Tuesday poem: The compleat cake, part 3
April 1, 2025
3. Royal Easter Show, Sydney 2011
Welcome all, to the arena of cake. Kewpie doll stares with avid blueness, a malice far older than four or seventeen years lies hide in those little pools of scorch, trained like cool napalm at her competitors. She scorches the cute cotton-tail bunny (marshmallow shaped into an apostrophe of fur) and the rosette-less Smurfs; the ribbonless boomerang, its skeleton icing sketch of roo resolutely unrewarded. But oh oh oh, see the Opera House? Meringue fascinators balance like dreams near a liquorice bridge, climbed by grey lozenges, climbing up, up to catch a blue view in a dark net. Eyes eat these cakes; no tongue will ever lick Kewpie, and the Opera House is tasted only by sweet sticky Sutherlands of flies.
PS Cottier
My last slice of prose poem about cake, referencing the Agricultural Shows where cakes are made to resemble all sorts of things, from famous buildings to clowns and dolls. The Sydney Show is quite soon, so it seems appropriate.
And that wonderful illustration is from WikiCommons, and is in the public domain. Unfortunately, the artist is unknown. Here’s what the site says about the work: A collectible card by Elmshorn-based margarine brand Echte Wagner, circa 1932; “Aus dem schönen Echte Wagner Album Nr. 3, Serie Nr. 9, Bild Nr. 1.” It depicts visitors to “Schlaraffenland” (Cockaigne) eating pieces of a wall made of cake to enter the country, with a sausage tree seen in the background.
They are eating the wall of cake in a very serious manner.
Tuesday poem: The compleat cake, part 2
March 26, 2025
Politician’s Birthday Cake, Florida, 1965
Jill-in-the-cake, she waits, hermit crab in cardboard shell inside thin icing. She smells faint fire of too many candles; ears pick up obsequious tinkles of laughter. Smallest Matryoshka, curled over and into herself in cake-womb, body ribboned by expectation, waiting to uncurl herself into room. Her bikini moistens under her breasts, confined in oubliette of quasi-cake, and now, now, she hears the final you of the Birthday song and up she jumps, top-hat of cake swings to one side. Venus comes from the pink-icing-shell, floating above the sea of eyes that lick at her breasts like one huge tongue at Mom’s near-forgotten mixing spoon.
PS Cottier
This is the second part of my prose poem about cake. One more to go next week. The publication details appear in the last post on March 12th. Somehow this part of my epic cake poem seems particularly timely.
That Venus above has strapping feet, by the way.
Prose poem: The compleat cake
March 12, 2025
The compleat cake
1. Acland Street, Victoria, 1980s
Licking the windows, the cake-shop windows, with their peppermint swirls of galaxies, their new-born stars of strawberry creme; their slices of half-forgotten history lingering on the mind’s tongue. See that poppy seed twist, curled like a strand of DNA? Is it a memory of a 1960s dance, sister of the hula-hoop, or does the warming bite of the seeds take us back past wars to an older Europe, wrapped snug in coats against a so-long winter coming in? My mouth’s history stretched to pink-jammy-rolls and vanilla slices, sunny and seemingly vacant, or simply stuffed with more white. Here I first tasted a sweet warmed with a spicy aftertaste, and sensed that sadness and joy often walk hand in hand, supporting each other like an elderly couple, out for a weekend stroll. My tram-caught Newfoundland, my Acland Street, where abundance somehow whispered of loss to my thought-shy ears. Past the strawberry tarts, open and brazen, calling for business; past the rum baba that tingled like a taste-bell for the dead; past the endless tales of one thousand and one cakes; I rumbled, ate, and paused.
PS Cottier
This is the first section of a three part prose poem first published in a wee collection called “Selection criteria for death”. This was part of Issue Three of Triptych Poets, published by Blemish Books, who sadly, are no longer in business. The other sections of this poem are 2. Politician’s birthday cake, Florida, 1965 and 3. Royal Easter Show, Sydney 2011. I may post them over the next little while. I think I chose the archaic ‘compleat’ as I’d just seen a copy of The Compleat Angler, by Izaak Walton, but I really can’t remember back thirteen years or so! (That’s when I wrote the poem, which refers back to the 1980s.) Acland Street is in St Kilda, Melbourne, for those who have never visited.
The other poets in the collection were J.C. Inman and Joan Kerr. And once again, the illustration was found in Old Book Illustrations, and is by Leonard Leslie Brooke.
Poem: Sand cycle
February 3, 2025
Sand cycle
The sand stretches,
flexes its muscles,
and I am stuck, Goya’s dog,
pulled down,
waking in a different world.
Another world of sand.
I shake and try to pull myself
to a firmer edge. There is no edge,
and I suffocate, and wake again,
stranded, lungs filling, sinking.
I am trapped in an hourglass,
never emptying, dry drowning,
reborn on repeat, reversed
Sisyphus on the beach,
with ten million tiny rocks
pushing into ears and mouth and nose —
feldspar and silica and an
endless choke of grinding quartz.
PS Cottier
Well that’s a miserable poem for my first on the blog for 2025! Many people have had nightmares about being trapped, or suffocating, and this poem attempts to capture that feeling of dread.
In more cheerful news, another review of The Thirty-one Legs of Vladimir Putin, a novella co-written by NG Hartland and myself can be found here. The reviewer is Tim Jones.
(Illustration by Thomas Rowlandson)
Christmas poem: Burning the donkey
December 22, 2024
We were suspicious from the start.
What decent man brings a wife
pregnant as a pudding
into a new country, unless
he wants the child to be
a kind of hidden penny,
a nice little earner?
She was obviously mad,
whispering something about
a visitation, from behind
an annoying, coy blue veil.
We weren’t sure if she meant
secret police (who are unbelievably
common, in the places these people
supposedly come from,
breeding like cane-toads
in their vivid crops of lies).
She mentioned flashes and wings.
As I said, a few bats short of an attic.
He even admitted that he wasn’t sure
if the kid was his, or at least
that’s what we think he said.
It was hard to source a proper interpreter,
if, indeed, the language was real,
rather than a melange of all things foreign,
stirred like another pudding,
to be tongued off a soon-to-be silver spoon.
Mike said he thought Aramaic
was a perfume for men,
and we all had a good laugh,
but there was absolutely no whiff of that,
I can assure you.
It turned out to be a boy,
born in necessary seclusion,
though Mike said all the lights
turned themselves on
the moment the kid drew breath.
That was undeniably weird,
and a further example
of their lack of thanks
expressed in clever sabotage.
Lawyers even brought in presents,
breaching clear regulations.
Their poor excuse for a boat,
which had evaded all detection
and wound its feral ways to Darwin
despite navy, barnacles, tides and policy,
overladen with stink and sick and
God knows what else,
was towed back out and burnt.
All in all it was nothing remarkable,
although my skin is itching,
itching like an alien.
A nice little souvenir, no doubt about it.
The press should really leave it alone,
and focus on some bigger issues －
a Test begins tomorrow.
PS Cottier
This retelling of the nativity story, set in modern day immigration detention and narrated by a guard, was first published in Verity La in 2017, and later in my book Utterly.
“And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!”
(Illustration by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo)
PS Cottier 