NASTURTIUMADE – Going Down Swinging

Ursula Robinson-Shaw is a writer living in Naarm/Melbourne. Her recent work has been published in Sydney Review of Books, Cordite and Overland. She is co-director of sick leave.

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NASTURTIUMADE

by Ursula Robinson-Shaw & Madalene Roper

COMIC POEMS,Comics,Poetry

March 22ND, 2024 / COMIC POEMS

She’s the kind of doctor who asks do you want a mandarin. It is a beautiful sunny afternoon in what now amounts to a season. What are my ambitions? Morally serious personhood, frivolous artwork, suppressed allusions, to be free for all hours, to purchase and read Nigella’s husband’s regicide book, to fall out of love with everyone. No verse, only social life. Do not describe the night. I must be younger now I am older. I have enough money to make choices, but not enough to outsource. I used to think, dead at 50 and good riddance. Now it is not so far off, not close enough to commit. You know not the day nor the hour, but you could. I guess I am training for war. Beauty and courage in times of fear. ‘Beauty’, I know. But the first found adornments were made for the hunt. Frills or no, you will get sick and die, said Abigail, so why quit smoking. She said a fraud, that is a poet, is concerned above all with their own status as an attempt. Whereas jewellery denotes our human commitments. Yet you can get a degree in poetry. Burning bushels in the shape of rings, spontaneous passions, a cold draft running over. Obsession with mastery re-centres the soul. Now I am older, I am on the rocks. All my lines are timeless, that is, irrelevant to history. Here I am finally myself, that is divided, legless at Lachie’s bar, floundering for a nameless emotion, but I refuse this shit about the law. There are many ways to make the world, but only a poet opens a door to close on their fingers, turns their back on anyone who’ll listen, knows that guile is the beautiful art. — The doctor said take my words and mandarins, I don’t consider them property, they’re creative commons, like Friday, to the benefit of all heathens. Our names running over: Looking, Speaking, Joking, Kissing, Revelry, Late Nights, Invisible Kingdoms, swearing off the love of women, swearing back on, freedom. What aren’t we permitted.

A swirling abstracted drawing in shades of grey, green and orange. Faces, hands, a dagger and a wine glass appear within the mist.

words by Ursula Robinson-Shaw

art by Madalene Roper

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Nikes — by Danny Silva Soberano
spot in the house where the phone works — by Nat Briggs & Edie Bush
Find a Homophobe, Ask Her How It Tastes — <3 <3 <3 poem by Madison Griffiths <3 <3 <3
Haven’t We All Wanted To Sink In A Sequined Outfit? — Comic poem by Madison Godfrey and Ele Jenkins
Reception Theory or How to Sit in an Office Chair — by Autumn Royal & Lee Lai
Badenoch Street — by Jessica Kilkenny
What wouldn’t take root in the cucamelon garden — by Clare Millar
Ode to friendship — by Anneliz Marie Erese & KAZKOM
Circle Jerk — by Xanthe Dobbie
It Goes, I Had a Dream I Was Your Hero — by Madison Griffiths
Inertness — A poem by Grace Chan and illustration by James Martin
How To Talk To White People — Comic by Aries Gacutan
The Wedding — by Georgia Rose Phillips
[in the pebbled rut] — by Christine Hamm
Like a song, like a dance — Spoken word poetry and translations by Coco X. Huang
8.44pm — by Ouyang Yu
astral projecting — by Ava Chapman
ice-skating — by Izma Haider

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info@goingdownswinging.org.au

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