Joel Ephraims
Joel Ephraims is a NSW South-coast poet. He has won two national awards and has been published in many Australian places including Griffith Review, Cordite, The Marrickville Pause, Australian Poetry Journal, Verity La, Overland, The Red Room Company, Mascara, Seizure and The Australian Weekend Review. In 2013 his chapbook Through the Forest was published with Express Media and Australian Poetry as part of The New Voices Series. He recently edited a guest issue of The Marrickville Pause.
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The Aviary
It was only a matter
of building the stone cage
in the shape of a cathedral bell
with secular picture windows
plaiting its curve
for the flying trams to come.
They came slow at first
and warily,
like established patients
to a new hospital ward,
but in less time than it takes
a young woman
to pass through the state’s
many educational systems
and embark upon her desired career
the optimal amount
had lingered for the drawbridge
to be lowered.
To wake up
at the bottom of that bell dome
to the brass elm-splash
of their spiralling chimes
is like discovering you gave birth long ago
to a celestial no-time
far, far, far above
your undressable mind.
And then later, outside
in nighted day
a bob-haired bird came up to me:
‘You look better than you did before.
That it's you makes me feel
a whole lot better myself.’
The Spiral Way
I
Vision Through the Neo-cortex
The cranes which absent themselves
at night appear at all points of morning.
You know that that which
is capable of sleep
has all prerequisites for life.
As books are taken
from supermarket shelves
the people accrue
in the questions posed them.
‘Submarine battles in ear canals,’
many onlookers say.
‘Gahhhhh…my labyrinthitis again...,’
the governess with charity investments
in stolen baboons trails away.
Gold-coated stone bluffs
continue to Rolex-pace
with ever more revolved faces.
We continue our etching
under shadow
of our adjustable fantasy trees.
II
Interstice Blues
August 8th 2017 7:30pm
Callistemon scattered former sea bed.
Japanese girl’s off-season Halloween
love elbow quiver.
April 29th 2016 1:33pm
The Rocks:
penny-farthing walked.
Circular ghost tour advertisement
clipped to front wheel spokes.
Paved courtyard hat catalogue shoot.
February 12th 2017 6:04am
A room of wine glasses:
Cabernet, Burgundy, balloon, flute,
stemless, aerating, rose, Zinfandel;
and a single whiskey glass
with a pattern of winding windows
getting smaller towards the base.
Each smeared with lipstick
faint to almost dark.
The ineffable pride
of having been chosen by them,
their traces living forever
in my dreams where no walls stay.
Neon, pastels, all the primary colours.
November 23rd 2018 8:02pm
Walking down the escalators
onto the underground train platform
Ben said, ‘they are like Dorylus ants.’
‘But why,’ I said, over-thinking his point,
‘do we always do that?
Ants have six legs, we have two.
In terms of networks
the differences are dwarfing.
Ants can’t say anything of us.
February 12th 2017 7:02am
Climbing a spiral stair.
Going up or down.
Legs turned to spiralling jelly.
No landing except
a field of psychal energy,
warm, too bright or freezing
to the touch.
Geographical terms
turned to water.
May 22nd 2016 12:57pm
Summer candidates,
cardboarded Mcdonald’s latte–
overheated.
June 3rd 2016 5:30pm
I saw a poster I had seen
of Hugh Jackman
framed like an oil painting
but glassed over
on the outside wall
of an opulent French-styled
shopping mall in Ho Chi Minh City.
Now, it was Wolverine
behind the glass on the poster
with trimmed sideburns
and subtly applied blush
beckoning with manicured claws,
platinum wrist watch and
irradiating smile
to a Vietnamese woman
slicing hair-matted coconuts
on a pre-schooler’s chair.
August 30th 2018 6:32pm
The new Prime Minister pets
his jumping spiders.
To secure the future,
intelligent metal wads
for the sky.
June 7th 2016 7:03pm
Lime green,
incising night-barred trees.
Leaf blower sweating on carpet.
New American ground missile
defence site in Romania.
June 20th 2017 5:59am
A nude photo of Oprah Winfrey
and a time machine
doubling as a flying artificial womb.
The photo was autumnal TV static sepia,
Oprah was uniformly covered in plastic hair
like vacuum cleaner brush bristles
except of every colour imaginable.
In the background of the photo,
over which the time machine-womb
cast its shadow before it disappeared,
the BFG from the Disney adaptation
sprayed plastic hair stimulation
aerosol leaflets from rooftops
while saluting okra-shaped
Australian jets razing Raqqa.
July 17th 2018 7:00pm
Amnesty International
labels the US-led Coalition’s
Raqqa casualty figures ‘artificially low’,
not credible, their denials
‘knee-jerk reactions’,
extended families wiped out
in a ‘horrendous toll’.
December 1st 2018 5:34pm
Things grow smaller
and more complex.
III
There, Shadow!
On the perimeter wall
of Daniel’s Engineering,
by the self-heal wreathed
five-foot high, head-warning tunnel
going under the railway tracks,
by a line of Islamic green,
antique brass, Air Force blue (USAF),
copper penny and atomic tangerine
coloured, unlabelled oil barrels,
a 4-chan-style graffiti version
of Bart Simpson’s face melting.
BART
Oasis's of holding
in narratives of decay
where skateboard parks teeter
and machines transmute
consumerist visions.
Predictably, they have used the wrong shade
of yellow again.
Would that I could
depart for a record-breaking,
abandoned ghost city skyscraper,
lack of body notwithstanding.
Chick beaks sparkle
in the jumpsuited jumpsuit tree.
Tutankhamun's dagger
was made of meteorite metal,
his mask first of all
most likely by collision
of neutron stars.
[A few held moments of silence.]
In the town
where everyone is Shakespeare
the sun sets five hundred times
at roughly a quarter past six in the evenings.
A great chute is carried
on Medieval-mutated shoulders,
long evolved
it is used to carry gold from the ground
making vast vortex swamps.
[A brief pause not long enough to collect full silence.]
Voices flap like skyscraper windows
tangling on an all-purpose clothesline in Heaven:
PEPPA PIG
Never send a human
to do a machine's job.
AGENT SMITH
It’s freezing and snowing
In New York – we need
global warming!
TURNBULL
Pressurized lips and squeezed eyes
fish-sucker golf-course time.
MIRANDA
Shard of solar panel, ion lithium,
marsupial areola, shaving of safety mechanism...
SHORTEN
If you'll sit down,
I'll bear your logs the while: pray, give me that.
FIRST WITCH, SECOND WITCH, THIRD WITCH
The challenge before us is real,
the questions we grapple with
as real as life and death.
AZORIN
I'm not making a salad!
Joel Ephraims is a NSW South-coast poet. He has won two national awards and has been published in many Australian places including Griffith Review, Cordite, The Marrickville Pause, Australian Poetry Journal, Verity La, Overland, The Red Room Company, Mascara, Seizure and The Australian Weekend Review. In 2013 his chapbook Through the Forest was published with Express Media and Australian Poetry as part of The New Voices Series. He recently edited a guest issue of The Marrickville Pause.
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