Tag: Australian

Categories
Slices from Life

Serendipity in Vietnam

Narrative by Meredith Stephens: Photographs by Alan Noble

Boat which took the author and her husband to Mekong Delta

We alighted from the ferry and disembarked at a small island in the Mekong Delta. Our Vietnamese guide had promised us that we could witness how local people lived. After walking along a trail, we were ushered into a small boat with a local lady at the rear who would row us down the river. We stepped into the back of the boat and another couple stepped into the front.

“Would you mind taking a photo of us?” asked a woman with a bright smile and an energetic voice. I could hear she was English. Then the four of us started bantering and I detected that her partner was English too.

Next, we hopped off the boat and were treated to the chance to hold a cobra, sample local delicacies, and listen to the villagers’ musical performance. The next day we were taken to a restaurant where you could make your own seafood pancakes. Just before lunch, we were given the opportunity to cycle along a nearby path. Those of our group who wished to cycle selected a bicycle. I chose one and headed to the path. Then I looked ahead of me and realised that the English woman’s bike was the wrong size for her.

Cycling tour of the village

“Would you like to swap bicycles? Mine is too large and yours seems to be too small.”

She nodded. We swapped bicycles and seemed to find the perfect match. Our tour guide gave the signal and off we went. After a few kilometres, he signaled to stop so the group would stay together. I found myself at the front of the group and turned around to see the English woman immediately behind.

“I commuted to work by bike for twenty years,” I explained, surprised to be the one who had to stop so the others could catch up.

“I was in Japan. Japan is much friendlier to cyclists. The traffic is slower, and the roads narrower. It’s easier than driving, at least for short distances.”

She nodded. “They cycle a lot in Amsterdam. Also in Cambridge, where I lived for three years.”

I didn’t want to ask too many personal questions of this woman I had only just met, but I was curious. I wondered if she had studied at Cambridge University. Instead of being nosy, I added a few comments about Cambridge.

“We visited there recently. We stayed on the outskirts, and walked in. We had to walk through a park where there were cows grazing with bells around their necks. I much prefer Cambridge to Oxford.”

“Yes, it’s smaller. But Oxford is pretty good too!” she added.

By then the other cyclists had caught up. We continued along the path and then returned for lunch. We resumed the tour and were dropped off back in Ho Chi Minh City.

“Where can we store our luggage?” Alex asked her.

“Here at the tourist agency. We’ll leave ours there while we pop into the markets to get Ian a new backpack. His is broken.”

“Thanks for the tip. By the way, do you have an email address so we can exchange photos?”

“Sure. Where are you heading next?” she asked.

“Hoi An,” she replied.

“Oh! We are going there too. We are doing a cooking class. Would you like to join us?” offered Alex.

“Sure! Send us the link.”

We parted ways.

“See you in Hoi An,” I said, hoping that we could meet again.

The English woman was so easy to talk to, so quick to respond, and pick up on any nuance. I’d already decided that she must be a therapist. I had been trained since early adulthood not to ask people what they did for a living. It wasn’t fair to allow your knowledge of their career success to determine your assessment of them. But I admit to being curious. If she had studied at Cambridge, what career had followed?

Alex and I caught a sleeper train to Hoi An. There we found generously proportioned historic buildings. However, there were too many tourists in Hoi An, people like us. We walked around the town and felt overwhelmed. We could barely move down the street without bumping into other tourists.

Night train
Train station

The next day Alex texted the English woman. He must have been just as eager to meet the couple again as I was.

“Sorry, your cooking class was full. We booked another one. How about drinks this evening?” she replied.

Alex accepted. That evening we made our way to the bar she had suggested. They stood up and hugged us.

“I’m Jill* by the way. And this is Ian*.”

“I’m Alex, and this is Merri.”

We ordered a gin and tonic. They were drinking beer.

“Since we were meeting you today, we thought we’d better order a gin and tonic,” I explained. This drink brought back memories of England.

After we had sipped our drinks, Alex broached the question that was on my mind.

“So, what do you do when you’re not touring in Vietnam?” he asked.

“I write historical fiction. Ian has retired. When the children were younger, he supported me, but now it’s my turn to support him.”

