Learning of the death of the Circus Girl   Your family had been Circus for generations.   When we were very young We dressed as toreadors in spangles, Rode ponies in the Grand Parade. So I was Circus, too. My young life’s proudest moments. The second proudest (What would Health and Safety say today?) Was […]

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The Great Male-versus-Female Guitar Contest of 1933 Little Lizzy Douglas (they called her the kid), was born in Louisiana, in a farmer’s shed. She didn’t like farming, she didn’t like her name, so she grabbed a guitar and hopped on a train. Little Lizzie Douglas stepped on board— but when she stepped off, Memphis Minnie […]

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The Last Voyage   They came at us with rocks and spears, the oldest of our soldiers falling with his head split open, blood as red as his coat, while muskets rattled from the long boat. The captain turned his back on the attackers, shouting, perhaps, to stop the shooting. So they stabbed him from […]

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A Single Sparrow The present life of man, O king, seems to me like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I […]

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On the Composition of Haiku   i The haiku master— labouring past the moment to seize the moment.   ii Counting syllables— the ancient haijin did not count it beneath them.   iii Attempting to touch in seventeen syllables a small thing as such.   Andrew Lansdown         Ukiyo-e Kawaii   Plainly […]

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Sense of Out-of-Place Barbecue. Unincorporated community in North Carolina. Bastardstown. Townland in Wexford, Ireland (Irish name: Baile Bhastaird). Batman. City, in Turkey, threatened to sue Warner Bros for use of name. Bitch Mountain. Summit in Essex County, New York. Boring, Oregon. Sister city to Dull, Scotland, and Bland, NSW. Boquete. Small town in Panama. (Boquete […]

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Peacocks When the rain came that afternoon, I put on the Emperor. At first I thought it was the peacock strutting on the roof scrabbling around, but no, the downpour was flooding the damp ground. I had seen them earlier, the peacocks, head to head, cock to hen in what appeared to be avian affection. […]

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The Whale Watcher’s Road, Moreton Bay The Humpbacks have a way of knowing beyond our ken, their biomagnetic cortex tuned to an inner codex each new season, one where songs of their ancestors pull aside the curtain of time as they cruise the Whales’ Road northward, up from the Antarctic to Moreton Bay to leave […]

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Serpentarium She can fit a thirty-foot giant into one sheet of A4,   pack pythons into her sketchbook,   squeezing their loops in tight breeding-balls, until   the man comes with his forked stick and pins her head down.   She must have been drawing too fast, her tail in her mouth   like Ouroboros—that’s […]

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Lineage You’ve heard it said, or seen it inferred, we never lose our parents and only ever find parts of them. The bits they didn’t hide, the bits they couldn’t piece together, the bits and pieces that make up a big part of you, the chips off their blocks along with irksome blockages to go […]

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