Blowfly Grass

by Les Murray

The houses those suburbs could afford

were roofed with old savings books, and some

seeped gravy at stitches in their walls;

some were clipped as close as fury,

some grimed and corner-bashed by love

and the real estate, as it got more vacant,

grew blady grass and blowfly grass, so called

for the exquisite lanterns of its seed,

and the land sagged subtly to a low point,

it all inclined way out there to a pit

with burnt-looking cheap marble edges

and things and figures flew up from it

like the stones in the crusher Piers had

for making dusts of them for glazes:

flint, pyroclase, slickensides, quartz, schist,

snapping, refusing, and spitting high

till the steel teeth got gritty corners on them

and could grip them craw-chokingly to grind.

It’s their chance, a man with beerglass-cut arms

told me. Those hoppers got to keep filled. A girl,

edging in, bounced out cropped and wrong-coloured

like a chemist’s photo, crying. Who could blame her

among in-depth grabs and Bali flights and phones?

She was true, and got what truth gets.

Purring

by Coleman Barks

The internet says science is not sure
how cats purr, probably
a vibration of the whole larynx,
unlike what we do when we talk.

Less likely, a blood vessel
moving across the chest wall.

As a child I tried to make every cat I met
purr. That was one of the early miracles,
the stroking to perfection.

Here is something I have never heard:
a feline purrs in two conditions,
when deeply content and when
mortally wounded, to calm themselves,
readying for the death-opening.

The low frequency evidently helps
to strengthen bones and heal
damaged organs.

Say poetry is a human purr,
vessel mooring in the chest,
a closed-mouthed refuge, the feel
of a glide through dying.

One winter morning on a sunny chair,
inside this only body,
a far-off inboard motorboat
sings the empty room, urrrrrrrhhhh
urrrrrrrhhhhh
urrrrrrrhhhh

Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.
- Cary Grant

When I Call

by John Brantingham

As I talk to her,
I like to think of
our paperback copy
of Thomas More's
Utopia sitting

on the phone table.
No one reads Utopia
No one has ever
read Utopia
No one has ever

wanted to read
Utopia, not
even Thomas More.
The only action
it will ever see

is when she absently
flips its pages while
she talks to me . When
I call, I like to
think of her doing that.

Sean Penn Anti-Ode

by Dean Young

Must Sean Penn always look like he’s squeezing

the last drops out of a sponge and the sponge

is his face? Even the back of his head grimaces.

Just the pressure in his little finger alone

could kill a gorilla. Remember that kid

whose whole trick was forcing blood into his head

until he looked like the universe’s own cherry bomb

so he’d get the first whack at the piñata?

He’s grown up to straighten us all out

about weapons of mass destruction

but whatever you do, don’t ding his car door with yours.

Don’t ask about his girlfriend’s cat.

Somewhere a garbage truck beeps backing up

and in these circumstances counts as a triumph of sanity.

Sleet in the face, no toilet paper,

regrets over an argument, not investing wisely,

internment of the crazy mother, mistreatment

of laboratory animals.

Life, my friends, is ordinary crap.

Pineapple slices on tutu-wearing toothpicks.

Those puke bags in the seatback you might need.

The second DVD only the witlessly bored watch.

Some architectural details about Batman’s cape.

Music videos about hairdos, tattoos, implants and bling.

The crew cracking up over some actor’s flub.

Hardware

by Ronald Wallace

My father always knew the secret
name of everything—
stove bolt and wing nut,
set screw and rasp, ratchet
wrench, band saw, and ball—
peen hammer. He was my
tour guide and translator
through that foreign country
with its short-tempered natives
in their crewcuts and tattoos,
who suffered my incompetence
with gruffness and disgust.
Pay attention, he would say,
and you'll learn a thing or two.

Now it's forty years later,
and I'm packing up his tools
(If you know the proper
names of things you're never
at a loss) tongue-tied, incompetent,
my hands and heart full
of doohickeys and widgets,
whatchamacallits, thingamabobs.

Windows is Shutting Down

by Clive James

Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.

Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must be meant to had.

The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.

Too bad for we, us what has had so long
The best seat from the only game in town.
But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?
Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.