I was beside myself with excitement. If you asked me which profession intrigued me most, I would have said a writer. I have little inclination to meet actors, politicians, astronauts, rocket scientists, or billionaires, but I certainly would like to meet writers (not to mention musicians). For the next couple of hours, Jill shared her experience of writing, and Alex and I shared our experiences of sailing. I was so excited that I lost my appetite and only nibbled a few snacks at the end of the evening. They told us that they lived in a nearly three-hundred-year-old house in Somerset*, one of my favourite places in the UK.

“Just a warning. We will visit,” Alex added.

“Certainly!” replied Jill.

“And please come sailing with us when our boat is ready!” I urged.

We parted company, and I floated all the way back to the hotel. I looked up her many books online and resolved to read her latest one as soon as I could.

A day later, Alex and I caught another sleeper to Hanoi. It was so pleasant rolling along the tracks that I was lulled to sleep as soon as I lay down. I informed Alex that when we returned to Adelaide, I needed a sleep machine that mimicked the motion of rolling along the tracks and provided the accompanying background noise.

When we exited the station a throng of taxi drivers approached us to offer us rides. We had been advised that it is more secure and economical to use the local ride called Grab[1]. I shielded Alex from one driver that persisted in following him around too closely. I positioned myself between Alex and the driver with my back to the driver. Then we looked over and saw a couple laden with suitcases and eyes glued to their phones. The husband made eye contact with me and gave an exaggerated Gallic shrug and I immediately knew they were French. They looked desperate, and I knew I had to put my rusty French to practice. Years of study at the Alliance Francaise did not equip me to use my French in context. French speakers tended to switch to English as soon as I made my opening gambit in French. This was either because my English accent was too strong, or the French speakers wanted to practice their English. However, this time, the urgency of the situation prompted me to use my French.

“Have you tried to use Grab? It’s less expensive,” I informed them.

“We couldn’t install it. We’re trying to contact the hotel. They were meant to pick us up.”

Her husband was persevering on the phone.

“We’re meant to be going home tomorrow,” the wife informed me. “But our flight has been cancelled.”

“Because of the…,” I offered, unable to quickly find the words for ‘Middle East conflict’.

“Because of the…,” she confirmed. She knew what I meant.

“We were here for our anniversaire,” she explained.

I knew that ‘birthday’ is ‘anniversaire’ in French, but as I was scrambling to communicate, I temporarily assumed that it meant its false friend, anniversary.

“How many years?” I asked.

“69 and 64,” she explained.

Whoops! She must have meant birthday. I pointed to Alex. “He’s ten weeks older than me,” I added.

She laughed and then switched to English.

‘Where are you from?” she asked.

She must have known we were anglophones, but not which anglophone country we came from.

“Australia,” I replied.

She was very surprised to hear this. I continued to scramble to make meaningful conversation, sacrificing precision for getting the words out quickly.

“We come from a town that no-one has heard of,” I added in exaggeration, reverting to French. “Our city Adelaide often gets left out when visiting performers and VIPs come to Australia.”

She laughed again. Then Alex saw on his phone that our Grab ride had arrived. We picked up our bags and exited the station.

Alex decided to join in in French.

“Bonne chance,” he said, hoping they would soon find their transport.

“Bon voyage,” she replied.

“Bon voyage,” I echoed.

I felt sorry and guilty as we boarded our Grab outside the station.

The third serendipitous encounter was on our boat tour in Lan Ha Bay. After spending the night on a small cruise ship, we boarded a dinghy to take us to the rowing boats which were to take us to the caves.

Our tour consisted of two Indian couples, two Danish girls, three Russian couples, and a young Australian family of four from the east coast. Each rowing boat seated eight. As Alex and I were lining up to board we were directed to the boat with the three glamorous young Russian couples. I was a bit concerned about how we would converse in the boat. Sitting in silence would be awkward. The only Russian I knew were those words from the media in the ‘80s, perestroika and glasnost. They wouldn’t get us far because these Russians would be too young to remember the times when these words were used. Alex and I averted our gaze, and the tour guide gave up trying to persuade us to board the boat. We turned around and saw the young Australian family lining up behind us. We smiled at them.

