Woman

the real sea snoring half a mile away
the scrubbed brick walls of the double lounge and its
samples of african drums flood the speakers

Is that your shadow, weightless,
a smudge of grey dust
in the black trickery of the she-oak?

the lyrebird
   in the moon,
with her cloudy skirt, shimmies down

                    Man

There are transparent fish
                                               lifting the mist
          fish, coral
and offspring. The red is too brilliant,
big as Africa

or an infant at the telescope's opposite end

cattle walk over a hill, their eyes connected, swivelling
    now there is no safety anywhere

The moon will fizz like a pill in a drink ...

Stuart Barnes

a cento sourced from Alison Clark's 'To the Moon Behind Branches', joanne burns' 'moon', Jill Jones' 'waiting for the moon beyond the disco', Dorothy Hewett's 'Moon-Man', Nicolette Stasko's 'The Moth and the Moon', Caroline Caddy's 'Editing the Moon', Kate Llewellyn's 'Speaking of the Moon', Dorothy Porter's 'Full Moon', M.T.C. Cronin's 'Sonnet of Eggs & Moons', Gary Catalano's 'Nocturnes', Robert Kenny's '[Was moved across these waters]', S.K. Kelen's 'Moon Beach', John Kinsella's 'The Healing Of The Circle', Mark O'Connor's 'Moon Over Mindil Beach', Alex Skovron's 'A Concise History of the Moon', Michael Dransfield's 'Philosophy of movement', Peter Porter's 'Diana and Actaeon', Alan Gould's 'Moon'.

Nan's budgerigar,
cat fed    squeezing like the morning
fog between oxidized barbed
wire and gorse
with an older cousin
with a slug gun

booting sheep skulls
stripped by gusts, our fathers'
1950s snares    swooped by plovers,
daring: 'yellow spurs! forearms
up!'   shooting star-
lings for laughs

another exhausted afternoon:
a hotted-up Torana: another burnout
to Warrant, to Poison
footy, swimming, cricket
on Pop's prized green, putting
with the wrong kind of club

transfixed by sixpence-
riddled heads hooked over the wash-
board   another hand of Patience
and Snap!   the glass swan
brimming with owl-red water
numb on mother-of-pearl veneer

lake   one more theft—
a short-finned eel, writhing
and crackling—from the Esk
squeal of cast iron frying
pans   slaps on the back   each mouth-
ful of muddy flesh foreign to a South-

erner   on each empty double bed
a leering toilet roll
doll   full moon, mid-
night's deer-sprint to the outdoor
loo   the top bunk's hexagonal wiring sprung,
the mattress oozing through the cells like honey

Stuart Barnes

... it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
—Sylvia Plath, 'A Birthday Present'

Here's some activity you may have missed:
pompadour-lure hung three days after I
disentangle.
                       'It misses me.'
The fourth: A lot has happened on
Facebook since you last logged in. And later:
Do you know [famous so-and-so]? You have more
friends on Facebook than you think.
                                                               Emboldened,
the fifth: You have new friends on Facebook.
'You can never have enough friends!' O.M.,
M.H. and two others have their birthday
today on the sixth.
                                 Her photophore
shimmers   shimmers   shimmers. I bite, dissolving skins.
Parasite, I atrophy to gonads: deepsea
love for my common black devil, my humpback.

Stuart Barnes

From his ebony eyrie
the moon is salubrious,
round as the white lotus' root.
The desert's his adversary.

The moon is salubrious
with his godly left eye.
The desert's his adversary,
spiteful, like a hippopotamus.

With his godly left eye
the moon is neither ossuary,
nor spiteful, like a hippopotamus,
a shape-shifting crocodile.

The moon is not an ossuary.
The desert is a troglodyte,
a shape-shifting crocodile.
The moon's a fresh apothecary,

the desert is a troglodyte.
From his ebony eyrie
the moon's a fresh apothecary,
round as the white lotus' root.

Stuart Barnes