Sunday, June 16, 2013

Volume 1., No. 3, Winter

Leaves Literary Journal


Contributors

Patrick Emanuelle
Ross Enrique
Mark Whitmore
Andrew Stinylus
Styulou Enderich
Francais Nichols
David Simpson

Patrick Emanuelle

 A Translation
THETIS ORDERING THE NEREIDS TO DESCEND
INTO THE SEA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
552
JUNO COMMANDING THE SUN TO SET. . . . . . . .
556
TRIPOD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
561
THETIS AND EURYNOME RECEIVING THE INFANT
VULCAN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
562
VULCAN AND CHARIS RECEIVING THETIS. . . . . .
564
THETIS BRINGING THE ARMOUR TO ACHILLES. . .
577
HERCULES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
592
THE GODS DESCENDING TO BATTLE. . . . . . . . .
597
CENTAUR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
614
ACHILLES CONTENDING WITH THE RIVERS. . . . .
628
THE BATH. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
662
ANDROMACHE FAINTING ON THE WALL. . . . . . .
663
THE FUNERAL PILE OF PATROCLUS. . . . . . . . . .
677
CERES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
705
HECTOR'S BODY AT THE CAR OF ACHILLES. . . . .
709
THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
710
IRIS ADVISES PRIAM TO OBTAIN THE BODY OF
HECTOR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
715
FUNERAL OF HECTOR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
744

Ross Enrique

A newness

Standing in the domain.
          I will never faulter
          But when I am here
there will come a new need,
to let go of the wetness
          that hides in shards of glass

but come now
          we must not faulter


Hearing

What comes
Will be enough,
To shelter
The sound      that is the spring
I will be here
for you
and all our children

Mark Whitmore

Style

We’ve all acquired some education

A bit of this a bit of that,

God be thanked, some imitation,

And we can all display éclat,

Onegin, he was deemed by many

(Critics stern, acute as any)

As well-read, but opinionated,

For conversation’s art created.

He had the gift of easy chatter,

Touching lightly on each theme,

Then like a very sage could seem

When talk was of some graver matter,

Yet make the ladies smile, un-clam

With some ready epigram.

Andrew Stinylus

The Temptation

Why are we here?
Because

Why do we need stimulation?
And why?

Only because
There is nothing left
And nothing left to bend
So true.


Regression

Why did Freud regress?
only because
When there was something more
he didn't take it.


Green

A night
That is neither cold
Nor hot
It is in the extremes they say
Well
Extreme
All that has come to pass
And all
That will come to pass.

Styulou Enderich

Silence is a wish that never can be granted

A well that seeps the dew of the stars
a noise that makes me hold you close

when lamplight reveals the mist as a ghost
a quarter moon will disappear into the darkness
and that which holds the sea from the sky
will believe once again
in what the laughter of the dawn has always known
(that silence is a wish that never can be granted).

Francais Nichols

La Boucle Retrouvee

Il retrouve dans sa memoire
La boucle de cheveux chatains
T'en souvient-il a n'y point croire
De nos deux etranges destins

Du boulevard de la Chapelle
Du joli Montmartre et d'Auteuil
Je me souviens murmure-t-elle
Du jour ou j'ai franchi ton seuil

Il y tomba comme un automne
La boucle de mon souvenir
Et notre destin qui t'etonne
Se joint au jour qui va finir


The Farewell

I picked this fragile sprig of heather
Autumn has died long since remember
Never again shall we see one another
Odor of time sprig of heather
Remember I await our life together

David Simpson

To Cease

A clashing
Darkness
Wanting
Without holding
Winding
in the meantime
I am here
and the treasure
of the mean
is inhanced
and then let go of

Why do we plunder
When to die
is enough to get by
Don't give up
Or else we all will.


Climbing

Each step
Is like the last
it knows that wind has its mark
in times that are for the deer
i am in my most selfish spirit
because when we are through
i will have it all.