“Aussies!” I exclaimed. We had been deprived of conversation with our compatriots for quite a few days.

The six of us hopped in the rowing boat and were taken inside the stunning Lan Ha Bay. I am not sure that our conversation with our compatriots amounted to much, but it was animated and fun, and I hardly had the time to take in the wonderful bay.

Lan Ha Bay

Seeing the sights in other countries is both a privilege and an enormous treat. What is just as exciting is meeting locals, and the random, sometimes fleeting, and yet meaningful encounters with fellow tourists. We may meet Jill and Ian again. We will never meet the French couple again and don’t even know their names. We just hope they made it to their hotel and then safely back to France. We probably won’t meet the young Australian family again either. The east coast is just too far away. Nonetheless, we have been enriched by the knowledge shared by our kind, enthusiastic and energetic Vietnamese tour guides, and the unexpected encounters with fellow tourists trying to navigate this unique culture together.

* Some names have been changed.

[1] A Singaporean company that caters all over Southeast Asia

.

Meredith Stephens is an applied linguist from South Australia. Her recent work has appeared in Syncopation Literary Journal, Continue the Voice, Micking Owl Roost blog, The Font – A Literary Journal for Language Teachers, and Mind, Brain & Education Think Tank. In 2024, her story Safari was chosen as the Editor’s Choice for the June edition of All Your Stories.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

Categories
Poetry

Three More Poems by John Grey

From Public Domain 
THE KENNEL

Studio flat. Mattress, futon, floor. 
Could we have stayed there forever, content? 
No reply. It measured roughly the size of a kennel. 
She barked -- “Woof.” 
But she giggled when she said it.

Now we sleep in a proper bed, sprung coils, 
fitted sheets, a home with walls that favour silence
over the fights and lovemaking of next-door neighbours.

And the refrigerator fits more than beer and pizza slices.
We’ve enough stove to cook an entire meal. 
But sometimes, she stirs honey into tea, 
and the spoon’s clink is a memory of rain 
on that single-pane window. 

We don’t speak of that old apartment.
But sometimes, lying back and thinking of nothing,
I can hear the echo of her bark -- not grief, not joy –- 
just the sound of a life small enough for two.



THE BOY WHO FELL THROUGH THE ICE

What does it mean to stagger from the old pond, 
mouth smudged, blue eyes cratered, nostrils red?

The hometown has traded soul for shingles. 
A strip mall fronts our watery playground now.
The wire that fences it is a trellis for weeds.

And you who once were too late for saving,
now clutch soil in ever-defiant handfuls. 

Winter holds you still. 
You rise -- a revenant carved from frost 
and a memory of your flailing body
as seen from far above.

This is no repeat of our childhood. 
Then, you didn’t return. 
Now, you crawl past the despair.

I marvel at your instinct -- 
how you chase the moment beyond meaning 
to what breathes on the other side.
I want that too. To know death as merely vessel--
something we sail in when the ice thins.


THE GIANT

He was at the birthday party,
a shadow of immense proportions.
Streams trembled.
Balloons lost their moorings.
The cake sank.
Giggles stuck in many a craw.

He stood apart as the children 
shrieked and scattered.
In the swimming pool’s blue eye 
he was a reflection, 
not a swimmer.

He waited. 
Not for flat cake, 
not for games,
but for the slow growth of girls 
into something more dangerous. 

He would guard her, 
then become the thing 
she’d need guarding from.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Shift, Trampoline and Flights. His latest books — Bittersweet, Subject Matters and Between Two Fires — are available through Amazon. He has work upcoming in Levitate, White Wall Review and Willow Review.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

Categories
Musings

When Measurement Fails

Tamara-Lee Brereton-Karabetsos

By Tamara-Lee Brereton-Karabetsos

The numbers arrived without ceremony: a small column of figures, neat and confident, delivered through a screen that assumed fluency. There was no preamble, no invitation to feel anything about them. They simply existed—self-contained, conclusive. I stared at them longer than necessary, as though attention itself might persuade them to say something more.

