Paul Hardacre’s poetry has been published in literary journals throughout Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and the United States, including Meanjin, Westerly, Imago, Verandah, Cordite, Yomimono and Southerly. He is the editor of papertiger, Australia’s first CD-rom journal of poetry, and contributing Queensland editor for the South Australian journal of poetry and poetics, Sidewalk. Self-Portrait with Small Monkey september: frida kahlo smoking a cigarette on the beach caramel nipples dripping sunscreen like some surrealist timepiece wilting polio’s crutch & saint anthony lifting the folds of virginal snow skirt a mock wedding portrait digging a hole in the sand to bury banana skins & used tissues her finger penetrates an egg a crimson, u-shaped cactus flower opening the polished cuttlefish of her smile carried by the wind onto rocks in one photographic plate pamphlett dressed in obsolete hair-shirt swims cimmerian waters of moreton bay in another (from the first official photographer of mexico’s cultural patrimony) some years have passed pamphlett is bearded of course wears skins eats pippies for tucker with the blacks his thylacine blood collected by romans beneath a bridge on a northern highway where white mercedes-benz children eat prickly pear study post-Sumerian graffiti vomit barley sugar into plastic ice-cream buckets delete the sky umbilical (in charming peasant frames of glass and tin). Chhinnamasta for Marion Rosalie Hardacre I. downstairs, behind the laundry mother shuffles labyrinth footsteps traces tritons and wentletraps in four decades of dust, extends one puffy hand opens her mouth speaks the language of battered trunks. II. a bottle find just outside Kalgoorlie in 1972 when Gary was little a pile the size of the kitchen standing as tall as your shoulder marble bottles as long as torpedoes shattered deliberately, shakes her head voice thick with disbelief. III. inside the storeroom words extinguish stillness whiteants dream from cracks of grandfather's card table primitive waxen effigies, seaside photos 1971. IV. on a shelf, in a faded green duffle bag a battery of trumpet shells, egg and spindle cowries nine seasons of nervous Saturdays the chipped blue railing crunch of gravel carpark and winter sun, ambitious spilling gooseberry faces. V. at four, we feed birds the ramshackle stairs heavy with frangipani crawl through the catflap sit down to bowls of tin coal water asbestos. VI. later, dining on holes in air even our smiles are postmarked vanished into white, the blueprint gemini rising. The Hill of Life drinking strong & sweet tea listening to Mal Morgan climb dark stairs & tell moon stories awake to the world he says meditate on a bed of lime. on my mattress red barbed wire green plastic soldiers boys hold hands & dream of the Pyramids & the bird a princess parrot calls to me wrestles plastic farm animals then falls back content to dream of street pedlars selling Ramakien battle scenes and children combing smouldering heaps of refuse & living beneath cars in starving cinereous light. to my right the monkey-king Hanuman levitates on a cloud struggles with demonic agents of Ravana then like a blazing comet he flies fast & generous speedy & bright to the hills where luminous plants shine as cold white fire to the hills where day is night & night is day & holy saints retreat to icy cliffs to contemplate trees & stones & elephants atrophied limbs & coloured veins of ore pockets of snow & falling rivers to the hills where cheap wine is nectar & the obituary of a poet is headline news & the dead have no choice but to huddle on the shelves of the black library while those they left behind stand at the shore of the dream-sea & announce I am all this, All this Life; I am all this.