Monday, April 1, 2013

Volume 1, No. 2, Autumn 2013

Leaves Literary Journal

Volume 1, No. 2, Autumn 2013

Contributors

Anna Fern
Stu Hatton
Stuart Barnes
Iain Britton
Phillip A. Ellis
Paul Fearne
Alice Melike Ulgezer
Les Wicks

Anna Fern


Anna Fern


in my chest
a grass tick buried deep
homesickness

cheap motel room
smoke alarm chirps
halfway there

dawn chorus
kookaburras chuckle and laugh
my insomnia

driving home from hospital visit
his health improving
an L-plater bunny hops

***

urgent proofreading job
across the pages he sprawls
purring

my velvet tin roof drummer
bounces to his own tune
purrs to the moon

spring shower
baby blackbirds hop on the lawn
cat sleeps inside

cleaning out the freezer
my dead cat’s kangaroo mince
rissoles and tears

Stu Hatton



sands


Sweat behind the knees; craving the shade that never finds us. When the only way out of a desert is to sit with it awhile. Thought we saw the bird flying but in fact it was grounded, lifeless. Drinking perspiration from a shirt. Deep in the desert, a bridge over sand … for what purpose? Scarves failing to filter dust from our lungs. Rubbing eyes with sand-fingers. We travel at night where possible.


after reverdy

for Paul


these are false portals
            through which nothing leaves

& what is the endless wall?
            what is the heavy house that sleeps?


a seedsman’s garden

            overcrowding of seeds, rose dust

if hope has no object, what are seedlings?

            the garden birds’ wings too short for the task


flows


Knowing there would be some way to continue. So many forms of breathing (breath-forms), the many stations of the breath. Breath spiral.

Bonding in the spiraling. Breathing changes what happens. Confidence in uniqueness. Trying to find out what the words want. The breathwork.

And then you know you’re in the detail; glints of the not-yet settle. Let the breath itself do the breathing. A house of breath is not a building. Countless forms of yes; yes-forms.

Time may enter or be entered … as flows. Tending toward multiplicity, multiple vectors, multiple persons. Two people will breathe this differently. A close reading of breath … a close dissolving.

Unbounded breath; no beginning, no endpoint of. No bounded system. Mind is part of the air. A home in yes, of flows … flows flow through flows.

Stuart Barnes



Stuart Barnes lives in Melbourne, Australia, where he writes & edits PASH capsule, a journal of contemporary love poetry. Poems are forthcoming in Southerly, blackmail press, sacred / profane, Mascara Literary Review, &Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry.


The Secret History,


your prized
thyrsus,
soon became mine
(no other could’ve prised my twenty-first
fist).

fist). In a leather bar
that Frenchman’s
spiteful
spiteful telling,
then the laughter—

The Bacchic shout awoke
A shoot entwined your throat

Quickly
I grasped some antiquity’s
safer
veiled.





                      †… I have chosen Thebes as the first place
To raise my Bacchic shout, and clothe all who respond
In fawnskin habits, and put my thyrsus in their hands –
The weapon wreathed with ivy-shoots –

—Euripides, The Bacchae, translated by Philip Vellacott, Penguin Books, 1973

Iain Britton




paper-orange philosophy   


first in queue

       you open the door

to the girl with the greenstone

pendant


             here’s

    where one’s beliefs change every day

                       where prayers become power points

                       items of possession

                       healers of hurt


your conversation with her

is predictably about tomorrow

the colour of the fountain

the sunset’s haemorrhaging

couples tucked into whispering


         you approach her softly / by the lake /

                      at the water’s edge


you enter

the prizegiving ceremonies
                                                                       
of her survival - her reliance on walking
through gates / the opening and shutting / each different
each for a particular reason - a walk on the wild side
through panoramas paddocks cities through invisible people

            your friendship with her

                   stops at the lake

        her journey is one of many phases

       here today /       then gone

               ubiquitous

                  in the next breath


and orange kites

              criss-cross valleys in the sky


she leaves your house every day

follows the path past motels cottages volcanic stones
boats fishermen rivers the living and the dead confessing