I had been trained to trust measurement. To believe that what can be counted is what can be known, that precision is a form of care. Science has given us extraordinary clarity—the age of the universe, the speed of light, the composition of distant stars. It reduces the world to units small enough to hold without trembling. And yet, faced with those figures, something loosened. Not doubt exactly, but space.

Outside the window, trees moved according to rhythms that resisted instruction. The wind shifted, paused, resumed. Nothing announced itself. Nothing asked to be improved. I noticed this only because the numbers left room for it. They explained something, certainly—but not the sensation of standing there, or the quiet pull of attending to what did not ask to be solved.

The figures were accurate. The method sound. Still, they felt incomplete—not because they lacked information, but because they stopped where experience continued. They could describe a condition, but not what it felt like to inhabit it, or how knowledge settles unevenly into a day.

I began to notice how often I reached for numbers for reassurance. Steps counted. Hours logged. Probabilities consulted. Each promised orientation, a sense of being located within something stable. Yet the more faithfully I checked them, the more sharply I felt what they could not carry: anticipation, curiosity, the pleasure of patterns that were alive rather than abstracted.

The trees continued their unsystematic movement. No pattern held. Nothing corrected itself. They offered no explanation, only presence. Whatever I was leaning toward did not arrive as conclusion. It arrived as attention.

My body seemed to understand this before I did. Breath shifted. Awareness sharpened. These responses did not contradict what the numbers said; they existed alongside them—gathered without instruments, held without proof.

By evening, the figures had settled into their proper place—neither dismissed nor revered. What lingered was the act of noticing: the difference between explanation and understanding, between knowing the parameters of a situation and standing inside it.

Later, I returned to the window. The trees were still there, indifferent to coherence. Light moved across them without emphasis or instruction. It required very little of me—not judgment, not conclusion, only presence.

Some kinds of knowledge arrive complete. Others unfold slowly, through attention. The numbers gave me the first. The rest asked only that I stay.

Tamara-Lee Brereton-Karabetsos is an Australian writer working across poetry and lyric non-fiction, exploring perception, science, and the spaces where language meets what cannot be measured.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

Categories
Poetry

Seek Out the Spark: Poems by John Grey

From Public Domain 
THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY

Seek out the spark.
Silver-scales flicker in copper dusk, 
belly-deep in shallows. 
A fish shimmies just within my gaze, 
unaware of eyes across the bank.
Hands twitch with eagerness and line.

One dart crisscrosses another.
One swish and it vanishes,
leaving the kind of unwrinkled ripple
that only a ghost could make.

Not beautiful, not holy either,
but glows in its ignorance,
it wears shimmer like an evening dress, 
dances as if it knows no predator, 
as if the hook is its own instinct
and not that metal thing bobbing
in the water.


LANDS OF DROUGHT

If only the magpies and cockatoos 
pitched in with the seeding,
instead of stealing the last of the barley 
like feathered masked bandits.

The fields stretch wide, sadly sown, 
sunburnt ledger of solitary labour. 
And my silos are as hollow as a bird’s bones.

Summer lays claim and offers nothing. 
A long, dry siege where dreams peek out 
between nightmare’s teeth. Even the soil knows -- 
it clumps in my palm like the ghost of work. 
I’m its servant. It’s retired.

Each day arrives full as an empty drum: 
from end to end, absurd rows of nothing. 
I’m a farmer — no, a resident of dust. 
A scarecrow by trade: 
sticks in a hand-me-down shirt, 
some straw stitched at haste.


IN A STEEL TOWN

Noise factories 
churn out red-hot steel.
Chimneys feed the air.
The sky nibbles on the ash.
Clouds swallow hard.

Smog coats the lungs
with slag heaps 
for illustration.

Eyes burn.
Everything tastes 
of iron and carbon.

Some say the money’s good.
But no one knows
what’s good about it.

From Public Domain

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Shift, Trampoline and Flights. His latest books — Bittersweet, Subject Matters and Between Two Fires — are available through Amazon. He has work upcoming in Levitate, White Wall Review and Willow Review.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

Categories
Slices from Life

From the Land of a Thousand Temples

By Farouk Gulsara

From Public Domain

“Which part of India did your people come from?” asked the Tamil tour guide during our last trip to Chennai. 

