china bowl, a fork, and her hand slowly eating.

Carlton, Melbourne, 6th March 2013

The streets and pathways of the city were dark and gloomy at night. The houses with their faces to sea were blank and blacked out. Only through doors that faced inland came “occasional glimmers of light”.  The brownout, a “half-way business of restricted light and deceptive shadow”, gave a strange air to a familiar scene, “distorting the shapes of the trees, casting monstrous shadows over the street”.

sometimes, at night
between Moreton Bay Figs
there is something watching,
in the corner of the eye
a shadow, an eclipse
a feeling like crepitus
and lions pad across the road under a sky of rust
near the buildings of the Catholic Church.
Three years ago, in my parents’ garden, I planted a fig

small                           spindly             thing

now I touch its smooth trunk and varnished leaves
its roots tapping the labyrinthine seam
running inland from the coast
where the distant hum of machines echo
the cochlea

the tracing of a snail’s shell with my fingertip

The air above is musk
Port-wine magnolias and warm rain,
but from here the city is imagined,
the Cathedral’s dog-like sneer
steps leading nowhere

I twist feet on slipped gutters
slide on sticky berries and hills of limbs
lying under bitumen

trunks stamped on the street like elephant feet

halfway down Tyrrell Street
past the rook in its corner square,
the figs
were sliced to stumps

their roots cross-hatched like a bone collection

—

Work Cited:
John Ramsland “Silver pencils of light”: Fragments of Remembered and Forgotten Space in Wartime Newcastle”. R. John Moore and Michael J. Ostwald Eds. Hidden Newcastle: Urban Memories and Architectural Imaginaries. Ultimo: Gadfly Media, 1997.

—

Published in antiTHESIS. 16 (2006): 90