she’s there for you for the morning
                               for the evening
                               for meals /           she’s there

because the newspapers say so
because she’s become the main feature /      because


her survival is fixed

on the rose bush
the palm tree
the rows of perennials
your shirts
pegged on the clothes-line                                                                       

she lives on the wild side

          in a town

                which lives on sulphur

                    the tribal directions of a family

               which eats with ghosts

         beds down with ghosts


                        she starts each day

as if things

were pushing her towards the lake

          the galileen waters
          wash her feet
          rainbows beget rainbows
          orange kites grin
          loose pumice
          nudges albino hedge-
          hogs onto the beach


she can’t be ignored

            until all that’s ephemeral

                    is suddenly locked up

       for the night

Phillip A. Ellis



Phillip A. Ellis is a freelance critic, poet and scholar. His chapbooks, The Flayed Man and Symptoms Positive and Negative, are available. He is working on a collection for Diminuendo Press. Another has been accepted by Hippocampus Press. He is the editor of Melaleuca. His website is at http://www.phillipaellis.com/


The Battle Continues

The war is not over. We continue to fight,
find ourselves wearied, worn down.
The piano plays in a bar, where we find ourselves
as we listen to the sob and clubbing of gunfire,
and we wonder, wrapping thoughts around truth,
like the hands we wrap around our glasses,
whether it was worth it, this endless fight,
whether it was worth brutal force.

We ask who will win the war, and do not say
what we imagine to be the truth,
for it does not take the brave to stay alive
when we would rather be the cowards that we are,
finding a haven in a place
made of 1s and 0s, where we can no longer be weary.

Paul Fearne


Paul Fearne

A thousand


I never thought
that sunlight
would be so thick
as to drown the evening
in its own restless clawing

there are chances
and bright stars
that the daylight cannot hide
there are songs
that take the breathing of dreams
to let wander over sea shells

a corner
in a room
that a thousand children have been taught in
in that corner
a thousand tears have been shed
and each tear
upon hitting the floor
has given birth to a thousand dreams
a thousand new cities
a thousand works of art
untold marriages
and untold books

and when the tears have dried
and the cities have turned to dust
the art picked by wingless time
the marriages gone to a thousand generations
and the books to mere ideas
I will sing a new song
and it will be more lovely
than our hopes could bare
and it will be for you
and our children
and the wishing of the sun


The beauty of love


love and all it brings
hope and all that it lets us wish

when we find that special someone
we open our hearts
and our souls
and everything we thought was hidden
but when it comes to that missing heart beat
there is nothing like love
to bind the gap back together

we never know
what it truly means to love
until we have been there
and then
when the sand of the hourglass
no longer falls
here we find ourselves
through the mist
and into the arms of the other

but when we can no  longer feel life’s pulse
here love is
stretching
and bending us
to that deeper part of ourselves
that is not for touching
but for yearning
and all that comes to pass

when we look into the eyes of the beloved
here we find that something special
that we cannot describe
only hint at
when the dawn is at its most precious height
and the sparrow is at its nest
and feeding its young

but we must not be surprised at this
for when all the poets have had their say
and all the bards have sung their songs
there is something more that sweeps us away
and that is the strength we find
in the arms of the beloved
and dance which is love

I can only say one thing more
and that is
when we are through with everything about life
we return once again
to that centre
which is where love is
it holds us
breaks us
and transports us
to where we want to go
(and that is everywhere
and everything
and all that cannot be touched
by any hand of winter
or any lap of any wave
        on the hearth
              which is the beauty of love)


What we have always wanted


a sense
that we all have
that the daylight is a thief
as the time between moments
is what the scorching of the sun will take

and when we are through
I will have it all
and then
when the dance is done
and nothing can escape us
there will be a foraging
in the oldest places
we will find ancient manuscripts
and know them to be new
and then
when the darkness has left us without sight
I will forge a new path to the sea
            and we will come to know
                   what we have always wanted