“I know my forefathers came from Tamil Nadu, but, sorry can’t tell you which part of Tamil Nadu or village they came from,” I told him in Tamil. “I am a third generation Malaysian Indian. We lost touch with all the relatives back home.”

“Your Tamil is very good for someone out of this country. Judging from way you speak, you could pass off for someone from Thanjavur!” he went on. 

“People from Malaysia have mostly left their original accent and have developed new ones with Malay and Chinese words in theirs, so you cannot pigeonhole them to any region in India anymore.” I replied.

In a philosophical tone, he paused, then said, “I am here in Chennai, and you are there in Malaysia, and the only thing that connects us is the Tamil language.” 

Of course, there is the DNA that unites us, but the bond that draws us to India is independent of the language spoken or written. 

Our little conversation reminded me of the 1980s music video ‘Down Under’  by the Australian rock band, Men at Work. In that scene, the singer goes around the world, and everyone recognises him with his characteristic Aussie mannerisms. “Do you come from a land Down Under?” is their first response. 

My grandparents and parents believed that, despite moving away from their homeland due to increasingly hostile living conditions, it was necessary to pass down their culture and language. Perhaps it was the only language they knew. They did not turn their backs on Tamil Nadu, nor let their offspring immerse themselves solely in the local culture. They had no anger towards their country. They did not turn their backs on her. They understood their motherland was going through difficult times and that tides would eventually change. Maybe they thought that one day their descendants would return and boast about how their princes of the soil had succeeded in a distant land, even while still holding onto their ancestral roots – the mother tongue. 

It looks like the sun has risen, and the country has awakened from her long slumber, continuing to pursue what she stopped in her glorious past. Even her children, who have spread across all corners of the Earth, have made her proud. 

For the rest of my trip, I conversed in Tamil, checked into a four-star hotel, and even conducted transactions at a bank counter. At first glance, I am sure they could tell I was not local, with liberal use of the word ‘lah’[1]  in my sentences and the distinctive sing-song manner Malaysians use when speaking Tamil, it seems. The Malaysians are also described as extremely courteous, unlike the locals there.

[1] Lah is a phrase used by Malaysians and Singaporeans in local parlance

.

Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Poetry

A Prose Poem by Andrew Leggett

Andrew Leggett
ANGELTURTLE COAXES THE SOUL   
         
Come now, little frightened one. That twinge is all you’ll feel as death tears you from the desiccated husk that lingers in your carapace. Then it’s done and all is light. You are floating now above your shell. You seem surprised I hover, spreading protection of bright wings as you stare down at your remnant. There is nothing you should fear as I reach to catch you, shielding you from Valkyries and other predatory fowl circling in hope that you will stray into the bardo space where you become their choice reptilian feast of sorrow. Come closer now and let me wrap my webbed, clawed feet around you as I bear you up to where you swim, with myriad freshwater turtle souls, in the river of light. Some you may recognise: your mother, who passed over soon after she laid your clutch. Several of her hatchlings swim in this bright stream in which the golden minnows jump: Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo. Here it’s always summertime. You will remember me as Raphael, the Terrapin of Seraphim. You may hear Ella Fitzturtle ‘rise up singing’ to Gershwin’s melody ‘as I spread my wings and take to the sky.’

Andrew Leggett is an Australian author of fiction, poetry, interdisciplinary academic papers, reviews and songs. His latest collection of poetry Losing Touch was published by Ginninderra Press in 2022. His fiction collection In Dreams and Other Stories will be published by Ginninderra Press in 2026.

.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL. 

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Poetry

Winter Meanderings by John Grey

From Public Domain 
FOOTPRINTS IN THE SNOW

The weather has landed 
and moved on.
The house evokes candy
with its frosted roof,
creamy shingles,
and crystalline hangings.
The grass is heavy
with its burden of snow.
And the trees gleam like porcelain
in the tepid sun.

Bundled up outside,
we leave visible footprints
in the yard,
whereas, in previous seasons,
our presence lacked such evidence
and yet, intuitively, 
we always know where we are,
what is ours, who we belong to.

The winter merely
reiterates the point I’m making.
It lacks our self-awareness.
So it sinks us deep instead.


