Featured in
- Published 20240806
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-98-6
- Extent: 216pp
- Paperback, ePUB, PDF

Che Guevara is white and wearing a shirt
with his face on it, mansplaining Derrida or Adorno
a hat like your grandfather used to wear though at least
the man knew something about the great war [2]. This Che
hasn’t worked out how to borrow a book from the Baillieu yet
& his diary suggests a paranoid persona not a propensity
toward engines – see, he is trying to build something here
the exact proportions of which were lost with Da Vinci
or was it Dan Brown? Your dog, likewise, is a sommelier
of poop. Can snack twice on an idea of self but never
quite muster a technology. The part of the rewriting
in present tense hasn’t become present yet. Present
to self: presence. The sort of gift that keeps giving
you anxiety. Untangle a tongue, but still the memory
of knots. You are me are him, in a sense of difference
though there is nothing deferential about this. We both
hate him, hate you. Just join the environmental society
& hoon a cherry vape with someone just as old & stupid
as you will be. Imagine: dealing with humanity every day.
Imagine: people turn to you, gasp. Imagine: mansplaining
but this time end up with an abanico, a PowerPoint &
a briefcase. Imagine: the classroom gets that much
smaller and becomes an office.
Share article
More from author
Is poetry disabled?
In poetry’s capacity to self-define, to reject conventionality, to be in a constant state of flux and to hold the contradictory together in its granularity, it subverts formal systems of designation time and again. Poetry then avoids simple diagnosis, at least pre-emptively.
More from this edition
Class acts
Non-fictionSocial media has made available to us whole new audiences and vectors for class and lifestyle performance. Where previously your political commitments or what books you were reading might have been topics of conversation with close friends at the pub, now they can be projected to hundreds or thousands of followers. Eating at a restaurant is another example; a previously private and intimately social act can now be a place to be seen, not by the people you’re dining with, or even the other patrons, but by everybody who follows you.
Put your house in order
In Conversation Poet, performer and musician Pascalle Burton has always been compelled by the visual possibilities of language and the imaginative dynamism of collage. Her multimodal...
the road of ghosts
FictionGraeme works with me almost every day of each school holidays. He conducts sessions that stretch from an hour into two. He teaches me how to shoot; he splinters my form down into nothing and then restructures it until it is exact. Fingertips: the ball slides through the air into the ring. He shuffles after each rebound, his returning pass precise. Graeme pours himself into me. He is patient. He is generous. He is firm, like a grandfather.