HEAT Archive | Australia’s International Literary Magazine

I’m chasing after something faster than me, that refuses to be pinned down. I find myself getting lost in its contradictions and capaciousness. How to write about something that is made for no one, but imagines, or hopes for, an audience anyway?

my understanding of a nation is not abstract/ if america did not let off Ezra Pound/ it would not tolerate me/ no! I am not satisfied with my own country/ but that does not mean that I shall love america

In 1958 when I was eight years old my parents took me to New York. I fell in love with its powers of abstraction. It became the city of my mind. In 1988 we took our son to New York. He was eight, and the same thing happened. Now, the door to his room is covered with a large map of midtown Manhattan in detailed axonometric projection. He reads books about places and technologies and is thinking of becoming an architect.

Running in a sequence of dismembered sections, the Roman aqueduct of Nîmes can be read as a kind of fragmented text. Its choked tunnels, collapsed archways, brief truncated arcades can be seen as the scattered passages, say, of some early ontological discourse.

There was a dim lantern filled with dead insects near the amphitheatre, and the moon was hidden by the top of an old apartment beside the station. Moths made silent sweeps at the flickering lantern, and Liam placed his open guitar case underneath, so that anyone wandering down the winding path could pay their respects to his work.

The roastery was a cover for the accommodation rort our landlord was pulling. The whole warehouse was divided with heavy curtains into small rectangular spaces where we all slept in single beds. Every space looked the same and it was hard to tell them apart. Our landlord called them pods but it was more like a battery.

Many persons are fluent in more than one language, but my setting out some years ago at the age of fifty-six to teach myself Hungarian provokes comments and questions from those who get to hear of it.

standing under the ex-wife’s house concrete pillars covered in / the hieroglyphics of grubby little hands pieces of antique chairs hang / that we had planned to restore together arm-rests of that old coach,

I’ve arrived late to Gillian Mears. Or exactly when I ought to have: standing in the morning rain at Adelaide Writers Week for a panel on biography, two days after a car wreck, not yet able to fully open my jaw.

I am in the process of buying a thirty-year-old ambulance in 2004, sight unseen, and in the opinion of most people, I’ve gone crazy. Listening to Mr Bible from Homebush Motors in Sydney make his sales pitch on the phone, I think they might have a point.

In Nabatieh, the small town in the south of Lebanon my forebears and I come from, Hassiba has been the uncontested diva of Ashura.

I was writing a long and labyrinthine poem in which I opened up / and at the same time stepped into that openness, stillness, with a white voice

HEAT Joins <em>One-way Street</em>ʼs Literary Round Table

The second New Voice literary round table, focusing on creative nonfiction, took place in May, and featured Oscar Schwartz, whose essay 'Father Figures' appears in HEAT Series 3 Number 6.

I spent a few years working in cafés after graduating from art school. I didn’t see what else I could do. The work kept me moving, I was fed, had nice coffees and beers and wines, and most of all I enjoyed the many faces constantly passing in front of my eyes.

Emily was aware she had a problem, but it was a good, distracting problem from the more real, emotionally crippling problem of being in love with her boss. In the last few months, however, her shopping obsession had reached new problematic highs.

When she and Didier had first met a few weeks ago, he had been impressed to hear that she was an Australian. ‘La sauvage,’ he had said. ‘So wi-i-ild. L’Australie, c’est la sauvage.’

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Featured

The New Violence

All Articles

Life’s Work

Four Poems

Claiming the Colossus

Aquaeductus

Sit Down Young Stranger

Unlock to Ride

The Angel’s SonWhy I Learned Hungarian Late in Life

rip

On ‘Alive in Ant and Bee’ by Gillian Mears

Alive in ‘Ant and Bee’

AshuraThe Tenth-Day Catastrophe of Duodecimal Shi’ism

Ark

HEAT Joins One-way Streetʼs Literary Round Table

Two Stories

Shopping

The Umbrella

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HEAT Series 1

HEAT Series 2

HEAT Series 3