ENVISION

Each evening, though
shaped by oncoming sleep,
my body informs me that
knowledge need no longer
conform to the physical.
So I gaze at black waters
of night, at sleep caves,
dream tunnels --
Senses float...sight on sound,
vision on taste.
Something awakens in me.
No, distractions ebb
so consciousness can flow.



NO POINT LOOKING UP 

Jupiter…it’s all just hydrogen and helium.
A liquid body with a small solid core.
No one gets to love on a planet like that.
Or vote. Or watch sports. See movies.

The sky, for all its heavenly associations,
is sure no cosmic comfort.
The light is dead by the time it reaches me.
And the moon, near as it is, is just a rocky squib.

My escape cannot be collapsing nebulae.
Or atmospheres of methane and ammonia.
Or icy dots. Or superdense neutron stars.
And spare me your planet X.  

There is no treasure up there.
No future. No work. No woman.
The good air sticks to what I know.
If I’m to breathe it, I can only be here.

.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Shift, River And South and Flights. His latest books Bittersweet, Subject Matters and Between Two Fires are available through Amazon. He has upcoming work in Rush, Spotlong Review and Trampoline.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Contents

Borderless, November 2025

Art by Sohana Manzoor

Editorial

Spring in Winter?… Click here to read.

Translations

Nazrul’s Musafir, Mochh re Aankhi Jol (O wayfarer, wipe your tears) has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Four of his own Malay poems have been translated by Isa Kamari. Click here to read.

Five short poems by Munir Momin have been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.

Five poems by Rohini K.Mukherjee have been translated from Odia by Snehprava Das. Click here to read.

S.Ramakrishnan’s story, Steps of Conscience, has been translated from Tamil by B.Chandramouli. Click here to read.

Tagore’s poem, Sheeth or Winter, has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.

Poetry

Click on the names to read the poems

Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Usha Kishore, Joseph C. Ogbonna, Debadrita Paul, John Valentine, Saranyan BV, Ron Pickett, Shivani Shrivastav, George Freek, Snehaprava Das, William Doreski, Mohit Saini, Rex Tan, John Grey, Raiyan Rashky, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal

Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

In Nomads of the Bone, Rhys Hughes shares an epic poem. Click here to read.

Musings/Slices from Life

When Nectar Turns Poisonous!

Farouk Gulsara looks at social norms around festive eating. Click here to read.

On a Dark Autumnal Evening

Ahmad Rayees muses on Kashmir and its inhabitants. Click here to read.

The Final Voyage

Meredith Stephens writes of her experience of a disaster while docking their boat along the Australian coastline. Click here to read.

Embracing the Earth and Sky…

Prithvijeet Sinha takes us to the tomb of Saadat Ali Khan in Lucknow. Click here to read.

Musings of a Copywriter

In A Fruit Seller in My Life, Devraj Singh Kalsi explores the marketing skills of his fruit seller a pinch of humour. Click here to read.

Notes from Japan

In Return to Naoshima, Suzanne Kamata takes us to an island museum. Click here to read.

Essays

The Trouble with Cioran

Satyarth Pandita introduces us to Emil Cioran, a twentieth century philosopher. Click here to read.

Once a Student — Once a Teacher

Odbayar Dorj writes of celebrating the start of the new school year in Mongolia and of their festivals around teaching and learning. Click here to read.

Bhaskar’s Corner

In ‘Language… is a mirror of our moral imagination’, Bhaskar Parichha pays a tribute to Prof. Sarbeswar Das. Click here to read.

Stories

Visions

Fabiana Elisa Martínez takes us to Argentina. Click here to read.

My Grandmother’s Guests

Priyanjana Pramanik shares a humorous sketch of a nonagenarian. Click here to read.

After the Gherkin

Deborah Blenkhorn relates a tongue-in-cheek story about a supposed crime. Click here to read.

Pause for the Soul

Sreenath Nagireddy writes of migrant displacement and adjustment. Click here to read.

The Real Enemy 

Naramsetti  Umamaheswararao gives a story set in a village in Andhra Pradesh. Click here to read.

Feature

A conversation with Amina Rahman, owner of Bookworm Bookshop, Dhaka, about her journey from the corporate world to the making of her bookstore with a focus on community building. Click here to read.

Book Excerpts

An excerpt from from Love and Crime in the Time of Plague: A Bombay Mystery by Anuradha Kumar. Click here to read.

An excerpt from Wayne F Burke’s Theodore Dreiser – The Giant. Click here to read.

Book Reviews

Somdatta Mandal reviews M.A.Aldrich’s Old Lhasa: A Biography. Click here to read.

Satya Narayan Misra reviews Amal Allana’s Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive. Click here to read.

Anita Balakrishnan reviews Silver Years: Senior Contemporary Indian Women’s Poetry edited by Sanjukta Dasgupta, Malashri Lal and Anita Nahal. Click here to read.

Bhaskar Parichha reviews Diya Gupta’s India in the Second World War: An Emotional History. Click here to read.

.

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

Categories
Poetry

Two Poems by John Grey

From Public Domain 
EVICTED

There’s a slowness to packing boxes
when there’s nowhere to take them.
It’s the deliberation that surrounds
every item of clothing 
as it’s neatly folded,
placed gently with the others.

With the child, there’s an even 
greater sluggishness when it 
comes to the dolls and stuffed animals,
an unwillingness even 
for fear that 
there won’t be enough room
to fit them all.

For haste in that apartment house,
you’d need to look to 
the landlord’s first floor apartment,
the tapping of his fingers on the kitchen table,
like tiny impatient jackhammers.

For mother and child,
the sidewalk awaits.
It’s both leisurely and brisk…
and indifferent,
which is not a speed at all.


KISS AND MAKE UP, THE LATEST ITERATION

Your words slap my face around.
Now you have me where you want me –
an effigy of everything you hate.

My response is a prison-riot
of old angers.

Pain doesn’t travel well
so hurting others is our go-to.

We learned it from our parents.
We were taught it in school.

To be cruel is a mega-aspirin,
a vein-load of morphine.

But we love each other.
Our harshness knows this.
Our rages are intrinsically aware.

So our voices soften.
Red cheeks whiten.
Flaming eyes are doused by tears.

Then it’s kiss and makeup time.
Our mouths are like tunnels in a mountainside.
Tongues collide 
but there’s little collateral damage.

.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Shift, River And South and Flights. His latest books Bittersweet, Subject Matters and Between Two Fires are available through Amazon. He has upcoming work in Rush, Spotlong Review and Trampoline.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Poetry

Two Poems by John Grey

BUS OUT OF TOWN

The kids in the seat behind me
are already pushing and shoving each other.
They’ll be bored out of their tiny skulls
before the bus even gets to Worcester.
We take Grand Street out of town,
and pass an estate sale 
at one of the mansions 
that once housed prosperous mill-owners.

The sloping front lawn
is like a giant green shelf 
piled with boxes and evening clothes,
antique chairs and tables
and, as a genuine gift to poets,
an escritoire and an armoire.
I didn’t need to see this
to know it was time to leave 
this dying town.
But the buyers sure do look like vultures
as they pick among books and jewelry.
My guess is they’re not
from around here.

The kids, done fighting, are now
whining to their parents,
“We got nothing to do.”
So take a bus out of here,
I want to tell them.
But wait – they’re already doing that.


NARRAGANSETT BEACH IN AUGUST

This is a town of seaside pleasure
from barefoot steps on sand
to flights of terns and shearwaters.

The beach is fragmented
by waves coming and going,
skittery sandpipers, darting sanderlings,
but there’s enough 
wet and dry for all.

Here the world is bird-nesting cliff-face 
dunes that rise soft as clouds
and rocks offshore
that bear the brunt of brief battering.
 
Fun is democratic:
old man and woman
in chairs shaded by umbrella,
young women on towels tanning gently,
children splashing in shallows,
older siblings bobbing in the deep.

The sky towers overall.
The sun smells of salt.
And, every now and then,
somebody laughs for no reason.

Little used on the day, 
the mind doesn’t mind at all.
From Public Domain

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, River And South and The Alembic. His latest books, Bittersweet, Subject Matters and Between Two Fires are available through Amazon. He has upcoming work in Paterson Literary Review, White Wall Review and Flights.

.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International